JNF-The-Working-Class-Struggle-of-Half-a-Century

14 ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER
SLAVERY
The year 1934 was a time when West Indians, particularly the working
class, paused to examine the foundation on which they had built; made
an evaluation of the present; and pledged to continue to build for the
future. Some people said at that time that the first day of August - one
hundred years after slavery was abolished - should not be an occasion
for much ado, because emancipation was nothing peculiar to Negroes in
the British Caribbean. The critics stated that every race on the globe
experienced, at some time or another, the agony of being enslaved by
another race of people. The St. Kitts Workers League took a different
view. The people of our three Islands had just been awakened to the
necessity for pursuing social and industrial reform by united efforts.
The working population had begun only two years earlier to organise
themselves for the big move forward under the this new leadership.
The Workers’ League simply could not miss such a unique opportunity
to advance the education of the working class on the most important
part of their history. The celebration of the centenary was a significant
milestone along the pathway of human events in the Western
world.
The chain of events may be restricted to the period commencing
with the first discovery of land in the west by Christopher Columbus
in 1492. Next would be the colonisation of St. Kitts by the English
in 1623. Then followed the incident of the slave trade which became
the basic element of the West Indian economy. In the last quarter of the
eighteenth century the slave trade was an indispensable source of labour
supply in the British Islands, and British traders were supplying slaves
to French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish territories as well. While the
trade was a flourishing business for the Lords of Commerce, it reduced
human beings from the West African coast to the level of the beasts. So
the abolition of slavery in1834 brought the end of an era of misery to
the ancestors of Negroes in the British Caribbean. It was therefore a
duty resting on organised labour in St. Kitts in the year 1934 to take a
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