THE EDITOR, Sir:

On Tuesday, January 22, thousands of Jamaicans gathered at the Emancipation Park in New Kingston to mark the 200th anniversary of the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in Africans to the Caribbean. The event was celebrated with a cultural rally hosted by the Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee and the Haiti-Jamaica society.

Now, I wonder if the masses of black people across the length and breadth of Jamaica really understand the significance of commemorating the bicentennial year of an era where white people once viewed us as one-fifth of a human. I am saying that with the high level of wanton killings of negroes by negroes on this island, it is clear that Jamaican blacks don't have a clue of where they are coming from or where they are going, or they wouldn't be displaying such gruesome 'nigger monster' behaviour on their own kind.

Here is a quotation from a poem by the late Stennet Kerr Coombs, "Though honest men are kept at bay, though rat-like men at times are crown, I lift my pen and write this down, I am no slave."

I am, etc.,

ALLAN MARTIN

Namibia.