By Raffique Shah
August 01, 2026

I begin this column on Emancipation Day 2026 with these two songs that tell the story of African slavery in the Caribbean and North America, when people of all of Africa and elsewhere were in a wicked world that decimated an entire continent and mauled the world.

My colleagues who work in the audio media often quit their conversations and allow the music to do the talk. I feel that today, my music, which I enjoy at home, should tell my story; my love for music that tells the story and gives the vision that I want to implant in the depths of my readers. These songs eloquently tell the world what millions of people from Africa, who were enslaved from the 15th century to the 19th century, had endured.

I was about to start writing my column when the idea popped in my head: why not let the music do the talking… and the writing? In a column that is expected to maintain standards, I do not enjoy such freedoms. So, I decided to combine the songs. I should let readers who may be less informed think this is me putting down the best calypsonian in the world and the best reggae singer in the world. I will never entertain the thought of sparring with Bob Marley, who is the best reggae singer of all time, and Slinger Francisco, The Mighty Sparrow, the best calypsonian in the world.

Ever since Sparrow released his “Slave” in 1963 and Bob Marley shook the world with “Redemption Song” in 1980, those who were oblivious to the slave trade became conscious of the atrocities that were committed against their foreparents. No artiste of any kind, anywhere in the world, could match these songs about slavery. (Bob Dylan is perhaps one of the others who has tackled social and historical issues, but he is not of our genre.)

To see Sparrow sing “Slave”—not just hear him—is the equivalent of setting yourself in the fields, toiling all day in the blistering heat, and barely sleeping at nights wondering what fresh hell tomorrow will bring. It is feeling the slave master’s whip on your back, that stinging feeling, one of pain, fear and confusion. It is the feeling of trying and failing many times over to escape the life that you were sold into, against your will. You never asked to come here.

You were bartered like a piece of commodity and treated as less than a beast of burden. When he sings, “I’m dying, I’m crying, Lord I want to be free”, you begin to understand what true desolation must feel like. The hopelessness of being bonded by law, back then, to a cruel white slave master whose only goal was to get rich off your labour, and knowing that your life or death rests in his hands: not God’s.

Slavery was one of the main reasons I became agnostic, because I could not understand how this God everyone so revered could be so cruel as to have allowed something as vile and inhuman as slavery to not just happen, but to operate like a well-oiled and tuned locomotive, spewing its black ash in the air as it winds its way to wherever the slaves are required.

In “Redemption Song”, Bob Marley sings of being taken from the bottomless pits that held thousands of slaves—chained to each other, whether dead or alive, living in their excrement, with barely any food or water—for a journey that lasted sometimes months.

History records the conditions as unsanitary; I will say the persons responsible for recording history lacked the vocabulary to paint the true picture of what it really was: a macabre scene like the ones the Bible has described hell as being.

He also sings of present-day Africans moving forward and building a future triumphantly, having descended from those conditions their ancestors were forced to endure.

But perhaps the most important part of his song is his chorus: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery”. That is perhaps one of the worst kinds of slavery that affects present-day Africans and people in general.

Marley did not live to see reparations, and at this rate, I believe I may be long gone before reparations are ever made to the families of slaves. Bob was rewarded by his people in the Caribbean taking the lead in that fight that has only just begun.

The world expects us to never forget the Holocaust which snuffed the lives of thousands of white Jews at the hands of their German captors. But Western media in general never speaks about slavery even a quarter as much as they mention the genocide against the Jews.

I recommend that the mass media use their easy reach in the world to not allow another generation of slave descendants to enter and exit this life without ensuring that the descendants of slavers pay for the sins of their forefathers.