Martin Henry
Surely there is a big difference between being a well-kept prisoner on Robben Island and being able to walk the streets of post-Apartheid Johannesburg even if one does not have a rand in the pocket.
Our esteemed brother Nelson Mandela has come out of retirement, again, to address the world on poverty and freedom. Brother Nelson agreed to make the arduous journey for an 86-year-old, from his clan village place of quiet retirement to London to speak at a 'Make Poverty History' rally ahead of the recent G8 Summit in Scotland. The Summit devoted a lot of its time to poverty alleviation in the poorest continent which has given the world its greatest
living retired statesman. Addressing the rally on poverty and freedom must have been judged to be of the highest importance to pull Mandela out of his seclusion.
RICHEST NATIONS
The freedom to hold the rally, the freedom to picket Gleneagles must not be regarded lightly. In principle, representatives of the poorest of the earth (aided by rich benefactors or by pooling their own meagre resources for a big worthy cause) could gather in London or in Gleneagles, Scotland to speak and to protest and to seek to influence the leaders of the world's richest nations. By and large these are the very nations which have been historically leaders of democratic freedoms, despite very spotty records. And freedom, as a principle though very imperfect in practice, seemed to have led to their prosperity, rather than prosperity leading to their freedom.
Mandela said many important things at Trafalgar Square which he could not have said in Apartheid South Africa. I doubt very much if when Mandela walked to freedom from Robben Island prison and then led South Africa to freedom as its first and democratically elected post-Apartheid president that many of his liberated black compatriots would have agreed with his London declaration of 2005 that "While poverty persists there is no true freedom."
EMANCIPATION
We in Jamaica and the former British West Indies are approaching another Eman
cipation Day on August 1. Comparing the 'social evil' of poverty to Apartheid and slavery, Mandela demanded freedom for the millions of slaves of poverty worldwide. At the anti-poverty 2005 Battle of Trafalgar he described massive poverty and "obscene inequality" as "the terrible scourges of our times".
We must commend again Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, with his own up-from-poverty credentials, for the restoration of Emancipation Day for national observance. This is going to be a more substantial part of his legacy than the raiding of the NHT Fund for the transformation of education or the building of Highway 2000, of housing or any other physical infrastructure. Emancipation marked the beginning of the possibility and potential of a free society with the 'smaddification' of the previously non-person slaves. It is the greatest social revolution in our post-Columbian history.
Embedded in the Mandela argument for making poverty history, a noble ideal, and in Rupert Johnson's letter last week Wednesday to The Gleaner out of Toronto which drew my attention to the Mandela speech, is the view that economic freedom is the basis of all freedoms.
When one is simply poor, this proposition may appear unduly reasonable. When one is a proper slave, some of whom in history were very well kept and were 'better off' than the free poor, when one is a victim of Apartheid, when one is a dissident in Cuba and other old communist states, with no hope of escape, the matter looks substantially different.
SLAVE FOREBEARS
When our slave forebears on this rock crammed into the dissenting chapels on the night of July 31, 1834 to await 'freedom' at the stroke of midnight, what might have been uppermost in their minds? They would have been worried about their landless status when day light came; the loss of provision grounds, huts and rations; the loss of rudimentary medical care and of tools. We may not want to admit it, steeped as we are in heroic history 171 years on, but also the loss of Massa and the certainty which a paternalistic, regimented life, harsh though it was, brought with it. We see the same syndrome today in job attachment for fear of moving on into the unknown and in attachment to political personalities, government and the state as providers. Freedom can be scary - and painful.
But the great power, pull and promise of freedom on that fateful night of 1834, as in Apartheid South Africa as everywhere where people have been owned, was self-ownership by humans, made in the image of the Divine Person, destitute and afraid but thirsting to be their own person. The ringing declaration of Samuel Sharpe, the literate, well kept, Christian house slave as he faced execution after the failure of the Christmas Rebellion of 1831-32 says it all: "I would rather die on yonder gallows than be a slave another day."
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
