Guyana marked Emancipation Day on August 1—188 years since the end of chattel slavery—but Dr. Karen Abrams warns that celebration without courage reduces freedom to ritual, stripped of its real meaning.
In her op-ed, “Emancipation Is Also the Courage to Speak,” published in Kaieteur News last Sunday, the Founder and Executive Director of STEMGuyana and Pathway Academy delivers a sobering reflection on what emancipation truly demands—linking the quiet resistance of enslaved Africans to the modern-day silence she believes is taking hold in society.
Abrams shifts the focus from the well-known rebellions and uprisings to something less celebrated but equally powerful: the everyday defiance of enslaved people who refused to surrender their humanity.
They resisted in ways both small and dangerous—working slowly, arriving late, refusing unjust demands, protecting one another, and even risking punishment to lodge complaints against those who controlled them. These acts, preserved in colonial records from nineteenth-century Berbice and examined by historian Trevor Burnard in Hearing Slaves Speak, reveal a relentless struggle over dignity in a system designed to crush it.
“Sometimes it was simply the decision not to surrender every remaining fragment of their humanity.”
Abrams recounts the case of Frederick, an enslaved man who insisted that Sundays belonged to the enslaved. For visiting friends on a neighbouring estate, he and others were punished—placed in stocks and flogged. Still, they persisted.
At Plantation Highbury, sixteen women cutting cane collectively put down their tools at eleven o’clock to cook and rest, insisting on a break they believed was theirs. With no unions, no legal protections, and no independent courts, their stand was a direct challenge to absolute authority.
Even the act of complaining, Abrams notes, was resistance. In 1824 and 1825, hundreds of enslaved people in Berbice brought grievances before colonial officials, fully aware that the system was stacked against them.
“They resisted because there were parts of themselves they refused to surrender.”
For Abrams, these stories are not distant history—they are a moral inheritance.
She is careful not to equate modern Guyana with slavery. Today’s citizens have constitutional rights, access to the courts, and the ability to speak publicly. But she warns that fear—subtle, pervasive, and often unspoken—can still shape behavior in ways that undermine those freedoms.
Too many Guyanese, she argues, believe that speaking out carries consequences: stalled approvals, lost contracts, professional setbacks, or economic retaliation. Whether those fears are always justified, she suggests, is beside the point.
“When enough citizens believe criticism brings punishment, fear begins to govern behaviour.”
In such an environment, silence becomes internalised. People censor themselves before anyone has to silence them. They whisper instead of speaking openly, wait for others to take the risk, and calculate the personal cost of telling the truth.
Abrams places this concern squarely within the national moment following the July 18 sinking of the MV Barima, a tragedy that left dozens dead and many families still searching for answers. In its aftermath, citizens have demanded accountability, including calls for ministerial resignations. Others have defended the government.
That disagreement, she argues, is not the problem—it is the test of a functioning democracy.
“The larger democratic question is whether Guyanese feel free to participate in that debate without fearing retaliation.”
Her warning is direct. Democracies do not erode only through laws or force; they weaken when citizens begin to doubt that it is safe to speak.
Governments, she argues, are strengthened—not threatened—when citizens can point out failures without fear. Institutions improve when professionals give honest advice, journalists investigate freely, workers report unsafe conditions, and families demand answers.
Silence, by contrast, allows weaknesses to deepen—sometimes with devastating consequences.
“Silence may protect officials from discomfort for a time, but it can also allow weaknesses to deepen until the consequences become catastrophic.”
Abrams does not absolve citizens of responsibility. Freedom of expression, she stresses, must be exercised with integrity—grounded in evidence, honesty, and respect. But she rejects the idea that responsibility should be used as a pretext for silence.
“Responsibility cannot mean silence.”
Her conclusion returns to the enduring lesson of emancipation. Freedom was not handed down in a single moment; it was built through generations of resistance—both dramatic and ordinary. From uprisings to unfinished rows of cane, from Sunday visits to whispered complaints, enslaved Africans practised freedom long before they formally possessed it.
Today’s Guyanese, she argues, inherit that legacy under far less perilous conditions.
“If they found the courage to speak under slavery, we must find the courage to speak in freedom.”
It is a challenge that cuts through the pageantry of Emancipation Day and into the heart of national life. Because remembrance alone is not enough.
The real question Abrams leaves hanging over the country is simple—and unsettling: in a free Guyana, who is still afraid to speak?
