As we embrace the approach of Emancipation Day, what tools can we of this vast African diaspora take away from our total experience to move forward?

Our tales are not of one story but many. We all agree on the horror of a deep dark episode that impacted and even dominated our experience for centuries. It is not easy to erase the scars from that experience, but just like one flicker of light can brighten and remove darkness from an entire room, it is worthwhile to focus on the bright spots of our experience because it, too, removes darkness and helps us to see our way forward

I have to recall from just within my own family’s legacy a few bright lights, one being my great-great-great grandfather, Anthony Darrell, the nephew of legendary pilot Jemmy Darrell. Anthony, who purchased his own freedom in 1825, was by Emancipation Day 1834 one of the wealthiest men in Southampton.

Whale Bay Beach bears the name from one of his activities — whale hunting. He owned a half-acre of land surrounding the beach and a building called “Whale House”, which is now the Whaler Inn. Yes, he was also infamously known for other things, too, such as the euphemistic term privateer, or pirate, whence most of his wealth was generated.

Then in another legacy, coming down from another great-great-great-great-grandfather, who more than likely was killed during the Haitian Revolution, was his son, Joseph DeShields, who sailed to Bermuda on his own boat and whose name is inscribed on the first church built by slaves and free Blacks situated on Cobbs Hill, where records show he had pastored that church for years before his early and untimely death. His son, George Morris DeShields, went on to be one of the founders of the Native Bermudian Sail Boat Club preceding the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. He, too, was a wealthy man and landowner, a whale hunter who also aside from that lucrative fishing business ran a tour boat service taking visitors around the island.

This is just one example of what is a familiar storyline of many Bermudian families. So what should we say as per slavery except “up from the grave we arose”. Why talk about the grave when we arose from it?

Nor do we deny the struggle that continued thereafter; rather, we are a generation that moves with the force of an emancipated soul, and not that of a wounded one.

This is what an emancipation celebration means to us. We are here to dominate the same seas that once captured us. The same transatlantic slave trade that carried us into captivity is now our vehicle to support us possessing an advanced hold on freedoms to build a new life and world that were once denied.

Whether it is Bermuda, Canada, United States, South America or the Caribbean, when we look back on our emancipation celebrations, we should see the spark of light that got us here and use that light to propel ourselves forward. The federal mandates that once bound us to captivity are now mandated to support our trajectory forward. It is we who need to climb on board that ship. We have the greatest opportunity today in jurisdictions such as Canada, which has become like the America that was once called the land of the free.

Canada has the federal mandate, the will and the means of support for global transformation. It is we of the diaspora that can use this opportunity to fulfil what could only once be dreams. First, we ourselves must have that dream and build the network to deliver it. The fact is, this could be the shining light of Canada’s moment in history, but we have to help attain it. Like Marcus Garvey said in his address to a Canadian audience “Free your minds from mental slavery, none but ourselves can set us free”.

I offer this as the legacy of Bermuda’s seafaring culture, which was the bedrock of the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, whose best man at his wedding, a Mr Tucker, was a Bermudian.

In too many ways, politics has sidetracked us from our innate culture. But like a shrivelled plant that once given water springs to life, so too does that culture come to life when in the proper environment, and when given the nutrients its DNA recognises as food that is nutritional.