By COREY CONNELLY Sunday, July 31 2011
As the nation prepares to commemorate yet another Emancipation Day
observance tomorrow, chairman of the Emancipation Support Committee
(ESC), Khafra Kambon, says he is deeply offended by "unfounded"
queries expressed, in some quarters, about the manner in which the
organisation has managed its funding for the celebration over the
years.
The committee, after some prodding, recently received some $2 million
from the People's Partnership Government for activities to celebrate
this year's observance of Emancipation, which was granted to slaves on
August 1, 1838.
Kambon, who has chaired the committee since its inception in 1992,
told Sunday Newsday on Wednesday that while the organisation was
grateful for the sum, the cost of celebrating such events often
amounted to considerably more.
"Emancipation is a lot more expensive than that," he said, lamenting
that questions continue to be raised about his integrity with respect
to the organisation's funding.
Kambon argued that concerns were hardly ever expressed about the sums
given to other bodies for the hosting of religious or cultural
festivals.
"But people always question what Kambon and them doing with their
money and nobody could tell you what other festivals get except when,
because of the race thing in our head, they will say 'Divali get this
or that.' It only comes up in that way because we think of race in
that way," he argued.
Kambon said people's integrity aren't questioned for larger sums of
money.
"In fact, I don't think the integrity of people who organise Divali is
ever questioned. I don't hear that being questioned on the radio," he
said.
"They may make comparisons but they do not question the integrity of
the organisers. But our (ESC) integrity is questioned almost daily for
receiving what is really a small sum of money."
Upset about the aspersions to his character, Kambon gave several
examples of festivals which receive huge funding and where little or
no concern was paid to the organisers' management of the money.
Citing the Tobago Heritage Festival, currently taking place, Kambon
claimed that some $6.3 million was pumped into the two-week event.
"Because the Tobago House of Assembly understands the significance of
that ... the question would not arise as to what they doing with all
that money," he said.
Kambon also observed that the recent Tobago Jazz Festival, which
attracts a huge international audience, was also "horrendously
expensive" at more than $30 million.
"I have never heard any commentator talking about what they did with
all that money, because people believe it is an expensive thing to
produce," he said.
Kambon added: "We have months of activities and then we set up a
magnificent village (Lidj Yasu Omowale Emancipation Village) and we
are responsible for bringing people to Trinidad who don't normally
come and they want to know what we do with the money.
"You have that jamming on the integrity question all the time, as
though we suddenly cannot measure cost," he said.
Kambon claimed that such queries were fuelled largely because of the
negativity associated with "everything African" in the society.
However, Kambon still regards the annual Emancipation celebration as
the country's most significant historical observance, symbolising a
"positive turning point in our history here and throughout the
Caribbean" and allowing for a greater awareness of Africanness.
The ESC chairman sought, though, to put the observance in context.
Referring to the arrival of explorer Christopher Columbus to the
Caribbean centuries ago, Kambon noted that the occurrences of that era
had given rise to many of the problems being encountered by people of
African descent in contemporary society within the region.
"It was the beginning of tragedy on an unimaginable scale which
resulted in widespread genocide in Trinidad and Tobago, throughout the
region and even into the Americas, which changed the demographics of
the region in a way that was very anti-human - something unprecedented
in the history of mankind," he said of the Columbus era.
Part of the tragedy of the experience, noted Kambon, was the
enslavement of Africans, which he regarded as "one of the worst forms
of inhumanity in history".
Since that period, he observed, the word "slavery" has been used to
account for every supposed injustice inflicted on people of African
descent.
"If a man don't have a good job, he is a slave, if he gets underpaid
he is a slave. So the word slavery, because of being overused, has
lost its real meaning," he told Sunday Newsday.
Kambon added: "There is something deep in the psyche that knows,
despite what our conscious knowledge may be, that there are memories
that affect our psyche and affect our behaviours and also gives us a
negative reaction to not just slavery, but Africanness, because it is
all lumped in our psyche somewhere. There is a lot of trauma
associated with being African."
Although slavery has long passed, Kambon said many people have not
recognised and embraced their history as a means of moving forward.
"You can't have centuries with human beings having been treated like
cattle and not affecting everybody in the society in a fundamental
way. The oppressors and the enslaved were both marked in very
fundamental ways by that brutal experience," he said.
In Trinidad and Tobago, he said, people have continued to suffer from
psychological scars because of not owning up to the legacy of that
period.
The situation, Kambon observed, has resulted in a very pretensive
society, "where people who are white feel they are better than people
who are non-white".
He said: "That is deep. So people can either try to purge themselves
from it, or just grow up with it as something that is just in the
culture. This is reinforced in many things on the television, in the
cinema, in books and in our education system."
The negative perception of Africanness is often reflected in how young
people view themselves within the education system, Kambon observed.
"As we interface with our children at the primary school, you get some
very innocent statements that would bring tears to your eyes when you
see the way in which children address the question of their blackness
— the association of blackness with ugliness."
Kambon lamented that the "hangover of trauma" still has not been
addressed. "As significant a change as took place by law, where human
beings could no longer be considered the property of the other, that
is something so significant it should be marked. There are people who
fought for that to happen," he said.
Kambon was especially grateful to Haiti for "breaking the back of the
slave system" in the region, thus paving the way for the movement
toward Emancipation.
"They paid a very high price," he recalled.
"One-third of the population was almost wiped out in that struggle for
freedom in Haiti - to transform life so we could be born into a
different scenario. How could we not remember that, how could we not
institutionalise that memory?" he asked.
Despite the challenges, Kambon believes that an increasing number of
people have welcomed the Emancipation observance over the years.
The ESC, he said, now had a voice on radio through Talk City 91.1, as
well as a column in a daily newspaper where issues which impact
African people and society generally are ventilated.
Kambon said the committee has also conducted extensive education
programmes and lectures with limited funding and mostly outside of the
glare of the media. Every year, he said, the committee receives close
to four dozen requests to conduct lectures for various organisations.
"But reporters don't even come to hear what the people are saying,
whether the lecturers are local or foreign, because we have a lot of
cost factors involved. We are reaching a few people here and there,"
he said.
Kambon admitted, however, that the contribution of Africanism to
mankind has not been fully captured in textbooks.
"You hear something once because someone has come to your school and
said something, but everything else you will experience in the
education system, none of that reinforces that and that is why we are
fighting a battle," he said of the lecture sessions.
Still, there has been tangible evidence of success, he feels.
"Some of the information on Emancipation is communicated. You could
see it in the large crowds (on Emancipation Day), look at their
behaviour, they have not come to party and the way they dress, they
have come to express a certain kind of pride.
"I would say it has reached a lot of people, but there are a lot of
people it has not reached and some don't expose themselves to it
because this is something African."
Saying there were many people who lived near Port-of-Spain and had
never seen an Emancipation parade, Kambon said, however, the fact that
people were coming from other districts throughout the country
reflected a growing interest "but the process is slow because there is
no way of institutionalising that within the education system."
He added: "There is a whole process involved in changing a system. At
least we are seeing changes in the right direction, enough so that we
can feel happy.
"I remember when the Emancipation Day Parade had a handful of people.
Now, in the street, you can see tens of thousands of people and,
therefore, I have seen within a relatively short period of time, a
tremendous kind of change that has taken place."
Tomorrow, Kambon said the Drum Call will launch Emancipation
activities. This will be held at three sites: All Stars Pan Yard;
Piccadilly Greens and the Yoruba Village.
Around 8 am, participants are also expected to assemble outside of the
Treasury Building along Independence Square in Port-of-Spain, before
parading through the streets of the capital city to the Queen's Park
Savannah for the main cultural extravaganza.
--
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