Caribbean: Marking Emancipation  · Global Voices
Janine Mendes-Franco

Today, many Caribbean territories celebrate Emancipation Day, which commemorates the abolition of slavery.  Each year, bloggers mark the occasion, but this year, online attention to the holiday is rather low-key, with only a handful of netizens mentioning it in their posts or tweets.
From Guyana, Demerara Waves republished the president's Emancipation Day Address, while its neighbour, Barbados Free Press, thought it appropriate to “pray for millions still held as slaves” through human trafficking.
Jamaican diaspora litblogger Geoffrey Philp found that today was the perfect opportunity to further his cause for the exoneration of Marcus Garvey, and uploaded a video of Bob Marley performing Redemption Song in memory of “our prophets”.
In Trinidad and Tobago, Afra Raymond republished his ‘Emancipation’ column, which was published in the business section of one of the daily newspapers in 2009.  He referred to the article as his “attempt to grapple with some of the the unspoken causes and consequences” of the CL Financial and Hindu Credit Union financial disasters and suggested that:
In my opinion a significant part of these two interlinked stories – the CL Financial and HCU collapses – is rooted in our own issues with race. It would be a grave error to dismiss race in trying to understand these crises.
I have not had the time to delve into the role of race in the HCU matter, so this is my offering in relation to CL Financial and our own African Emancipation Day celebrations…