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EPILOGUE: The Living Past
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
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EPILOGUE / the living past This study is an effort to grapple with the complexities of Afro-Caribbean people’s relationship with the process of slave emancipation and to think historically about contemporary political discourses and the modern public sphere in the postcolonial Caribbean. The analysis signposts the wider implications of the study of slavery and emancipation and the place of race, nation, nationalism and gender as tools of historical analysis and forms of social identity. One should always be mindful of the dangers of making the study of slave emancipation into “the servant of present needs,” as historian of British slave emancipation William A. Green once termed it.1 Nevertheless, there are significant and intriguing resonances between the concerns and struggles of Afro-Barbadians in the age of emancipation and the challenges that face Afro-Barbadians, as well as other communities across the Anglophone Caribbean, in our own time. These similarities were crystalized by the Barbadian government’s 1998 declaration of ten “National Heroes,” among whom were two free people of color discussed in this book, Afro-Barbadian Methodist Sarah Ann Gill and journalist and politician Samuel Jackman Prescod. This is not the place to debate whether or not these individuals deserve to be national heroes—or even why it was suddenly considered important to have national heroes. What is in question is the manner in which Gill and Prescod were represented in this official commemoration process. In the government’s booklet on Our National Heroes Prescod is described as someone who “gave a voice to the dispossessed and the marginalized when they did not have one, and who broke down the barricades of Parliamentary segregation , creating the aperture through which all the rest of us have followed. . . . [He] had a futuristic vision of the importance of training the masses in the business of self-government” and earned the title “counsellor” and “adviser” from the people.2 Sarah Ann Gill also is eulogized: 1. William A. Green, “The Creolization of Caribbean History: A Critique of Dialectical Analysis,” in Beckles and Shepherd, Caribbean Freedom, 28. 2. Barbados Government Information Service (GIS), Our National Heroes (Bridgetown: GIS, 1998), 10. 284 the children of africa in the colonies Widowed early and a woman alone, fighting for religious freedom, the rights of the individual, and, in a most dangerous age, representing and radiating the indomitable spirit of Barbadian womanhood. . . . By her faith, her courage, her charity and nobility she altered the course of history. She symbolises the faith, strength and courage of Barbadian women through history, and the great rock of Christian faith they built, on which our lives are based.3 These official eulogies are a crude reflection of the relatively small body of historiographical writing on Afro-Barbadian political activity in the era of slave emancipation and they fairly cry out for analysis. They contain echoes and reverberations of the normative gender and class discourses that shaped elite representations of “correct” bourgeois Afro-Barbadian masculinity and femininity during the era of emancipation. Sarah Ann Gill is the only “national heroine,” and in Our National Heroes she is Mrs. Sarah Ann Gill, “widowed early, and a woman alone”—the only one of the national heroes whose marital status has been provided. This is reminiscent of the privileging of marital status among elite Afro-Barbadian philanthropist women during the early nineteenth century, distancing themselves from less “respectable ” and unmarried women in the public domain.4 Gill’s entry into the sphere of public life is justified by the fact that as a “woman alone,” she had no one to protect her from the planter state. The reference to her widowhood renders her involvement in a public political struggle respectable because she crossed the line between involvement in “nonpolitical” church and missionary activity, areas of civic engagement that are still considered “respectable” and appropriate for AfroBarbadian women, into the sphere of politics. Gill’s religiosity and that of other Afro-Barbadian women is marked as the “rock” on which the “lives” of generations of Barbadians have been built. Such language resonates with the idea of her as a maternal figure, casting her in the role of a spiritual Christian mother to the nation and a symbol of proper bourgeois motherhood for other women. This description of Gill reflects the fact that, despite the high political profile of AfroBarbadian women and the recent increase in the number of women occupying powerful positions in formal party politics, women in politics...