We Came With Ourselves!

02, Aug 1999
At any given moment in time an individual is representative of the sum total of his/her people's collective history. The only way this assumption could be deemed untrue would be if that individual were to drop abruptly from the sky devoid of any human lineage and connection.

A lot of what any individual may or may not do in the concrete has a lot to do with the metaphysical; that flow of seeming, abstract stream of consciousness to which he/she is connected by dint of place and time and circumstances of birth, growth, moulding and development.

Nowadays no one accepts any longer the ridiculous view that African people brought over on the slave ships were devoid of culture. There is enough recorded evidence to the contrary even in the writings of some captains of slave-ships. What, however, is more obnoxious and dangerous is the view, oft expressed, even by some among us, that the African could have been stripped of his culture.

As CLR James, our mentor, was wont to say: the African did not come to the Caribbean with nothing, he came with himself. And even if he were not allowed to engage in his traditional religious and socio-political practices, which in fact are merely outward rituals and mores, the African, himself, even if naked, stood clearly as the best and surest manifestation of his culture and the sum total of his own people's history.

To destroy a man's culture, "his way of seeing and doing", you have to kill him and everyone like him, his entire progeny must be consigned to exacting genocide. As long as he exists and breeds, his culture will be manifested in what he does and how he does what he does. Amen.

This is not to say that slavery did not wreak psychological damage, and we will come to that, but in the assimilation process that took place within the brutal process that was slavery, the African "Africanised" all European impositions, from religion to language, that were foisted upon him.

We say: "the mango sweet, sweet"; "rain falling"; "it making hot"; etc, which indicate clearly that our means of communication are in fact Africanised usage of English and French vocabulary. We are always more comfortable with the dialect and do not make mistakes or harsh-sounding "boo-boos" with syntax as we do when we attempt Standard English. Both our comforts and discomforts in this regard tells us who we are. We instinctively invented the "steel drum" musical instrument rather than any other precisely because we are African, and calypso, in structure, rhythm and beat, is without question distinctly West African.

In regard to religion, some Afro-Caribbean people have remained within the fold of Roman and English Catholicism as projected by the slave masters and are gradually bending these two bastions of European culture to absorb different approaches, but the vast majority of black people are to be found either in the new Evangelical offshoots that are more appealing to the African forms of praising the Lord, or in the authentic African Orisha faith that seems today to have attracted black intellectuals, artists and thinkers, and lastly in the Baptist religion who by far are the best example of an Africanised form of Christianity and still the most appealing to the African grassroots.

If the these two black religions can ever see their way to a united front, then they shall see the power and glory of which now they only dream. The point, however, is that we walk, talk, sing, dance and praise the Lord the way we do only because we are African and though we may have been brought here as slaves, we came with ourselves!

We need to ignore those people who claim that we have nothing to learn from slavery and nothing to gain from Emancipation celebrations, that we must stop linking slavery to certain shortcomings and/or hindrances to our further development as a people. The Jews have sworn never to forget the "Holocaust" which lasted a few years and brought the butchery of some six million of their kin. They have organised themselves internationally to defend themselves and their nation, founded only in 1948. They vow to guarantee that in their regard history shall never repeat itself.

Slavery lasted over 300 years and saw the butchery of hundreds of millions, and the brutality has been extended into modern times by means of rampant discrimination against black people everywhere in the world. But no one chides the Jews for not forgetting.

When the last war broke out between Israel and Egypt, Israel put out a call for financial support internationally. In Montreal, where we were at the time, Israel could have raised some US$30 million in one day, and the Jewish Defense League began training every Jewish man, woman and child to use modern weapons. Thousands of North American Jews who had never seen Israel flew to Israel and enlisted. In their view, the fate of Israel was directly linked to their self-esteem and spiritual well-being. What informed their thinking was the question of "territorial imperatives".

It is the natural instinct of every human being, every animal on this planet, to mark off territory, a piece of this earth, and subdue it and develop it and defend it as the major means of guaranteeing self-preservation and further development of one's own kind.

Every group of human life did that as did every dog, every rat. Every section of humanity developed a psychological and emotional attachment to a land base and a sense of geography. From this arose the great nationalist movements.

The African slave in the Western world had this instinct and imperative compromised by the fact that he was made the "chattel property" of slave masters. The emancipation of the mind has a lot to do with the rekindling of "territorial imperative".

This is why the slaves throughout the Caribbean region in their struggles towards emancipation sought to accomplish two interrelated things: (1) to destroy property relations altogether they targeted the planters' property and (2) to make themselves the masters of the islands.

In other words, to cripple the plantation system they had to subvert all the extensions and ramifications of property relations, moreso they had to withdraw themselves as property and hold and control the land-territorial imperative so as to sustain their power by way of creating and recreating wealth for themselves through use of the land.

When freedom was won, the Africans left the plantations and attempted to set themselves up as an independent free peasantry, diversifying the economic base, but the planters and colonial governments sought out every way to block such development, keep them out of the wealth-creating process and extend the life of the plantations. New people, indentured servants, were brought in to achieve this, thereby forcing all the exploited at the bottom of the society to forge new alliances and new strategies.

But the imperatives continue to be the same once the mass of people at the bottom are left out of the process of creating wealth. Land holdings and land use still determine today the social structure and stratification of society in T&T.

Any new dispensation, any social transformation, any emancipation of all, any national unity must be based on land reform and thereby the inclusion of all in the process of wealth creation.

E-mail: brenco@tstt.net.tt