“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, no one else can free our mind.” - Bob Marley

Being a slave to your thinking is the most unfortunate situation that can ruin your freedom! There comes a time when you need to emancipate yourself from mental slavery.

August 1, every year is celebrated as Emancipation Day throughout Canada. As an educationist and social commentator, I want to draw attention to this special day on our calendar and link it to the need for us to emancipate our political mentality from our blindness to the reality caused by our unprecedented party politics fanaticism that is dangerous to national development around the world -THE EXTREME RIGHT VERSES THE EXTREME LEFT!

Let me begin by tracing the origins of Emancipation Day as we have it in Canada:

In March 2021, the Canadian House of Commons voted unanimously on a motion to recognize 1 August as Emancipation Day across Canada. However, African-Canadian communities have commemorated Emancipation Day since the 1800s, most notably Black communities in the towns of Windsor, Owen Sound, Amherstburg, and Sandwich, in Ontario, and provinces including New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

History has it that the first of August marks the day the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 ended slavery in the British Empire in 1834 and, thus, also in Canada. However, the first colony in the British Empire to have anti-slavery legislation was Upper Canada, now Ontario. John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, passed the 1793 Act Against Slavery, banning the importation of slaves and mandating that children born to enslaved women would be enslaved until they were 25 years old, as opposed to in perpetuity. This was the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to abolish the slave trade and limit slavery. The Act Against Slavery was superseded by the Slavery Abolition Act.

In 2022, the celebrations of Emancipation Day in Canada were declared a National Historic Event by Parks Canada.

How do we see the celebration of Emancipation Day as relevant to the need to free ourselves from ongoing political mental slavery as a result of party politics ideologies that are divisive of people as one nation with a common destiny?

Poverty and bigotry make some people sell their conscience to opportunistic politicians in some countries around the world which Ghana is no exemption. The political climate in the country leading to this year's crucial national elections has become acrimonious among the two largest political parties in the country, just as we see in the US political campaign of today.

Political parties’ presidential candidates have become vicious to their opponents in campaigns to win their impending elections. And as could be seen in the two countries mentioned here, party faithful have sold their political thinking to their leaders to the extent that they have become “slaves” to their leaders' vicious campaigns to the detriment of nation-building. However, democracy as we know it does not make us “slaves” to our political leanings.

Unfortunately, many people around the world have become slaves to their political thinking or ideologies, to the detriment of the progress of democracy. We need to wake up and emancipate ourselves from political and mental slavery to better the governance of nations.

The crucial national elections due in the US in November and in Ghana in December this year are in the hands of the citizens of both countries, and true democracy must rise above “political mental slavery” so that we vote for the right and competent leaders to govern our countries.