The Annual St. Patrick’s Festival Lecture slated for Tuesday, March 14, 2023, will feature two thought-provoking conversations.
This year, there are two lectures. The first at 5PM is organised by The UWI Open Campus and will be moderated by Discover Montserrat Editor, Nerissa Golden and presented by Hon. Claude Hogan, Esq.
Hogan, who is also a Member of the Montserrat Legislative Assembly will speak on “Repairing the Trauma of Enslavement: How are we doing since 1768?”
The second presentation will begin at 7PM and is a collaboration between Montserrat Arts Council and the MNI Department of Community, Youth and Sports Services.
Abstract for “Repairing the Trauma of Enslavement: How are we doing since 1768?”:
Historian and Reparations Activist, Professor Verene Shepherd explains that when we reach back into the Caribbean’s imperfect past, we collide with these “grave and massive violations” and the major historical tragedies or inhumane actions that have left scars on its regional landscape and deep within the souls of its citizens. The accounts of physical brutality that was a manifestation of European racial ideology, which caused so much psychological trauma to Africans and their descendants, populate the pages of history texts…”
She goes on to say that women “the backbone of the labor force, were worked to death, whipped, raped, imprisoned, placed in the stocks, hanged. Men labored and like women produced commodities that enriched Europe; but they were also flogged, imprisoned, shot, and hanged and had feces locked in their mouth and lime and pepper rubbed on their wounds when they insisted on justice.”
This is the hell that our ancestors had planned to escape in 1768, a hell which continues to affect Montserrat’s social and economic development today.
