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STATEMENT: From left - Reverend Canon Eve Pitts, centre, with Tolu Odubanjo, left, and Siobhan Bartley

A LEADING cleric within the Church of England has made a public statement today, August 1, which is Emancipation Day. The end of slavery in the British Empire is marked each year on August 1.

Reverend Canon Eve Pitts stood in chains outside of her church. She wanted to make the gesture in order to ‘put myself humbly’ in the place of thousands of enslaved African and Caribbean ancestors forced to endure a life in chains.

As she stood outside her inner city parish church of the Holy Trinity in inner-city Birmingham, flanked by two young supporters, Pitts told The Voice:

“I am not saying I’m grateful for Emancipation Day – who are those people to tell me that I depended on them for my freedom?

“We are doing this because I can only begin to imagine what it must have been like for the women, men and children to be tied and chained up as if they were animals. We all need to remember this, not be ashamed of it. What would it have been like for a little child to realise they were slaves? What would it have been like for our men, separated from their women and chained together.

“We’re not here for crowds - I just wanted to stand here and publicly say we need to remember, we need to reflect and we need to learn from it, otherwise we can never move forward as a people.

LEST WE FORGET: Reverend Canon Eve Pitts at last year's Ancestors Arise service

“If I can encourage people to think – because today no-one wants to think. We want to fill every moment with being entertained, taking selfies. I’m not against all that, but if it’s in the place of proper thinking then I do have a problem with that.”

She added:

“Where has Emancipation Day got us? We’re still ashamed of ourselves, we don’t want to talk about slavery – and I get that because it’s painful. We think that personal fulfilment is all that we need, but we need more than that. We need to be a community that is not constantly at the bottom and internalise the lies that have been told to us that we’re of no substance and we’ve come from nowhere."

Pitts, the first black woman to be ordained as a Deacon in the Anglican Church in 1992, added:

“We’ve been told so many lies about our history – we have to be prepared to learn for ourselves what our true history is. It’s a great history – we come from a great nation of African thinkers but we have been subdued by the barbarism of slavery and the haunting history of slavery is still keeping us in chains.

“We have to have real courage to say ‘I have had enough of this. I will no longer live in a world which tells me that I am not worthy.’ I’m tired of the mindset that we have that still carries the scars of the chains around our heads. As Bob Marley says: ‘the chains are off our feet but in our heads.’

“It seems to me we will remain right where we are or take a retrograde step because we are less and less in control of our own countries. And here in the UK our young men are still being arrested for no good reason; so many black people are in prison and many ought not to be there; people with so called mental health issues are often misunderstood deliberately, so I beg to differ about this ‘freedom’ that we now have. The only freedom that seems acceptable is if I take on the persona of other people’s cultures.”

The reverend said she was invited to take part in the annual Reparations March taking place in London on 1 August, but said she wanted to remain in Birmingham to make a ‘quiet statement’ in her adopted home city. She said she would like to see Emancipation Day recognised in the UK, as it is across the world.

20-year-old Tolu Odubanjo, an aerospace engineering student, who stood next to Pitts, said:

“This is all about the mindset that we have right now, that unfortunately is still keeping us, as a race and as a people, in a place where we don’t want to be.

“We want young people of our generation to say: ‘We have a voice.’ If we keep on following what is told to us, we will never get there. We have to realise that as a people we have our own identity and it doesn’t have to be dependent on others. We should be standing on our own saying: ‘This is what we want to be, what we want to remember.’”

Siobhan Bartley, 27, a senior teaching assistant, added:

“Today is about the here and now, but it’s also about remembering the past. I’ve had my own experiences of racism and that is why I’m standing here today in chains as I’ve done before for Rev. Eve’s Ancestors Arise service. When I wore them at the service I was almost in tears feeling what it really felt like to be in chains. I couldn’t talk, I had a piece of metal in my mouth. We are doing this to remember our ancestors and how they must have felt.

“I feel for many young people today, their minds have been changed – mine has – I feel that I’m still in chains. We need to change this, society and how it is. It’s time for real change.”

Reverend Canon Eve Pitts will be holding her annual ‘Ancestors Arise’ service at the Parish Church of Holy Trinity, 213 Birchfield Road, Birchfield, Birmingham, B20 3DG on Sunday 24th September at 3pm.

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