Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour and an opportunity for me to speak tonight on the private member's motion to establish an emancipation day in recognition of the heritage and contributions of Canada's black communities.
It is an honour because I represent thousands of people in Dartmouth and the communities of North Preston, East Preston and Cherry Brook, many of whom are the direct descendants of African people captured in the slave trade.
I am also honoured to speak on behalf of my esteemed colleague from Windsor, Ontario, who also represents many black Canadians who made their way out of slavery through the underground railroad into Canada.
It is an important debate to have because it will shed light on a widely forgotten and obviously shameful part of our history. We can learn from it. It is an opportunity for us to think, meditate and really try to imagine the experience of the first African-Canadian descendants who arrived in the country.
Where does the story start? It started 500 years ago when Spanish settlers first brought slaves from Africa to the Dominican Republic. In the next 300 years, conservative estimates say that over 10 million people were brought across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa in the slave trade. Henry Bishop, the curator of the Black Cultural Centre in Nova Scotia, said the numbers could be double or triple that but they do not take into account the numbers of women and children who died in transit.
Where did this human cargo come from? The original homeland of most Nova Scotia peoples of African descent is west Africa. From about 500 until the 1600s, the three west African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhai were rich and powerful nations. Their economic life revolved around agriculture, manufacturing and the international trade of gold.
When the British established rice, indigo and tobacco plantations in the southern parts of North America, plantation owners first used native Indians as slave labour but then turned their eyes eastward to the continent of Africa.
In the 1700s European countries, including Great Britain, had slave trading companies on the west coast of Africa in such present day countries as Gambia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast. Men, women and children were captured inland, ripped away from their families and brought to the coast by African dealers, then sold and held in European slave factories. They would then await shipment and be transported across the ocean.
In the Americas and the Caribbean, the Africans were sold for cash. This money purchased sugar, rum, spices, cotton, tobacco, coffee and molasses for sale in Europe. The transatlantic slave trade between Africa, the Americas and Europe created immense wealth for European nations. It was a cruel commerce in human lives with no regard for anything except profit and power. I believe it surpassed any atrocity, any genocide, as yet recorded in human history.
In the northern colonies, slaves worked as farmhands, domestic workers or in trades, such as lumbering, mining, blacksmithing, weaving and spinning. A slave was not free to marry, vote or move freely about. A slave could be legally whipped, starved, tortured, mutilated or branded. A slave could be forced to have children or to work many hours a day.
The first crack in the slave trade began during the American revolution between 1776 and 1783. Historians customarily portray the American revolution as an epic struggle for independence fought by stalwart white columnists against mighty England. The struggle for liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness also involved tens of thousands of black Africans and their descendants residing in the British colonies.
Caught in the middle of this war, thousands of them took up the British offer of full protection, freedom and land in return for their support for the British cause. When the rebel Americans won the war, the black people in New York, who had joined the British before the surrender, were issued certificates of freedom. About 3,500 of these black loyalists fled to what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Black loyalist settlements sprang up in Annapolis Royal, Weymouth, Digby, Windsor, Preston, Sydney and Halifax. About 1,500 black loyalists settled in Shelburne county. Free blacks built the community of Birchtown, named after the man who signed their certificates of freedom. Their freedom remained illusive and hard won. The British had promised free land and rations for three years to the black loyalists. However, most were cheated of land and forced to work on public projects, such as road building, and were denied equal status.
Racism, epidemics, poverty and harsh winters made life miserable and for many the promised land became intolerable. In 1792 about 1,200 free blacks sailed from Halifax to Sierra Leone in west Africa where they helped set up the capital which is now Freetown.
Many more escaped slaves arrived in Nova Scotia from the United States during the war of 1812 under conditions similar to the ones of the black loyalists. They moved into the Halifax area to settle in Preston, Hammond Plains, Beechville and Porters Lake. However life remained brutal and dangerous. Slavery was still legal and in force in Nova Scotia until slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834.
Thousands of miles away, in the centre of the continent, in the period leading up to the American civil war, many more black African descendants travelled the underground railroad by night through waterways, swamps, forests and backroads. With the assistance of such groups as the Quakers, free blacks and native Americans, these bonded men, women and children sought out the freedom land of Canada.
A legendary conductor of the underground railroad, Harriet Tubman, became known as the Moses of her people. Tubman was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation and suffered brutal treatment before escaping in 1849. Over the next decade she returned to the American south many times and led hundreds of freedom seekers north.
It almost paralyzes the mind to think of the hardships facing these early black settlers in our country. It is hard for young black Canadians of African descent to fathom the horror that befell their ancestors or the courage and the tenacity with which they carried on. They were held together by strength of purpose and endurance, and by their faith in God. Black loyalists used the church as a source of security, a social gathering place and an educational institution. The church provided a spiritual and emotional release for these settlers. They continued to express their yearning and hope for freedom and equality through spiritual songs.
The memory of slavery and the scars of slavery run deep in the black communities of Nova Scotia and all of Canada to this day. They run deep in the literature of black Nova Scotian artists such as Lucky Campbell, George Elliot Clark, Jeremiah Sparks, the gospel choirs, the civil rights activists and the church leaders. They run deep in their continued efforts to fight racism, poverty, injustice and ignorance wherever they find it in their struggle to raise their families and build strong communities.
They run deep in the words of the song which has become the black national anthem and which begins every event within the black community where I come from. I respectfully quote from Lift every voice and sing :
Lift every voice and sing 'til earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty Let our rejoicing rise—high as the listening skies— Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
It has been my privilege to speak today on the history of Canadians of black African descent. I wish to offer my support to the motion to enact an emancipation day so that we can remember, learn, listen and appreciate the lives and the history of these brave neighbours. Let us remember and work together to make sure that they will indeed be free at last.