This weekend, the Emancipation Support Committee (ESC) hosted a range of events that celebrate the African presence in the cultural and social mix that is Trinidad and Tobago. Among the events was a celebration of the work, life and career of singer and songwriter Ella Andall scheduled for Saturday night which featured the considerable talents of South African singer and composer Lorraine Klaasen.
Sunday’s Food Fair and Family Explosion included an impressive line up of youth steel orchestras as guest performers and Ziggy Ranking was set to headline Sunday night’s Youth Unity Concert.
Today, the Emancipation Proclamation is to be read at dawn as part of Freedom Morning Come, a play by Pearl Eintou Springer, a dramatic early morning outside the Treasury Building that marks the start of a full day of activities running from the Brian Lara Promenade to the home base of Emancipation celebrations, the Queen’s Park Savannah.
The hosting and continuance of Emancipation Day is also the lasting legacy of the National Joint Action Committee, which successfully evolved from being a marginal political party into a significant cultural force over the last four decades.
It’s a powerful and valuable contribution and in acknowledging that, it’s also sensible to consider what it has brought to its intended audience in T&T and where it might consider going in the future.
On Saturday, the ESC organised the 16th edition of its Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Symposium in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Trinidad and Tobago Unit Trust Corporation.
The discussions were meant to encourage proactive approaches to current economic challenges through a revaluation of the old triangle of trade which was lubricated by slavery.
Cuba sent Jesus Gonzalves, its Caribbean Coordinator in the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Trade and Investment and speakers included Amadu Massaly of Sierra Leone and a keynote by Dr Abdoulaye Bathily, who was expected to draw attention to fast growing economies in the Central African region which have not drawn significant economic notice.
Despite sixteen years of work on this front, this has not proven to be a particularly effective forum for the work of the Emancipation Support Committee and further planning on how to refocus and clarify its role in supporting local economic activity would not be out of place.
On the cultural front, one of the strongest aspects of the committee’s work, the planning and programming of this weekend’s activities, betrays the mature mindset of the leadership of the ESC, as a weekend’s worth of cultural activities managed to ignore the enormous influence of Afrobeat pop on a potential youth audience as well as among local performers who work closer to the cutting edge of composing and song distribution.
This weekend’s events, as exemplary as they were in presentation, were more about what NJAC’s elders thought young T&T should be paying attention to instead of what they actually are doing, listening to and creating. The committee, on the evidence of its cultural programming, is doing a great job of talking to its peers and to young children, but is demonstrably unfocused on the interests of the young adults it desperately needs to assume an important role in preserving and guiding Afro-Trinidadian traditions.
To that end, the ESC must prove willing to trust and evolve its legacy, passing more of its work into younger hands and its planning to youthful minds if it is to reflect and influence the young audience it seeks to reach in T&T today.