With Cup Match just around the proverbial corner, we note with great interest the growing consciousness in the community at large about the relevance of Cup Match and the Emancipation of slavery that took place in 1834.

We also know there are some in our community who get hyper the moment slavery is mentioned. They may even go so far as to say we're 'whining!' But how could one logically deal with Emancipation without also deal with slavery? And in this specific instance, it is chattel slavery we're citing.

That was the captivity of the defenceless Africans, their transportation through the Middle Passage; millions of them, with hundreds of thousands lost at sea en route; the auction block, the shackling and branding of men, women and children; their working in the fields and wherever else and the massive profits derived by countries and communities that regarded slavery as the main pillar of their economies.

Many are quick to label as slavery anything that borders on the exploitation of labour. It could be coming from organised labour leaders who ought to know better, activists campaigning against the draft of young Bermudians into the army or newspaper columnists consumed by the old British dismissive arrogance summed up in the phrase, "I'm all right jack, later for you!" What they fail to recognise is that there are the fundamental distinctions between slavery, the dreaded slave trade, abolition of the slave trade and then Emancipation.

First of all we should establish that slavery per se is as old as the hills.

Slavery in the Roman and Greek empires was well known. But there was no racial basis for that traffic. So when the Christians of Western Europe began to turn their attention to the trade in men in the 15th and 16th centuries, they were not introducing a new practice.

They did, however introduce, some new techniques such as brutality, torture, branding with red hot irons, whippings and hangings.

The English, Spanish and Dutch, in developing the New World, preyed on poor whites to do their donkey work. We only have to make a short visit to the recently opened Prisoners in Paradise exhibit at the Maritime Museum for the stark proof of that.

At first those poor whites were regarded as 'servants', indentured servants. Later the empire builders raided the prisons in England and elsewhere for outcasts to dump on the New World to clear the forests and cultivate the fields and to build their dockyards, like that in Bermuda.

Indentured servitude was the name of the game. When the supply of those who 'voluntarily' indentured for a period of years proved insufficient, the English resorted to more desperate means. They not only raided the prisons, they kidnapped children, women and drunken men. Somehow those servants and convicts gradually gained respectability in the New World; or they ran away, or otherwise showed their heels to the masters.

The 'empire builders' came to realise that white servants were unsatisfactory. They found it was costly tracking down their runaway servants and that caused fluctuations in the labour markets and on the plantations.

The Europeans began asking why they should be concerned with white servants when black people, negroes, as they became known, presented so few of the difficulties they were encountering with their white brothers.

Because of their colour, and that factor was most relevant, black people could be apprehended easier if they dared to run away. Also they discovered negroes could be purchased more cheaply; and with the inexhaustible supply of blacks, negro slavery became a fixed institution and their worries about labour were minimised.

Meanwhile, the Europeans, bullish about capitalising on the commercial revolution taking place in the Americas began scouring the coast of Africa for 'black gold'. And that became a source of great wealth for those engaged in the trafficking of human souls.

Now the distinctions should be obvious between the original slavery we mentioned earlier as being as old as the hills, and the slave trade that went on from the 1600s and continued for the next three centuries. And what is most interesting is the fact that the Christian church profited most from this traffic. It considered Africans as pagans, and salved their consciences on the grounds that they were converting slaves to Christianity.

By the early 1800s sufficient numbers of white people of good conscience and goodwill were so outraged by the barbarity of the slave trade and all that it encompassed, that they started a move to abolish slavery. The Abolitionist Movement became sufficiently powerful enough as to influence the British Parliament to pass an Act in 1807 abolishing slavery.

However, it took the next 27 years after the passage of that Act abolishing the slave trade, for the actual Emancipation of the slaves. That occurred on August 1, 1834. And the foregoing brings us directly to Cup Match.

It should be easy to comprehend the joy and excitement of the slaves when Freedom Day came. The rejoicing was unbounded, even though the slaves or former slaves had no material possessions, only the clothes on their backs and their indomitable spirits to sustain them. They had no churches, schools, infrastructure, but they built one, through the friendly unions, or friendly societies they formed in each community, enabling them to care for one another, especially the sick and most importantly, to help bury their dead.

It was those same friendly unions or societies now called lodges that spearheaded on August 1 each year after 1834 the celebration of 'Freedom Day'. The joy over Emancipation was unbounded by the freed slaves. It was first manifested with grateful thanks at church services, then impressive parades, parades, picnics, sports and other events that grew indefinably, phenomenally, all packing a soul force that culminated in 1902 into what is now Cup Match.

That soul force rebounds in this year of 2008, challenging us, as indeed generations down through the years, to describe in a few words just what Cup Match is all about.

@BODY-TIMES-6.5:Sometimes I think it is easier for us to say what Cup Match isn't. Certainly it is not a Trinidadian or a Rio carnival. Not a Notting Hill, London jump-up. It's more than World Cup football or Twenty20 cricket or World Series baseball.

It's Cup Match!