The Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago (ESCTT) is celebrating 30 years of advocacy, resilience, determination, transformation and its re-emergence out of the covid19 pandemic.
ESCTT was founded by Lidj Yasu Omowale and Khafra Kambon in 1992 to strengthen TT's emancipation celebrations.
Its director Zakiya Uzoma-Wadada said this year’s celebration will reflect the gains and losses of the committee.
For Emancipation Day 2022, ESCTT will pay tribute to iconic performers Singing Sandra (Sandra DesVignes-Millington) and Brother Resistance (Lutalo Masimba) who both died in 2021.
“This is the first year we are having this festival without them,” Uzoma-Wadada said during an interview with Sunday Newsday at her Maraval office on July 21.
As part of the 30-year commemorative celebration, the public was asked to pay a $30 contribution to enter night events for activities leading up to this year’s Emancipation Day.
In 2020, Emancipation celebrations moved online as the country battled to contain the spread of covid19.
Over the past two years ESCTT instead hosted a series of virtual events. A virtual jazz and pan concert, trade exhibition and youth reggae concert, virtual drum calls along with a virtual flambeau procession and display of images of past street processions and a virtual calypso concert were among the events.
Uzoma-Wadada said she was excited to plan the physical return of Jazz at Sunset, Pan at Moonlight, Kambule street procession and the Aruba Village expo.
[caption id="attachment_967516" align="alignnone" width="1024"] In this 2020 file photo, PM Dr Keith Rowley, then-Minister of Community Development, Culture and the Arts Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly and members of the Emancipation Support Committee unveil the monument to commemorate the end of enslavement at Treasury Building, Independence Square, Port of Spain. -[/caption]
After going 28 years strong, Uzoma-Wadada admitted, the existence of the organisation was threatened by restrictions of the pandemic.
Following two years of challenges, ESCTT owes its survival to the commitment and sacrifices of committee members.
“We had problems keeping staff on full-time, clearing monthly expenses especially after most of the organisation’s sponsors had to pull their support.
“It was a difficult time. Contributions that helped significantly were gone and the fundraiser events we could not host because of the restrictions. It is still difficult for us; our sponsors are still emerging and even government institutions.”
In 2020 and 2021 the organisation hosted 16 virtual events to keep the festival alive but it wasn’t enough to sustain its operations.
Uzoma-Wadada said the pandemic has exposed and revealed inefficiencies of ESCTT and now the committee is working to use the lessons from the pandemic to ensure further events don’t threaten its lifeline.
She said, “Because resources, both human and financial, have always been limited...ESCTT has depended on that spirit of revolution, that spirit of fight, that spirit of making it h
