Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
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There were standing ovations at the beginning and end of Professor Chinua Achebe's address to a huge audience of thousands at Emancipation Park, New Kingston, on Tuesday evening, as in clear, yet quiet and measured tones, he advised a closer connection between the Africans who remained and the ones who were taken away as slaves.
Achebe, present to help launch the Bicentennial observation of the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade on Haiti’s Ancestral Day, there was still rapt attention to the Nigerian author's long speech, punctuated with applause.
Achebe, who was introduced by Kenyatta Powell, expressed his happiness that Jamaica, which acquitted itself well in the long struggle for equality and freedom, chose him as one witness to the events at Emancipation Park that night.
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He advised that what persons should take from the event is not the drive to move on, but the "determination, never again".
"To do this, we have to reach out to each other more than we do at the moment and make each other more comfortable in each other's presence," he said. "The awkwardness we feel now is the result of centuries of guilt," Achebe said, noting that supposed education has taught that Africans brought down Africans to sell to British people in ships off the coast. "What were they doing there?" Achebe asked. "I hope I am not the only person who is skeptical of this scenario. It would be laughable if it was not so tragic." Referring to persons such as Marcus Garvey, DuBois, George Padmore, Richard Wright, CLR James and also to the Pan-African conferences between 1900 and 1945, Achebe noted that both Padmore and DuBois died in Africa, recalling Padmore's weekly columns in the Nigerian newspaper The West Africa Pilot.
And there was more personal example of reaching out - to Jamaican professor Michael Thelwell and American writer James Baldwin, with whom he had a public conversation in 1980. In his opening remarks then, Baldwin said, "This is a brother I have not seen for 400 years," to which the audience cheered. But there was quiet when Baldwin said "It was not intended that we should ever meet."
Still, Baldwin said that the character Okonkwo in Achebe's Things Fall Apart was ‘my father.’ "How he (Okonkwo) got there (to America), I do not know" he said.
Distinguished guests at the rally included the Prime Minister of Jamaica Portia Simpson Miller, cabinet ministers, Nigeria’s representative to the Island, Ambassador O. Akintola and other embassy staff; members of the Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee, a non-partisan, broad-based group, that organized the event and chaired by University of the West Indies Professor Verene Shepherd; and several of Jamaica’s distinguished intellectuals such as Professor Michael Thelwell. Also in attendance were members of Professor Achebe’s family - Professor Christie Achebe, Dr. Ike Achebe, and several of Jamaica’s cultural, economic and social celebrities.
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