Abolition of Slavery Commemorated

London, England, March 26, 2007

For well over a week or so by now we are being bombarded, and I am sure this will be going on for the rest of the year, with commemorative programs on radio and television about Wilberforce and his fight to abolish slavery in the British Empire and the talk returns to the need for the British to apologize in their part in this dastardly trade and such. While we can all sympathize with that, I am sure, it is been basically negated that, in fact, had it not been for the Ashanti and such tribes, and for the Arabs in East Africa, the trade of Black African slaves may not even have happened to the Islands of the Caribbeans. There seems to be so much “White Man Guilt” that anyone bringing up the fact that the Blacks preyed upon each other and sold each other, especially the warrior tribes upon the pasturealists and such like, is being silenced. Obviously, amongst all this clamour of the Blacks demanding apologies and reparations from Britain the first slaves that were sent to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the Caribbeans and the New England Colonies are being forgotten, namely those that were referred to as “white slaves” but who were, in fact, Romanichals from the British Isles and Ireland. Byt the thousands they were rounded up, men, women and especially children, and in chains transported to the Caribbean islands and the colonies in the New World. Not a word is being mentioned about the Gypsy slaves. Why not? Because we are just, still to this very day, to government and church, dirty Gyppos and no more.

Other nations aside from Britain also shipped their unwanted Gypsy population to the colonies as slaves, namely Spain, Portugal and France. But also German Sinti arrived in the New World to be sold as slaves. Again, however, not a mention anywhere.

Then again, why should I be surprised. Is it not the same with the Holocaust where the powers that be want to have it as a uniquely Jewish even, colonial slavery cannot have been perpetrated upon any other than the African Blacks now, can it. The Gypsies defile the memory of this all by wishing to be associated with it; that is, I am sure, the reasoning of those that leave our memory out of it.

Am I being sarcastic? Probably, but then again, it is the truth after all. Again and again Gypsy Holocaust survivors and their decedents are being told that the Jews were sent to the camps because of their race while, and they say this even openly to the Gypsy, the Jews that is, it is said that the Gypsy only was sent to the camps because they were asocial. That despite all the proof in the records of the German Reich that show this bluntly and openly that the Gypsy People were treated even worse than the Jews in racial regards.

But I digressed.

The first slaves in the cane fields of the Caribbean Islands, folks, were not Blacks from Africa or elsewhere, but they were Gypsy, Romanichals, from the British Isles and Ireland and sent their in chains, not for any crime but simply for being Romani. But then, that was crime enough in those days.

Let us, while others commemorate the Blacks openly and publicly commemorate our Gypsy slaves.

© M V Smith, March 2007