Emancipation

Disclosure: Millennium River is an independent, professional website that uses hyperlinks. Some of these hyperlinks are affiliate links. When you click and purchase a product(s) through these links, I may earn a commission on qualifying sales. This is done at no extra expense to you. Consider also supporting this website via PayPal. Unless it is clearly stated, the content is not sponsored.

What Does That Word Even Mean?

Emancipation is the process of giving people social or political freedom and rights. Freeing from restraint, control, or the power of another.

Emancipation Day

This historic day paved the way to freeing over 800,000 enslaved Africans and their descendants in Canada, parts of the Caribbean, Africa, and South America. However, this only applied to children under the age of 6. Others still had to continue serving their former owners unpaid, for 40 hours a week. It not until July 31, 1838 that all enslaved people across the British Empire finally gained their freedom at midnight on that day. Since then, August 01 has been commemorated in many parts of the world, including through celebrations of freedom across Canada. In Canada, Emancipation Day did not get such status until March 24, 2021 when the Member of parliament in the House of Commons voted unanimously to designate August 01 as Emancipation Day across Canada. Trinidad And Tobago was the first country to commemorate Emancipation Day as a national holiday since 1985. 

Emancipation Day Versus Juneteenth

Juneteenth, short for June Nineteenth, is a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, observed annually on June 19. Similarly to Canada, it did not receive official, national status until 2021. On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed the bill into law, making Juneteenth the 11th holiday recognized by the federal government. In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which announced more than 3,000,000 slaves living in the Confederate states to be free. Despite this, it took 2 years for the news to reach Black Americans living in Texas. The news was brought to them through Union soldiers when they arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. Upon learning of their freedom, the former slaves celebrated with prayers, feasts, songs, and dances.

Black Slavery In Canada

The buying, selling, and enslavement of Black people in Canada was practiced by European traders, and colonists in New France in the early 1600s. It lasted until it was abolished throughout British North America in 1834. During that 200-year period, settlers in what would eventually become Canada were involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 12 to 20 million Africans were enslaved in the western hemisphere after an Atlantic voyage of 6 to 10 weeks. During that voyage now known as the Middle Passage, approximately 2,000,000 Africans died from disease, malnourishment, mistreatment, and fights. Upon arrival in North America, enslaved Africans and their descendants were forced to work in fields, perform manual labour, and domestic work in homes. They were forced to change their names, abandon their faiths, reject their cultures, and stop speaking their native tongues. 

Slave owning was not only limited to the elite and politicians. Ownership was widespread in colonial Canada, from government, military officials, merchants, fur traders, hotel keepers, millers, tradesmen, bishops, priests, and others. It cruelly filled the need for cheap labour, and was also considered part of an individual’s wealth. The law enforced and maintained enslavement through legal contracts that detailed transactions of the buying, selling or hiring out of enslaved persons, as well as the terms of wills in which enslaved people were passed on to others. Slaves were not treated any better in Canada than they were in the Caribbean or the United States. They were viewed as property tools, with treatment varying considerably from owner to owner. Some owners would have allowed them to read and write, free them after the owner dies, or reward them land, and property. However, the mere fact that they were held as property sums up the overall treatment: inhumane. Most were tortured, jailed, or even sexually abused.

Indigenous Peoples Slavery In Canada

Long before Black slaves made up the majority of enslaved peoples, Indigenous peoples of the Americas were the main slaves. European explorers in the 1400s and 1500s were infamous for kidnapping Indigenous peoples and taking them back to Europe to be enslaved or exhibited. Indigenous peoples were not granted basic human rights, and were treated as property tools. They were bought and sold for the main purpose of manual and domestic labour. Most of those enslaved were young women, with the average age being 14 years old. Indigenous slavery in Canada did not end until slavery was abolished in Canada. 

Caribbean Slavery

Between 1662 and 1807 Britain shipped 3.1 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Africans were forcibly brought to British owned colonies in the Caribbean and sold as slaves to work on plantations. Those involved in the trade were driven by the large financial gain to be made, both in the Caribbean and at home in Britain. However, it was not only Britain involved in the Slave Trade. The sugar plantations of the region were also owned and operated by French, Dutch, Spanish, and Danish colonists. The death rate on the plantations was high, as a result of overwork, poor nutrition, work conditions, brutality, and disease. The work in the fields was gruelling, with long hours spent in the hot sun, supervised by overseers who were quick to whip them. Tasks ranged from clearing land, planting cane, harvesting cane, to manuring, and weeding.

Slavery was not without a fight, however. There were rebellions against slavery right up until emancipation in 1834. Most notably were the slave revolts during 1700s and 1800s including: Tacky’s rebellion in 1760s Jamaica, the Haitian Revolution in 1789, Fedon’s 1790s revolution in Grenada, the 1816 Barbados slave revolt led by Bussa, and the major 1831 slave revolt in Jamaica led by Sam Sharpe. That people that ran away from slavery who would form communities became known as the Maroons.

Indentured Labour

The abolition of slavery in 1834 led to Britain creating yet another means of exploited work: Indentured Labour. After the abolition of slavery, newly freed men and women rejected to work for the low wages offered on the sugar farms in British colonies in the Caribbean. Indentured labour was a system of bonded labour that was instituted following the abolition of slavery. Indentured labourers were recruited to work on sugar, cotton and tea plantations, and rail construction projects in British colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and South East Asia. From 1834 to the end of World War 1, Britain had transported approximately 2 million Indian indentured workers to 19 colonies including Fiji, Mauritius, Ceylon, Trinidad, Guyana, Malaysia, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa.

The indentured workers were recruited from India, China, and the Pacific. Workers signed a contract in their own countries to work abroad for a period of 5 years or more. They were meant to receive wages, a small amount of land and in some cases, promise of a return passage once their contract was over. In reality, this rarely happened. The conditions were harsh and their wages mercilessly low. The system of indentured labour was officially abolished by the British government in 1917. Over the following century, the descendants of those who remained became significant parts of the population in a number of countries such as Guyana, Surinam, Trinidad, Jamaica, Malaysia and South Africa, and, to a lesser extent, in the East African countries of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. A lot of East and South Asian people also migrated to the United Kingdom in the 1950s and thereafter.

Legacy

Though countries such as Canada, United States, Britain, Spain, Holland, and France, have long abolished enslavement systems, freedom was not truly granted upon abolishment of such systems. Formerly enslaved peoples continued to face challenges of discrimination in housing, employment, education, health, transportation, and several other areas. Even though a lot has improved between then and now, the effects from hundreds of years of colonialism still effects these society in a number of ways, mainly through superiority complex. There is still work to be done.