The Chains That Never Rusted

One Caribbean Nation.

The Chains That Never Rusted

WHAT ARE WE CELEBRATING EMANCIPATION FROM AND WHY IT MATTERS IN 2026? 

by Professor Justin Robinson

It began with smoke.

Our journey to Emancipation began with the journey to slavery by our ancestors. Their journey to slavery in the Caribbean typically began with the smoke of their village afire.

Maybe they were engaging in some everyday activity like grinding millet. Maybe they were braiding a sister's hair, or teaching a son to track the river's current, when they saw the smoke. The slave raiders often came at dawn or some other vulnerable time, when they knew people were relaxed and exposed. Some people fought back, some were even able to run away, but many were herded like cattle through the brush, iron collars already around their necks and the chains attached.

As they were marched, still in shock, it did not cross their minds that their lives had changed forever, that they would never see their land or ancestors' grave again. They could not fathom that their language, the one that held the names of your ancestors, would soon become a liability and that speaking it would earn them the lash. They were marched for weeks, maybe months as a pack of human beings reduced to cargo.

Some died on the march and the living did not stop to bury them.

Then the coast.

If they were one of the lucky, or unlucky, ones who survived the journey to the coast, they saw the ocean, many for the first time in their lives. In the movie Roots when confronted with the sight of the ocean, the character Kunta Kinte asked, where is the river bank. As they were handed over to the slave traders they became property, branded and inspected like livestock.

Their new, temporary home would be the dungeons, which would hold hundreds of them for weeks, maybe months. They would be forced to live in darkness, in their own filth and witnesses spoke of the sound of endless weeping.

Then the ship.

If they were one of the fortunate, or unfortunate ones who survived the dungeons they went through the infamous point of no return as they were loaded onto ships to embark on the journey we know as the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage would be a journey of unspeakable horror. A voyage of infinite human suffering that has been documented in vivid mathematical detail by slave traders, insurance companies and others as they kept their business records.

On the slave ships your ancestors were stacked on shelves.

They were forced to lie on their sides, chained to strangers whose names they would never learn. Many had never been on a ship before and were plagued by seasickness. Your ancestors on the Middle Passage had to learn to live and sleep in their own vomit and bodily waste as well as that of others. The air below deck became thick with vomit, urine, blood, and the rot of dying flesh, and disease spread like wildfire. The dead were thrown overboard like bait. The case of the slave ship, Zong, tells us that sometimes the living were sometimes thrown overboard too. The Zong facing limited supplies tossed slaves overboard and then filed an insurance claim in London for lost cargo. It was for this reason that sailors said that the sharks followed the ships for weeks.

The historical record says that of the 12.5 million humans shipped as cargo, 20 percent of them did not survive the crossing. However, survival was its own horror. The women and men were raped by crew members. The men who were feared most because they were likely to rebel were chained longest. Their limbs wasted and some seemed to lose their minds. Children were the most vulnerable and the most likely to get sick and die and thrown overboard without record.

For those who completed the Middle Passage, a new life as property in the Caribbean awaited. These people, your ancestors, were "freshened up" and led off to slave auctions where they would be sold as property to be deployed at the discretion of their new owners. The best available historical evidence suggests that the majority would die in seven years on average creating a constant need for more Middle Passage journeys.

This is what we are celebrating Emancipation from.

In the season of Emancipation, the descendants of these slaves celebrate the end of this brutal system. We celebrate the end of a deliberately engineered system of dehumanization that treated human beings as property to support corporate profits and national wealth. The trade, the crops such as cotton, rum, indigo, sugar, tobacco and the rice, the shipping, the banking, the insurance and all the ancillary sources of wealth all required this violent system. The smoke of burning villages in Africa, the horrors of the slave ship, the whip, the branding iron, the chains and the intellectual scaffolding of racism were all part of this brutal system that said it was acceptable to own other human beings.

So why care in 2026? The chains, the hateful symbol of slavery were broken as slavery formally ended on August 1, 1834, in the British Empire. However, the links from the chain of that long lasting and deeply embedded system are littered across our lives today.

The chain never rusted because our countries, Western Europe and the Americas are fundamentally shaped by the legacy of slavery. The chain never rusted for us of African descent as we are still too often judged by the color of our skin. The chain never rusted as the wealth extracted from our economies went to build inter-generational wealth.

You should care in 2026 because to celebrate the season of Emancipation without understanding what was endured, without feeling it as the suffering of ordinary human beings risks turning the season of Emancipation into mere ceremony.

This season of Emancipation remember the smoke.

I urge you to remember the families torn from each other and kept apart and to remember it by building strong families.

I urge you to remember the violence of the slave raiders, the slave traders and slave masters, the violence of the slave raid, the slave coffle, the Middle Passage, the slave auction and plantation life and to remember it by ending the senseless and endless cycle of violence that now plagues our society.

Remember that this violent system was not some inevitable stage in some historical process. The system saw real humans make choices to violently enslave other humans. The system I described were moments in the lives of our ancestors, real people who loved and feared and hoped exactly as we do.

The season of Emancipation Day is not an invitation to remain wounded but rather an invitation to remain awake.

Professor Justin Robinson is an economist and Pro Vice- Chancellor of the Board of Undergraduate Studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill Campus.

Barbados Today Thursday August 13th. 2026