 Let me emphasize my honor in delivering this Emancipation lecture on the occasion of the commemoration of the Emancipation of the Enslaved in the British Colonies. Special thanks to the Sinclution National Archives for the support given in undertaking this research. There has been a carefully constructed narrative around the issue of Emancipation that has left us with a misplaced gratitude towards our enslavers for a perceived benevolence and generosity that has generated tension, disharmony and discord in our liberation process. The result is that we think that Emancipation was about a specific date and time and that this occurrence meant that we are truly free and that we should just forget about the 300 years of oppression that was inflicted on every facet of our being. This narrative is prevalent in the history that is taught in our schools, but today, on this day designated as Emancipation Day, I choose to address three main issues that open the discourse to a deconstruction that presents us with an alternative and more realistic understanding of ourselves as Inclusions. The first focus is on some of the isms, racism, gradualism, abolitionism and colonialism that has created the schisms and resultant confusion. In this section, as I have done in other places, I am calling for us to write our own freedom declaration, our own Emancipation pronouncement aimed at repairing the damage and affirming our commitments to freeing our minds and moving forward triumphantly. I will also throughout the discourse make recommendations on how to break these chains and address the underlying rot that some of us refuse to wake up and smell. Secondly, I want to remind you that the violence of the system never dulled the fight for human rights and our demand to be justly defined as human as a person. The emphasis here is on the enslaved who liberated themselves. While we have spent time enthralled by the European rivalry for domination of St. Lucia, we all know the phrase, seven times British and seven times French. For me, the most significant dynamic is the condition of the enslaved during those years. How do we situate the shifting of allegiances of the enslaved between the British and the French? After all, the colonial powers were equally repressive because of the fundamentals of racism. My main assessment, in spite of the romanticizing of the French, was not that we preferred enslavement under one than the other. Rather, it was because we used every space, every strategy necessary for us to survive the brutality of enslavement, including alliances. We must understand that our fight for our own liberation had to be interrupted in order for a colonial master to put in place a system over which they would have control and continue to have to this day. We have to acknowledge that our liberation must be constant and present and that we must come to terms with the fact that we have always resisted. We must recognize the freedom fighter in the narrative of the rebel. Here I call for recognition for the independence of Haiti and Maroon kingdoms that have been marginalized. We have to put these liberation movements in the rightful place as they are already plans being implemented for tightening the chains again. You see, decolonization today has been a myth and our independence is tightly linked with our emancipation, our freedom. I want us to recall that the human trafficking that occurred, this extraction and trafficking of human beings from Africa was state sponsored. It was the British, the royals, the elite, both the British and the French elite who hired middlemen who set them up in companies like the French West India Company and the Royal African Company and who hired corsairs, pirates and privates to support this system. The first effort is placed on the Emancipation Act and the recognition that emancipation was designed as a gradual process that would keep us tied to a notion of inferiority as a people, seemingly petulant children incapable of taking care of our own in need of protection from themselves. They must always exist in ignorance. The Emancipation Act, which was actually entitled The Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British colonies promoting the industry of the manumitted slaves and for compensating the owners of such slaves was designed to reinforce racism and domination and to appease a prominent set of politicians, European elite, West Indian planters and estate owners and the ideology which underpinned that domination. We have to understand this construction for us to consolidate our freedom, hence the deconstruction. Before we deconstruct, we must understand the construction of the Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British colonies. Understand that the Emancipation Proclamation is the blueprint for the continued control of our minds, identity, our culture, our political systems, our environment, our economic and sustainable development systems, our futures. With a certain amount of indignation I say, how dare they speak to our industry when it was our labour and our industry which was responsible for their wealth. When they siphoned off all the profits of our labour and left our country's destitute. In the case of St. Lucia, this extraction was undertaken by two colonial powers. The Emancipation Act was part of the evolution of colonialism, a system designed to consolidate the British Empire and to enforce inequality and subordination. Least I be accused of utilizing the interpretations of Eric Williams, I went directly to the words of Edward Gibbon Wakefield as articulated in letters between statesmen and the colonists, where this theorists of colonialism and expansionism systematically and clinically enunciated during the 1930s and 1940s, the fundamentals of empire, the manipulation of land, labour and investment. It was he before Eric Williams who proposed that the European empires grow because of slavery and the slave trade and that their colonial expansions would further consolidate colonial power. Wakefield in his musings on what colonisation ought to be wrote, and I quote, My fancy pictures assort an amount of colonisation that would amply repay its cost by providing happily for our redundant people, by improving the state of those who remain at home, by supplying us largely with food and the raw materials of manufacture and by gratifying our best feelings of national pride through the extension over unoccupied parts of the earth of a nationality truly British in language, religion, laws, institutions and attachment to the empire. Wakefield would become a key figure in the establishment of the colonies of South Australia and New Zealand. I did however consider Eric Williams' warnings over exaggerating the work of the abolitionists. He points to their economic interests in India and that for decades they had never envisioned the complete emancipation of slavery. He writes, and I quote, Even then emancipation was to be gradual. Nothing rash warned Buxton. Nothing rapid. Nothing abrupt. Nothing bearing any feature of violence. Above all, slavery should never be abolished. It will subside. It will decline. It will expire. It will as it will burn itself into the socket and go out. We shall leave it gently to the key, silently, slowly, almost imperceptibly to die away and be forgotten. The incomplete story of the abolitionists is even more fascinating. The account of the work of black abolitionists like Mary Prince, October, Kuango, Equiano and the Sons of Africa has never been present in the teaching and has been disregarded within the narrative of the fight for emancipation in England and the colonies. Clearly it is no coincidence that British politicians and ideologues were expousing these doctrines simultaneously with the issuance of the Emancipation Act. They had to ensure that the expansion, exploitation and extraction on which the hegemonies were built would continue even with the decline of enslavement. I do not have to tell you that colonialism has been debilitating on our culture, mind, environment, economy, politics and social sustainability of the countries in the Caribbean. The system is, I say is not was, is ubiquitous, all-encompassing, all-divisive, all everlasting unless we consciously try to decolonize. This is not a sleeping dog that we let lie and it will leave us alone. It reshapes itself and comes back to bite you as imperialism. We have to recognize the trauma caused by this terrorism that will continue with the extraction of wealth, domination and control. Moreover, I want you to understand that enslavement, emancipation and colonialism were legal systems controlled from outside the country. There were over a hundred laws which accommodated the slave trade and which made slaves property. Beckles concludes that, and I quote, Caribbean economy and society were built with slave labor premised on the legal provision that Africans were not members of the human race. Unquote. Just read the work on slave laws as explored by Elsa Gaviah. The literature on emancipation points to many contributing factors although some would have you believe that it was only the lobbying of abolitionists and their ideological humanitarian efforts. Eric Williams points us to their new interest in India. There was also the decline of some of the sugar economies because of competition from places like Cuba and Brazil. But make no mistake, what really swayed them was firstly the offer of compensation of 20 million pounds that the British taxpayers finished paying in 2015. The second was the apprenticeship period, a period of continued labor, a supposed interim period to prepare both the enslaved and the planters and estate owners for freedom. The fact is that this colonial emancipation would ensure the continuation of control not to remove enslavement but to perpetuate a propaganda of benevolence that would forever make us grateful that these benefactors had our best interests at heart. In systems of domination after slavery, the control of land and labor in the British West Indies after 1838, or Nigel Boland posits that emancipation did not create a humane and social condition that was different to what existed under enslavement. The problem was that freedom was not a reality because we have never understood that emancipation was the first step to freedom. The planters were seeing new forms of coercion from that date. The multifaceted nature of colonialism ensured that the transition from slave labor to wage labor could still be manipulated from the metropole. This propaganda set the foundation for the continued domination of black nations and black minds. To fail to see emancipation on a continuum which started with enslavement of Africans on the continent, on the Middle Passage and in the Americas is to deny a very active and successful resistance on the verge of creating a new paradigm which the Haitian Revolution imagined. To continue to think of resistance and rebellion as black disobedience is to continue to perpetuate the myth of the savage. As part of the Act, slavery was abolished in most British colonies which resulted in around 800,000 slaves being freed in the Caribbean as well as South Africa and a small amount in Canada. The law took effect on 1st August 1834 and put into practice a transitional phase which including reassigning roles of slaves as apprentices which would later be ended in 1838. At the time of emancipation in 1834, according to Hansen there were approximately 14,000 enslaved persons in St. Lucia consisting of 8,725 field workers, 16,000 non-field workers 1,960 children and 1,000 aged and informed. The 384 plantations and estate owners received about 25 pounds, 3 shillings and 4 pence per sleeve. The listing of those who filed for compensation can be found in the accounts of slave compensation claims for the colonies of Jamaica and Tiga, Honduras, St. Christopher, Grenada, Dominica, Nevis, Virgin Islands, St. Lucia, British Guiana, Montstrat, Bermuda, Bahamas, Tobago, St. Vincent, Trinidad, Barbados, Mauritius, Cape of Good Hope, published by the House of Commons on the 16th of March 1838. On the majority of the plantations, we grew and produced sugar but there was also cotton and coffee, estates, and we also grew some food crops. Hansen, Ellis and D'Evo document that the first sugar plantation was established by the French in 1763 and that the nature of plantation work was similar to what occurred in the British territories. And they noted that, and I quote, from the 1717 onwards, no amount of human suffering was allowed to stand in the way of the money to be made from sugar. The slave registrars document identifying marks including scars and infirmities are testimony to the brutality of the slave system in St. Lucia. Many were missing toes, had bones on their bodies, as well as numerous scars. For example, in the 1816 registry of the Belair estate, we meet Jaloui 8, Ambrosine 6, Julie 4, Massey 2, Matherin 12, and Elizabeth 10, who all had one toe, and this is a quotation, on the right foot wanting. While Charles, Bouchel 12, and Elisa Pitoli 13, and Catherine Pitoli 3 all had scars on the right eye. On the Larisus estate, many of the enslaved had scars on the ears in the area of the right jaw. These included Jean-Charles Foixsois 8, Parfait Malona 12, and Lorine Angelique 8. The number of 1,000 persons considered infirm and elderly would include a large number of infirm, especially as the average lifespan of an enslaved person was less than 25 years. Alvin Thompson reminds us in confronting slavery, breaking through the corridors of silence, that slavery was nothing less than a genocidal institution. They are meticulously kept, always accurate plantation registers in St. Lucia from 1816 to 1834, as these were the years of the consolidation of the system under British control of the country. These registers outlined the names, ages, place of birth, skin color, gender, and any identifying marks. Moreover, the estate owners wanted to be compensated for their loss to potential labor on their estates. Interestingly in St. Lucia, most of the records were maintained in French and the names of the plantations remain unchanged while most of the enslaved were given French names, even after total control by the British in 1814. This point is stressed to ensure that calls for reparations from St. Lucia must not be limited to the British government but must also be directed to the French. After all, they were very familiar with reparations having demanded 150 million gold francs in 1825 in compensation when Haiti gained independence in 1804 after the revolution of the enslaved. This was nine years before the British Emancipation Act and 23 years before the enslaved in the other French territories were granted freedom. While that amount was reduced to 90 million, it was not paid off until 1947. It effectively said to the enslaved freedom fright fighters that they would never dare to overthrow the European slave system. So let us delve into the articles within the Act which are divided into three main parts. The first relates to how to treat with the newly manumitted, under what Edwin Jones tombs the doctrine of preparation, the gradualism that plagued us to independence. The second relates to control over labour and compensation for the planters and estate owners while the final part speaks the responsibility of the stipendary magistrates. I posit that it was simply an act to curb resistance movements while ensuring the continuation of forced labour for another four to six years. The enslaved. All persons who, on the 1st of August 1834, shall have been registered as slaves and shall appear on the registry to be six years old and upwards shall from that day become apprentice labourers. This means that all those below six would automatically be free. The planter or estate owner was no longer responsible for them as they were no longer his property. If these children were found to be destitute, the person entitled to the services of the mother would be entitled to the child. Yes, our babies remained enslaved. On the plantations in St. Lucia, there were many children who fell into that category. For example, on the Magway 2 toy state in 1834, there were 22 children in this category including Zillow, who was nine months old, one-year-old Celestine and Doralis, Selene, Bozin, Jules and St. Amy, who were two years old. On the Bois-Séju estate, Patrice was 11 months, Jeremy was two, and Marie-Baud was three. On the Anse-Livain estate, there were 12 children, six and under, including Gelouie, one-year and five months, Saint-Pierre, two months, and Anne and Adelaide, five years old. On the Reunion estate, we have 10 children in the stipulated age range. The 1831 records of the Belair estate show that six children would be eligible for immediate freedom in 1834. While on the Belair estate, there would be 24 eligible. I have recorded the names to show that most of the names remained French even 20 years after British control. This is just an example of the number of children who were left in the care of women who were responsible for their upkeep on reduced provisions. Of note is the phenomenon of recording the names as the Christian name of the mother. So Jeanette Isabel and Pauline Isabel on the Reunion estate were the daughters of Isabel. While Ger-Charles and Gigiste on the Larisouce estate also carried the first name of their mother, François. The fact is that the plantation owners only filled these registers according to Barry Higman to fulfill the demands of the British government and would use any arbitrary surname. Margot Thomas has also mentioned this phenomenon writing that many were based and named and based on physical behavior or appearance. Most of the estates used this practice making it difficult to trace ancestry. The apprenticeship period of four to six years would be established and apprentice laborers were divided into three categories namely, predial attached and predial unattached both of which would work for six years and non-predial would work for four years. They were expected to work 45 hours per week free for the planter that left little time to work for wages and to work on their provision grounds. Hamston writes that there were many attempts by the planters to restrict their movement and to limit their ability to work for more wages on other plantations. Punishment would be done under the order of stipendary magistrates. In addition, the apprentice laborer purchased his freedom against the will of his employer. While the planter had the right to the services of apprentice laborers he was not a transferable property nor could he be used for the payment of debts. The employer was to supply the apprentice laborer with such food and articles as the law at present required in the case of slaves. The provision of the act would define the care of the apprentices with regard to food. In cases where the a predial laborer was maintained by the cultivation of provision grounds a proper quantity of grounds at a proper distance was to be provided. Unfortunately, many planters denied such access and this contributed to poor nutrition for the apprentices. The planters, the persons who would have entitlement to the services of the slave would be entitled to his services as an apprentice laborer. Before the time of apprenticeship expired the apprentice laborer may be discharged by the voluntary act of his employer. The form of that discharge had to be regulated in the case of voluntary discharge of aged or informed apprentice laborers the employer would continue to be liable for their support. On the death of the employer the services of the unattached apprentice laborer was to be given to the person who would have been entitled to him as a slave on the death of the owner of the estate. That means that they could still be willed even if they were apprentices. Then there is the matter of compensation and it should be noted that the slave compensation act 1837 was the world's first major act of compensated emancipation and an act of parliament in the United Kingdom signed into law on 23 December 1837. It authorized the commissioners for the reduction of the national debt to compensate slave owners in the British colonies of the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope in the amount of approximately 20 million pounds for freed slaves. Based on a government census of 1st August 1834 over 40,000 awards to slave owners were issued since some of the payments were converted into a 3.5% government annuity they lasted until 2015. Yes, Britain was still paying compensation to planters in the Caribbean and their descendants up until 2015. The stipendary magistrates these were appointed to oversee the apprenticeship and ensure balance between the newly manumitted and the planter slave owners. They ensured that apprentice laborers were not removed from the colony. That apprentice laborers were not removable from the plantation except by the written consent of two special justices. The consent not to be given until the justices had ascertained that the removal would not separate the members of families. Unfortunately, there were too few of them to police the plantation. There are examples of fairness in their judgment but since there was a small number of them they were unable to ensure that the ex-slaves got justice at all times. At some times they were persecuted by the planters who felt wrong. In the long run, many of them were open to bribery and proved to be a little or no assistance to most of the ex-lave population. Conditions for freedom did not improve as the inequalities and hierarchies of slavery remained intact. In many ways, freedom was an aberration as laborers were forced to remain on plantations. Wages were menial, social and economic conditions continued to decline. More restrictions were placed on freedom of movement. Taxes were imposed and the prisons Act of 1838 ensured that the oppression would continue. So what of the slaves who emancipated themselves? The anti-slavery movement of the ex-slaves started from Africa through the middle passage and on the plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas and ensured the undermining of the slavery system. The challenge was not simply a challenge to the notion that one man could enslave another. It was a call for equality and the removal of an oppressive and violent system. Needless to say, the enslaved in St. Lucia like the enslaved throughout the Caribbean were not willing to accept the brutality of the system and so there were constant uprisings. The constant unrest in slave society in St. Lucia was also fuelled by the perpetual instability caused by the rivalry between the French and the British. We read constantly of the brigand wars but less about the unrest and instability caused by the fight for freedom by the enslaved. This was influenced by the innate resistance to enslavement but intensified. This was influenced by the innate resistance to enslavement but intensified after the Haitian Revolution which has been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. The enslaved initiated the rebellion in 1791 and by 1803 the former colony had declared its freedom. It influenced many of the slave revolts after 1804 when it was declared independent and may declare that any enslaved person who reached its shores would be immediately free. One of the tactical moves by the French which contributed to the illusion of their benevolence was the abolition of slavery in 1789 in the French colonies. This was after the French Revolution and gave freedom to the enslaved in St. Lucia for about one year. Margot Thomas notes that after the British captured the island they reinstituted slavery in 1796. This caused unrest in St. Lucia and the fight for freedom became more pervasive during the years of British control. It should be noted that Napoleon reinstituted slavery in the French colonies and that the emancipation did not come until 1848. Revolts throughout the region influenced unrest in all slave colonies. In 1823 the newspapers of 4th October of Castery St. Lucia reported that in August a plot was discovered after the Demerara revolt. Revolts throughout the region influenced unrest in all slave colonies. In 1823 the newspapers of 4th October from Castery St. Lucia reported that in August a plot was discovered after the Demerara revolt. It noted that three notorious characters ringleaders in a plot against the white and free colored people had been apprehended and brought into town. The death of Petronay in 1833 also resulted in short-term unrest amongst the slaves on the Fordo plantation. Her death caused stirrings of revolt so that the militia had to be sent to the Mabuya Valley to maintain order. The governor of St. Lucia Farquasen took it sufficiently seriously to place the plantation under military supervision. Of note is the appointment of a protector of slaves in 1831 as well as the establishment of a royal court, a petty court and a court of police in St. Lucia. On the eve of emancipation the one and two victorious C67 an act for the better government of prisons in the West Indies was issued three days after emancipation in the British West Indies. It was intended that Her Majesty would ensure some uniformity in the regulation of her prisons. This would be replicated throughout the British West Indies. To date throughout the region Her Majesty's royal prisons continue to thrive. It had the effect of ensuring that the newly freed would understand that the criminality would forever be tied to their race. It should be further noted that it was not until 1838 that the first micro school was established for the education of the newly freed persons in St. Lucia. So we did get prisons before we got schools towards reconstructing freedom. I want you to know that we are not the children of enslaved people. Rather, we are the children of freedom fighters. And as such, we must demand that the restructuring of our freedom must be within a global framework. We were the first global commodity and we have a moral responsibility to lodge this legal claim in order to bring to justice all former colonial countries responsible for native genocide and African enslavement. Former colonial powers that are also guilty of prolonging the relics of enslavement through systematic and institutionalized racism must also be approached. Black people have always maintained that equality could not be decreed by law or through lofty expressions of remorse and contrition. Such expressions must be accompanied by atonement from all the colonizers. The American abolitionist Frederick Douglass reminds us that, and I quote, power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and never will. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Unquote. Enslaved Africans were always aware of the veracity of the statement so that every act of rebellion by the enslaved, including staying away from work, working slowly, feigning sickness, running away to set up maroon settlements that mimicked African villages and rebellion was a demand for payment, better working conditions, freedom, equality, and humanity. Our restructuring of our freedom, our emancipation, must be based on knowledge and education. Our leaders are beginning to recognize that the adoption of colonial constitutions has prevented the decolonization in our countries that would raise our people out of the doldrums of an inferiority that continues to make us second-class citizens in our own countries. Let me end by recalling the 1844 riots in castries when it was rumored that slavery was being reinstated and leave you with the words then Governor Torrance used to quell the riots. And I quote, you are forever free. No person can ever make you slaves again. Let us live that freedom. I thank you.