“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.” These words are associated with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech for March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In that speech he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. They are also associated with an African American hymnal and these hymns are often associated with struggles for liberation.
185 years ago, it would have marked the first day Africans in the British Empire achieved their freedom based on the Emancipation Proclamation. This day came after hundreds of years of oppression and daily resistance to chattel slavery by our ancestors. It is a freedom that did not come free. It is a freedom that we must not only guard zealously but must continue to fight to preserve, deepen and strengthen. It is a freedom that could be reversed if we accept the Emancipation Proclamation is good enough and we need not do more.
Our ancestors were treated as subhuman not as equal to the white man. They were sold as property, on a trade block- men were quartered and whipped for daring to resist and demand they be treated with dignity and respect; women were violated in the cruelest of manner for putting up similar resistance, and children were ripped from their parents. Africans. Those were inhumane conditions under which our ancestors lived and toiled without pay.
Make no mistake, whereas the chains are no longer around our necks, and Guyana is no longer a slave society, but republican nation, inhumanity, brutality and cruelty are still present, albeit in different forms. The disregard today for the basic rights and freedoms of African national space poses a clear and present threat to the freedom won on 1st August 1838, the nation’s political independence on 26th May 1966, and full right to self-determination with Republican status on 23rd February 1970.
Africans are not in a happy place today. The state of the African race in 2023 in Guyana is deserving of individual and national attention.
Let’s remember where it all began, who stood to benefit and why it is important that we who today are the beneficiary of such support cannot turn our backs on modern day wrongdoings or stay silent. We are duty bound to resist wrongs and advocate and agitate for what is just and fair. The Church can no longer remain silent or disengaged from social issues.
The struggle of the African Guyanese for racial, social economic and political justice is real. The constitutional rights to life, work, own property, collective bargaining, freedom of association and protection from being discriminated against on the ground of race are being attacked.
We are proud and resilient people. Ours is a history of standing up against wrong, regardless of who commits it and who will benefit from our agitation. Ours is a history of economic, political, cultural and social determination. Ours is the ability to overcome and lift others up with up. Our is the inalienable right to be treated as human beings, with dignity and respect. We must know our worth and fearlessness stand up and demand what’s justly ours.
Today I ask of you to join hands with me and crusade across the length and breadth of this country to advance the struggle for equal rights and justice for the African race. Not until this is achieved can we say- Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty we are free at last.
On this 185th Anniversary of Emancipation may God continue to give us the strength to soldier on.
