Dianne Edwards

Yesterday, teaching my Grade 9 class the history of Caribbean agriculture, we arrived at the word "colonial," and I wanted to give them some context for it. I asked, "Have you guys heard about slavery?" Yes, they said. "What is slavery?" "Work without being paid." And I thought to myself — that's reasonable. That's not a bad starting answer for a fourteen-year-old. So I pushed a little further. "Give me an example of slavery." The examples they gave me were schoolwork. Chores at home. I give them a lot of homework, one of them said, and they don't get paid for it. And it struck me — descendants of enslaved people, sitting in a classroom in Jamaica, reaching for schoolwork as their example of slavery. Not because they were being flippant. Because that is genuinely the frame they have been given. So I had to back up and explain what chattel slavery actually was — that our ancestors were legally reduced to property, that they did not own their labour, their homes, their relationships, or even their children. Then they asked the question that always comes next: how did slavery come about? How did the Africans even reach the Caribbean? I explained that they were sold off by other Africans first — that part of the story has to be told honestly too. But then I detailed what awaited them once they hit those ships and reached the Caribbean, and that's where the numbers came in, and the contrast — because nowhere was it more brutal than right here. The United States received roughly 450,000 Africans over the entire course of the slave trade. Today, the African-American population descended from that group is over 40 million. Jamaica took in up to a million people — more than double what the US received. Today, home and diaspora combined, we have not reached five million. Same trade. Same era. Wildly different arithmetic. The difference isn't a mystery. Sugar slavery in the Caribbean worked people to death at a rate so brutal the enslaved population couldn't sustain itself by birth — planters had to keep importing people just to replace who was dying. In the American South, the enslaved population actually grew through birth, even under bondage. Two systems, both evil, but one consumed life faster than it could be replaced. Our ancestors did not merely work without pay. Many were worked to death. Families were broken faster than they could become established. Those who survived the plantation often left their descendants with little land, little property, no accumulated wealth. We rightly call ourselves resilient. But sometimes that language becomes so triumphant it hides the graves. Yes, we survived — but a lot of us died. This doesn't excuse what we fail to do now. History cannot become an alibi. But responsibility without historical understanding becomes condemnation. We cannot repair what we refuse to face. That's why homework is not slavery. Chores are not slavery. Slavery enriched somebody else while consuming the worker. Education, discipline, responsibility "done right" place something in a child's hands that becomes theirs to keep. We owe our children that difference. Not just because our ancestors were enslaved, but because so many of them never lived to see freedom.