Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller says Jamaica is proud to join with peoples of the African diaspora in marking the struggle for the abolition of the transatlantic trade in Africans and the passing of the British abolition act 200 years ago.

"Over one million of our African ancestors were torn from their homeland and taken through the notorious Middle Passage to our shores," the Prime Minister says in a national broadcast today.

"Their work, their blood, their sweat and their tears helped to build the plantation economy and enrich the colonial power. Out of their pain was born the core of the Jamaican identity."

Describing the act of 1807 to abolish the slave trade as "a significant turning point," Mrs. Simpson Miller said the large African population "took on a Jamaican identity, generating energy and passion for the movement that would lead to emancipation, full freedom and the liberation of all Jamaica from the slave system."

The Prime Minister said the only one real and lasting way to do justice to the memory of those who paved the way for our freedom is to live their legacy in our thoughts, words and action.

Said Mrs. Simpson Miller: "Every time we fail to honour the freedoms we enjoy today, we reopen the wounds of the past; every time someone commits a rape or any act of sexual abuse, the old wound of rape, as a tool of oppression and degradation used during slavery, is reopened; every time someone takes a life, the old wound of total disregard for the lives of our ancestors during slavery, is reopened; with every act of violence, the old wound of unspeakable brutality during slavery is reopened."

She added: "The way to honour our nation's journey from 1807 is to cherish every freedom that has been won and to live the legacy of our ancestors."

Not an immediate end

In his statement to mark the bicentenary commemoration of slavery, Governor-General Professor Kenneth Hall noted that the abolitionof the trade in enslaved Africans "did not bring an end immediately to the indecency of dehumanisation of millions severed from ancestral homes, to labour as chattels in the cane fields of Jamaica and the rest of the British West Indies."

He said the degradation, despair, the denigration of things African, the wanton exploitation and extreme punitive measures against surrogate beasts of burden on plantations and plots, continued unabated for many years later. He suggested that in 1838, "full free", as our forebears described that second abolition, marked the legal extinction from Jamaican reality that debilitating practice of man's inhumanity to man.

The Governor-General said the first abolition - that of the transatlantic slave trade - prepared our forebears to deepen and maintain the struggle against the indecency on this side of the Middle Passage. "They fought for the attainment of freedom both under law and for us to be the architects of our own fortunes,"he said. "Those struggles allowed us to determine the direction and the courses of action that can take us into civil society capable of coping with the third millennium."

Said Professor Hall: "The bicentenary commemoration is significant to us because the legacy of slavery continues to force into memory the urgent need to forget our history. This history could be in danger of being repeated if we fail to pluck from the jaws of the despair of the past, a future of hope that lies within our grasp."

Opposition Leader Bruce Golding also noted in his message that the abolition act did not bring an end to slavery itself but it was an important step toward its ultimate abolition.

"No one," said Mr. Golding "would dare deny, no argument can rationalise and nothing that has since been done can ameliorate the barbarity visited on our forebears in Africa when they were lured, ensnared, kidnapped, overpowered, sold and exchanged like livestock, crammed in overcrowded slave ships and shipped off to faraway lands to work like beasts of burden on sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations."

Brutal experience

He said the brutal experience of slavery and the devastating and lasting effect it has had on succeeding generations of people and on scores of nation states can never be forgotten, must never be dismissed or trivialised as "the way of the times" and can never be forgiven unless its savagery and reprehensibility are acknowledged and forgiveness sought.

Arguing that remnants of slavery still exist in our psych we ourselves have not been crammed in slave ships or condemned to work in the hot sun with a whip on our backs, Mr. Golding said its conditioning of our minds and its debilitating effect on our own appreciation of our worth, rights and dignity remain a yoke that we have not fully cast off.

"The process of liberation may have begun 200 years ago but the job is not yet done," said Mr Golding. "We who carry the burden of the legacy of slavery owe it to those who carried the burden of slavery itself and, indeed, to ourselves, to complete that process".