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By Hilbert Haar
I know that it is not done to blow your own horn but still, the initiative by stmaartennews.com publisher and chairman of the Trey Foundation Terrance Rey to establish a digital platform dedicated to projects about the history of slavery deserves more than a casual footnote.
Slavery is of course a painful subject, more so in the Caribbean countries of the kingdom than in the Netherlands but that does not mean that the topic should be ignored or even buried under the blanket of history. On the contrary, our citizens, and especially our young generation, should be made aware of all the efforts that are made on the islands to do justice to this part of our shared past.
Will it make memories of slavery less painful? Will it even make those memories go away? Of course not. Maybe this is what some politicians in the Netherlands prefer, and even in the Caribbean there are prominent people who’d rather announce that they were born free than to be labeled as a descendant of enslaved predecessors.
The undeniable truth is that our current generation was born free, but this does not mean that we are also free to close our eyes for our own history. Why? Because what happened in the past, can happen again.
It is for this reason that our citizens should be made aware of the history of slavery. Not so that they can complain about it, but to enable them to recognize signs of approaching infringements on the freedom that they are used to.
This is not a trivial matter, far from it. Freedom is not something that falls out of our beautiful blue sky. Most of the freedoms, as we know them today, are the result of hard work by people who cared about the quality of life that we all enjoy.
It is easy to take the lives we live and the freedom we have to do whatever we like (except breaking the law) for granted. But it is also good to realize that the lives of the people who lived before us were completely different and with what we know now we feel comfortable to say: oh, that was awful (or criminal – pick your favorite adjective).
Against this background, the idea to create a digital platform for all Caribbean projects about the history of slavery is not just brilliant; it is, unfortunately, necessary and I sincerely wish that many of our readers will embrace this initiative.
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