WESTMINSTER’S CHAINS
By Olutoye Walrond
The legendary Willie Lynch, reputedly of plantocratic lineage, is supposed to have left a blue print for slave owners for the effective, psychological control of their slaves. He was so confident about the efficacy of his method that he guaranteed its success almost in perpetuity.
Whether Willie Lynch actually existed – and there are credible questions about this – the story points to a problem among us as African Caribbean people that needs to engage more of our attention. I speak of the psychological enslavement of which we are still victims. With or without the existence of Lynch we seem to be in perpetual bondage with the people who enslaved, brutalised and murdered and our foreparents.
It is this self-affliction which forced Bob Marley to pen the words “emancipate yourself from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds....” Marley had recognised – living in Jamaica, where I understand brown-skinned people are virtually worshipped - that well over a century after the abolition of slavery, the psychological umbilical cords of African Caribbean people were still firmly linked to Westminster. It is a problem that tends to afflict all subjugated peoples, but Caribbean people seem to be the worst affected by it.
We are still very much like the chicken raised in the coop. After years of confinement he will not venture beyond the threshold of the coop even though the door is wide open. His mind has been conditioned to enslavement. What an awful state for anyone to be in!
I know we are chickens raised in a coop when after forty years of independence we still have as our head of state the supreme symbol of the old, colonising power; when our political leaders pledge allegiance, not to the people who elected them, but to the individual embodying this symbol, her heirs and successors.
Let us take this farce to its ultimate: given the appropriate circumstances some teenage boy in London could become the head of state of Barbados and many other sovereign states! This is the kind of constitutional absurdity visited upon us by our subservient, political leaders – Westminster’s choir boys as Gabby called them.
Without being subjected to the Willie Lynch formula, these ‘respected’ leaders have nonetheless allowed themselves to buy into the notion of class and white supremacy, which is really what the British has foisted on us, with this idolatrous notion that the humans born into their ‘royal’ line are somehow special beings to whom the rest of us, lesser mortals must bow down and make obeisance.
What utter and complete rubbish! The sordid lives lived by these royals portray them as anything but special – if we needed any proof.
The British monarchy was an integral unit of the system engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the Caribbean. To this day it has refused to offer even a symbolic apology for this role, unlike the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. By what mental gymnastics could our leaders have arrived at the notion that this is an institution worthy of our continued patronage!!
When, some years ago, the former Prime Minister, Owen Arthur, touted the idea of Barbados abandoning this subservient link to the Monarchy and becoming a republic, some of us breathed a sigh of hope that perhaps all was not lost with us as a people. We were excited as we listened to John King sing the republic song and saw the establishment of the constitution review commission. We smiled as our leaders spoke like truly liberated people about having a Barbadian as our head of state.
Well, little did we know that it was all just a nice, little fantasy – something to tickle our fancy for a season. Afterall, weren’t we told that Nelson would be relocated.
But what a wonderful legacy would it have been for any leader to have brought us beyond the threshold of a British-sanctioned constitution to the real sovereignty of republican status. It would have placed Mr. Arthur right up there with great leaders like E. W Barrow, Eric Williams, Michael Manley.
Unfortunately having let it slip, he will probably now have to settle for an ‘also ran’.
But I make bold to posit that Arthur’s diffidence is rooted is the very problem engaging our attention. It is essentially a lack of confidence in self, and by extension a notion that we cannot be completely separated from the old master. Remember the chicken: free but not willing to walk free.
You see, most Barbadian and Caribbean people have not even begun to put the colonial experience in its true perspective. There is still a widespread notion that this was some kind of benevolent relationship with the British in which we were the recipients of things we could not otherwise have had.Many are unaware of the utter brutality and subjugation of the slave and colonisation periods.One workmate of mine actually told me she considered it good fortune to have been brought to the Caribbean through the slave trade, because of what she considered the inferior lifestyle on the African continent! Marcus Garvey must be weeping at the abject darkness in the minds of our people.
The much revered E.W. Barrow is perhaps singular in his analysis of this relationship with the colonial power. Speaking during the independence debate in parliament in 1966 he had this to say:
“Colonialism is the reason for the present impasse in West Indian affairs and we cannot afford to wait. I am not going into a recital of what the British have done and what they have not done. Their relation with our people has not been a happy association. It has been a very unhappy association, and it is regrettable that we will have some of the down-trodden, who feel that they are now slightly privileged, fighting on the side of the people who perpetrated all these acts of inhumanity against our people.”
Barrow certainly knew what he was talking about, for it was he who asked us what we see when we look into the mirror. He was well aware of the problem we’re discussing. Regrettably, he didn’t do too much to address it.For it has been my contention that it is precisely because nothing was done to bring our people out of the colonial mode after independence that we are still enslaved to values and traditions alien to our environment and culture.
When we look into the mirror the image we see – or want to see - reflects the phenotypical characteristics of the Caucasian. Hence our women feel compelled to bleach their skins and straighten their hair; our male pop artistes seek out brown-skinned girls with Caucasoid features for their music videos – never black sisters; our ‘beauty’ queens come in the same phenotypical mode and our home-grown soap-operas reflect a preponderance of actors of light pigmentation in countries with 90% black people.
In short our notion of beauty is, once again, determined by a Caucasian blueprint.
One hundred and sixty-seven years after emancipation, Caribbean people, are still walking in the shadows of Westminster. We are free, physically, but our minds still hang on to the values and traditions of our erstwhile enslavers. The chicken refuses to fly the coop. Look at the hesitance over the Caribbean Court of Justice. Some leaders – those in the Bahamas being the most shameless – confessing outright that they have a preference for the British Privy Council.
What are these leaders saying to us? They are saying that they have more confidence in a group of privileged men four thousand miles away who know little about their countries and care just as much, than they do in their own people. This is not normal behaviour; but we must remember it is said that the oppressed often develops an allegiance to the oppressor over time.
So who will cut those chains to Westminster? “None but ourselves can free our minds”. It’s up to us to see the beauty and strength in our melanin-rich skins and its links to proud civilisations that once led the world in science and technology; that built the great pyramids of Egypt, to this day an architectural wonder.
We can establish our own institutions and symbols for recognising the excellence of our artistes, instead of jumping up and clapping our hands when others deem our work to be worthy of their honours.
Why give them the privilege to set standards for us?
What is a Grammy other than a symbol of what the hip hop community in the United States deems to be good music?
What standards are we setting for our own artistes?
Something is just not right when after four decades of independence our citizens are still being honoured with Commanders of the British Empire and other irrelevant British titles like Knights and Dames. These terms have absolutely no resonance in the history and culture of our people.
And on top of it all, they are being bestowed by the very institution and society that enslaved and oppressed our foreparents!
Just last year the Clement Payne Movement bestowed me with the annual Clement Payne Award. What a wonderful example of the kinds of honours our people should be getting. Clement Payne was a fighter for the oppressed masses of Barbados – now a national hero. An award of this nature would be a true honour for any Barbadian citizen.
We can cut Westminster’s chains by choosing to design a form of clothing that is suitable to our climate, rather than continue to stew our bodies in the tight wintry garb of our colonial masters. They dress to suit their cold climate and when they came to these shores they brought that dress with them. But it doesn’t take an Einstein to see that a man walking around Bridgetown or Kingstown at 12 noon dressed in a long-sleeved suit looks patently odd. Is it really beyond our imagination to devise a formal dress that speaks to the heat of the tropics and the colour of our environment?
Even the coats of animals like the bear and the sheep are designed according to the climate in which they live. The Polar Bear has a different coat from the brown bear, and the tropical Black Belly Sheep has much less wool than its counterpart of colder climes.
We help to cut Westminster’s chains by giving our children and ourselves names that reflect our identity as an African people – those of us who are African. Only property bears the stamp of its owner. There is no Chinese named John Smith; no Indian called Peter Parker; no European called Odinga Lumumba. Why should African people in the Caribbean who are no longer the property of Europeans bear English names?
What is a beautiful, black child in the Caribbean doing with the French name Andre or Sean? We need to cut Westminster’s chains.
* They downpress our minds, like millstones around the neck,
Stifling our confidence, frustrating our nationalism,
Tarnishing our mirror image:
The old, umbilical cords of Empire,
The chains of Westminster.
Down with Westminster’s chains!
A new nation let us create, of proud citizens, rich and poor, small and great,
With Lord Nelson guarding our city’s gates,
His gaze fixed, his dominance clear
The only non-hero in Heroes Square.
Westminster’s chains have rattled our identity and ruffled our unity,
Turning us into a fragmented mass of petit nationalities
Scattered across the waters of the Caribbean sea:
Vincentian and Dominican and Barbadian and Jamaican and Trinidadian and St. Lucian. banana republics, wilting at the first growl of the imperialist lion.
But the dormant spirit of Caribbean unity shall rise up to wrestle with the beast of fragmentation:
One people, one destiny! CARIFTA, CARICOM and the C.S.M.E
- with Guyanese ‘foreigners’ and Vincentian ‘small islanders’ doing battle at Grantley Adams ‘gainst immigration officers, next to white tourists, blushing before black, smiling natives bearing gifts of carnations: “welcome to Barbados, Sir’.Trinidadian coast guards casting flying fish nets to catch Barbadian Fishermen: ‘dah beach is yours; this sea is mine’.
Freedom of movement, but not without passports;
Freedom to work, but not for Julian Rogers.
Who will buy my white sand and who will buy my grey sand?
Cari-coming, coming, coming, but never arriving.
And the peacock parties continue with full pomp and pageantry:
Leaders, bedecked in wintry garb, ascending the podium on their hinds legs, speaking in lofty terms of ‘the regional integration process and the historical and cultural strands that bind our people together in this age of globalisation and the vulnerability of small states in the new world economic and social order’.
Words, words, words.
The Fishermen yawn; Rogers weeps; the people perish.
The chains of Westminster have been weighed in the balances and found wanting: ‘mene mene teckel, eupharsin!’
The writing on the wall heralds the dawn of a new consciousness among the children of the sun.
No longer strangers to our environment, living the lie of summer and winter in a land of tropical splendour.
Let’s break the power of Westminster’s chimes and free our minds to embrace our environment and clime – dancing with the cabbage palms and riding the trade winds.
Who says the sea doesn’t have a back door?
Let’s ride the crest of the Caribbean surf and dazzle our eyes with the sparkle of the golden sand, while the scorching rays of the tropical sun battles with sweating bodies decked in the robes of winter: the three-piece suit, stockings and boots.
The peacocks are sleeping through the dawn.
Westminster’s chains have saddled us with the justice of alien lords – barons of privilege and prestige passing judgement from the benches of distant courts: Pratt and Morgan, Bowe and Davis.
Judgement by remote control, shaking the sovereign foundations of the house of justice, and rousing the architects of regional unity from slumber:
A new court of justice for us by us!
The die is cast; the fanfare sounded, but only two will rise to respond to the blast.
‘Inferior justice!’, cry some of the rest, ‘Westminster’s justice and nothing less. We trust no Judge but Caesar’.
The cage door is open but the bird refuses to fly.
“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds,” less we be found loitering on colonial doorsteps after closing time.
Three centuries of Westminster’s chains have left us drained – drained of the natural inheritance of a proud and noble lineage: Hannibal and Nefertari, Bussa and Nanny Grig.
The children of Kings and Queens, heroes and heroines now appendages of alien civilisations, minions and mice.
Let’s cut Westminster’s chains with swords washed in the spilt blood of the ancestors.
The new millennium for us shall be an occasion to usher in our great, new republic, to finally rupture the umbilical cord of slavery and colonialism and establish our place in the word as proud, honourable men and women: Knights and Dames of St. Andrew, Officers and Commanders of the British Empire.
This is our new republic.
Long live our great republic!
Long live the Caribbean!
LONG LIVE WESTMINSTER’S CHAINS!
* An edited version of the NIFCA Bronze award-winning poem, Westminster’s Chains, by the Olutoye Walrond.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
CLEMENT PAYNE AWARD SPEECH
PRESENTED AT THE CEREMONY AT WHICH THE LATE KATHLEEN DRAYTON AND I WERE HONOURED WITH THE CLEMENT PAYNE AWARD.
I pay due respects the elders present, and proceed only with your blessing.
Mr/Madam Chairman, Mr. President of the Clement Payne Movement, my fellow awardee (Kathleen), comrades and friends of the Pan Africanist movement, my good friends Harcourt and Corey.
I join with the Clement Payne Movement is saluting my fellow awardee, Kathleen Drayton.
I have known Kathleen for many years.
She is one of the many gains Barbados has made from Guyana’s loss.
The national hero, Clement Payne, stands out as one of the giants among the warriors for working-class justice in Barbados.
I therefore I do not take this honour lightly.
Indeed when David told me he wanted to give me this award the thought that entered my mind immediately was: am I worthy of this?
Because we do what we feel compelled to do, very often without realising the positive impact of what we do on others and the society at large.
So I thank the Clement Payne Movement for the honour it has bestowed on me.
It is an award that is rooted in the society from which I spring.
It is not inspired nor patterned after some medieval English tradition that has no relevance to Caribbean culture and society.
Nobody is going to call me Sir anything nor the right honourable anything.
It speaks then to an independence of mind that seems so elusive to our leaders in all social spheres, who – in spite of all their radical mouthings – are still firmly connected to the chains of Westminster.
The knighthood for them carries the emblem of white superiority.
Therefore to replace it with a Clement Payne Award or the Order of Bussa, or the Pride of Barbados Award would be unthinkable.
So we have some of our eminent citizens walking around with these medieval English titles behind their names – Officers and Commanders of the British Empire.
But is this not the same empire that enslaved, brutalized and murdered our foreparents?
Where is their sense of pride?
The problem is that that deep down they still consider themselves inferior to white people.
It is the reason why, after much song and dance, the long promised republic hasn’t come into being yet, and why it is taking so long to remove the only non-hero in Heroes Square.
The worst form of enslavement is mental slavery; for in physical slavery
the mind is still free to yearn and strive for freedom, but in mental slavery, the mind
itself is enslaved.
There can no yearning for freedom if the thing that is to do the yearning is
programmed to be in bondage.
One of the biggest problems facing Caribbean society today is mental
slavery.
We are now, for the most part, independent nations in charge of our own affairs,
but the psychological umbilical cord to Westminster is still firmly in place.
Where else in the self-respecting world would there be such controversy and skepticism
over the creation of a house of justice as we’ve witnessed over the Caribbean Court of Justice?
We are virtually the only people still hanging on to the British Privy Council.Every other independent former British colony has its own judicial system.
But people have doubts about the integrity of the C.C.J.
Will the Judges be sound and fair? Can they be influenced by extra judicial considerations?
Of course, they have no such concerns about the so-called law lords of Westminster.
These be-robed, white men four thousand miles away, who wear sheep-skin on their heads are incapable of error.
That’s the inferiority of which I speak.
This psychological enslavement of our leadership is a major factor in the continuing under-development of the Caribbean.
For where there is no visionary leadership the people will perish.
It is important, therefore, that we have institutions like the Clement Payne Movement and the People’s Empowerment Party that can fill this terrible void in vision – institutions that are not hamstrung by the bondage of colonial indoctrination, and can point our people in the direction of independent thought and action.
And if you want a good example of that freshness and independence you just have to turn to the political columns page of the Nation newspaper and compare the P.E.P column with the others.
We in the Pan Africanist movement have a leadership responsibility to our people which we must never under-estimate nor shy away from.
Two decades ago when Comrade Harcourt, David, Hilary Beckles, Glenroy Straughn and others including myself launched the Bussa Committee very few people, including some of our political leaders, knew anything about Bussa.
We educated people about the 1816 Bussa revolt and instituted an annual Bussa award and lecture.
Today Bussa is a national hero.
A similar story can be told about the recognition of Clement Payne.
Glenroy Straughn shed tears when the Clement Payne Centre was opened at Baxters Road in the 1980’s – it was a lament that it had taken so long for someone to recognize the contribution of Clement Payne.
But even up to that point no one in political power had thought of giving Payne his due.
Today we have him among the pantheon of national heroes and the return of his political stomping ground, Golden Square, notwithstanding the contempt with which this national shrine has been treated.
That, of course, is a clear betrayal of the real attitude of those who created the square in the first place.
If you want to gauge the real intentions of a man or woman, check what they do rather than what they say to the gallery.
But to underscore the point: it is obvious that we in the radical movement have work to do.
It is to us that it falls to take the society into new frontiers of consciousness – to liberate the people from the psychological shackles of Westminster, so that they may fashion themselves into new men and women, people who see themselves, not as clones of those who ruled and subjugated us and our foreparents, but as independent beings capable of deciding our own destiny and the means by which we will attain it.
A lot of the fall-out from Cricket World Cup could have been avoided if our leadership had this kind of confidence in their bosoms.
They would have been able to say to the I.C.C: this proposal is unacceptable to us; let us negotiate that.
What apparently happened is that the I.C.C realized they were dealing with minions who were prepared to follow their every dictate, and they simply took advantage of it.
Then a few weeks ago we had an Antiguan Minister reacting to the small
crowds by saying that they thought the stadium was too large from the beginning.
Can you imagine independent nations being told by outsiders what legislation to pass so that these outsiders can maximize their earnings from world cup?
I understand some of the legislation was already on our statute books, but they didn’t trust ours, so they had to have their own.
Do you think that would ever have happened to Britain or the United States?
The idea would never have arisen in the first place; but monkey know who to frighten.
The ultimate shame of the whole fiasco was the submission of the supreme law enforcement agency of this sovereign nation to body searches by security agents of the I.C.C.
By what stretch of the imagination could our sensible Police officers arrive at the conclusion that it was in order for someone beneath them in status to frisk them – and in full public view!
It’s all in the mind, brothers and sisters.
If the mind is weak other people around you will recognize this weakness and some of them will take advantage of it.
You, yourself, will feel weak and inferior in the presence of those whom you believe to be superior to you.
The I.C.C merely took advantage of the subservience it recognized in our cricket administrators, political leadership, and Police force.
The mere fact that they were prepared to come back and relax some of their original rules tells us that they were willing to negotiate in the first place, if only our people had shown a little more metal and a lot less awe.
This year we are making a great song and dance over the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade.
It’ll be 169 years since the abolition of slavery itself.
But even after all this time the profound psychological legacy of slavery and colonialism is still with us.
It is a legacy that manifests itself in almost every facet of our personal and social involvement; and so far none of our political or social leaders seems to be even aware of it.
So that for us, independence was merely a superficial thing – a flag and a national anthem and a seat at the United Nations.
Where was the attempt, brothers and sisters, to construct a new independence of mind – a psychological paradigm shift from the old colonial mind-set?
Where was the attempt to inculcate in our people the notion that we are indeed a people in our own right – who can make our own decisions, have our own honours, our own head of state, even devise a form of dress that is suitable to our own climate.
The people are wearing winter clothes in the tropics – not even that did they have the presence of mind to fix.
The upshot of all this is that today we have in the Anglo-Caribbean a people with a pitiful lack of self-confidence, who live their lives in the shadows of those who once ruled them.
The post emancipation leadership has taken us as far as they are can; but the society is crying out for leadership into new avenues of consciousness.
They say where the blind lead the blind they shall both fall into the sea; and I suspect that as a nation we are already out to sea.
Brothers and sisters, let us then, take this responsibility seriously and get out into our communities with programmes of education to lift our people once and for all out of the quagmire of mental slavery and neo-colonialist subservience in which our leaders are apparently so bent on keeping us.
So what was it that got me so fired with the spirit of Pan-africanism and nationalism?
Barbadian society, clearly, is not one that fosters nationalism, self-confidence and pride among people of African ancestry.
So that is the environment in which I, like every other Barbadian, grew up and was socialized.
I have no recollection of any dramatic event that precipitated my own mental revolution.
It really seems to have been an evolution or maturity in thinking.
However, I do have a sense that the Elombe Mottley was, in some way, an influential factor.
All of us know of Elombe’s valiant work in the fostering of ethnic pride among black people.
I too had exposure to his published views and to some of his work at Yoruba Yard; and I thought it made sense that as descendents of Africa, we should have some positive identification with the continent and its people.
I hope one day we can pay our due to Elombe for the valuable and self-less work he did to move our people forward.
So that when Harcourt came along with the Bussa Committee I was a natural candidate and I readily accepted his invitation to be a part of that effort.
The question might well be asked: three decades after, what have we achieved?
Was it worth the trouble and – yes – the ridicule of the editorial writers of a local paper that seems to be vying hard for the title of most racist, anti-black publication in the western hemisphere?
My answer, unhesitatingly, would be yes – it was worth it.
I’ve already outlined some of the successes; but apart from these there has been a noticeable advancement in the consciousness of the people on matters of ethnic and national identity.
I think more could have been achieved if we hadn’t limited ourselves to traditional turf and traditional methods.
I cannot stress enough the need for us to branch out into the highways and by-ways of our country with new and interesting ways of presenting information, making use of video, and audio technology.
The most valuable asset in the hands of those who wish to use the people for their own economic and other purposes is ignorance.
As Pan Africanists we have a duty to bring our brothers and sisters along with us.
For even though some progress has been made, there is a still much to be done to lift our people out of the dungeons of mental slavery and moral decay.
I don’t know if I am super sensitive, but it seems to me that we are gradually returning to the proverbial jungle, when man and beast walked naked; when respect and concern for anyone but self was non-existent.
The standard wear for our young women these days is a tight, low-cut pants and top exposing her pubic area and breasts.
These are days when it not unusual to see young women and men walking the streets with their under-wear exposed.
A form of dress once limited to the red light districts has now become the norm.
Young men are permitted – in spite of the law – to ride up and down the streets on motorcycles making enough noise to wake up the dead.
Our young people are being programmed by the mass media and entertainment entrepreneurs to be fete freaks, living from fete to fete, with little concern for personal development.These youngsters’ choice of entertainment is almost limited to the debased, hedonistic offerings of B.E.T and Tempo television, and the loud, mindless offerings of semi-literate D.J’s.
My friends, if you care anything about the intellectual and moral development of your children you cannot let them listen to the most popular radio programme in Barbados; you cannot let them watch BET or Tempo.
It’s not an attempt to put a curtain between them and what is happening in the world; but to filter their mental diets so that they don’t feed on the trashy filth that has apparently become the staple fare on the electronic media.
A few years ago some of us were encouraged by the idea being advanced in high circles of having 80% local television programming.
It would have meant that for the first time in its long history CBC Television would truly reflect the Caribbean society in which it is located and which it serves – just like British television reflects Britain, or Chinese television reflects China or American T.V reflects America.
It was, and still is, an attainable goal, requiring only the will and the resources.
Well, it seems this was merely yet another grand idea that would just waft away.
In the meantime, our African cousins in Nigeria and South Africa are pressing full steam ahead with the development of a television movie industry, producing dramas that are capturing the imagination of viewers in and outside of Africa.
How much more meaningful if our people, especially our young people, could be exposed to this kind of indigenous entertainment.
It is time we let our governments know that programming on national radio and television ought not to be determined by the narrow – some might say selfish – interests of advertisers.
This accounts for the continued existence of a publicly-funded B.B.C, and public broadcasting systems in North America.
What do they know that we don’t; or is it that they do more thinking than we do.
The national interests are far more important than those of any one sector of the community, and we must be prepared to put money into the pursuit of those interests.
I mentioned the BBC because it is a fine example of a vision for a broadcasting entity.
If you visit the BBC website on the internet you get a fairly good idea of the vision which the British have of the BBC’s role in British life.
But if you wanted it straight from the horse’s mouth, listen to the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, as he spoke in the House of
Commons on February 21, 2000.
“The BBC is the U.K’s most important cultural institution…A strong BBC is crucial
in ensuring that everyone can have access to information, news, education and
current affairs, using efficient, modern methods, so that we can build a society
for the 21st. century on the solid foundations set down for us in the 20th.”
So the BBC is at the heart of British life – (Not even Margaret Thatcher would privatize it).
These are people who obviously believe in their way of life.
They have a sense of national pride.
For them it would be unthinkable to have a national television service that reflected a culture foreign to British society.
But in Barbados there is not even a serious discussion of this issue.
But the BBC is four thousand miles away. Let’s look no farther than a few score miles to the west of us. An article in the Nation newspaper of December 12, 2001 reported the establishment of a National Television Network in St. Lucia, funded by the government. According to the article, the N.T.N was created out of concerns about the preponderance of foreign programming on the regular television systems, and was given a mandate to bring St. Lucians ‘alternative’ and ‘relevant’ programming.
To quote the Director of Information Services, Embert Charles, “When we speak of relevant we mean programming which allows St. Lucians to see images of themselves, as well as (of) other people in the Caribbean and elsewhere who are facing similar challenges, in our common quest for development.”
St. Lucia, the country that has produced, not one, but two Nobel Prize winners, has set the lead for the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean in television programming. What do they know that we don’t?
But the record will show that there has been no shortage of words by high level
personalities in political circles and the broadcast industry expressing outright
support for Caribbean programming on television, or implying such support.
The difficulty, thus far, has been in translating these words into action.
It is my view that this lack of action is rooted in the same self-negating
mind-set I spoke of earlier and with which we went into the establishment of the station in the 1960’s – a mind-set that told us we were unimportant in the scheme of things; other people and their cultures were at the centre of the world, whereas we were on the periphery looking in, either as spectators unable to take part, or as mimic men waiting for initiatives to be taken before we fall in line like so many sheep.
Barbados was “Little England”; we were in the ‘back-yard’ of the United States;
our Prime Ministers carried their budgets in black boxes like the British
Chancellor; our Speakers and Judges wore wigs; our organizations were all branches of other people’s organizations, never home-grown.
We were always a part of, or a replica of somewhere else.
There is, then no positive local alternative in television programming to counter-balance the negative foreign influence.
It is popular to boast about our high educational standards in this country; but the facts are that a significant percentage of our children leave secondary school without acceptable certification in any subject – some say it could be as high as 60%!!
When you speak with our young people you recognize a distinct void in intellectual capacity.
But why should we be surprised at any of this, when you feed them morning, noon and night on swill?
Where is the intellectual stimulation that is so necessary for the development of the mind in raise yuh hand and juck or shouting out and bigging up?
Where is the intellectual nourishment?
But while the all-night party continues here, India, Japan and Singapore are churning out bright, young people gainfully employed in computer soft-wear development and other highly skilled technical areas.
India, for instance, is a country we might consider to be economically below Barbados, but India is a leading exporter of computer software and electronic products.
In the last financial year they exported 23.7 billion U.S dollars in products; and this year’s projections are for sales of 32 billion.
The industry is driven by thousands of trained young people.
In 2001 they had over 400 thousand working software professionals, and each year training institutions churn out 75 thousand software engineers, from a total of 122 thousand engineering students.
Where in the Caribbean are our young, computer wizards?
There’s virtually nothing now-a-days that is not touched by computer technology; computer institutes should be bursting at the seams with students.
They are not. Indeed the number of training institutions offering the technology can be counted on one hand.
In the kind of intellectually sterile environment I just described can we reasonably expect to see any Mark Deans emerging on our horizons?
Mark Dean – some of you may be aware – is the architect of the personal computer.
Dean helped to start the digital revolution that created the likes of Bill Gales and Michael Dell of Dell Computers.
He holds three of the original nine patents on the computer that all PC’s are based on and has more than 30 patents pending.
He recently made history again by leading the design team responsible for creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip, another huge step in making computers faster and smaller.
Dean, who holds a PhD from Stanford University, is in the American national Hall of Investors.
He’s presently a Vice President of Systems at the I.B.M company and was named an I.B.M Fellow in 1996.
I’m telling you all of this, brothers and sisters, because Mark Dean is an African American. He won the President’s Black Engineer of the Year Award for 1997.
If you want to read more about his story do an internet search on the name Mark Dean.
I don’t see any Mark Deans on our horizons.
I’m making the point that there’s a great work to be done in social upliftment, work that is not being done by the governments nor agencies like the Community Development Department.
Enlightened agencies like the Clement Payne Movement, the Pan African Movement and the Israel Lovell Foundation must step up to the plate and fill this void.
Innovations like this award play their part, but we need to follow Clement Payne’s example and get out into the highways and byways.
We need to agitate for greater accountability from the mass media.
This is not about censorship and undue restrictions, but about ensuring that the minds of our young people are not corrupted by the riptide of negative North American influences currently flooding our airwaves.
You cannot build a healthy society on the values of people who count murders, rapes and burglaries by the second.
If our mass media cannot exercise due responsibility then we must demand that controls be put in place to force them to do so.
And then there is the seemingly insoluble question of economic justice.
One hundred and sixty-nine years after emancipation, and more than half a century after universal adult suffrage, we have not managed to fundamentally turn around the position of the black Barbadian in the economic scheme of things.
Outside of the public service we still work largely for the same people – only this time in offices; we still buy from the same people and as a people we still lack the means by which we can create wealth for ourselves.
In the year 2007 it is not possible to walk down Broad Street and point randomly at a store owned by black people.
In every society outside the Caribbean region, the majority people own and control the wealth of the land.
But when the African people of this country go shopping they hand their money to immigrants, or the descendents of a privileged minority – and nobody in Barbados sees anything wrong with that.
I heard a sterile debate recently about who control the economy?
People in the mass media were picking up this debate and running with it – as though who controls the economy is the issue.
The issue is not who controls the economy; the issue is who own and controls wealth.
If control was the key factor – well we’ve had fifty years of black control of the economy and the status quo remains.
We are about to go into an election campaign in which all kinds of trivial and shallow issues will be ventilated.
But will any of the parties have on their agenda the question of economic wealth – of land ownership – how is it that one particular individual is able to amass such vast amounts of land?
Will anyone on the platforms talk about worker participation in ownership – the right of workers to share in the wealth they help to create?
Will anyone ask why – in some instances after more than a century of existence – there are public companies in Barbados that have never had a black Manager?
What is the position of black enterprise in this country?
On those occasions when we do venture out into the area of business enterprise, it seems the society puts every stumbling block in our path.
Look at the shabby way we treat our Street Vendors, people who have used their initiative to create a livelihood for themselves and their families.
You can’t sell here; you can’t sell there; you have to respect the law.
This is a country in which the Police seem to take pleasure in hounding down Vendors – in which Vendors are dragged before the courts of law and punished – not for stealing, maiming or killing, but for making a living.
Then we have the re-conditioned can dealers battling with enormous pressure from a negrocratic bureaucracy because they threaten the interests of the wrong people.
You would have thought that those who lead us would have been happy to see people creating their own livelihood, for it would mean more employment, less social fall-out.
All of this, my friends, under black control of the economy.
We have to ensure that these issues become part of the national discourse – and that those who lead us are put on the defensive on them.
There’s a lot of posturing at the podium, but very little action.
For if we are prepared to call on those who enslaved and exploited our foreparents to make restitution, it behoves us to set the example at home by using our political power to bring economic justice to the descendents of those who slaved for nothing.
Charity, afterall, begins at home.
So brothers and sisters, this is not the time to relax on our achievements for there’s a great work yet to be done.
We cannot expect those who walk in the shoes and robes of the colonial master to have the vision, confidence and drive to advance the cause of the people.
They have taken us as far as their shackled minds will allow them to.
This work calls for men and women who tread boldly in the footsteps of Marcus Garvey, Clement Payne, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X and Fidel Castro.
I am ready – and I hope you are too.
I pay due respects the elders present, and proceed only with your blessing.
Mr/Madam Chairman, Mr. President of the Clement Payne Movement, my fellow awardee (Kathleen), comrades and friends of the Pan Africanist movement, my good friends Harcourt and Corey.
I join with the Clement Payne Movement is saluting my fellow awardee, Kathleen Drayton.
I have known Kathleen for many years.
She is one of the many gains Barbados has made from Guyana’s loss.
The national hero, Clement Payne, stands out as one of the giants among the warriors for working-class justice in Barbados.
I therefore I do not take this honour lightly.
Indeed when David told me he wanted to give me this award the thought that entered my mind immediately was: am I worthy of this?
Because we do what we feel compelled to do, very often without realising the positive impact of what we do on others and the society at large.
So I thank the Clement Payne Movement for the honour it has bestowed on me.
It is an award that is rooted in the society from which I spring.
It is not inspired nor patterned after some medieval English tradition that has no relevance to Caribbean culture and society.
Nobody is going to call me Sir anything nor the right honourable anything.
It speaks then to an independence of mind that seems so elusive to our leaders in all social spheres, who – in spite of all their radical mouthings – are still firmly connected to the chains of Westminster.
The knighthood for them carries the emblem of white superiority.
Therefore to replace it with a Clement Payne Award or the Order of Bussa, or the Pride of Barbados Award would be unthinkable.
So we have some of our eminent citizens walking around with these medieval English titles behind their names – Officers and Commanders of the British Empire.
But is this not the same empire that enslaved, brutalized and murdered our foreparents?
Where is their sense of pride?
The problem is that that deep down they still consider themselves inferior to white people.
It is the reason why, after much song and dance, the long promised republic hasn’t come into being yet, and why it is taking so long to remove the only non-hero in Heroes Square.
The worst form of enslavement is mental slavery; for in physical slavery
the mind is still free to yearn and strive for freedom, but in mental slavery, the mind
itself is enslaved.
There can no yearning for freedom if the thing that is to do the yearning is
programmed to be in bondage.
One of the biggest problems facing Caribbean society today is mental
slavery.
We are now, for the most part, independent nations in charge of our own affairs,
but the psychological umbilical cord to Westminster is still firmly in place.
Where else in the self-respecting world would there be such controversy and skepticism
over the creation of a house of justice as we’ve witnessed over the Caribbean Court of Justice?
We are virtually the only people still hanging on to the British Privy Council.Every other independent former British colony has its own judicial system.
But people have doubts about the integrity of the C.C.J.
Will the Judges be sound and fair? Can they be influenced by extra judicial considerations?
Of course, they have no such concerns about the so-called law lords of Westminster.
These be-robed, white men four thousand miles away, who wear sheep-skin on their heads are incapable of error.
That’s the inferiority of which I speak.
This psychological enslavement of our leadership is a major factor in the continuing under-development of the Caribbean.
For where there is no visionary leadership the people will perish.
It is important, therefore, that we have institutions like the Clement Payne Movement and the People’s Empowerment Party that can fill this terrible void in vision – institutions that are not hamstrung by the bondage of colonial indoctrination, and can point our people in the direction of independent thought and action.
And if you want a good example of that freshness and independence you just have to turn to the political columns page of the Nation newspaper and compare the P.E.P column with the others.
We in the Pan Africanist movement have a leadership responsibility to our people which we must never under-estimate nor shy away from.
Two decades ago when Comrade Harcourt, David, Hilary Beckles, Glenroy Straughn and others including myself launched the Bussa Committee very few people, including some of our political leaders, knew anything about Bussa.
We educated people about the 1816 Bussa revolt and instituted an annual Bussa award and lecture.
Today Bussa is a national hero.
A similar story can be told about the recognition of Clement Payne.
Glenroy Straughn shed tears when the Clement Payne Centre was opened at Baxters Road in the 1980’s – it was a lament that it had taken so long for someone to recognize the contribution of Clement Payne.
But even up to that point no one in political power had thought of giving Payne his due.
Today we have him among the pantheon of national heroes and the return of his political stomping ground, Golden Square, notwithstanding the contempt with which this national shrine has been treated.
That, of course, is a clear betrayal of the real attitude of those who created the square in the first place.
If you want to gauge the real intentions of a man or woman, check what they do rather than what they say to the gallery.
But to underscore the point: it is obvious that we in the radical movement have work to do.
It is to us that it falls to take the society into new frontiers of consciousness – to liberate the people from the psychological shackles of Westminster, so that they may fashion themselves into new men and women, people who see themselves, not as clones of those who ruled and subjugated us and our foreparents, but as independent beings capable of deciding our own destiny and the means by which we will attain it.
A lot of the fall-out from Cricket World Cup could have been avoided if our leadership had this kind of confidence in their bosoms.
They would have been able to say to the I.C.C: this proposal is unacceptable to us; let us negotiate that.
What apparently happened is that the I.C.C realized they were dealing with minions who were prepared to follow their every dictate, and they simply took advantage of it.
Then a few weeks ago we had an Antiguan Minister reacting to the small
crowds by saying that they thought the stadium was too large from the beginning.
Can you imagine independent nations being told by outsiders what legislation to pass so that these outsiders can maximize their earnings from world cup?
I understand some of the legislation was already on our statute books, but they didn’t trust ours, so they had to have their own.
Do you think that would ever have happened to Britain or the United States?
The idea would never have arisen in the first place; but monkey know who to frighten.
The ultimate shame of the whole fiasco was the submission of the supreme law enforcement agency of this sovereign nation to body searches by security agents of the I.C.C.
By what stretch of the imagination could our sensible Police officers arrive at the conclusion that it was in order for someone beneath them in status to frisk them – and in full public view!
It’s all in the mind, brothers and sisters.
If the mind is weak other people around you will recognize this weakness and some of them will take advantage of it.
You, yourself, will feel weak and inferior in the presence of those whom you believe to be superior to you.
The I.C.C merely took advantage of the subservience it recognized in our cricket administrators, political leadership, and Police force.
The mere fact that they were prepared to come back and relax some of their original rules tells us that they were willing to negotiate in the first place, if only our people had shown a little more metal and a lot less awe.
This year we are making a great song and dance over the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade.
It’ll be 169 years since the abolition of slavery itself.
But even after all this time the profound psychological legacy of slavery and colonialism is still with us.
It is a legacy that manifests itself in almost every facet of our personal and social involvement; and so far none of our political or social leaders seems to be even aware of it.
So that for us, independence was merely a superficial thing – a flag and a national anthem and a seat at the United Nations.
Where was the attempt, brothers and sisters, to construct a new independence of mind – a psychological paradigm shift from the old colonial mind-set?
Where was the attempt to inculcate in our people the notion that we are indeed a people in our own right – who can make our own decisions, have our own honours, our own head of state, even devise a form of dress that is suitable to our own climate.
The people are wearing winter clothes in the tropics – not even that did they have the presence of mind to fix.
The upshot of all this is that today we have in the Anglo-Caribbean a people with a pitiful lack of self-confidence, who live their lives in the shadows of those who once ruled them.
The post emancipation leadership has taken us as far as they are can; but the society is crying out for leadership into new avenues of consciousness.
They say where the blind lead the blind they shall both fall into the sea; and I suspect that as a nation we are already out to sea.
Brothers and sisters, let us then, take this responsibility seriously and get out into our communities with programmes of education to lift our people once and for all out of the quagmire of mental slavery and neo-colonialist subservience in which our leaders are apparently so bent on keeping us.
So what was it that got me so fired with the spirit of Pan-africanism and nationalism?
Barbadian society, clearly, is not one that fosters nationalism, self-confidence and pride among people of African ancestry.
So that is the environment in which I, like every other Barbadian, grew up and was socialized.
I have no recollection of any dramatic event that precipitated my own mental revolution.
It really seems to have been an evolution or maturity in thinking.
However, I do have a sense that the Elombe Mottley was, in some way, an influential factor.
All of us know of Elombe’s valiant work in the fostering of ethnic pride among black people.
I too had exposure to his published views and to some of his work at Yoruba Yard; and I thought it made sense that as descendents of Africa, we should have some positive identification with the continent and its people.
I hope one day we can pay our due to Elombe for the valuable and self-less work he did to move our people forward.
So that when Harcourt came along with the Bussa Committee I was a natural candidate and I readily accepted his invitation to be a part of that effort.
The question might well be asked: three decades after, what have we achieved?
Was it worth the trouble and – yes – the ridicule of the editorial writers of a local paper that seems to be vying hard for the title of most racist, anti-black publication in the western hemisphere?
My answer, unhesitatingly, would be yes – it was worth it.
I’ve already outlined some of the successes; but apart from these there has been a noticeable advancement in the consciousness of the people on matters of ethnic and national identity.
I think more could have been achieved if we hadn’t limited ourselves to traditional turf and traditional methods.
I cannot stress enough the need for us to branch out into the highways and by-ways of our country with new and interesting ways of presenting information, making use of video, and audio technology.
The most valuable asset in the hands of those who wish to use the people for their own economic and other purposes is ignorance.
As Pan Africanists we have a duty to bring our brothers and sisters along with us.
For even though some progress has been made, there is a still much to be done to lift our people out of the dungeons of mental slavery and moral decay.
I don’t know if I am super sensitive, but it seems to me that we are gradually returning to the proverbial jungle, when man and beast walked naked; when respect and concern for anyone but self was non-existent.
The standard wear for our young women these days is a tight, low-cut pants and top exposing her pubic area and breasts.
These are days when it not unusual to see young women and men walking the streets with their under-wear exposed.
A form of dress once limited to the red light districts has now become the norm.
Young men are permitted – in spite of the law – to ride up and down the streets on motorcycles making enough noise to wake up the dead.
Our young people are being programmed by the mass media and entertainment entrepreneurs to be fete freaks, living from fete to fete, with little concern for personal development.These youngsters’ choice of entertainment is almost limited to the debased, hedonistic offerings of B.E.T and Tempo television, and the loud, mindless offerings of semi-literate D.J’s.
My friends, if you care anything about the intellectual and moral development of your children you cannot let them listen to the most popular radio programme in Barbados; you cannot let them watch BET or Tempo.
It’s not an attempt to put a curtain between them and what is happening in the world; but to filter their mental diets so that they don’t feed on the trashy filth that has apparently become the staple fare on the electronic media.
A few years ago some of us were encouraged by the idea being advanced in high circles of having 80% local television programming.
It would have meant that for the first time in its long history CBC Television would truly reflect the Caribbean society in which it is located and which it serves – just like British television reflects Britain, or Chinese television reflects China or American T.V reflects America.
It was, and still is, an attainable goal, requiring only the will and the resources.
Well, it seems this was merely yet another grand idea that would just waft away.
In the meantime, our African cousins in Nigeria and South Africa are pressing full steam ahead with the development of a television movie industry, producing dramas that are capturing the imagination of viewers in and outside of Africa.
How much more meaningful if our people, especially our young people, could be exposed to this kind of indigenous entertainment.
It is time we let our governments know that programming on national radio and television ought not to be determined by the narrow – some might say selfish – interests of advertisers.
This accounts for the continued existence of a publicly-funded B.B.C, and public broadcasting systems in North America.
What do they know that we don’t; or is it that they do more thinking than we do.
The national interests are far more important than those of any one sector of the community, and we must be prepared to put money into the pursuit of those interests.
I mentioned the BBC because it is a fine example of a vision for a broadcasting entity.
If you visit the BBC website on the internet you get a fairly good idea of the vision which the British have of the BBC’s role in British life.
But if you wanted it straight from the horse’s mouth, listen to the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, as he spoke in the House of
Commons on February 21, 2000.
“The BBC is the U.K’s most important cultural institution…A strong BBC is crucial
in ensuring that everyone can have access to information, news, education and
current affairs, using efficient, modern methods, so that we can build a society
for the 21st. century on the solid foundations set down for us in the 20th.”
So the BBC is at the heart of British life – (Not even Margaret Thatcher would privatize it).
These are people who obviously believe in their way of life.
They have a sense of national pride.
For them it would be unthinkable to have a national television service that reflected a culture foreign to British society.
But in Barbados there is not even a serious discussion of this issue.
But the BBC is four thousand miles away. Let’s look no farther than a few score miles to the west of us. An article in the Nation newspaper of December 12, 2001 reported the establishment of a National Television Network in St. Lucia, funded by the government. According to the article, the N.T.N was created out of concerns about the preponderance of foreign programming on the regular television systems, and was given a mandate to bring St. Lucians ‘alternative’ and ‘relevant’ programming.
To quote the Director of Information Services, Embert Charles, “When we speak of relevant we mean programming which allows St. Lucians to see images of themselves, as well as (of) other people in the Caribbean and elsewhere who are facing similar challenges, in our common quest for development.”
St. Lucia, the country that has produced, not one, but two Nobel Prize winners, has set the lead for the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean in television programming. What do they know that we don’t?
But the record will show that there has been no shortage of words by high level
personalities in political circles and the broadcast industry expressing outright
support for Caribbean programming on television, or implying such support.
The difficulty, thus far, has been in translating these words into action.
It is my view that this lack of action is rooted in the same self-negating
mind-set I spoke of earlier and with which we went into the establishment of the station in the 1960’s – a mind-set that told us we were unimportant in the scheme of things; other people and their cultures were at the centre of the world, whereas we were on the periphery looking in, either as spectators unable to take part, or as mimic men waiting for initiatives to be taken before we fall in line like so many sheep.
Barbados was “Little England”; we were in the ‘back-yard’ of the United States;
our Prime Ministers carried their budgets in black boxes like the British
Chancellor; our Speakers and Judges wore wigs; our organizations were all branches of other people’s organizations, never home-grown.
We were always a part of, or a replica of somewhere else.
There is, then no positive local alternative in television programming to counter-balance the negative foreign influence.
It is popular to boast about our high educational standards in this country; but the facts are that a significant percentage of our children leave secondary school without acceptable certification in any subject – some say it could be as high as 60%!!
When you speak with our young people you recognize a distinct void in intellectual capacity.
But why should we be surprised at any of this, when you feed them morning, noon and night on swill?
Where is the intellectual stimulation that is so necessary for the development of the mind in raise yuh hand and juck or shouting out and bigging up?
Where is the intellectual nourishment?
But while the all-night party continues here, India, Japan and Singapore are churning out bright, young people gainfully employed in computer soft-wear development and other highly skilled technical areas.
India, for instance, is a country we might consider to be economically below Barbados, but India is a leading exporter of computer software and electronic products.
In the last financial year they exported 23.7 billion U.S dollars in products; and this year’s projections are for sales of 32 billion.
The industry is driven by thousands of trained young people.
In 2001 they had over 400 thousand working software professionals, and each year training institutions churn out 75 thousand software engineers, from a total of 122 thousand engineering students.
Where in the Caribbean are our young, computer wizards?
There’s virtually nothing now-a-days that is not touched by computer technology; computer institutes should be bursting at the seams with students.
They are not. Indeed the number of training institutions offering the technology can be counted on one hand.
In the kind of intellectually sterile environment I just described can we reasonably expect to see any Mark Deans emerging on our horizons?
Mark Dean – some of you may be aware – is the architect of the personal computer.
Dean helped to start the digital revolution that created the likes of Bill Gales and Michael Dell of Dell Computers.
He holds three of the original nine patents on the computer that all PC’s are based on and has more than 30 patents pending.
He recently made history again by leading the design team responsible for creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip, another huge step in making computers faster and smaller.
Dean, who holds a PhD from Stanford University, is in the American national Hall of Investors.
He’s presently a Vice President of Systems at the I.B.M company and was named an I.B.M Fellow in 1996.
I’m telling you all of this, brothers and sisters, because Mark Dean is an African American. He won the President’s Black Engineer of the Year Award for 1997.
If you want to read more about his story do an internet search on the name Mark Dean.
I don’t see any Mark Deans on our horizons.
I’m making the point that there’s a great work to be done in social upliftment, work that is not being done by the governments nor agencies like the Community Development Department.
Enlightened agencies like the Clement Payne Movement, the Pan African Movement and the Israel Lovell Foundation must step up to the plate and fill this void.
Innovations like this award play their part, but we need to follow Clement Payne’s example and get out into the highways and byways.
We need to agitate for greater accountability from the mass media.
This is not about censorship and undue restrictions, but about ensuring that the minds of our young people are not corrupted by the riptide of negative North American influences currently flooding our airwaves.
You cannot build a healthy society on the values of people who count murders, rapes and burglaries by the second.
If our mass media cannot exercise due responsibility then we must demand that controls be put in place to force them to do so.
And then there is the seemingly insoluble question of economic justice.
One hundred and sixty-nine years after emancipation, and more than half a century after universal adult suffrage, we have not managed to fundamentally turn around the position of the black Barbadian in the economic scheme of things.
Outside of the public service we still work largely for the same people – only this time in offices; we still buy from the same people and as a people we still lack the means by which we can create wealth for ourselves.
In the year 2007 it is not possible to walk down Broad Street and point randomly at a store owned by black people.
In every society outside the Caribbean region, the majority people own and control the wealth of the land.
But when the African people of this country go shopping they hand their money to immigrants, or the descendents of a privileged minority – and nobody in Barbados sees anything wrong with that.
I heard a sterile debate recently about who control the economy?
People in the mass media were picking up this debate and running with it – as though who controls the economy is the issue.
The issue is not who controls the economy; the issue is who own and controls wealth.
If control was the key factor – well we’ve had fifty years of black control of the economy and the status quo remains.
We are about to go into an election campaign in which all kinds of trivial and shallow issues will be ventilated.
But will any of the parties have on their agenda the question of economic wealth – of land ownership – how is it that one particular individual is able to amass such vast amounts of land?
Will anyone on the platforms talk about worker participation in ownership – the right of workers to share in the wealth they help to create?
Will anyone ask why – in some instances after more than a century of existence – there are public companies in Barbados that have never had a black Manager?
What is the position of black enterprise in this country?
On those occasions when we do venture out into the area of business enterprise, it seems the society puts every stumbling block in our path.
Look at the shabby way we treat our Street Vendors, people who have used their initiative to create a livelihood for themselves and their families.
You can’t sell here; you can’t sell there; you have to respect the law.
This is a country in which the Police seem to take pleasure in hounding down Vendors – in which Vendors are dragged before the courts of law and punished – not for stealing, maiming or killing, but for making a living.
Then we have the re-conditioned can dealers battling with enormous pressure from a negrocratic bureaucracy because they threaten the interests of the wrong people.
You would have thought that those who lead us would have been happy to see people creating their own livelihood, for it would mean more employment, less social fall-out.
All of this, my friends, under black control of the economy.
We have to ensure that these issues become part of the national discourse – and that those who lead us are put on the defensive on them.
There’s a lot of posturing at the podium, but very little action.
For if we are prepared to call on those who enslaved and exploited our foreparents to make restitution, it behoves us to set the example at home by using our political power to bring economic justice to the descendents of those who slaved for nothing.
Charity, afterall, begins at home.
So brothers and sisters, this is not the time to relax on our achievements for there’s a great work yet to be done.
We cannot expect those who walk in the shoes and robes of the colonial master to have the vision, confidence and drive to advance the cause of the people.
They have taken us as far as their shackled minds will allow them to.
This work calls for men and women who tread boldly in the footsteps of Marcus Garvey, Clement Payne, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X and Fidel Castro.
I am ready – and I hope you are too.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Thought I'd share this piece sent me a while back. Just goes to show how far we've come - given recent historic events in North American politics.
BLACK WALL STREET
If anyone truly believes that the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma was the most tragic bombing ever to take place on United States soil, as the media has been widely reporting, they're wrong. That's because an even deadlier bomb occurred in that same state more than 75 years ago. Many people in high places would like to forget that it ever happened.
Searching under the heading of "riots," "Oklahoma" and "Tulsa" in current editions of the World Book Encyclopedia, there is conspicuously no mention whatsoever of the Tulsa race riot of 1921, and this omission is by no means a surprise, or a rare case. The fact is, one would also be hard-pressed to find documentation of the incident, let alone and accurate accounting of it, in any other "scholarly" reference or American history book.
That's precisely the point that noted author, publisher and orator Ron Wallace, a Tulsa native, sought to make when he began researching this riot, one of the worst incidents of violence ever visited upon people of African descent. Ultimately joined on the project by colleague Jay Wilson of Los Angeles, the duo found and compiled indisputable evidence of what they now describe as "a Black holocaust in America."
The date was June 1, 1921, when "Black Wallstreet," the name fittingly given to one of the most affluent all-Black communities in America, was bombed from the air and burned to the ground by mobs of envious whites. In a period spanning fewer than 12 hours, a once thriving 36-Black business district in northern Tulsa lay smoldering -- a model community destroyed, and a major African-American economic movement resoundingly defused.
The night's carnage left some 3,000 African Americans dead, and over 600 successful businesses lost. Among these were 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores and two movie theaters, plus a hospital, a bank, a post office, libraries, schools, law offices, a half dozen private airplanes and even a bus system. As could have been expected the impetus behind it all was the infamous Ku Klux Klan, working in consort with ranking city officials, and many other sympathizers.
In their self-published book, Black Wallstreet: A Lost Dream, and its companion video documentary, Black Wallstreet: A Black Holocaust in America!, the authors have chronicled for the very first time in the words of area historians and elderly survivors what really happened there on that fateful summer day in 1921 and why it happened. Wallace similarly explained to me why this bloody event from the turn of the century seems to have had a recurring effect that is being felt in predominately Black neighborhoods even to this day.
The best description of Black Wallstreet, or Little Africa as it was also known, would be to liken it to a mini-Beverly Hills. It was the golden door of the Black community during the early 1900s, and it proved that African Americans had successful infrastructure. That's what Black Wallstreet was all about. The dollar circulated 36 to 100 times, sometimes taking a year for currency to leave the community. Now in 1995, a dollar leaves the Black community in 15-minutes. As far as resources, there were Ph.D.'s residing in Little Africa, Black attorneys and doctors. One doctor was Dr. Berry who owned the bus system. His average income was $500 a day, a hefty pocket change in 1910. During that era, physicians owned medical schools.
There were also pawn shops everywhere, brothels, jewelry stores, 21 churches, 21 restaurants and two movie theaters. It was a time when the entire state of Oklahoma had only two airports, yet six Blacks owned their own planes. It was a very fascinating community.
The area encompassed over 600 businesses and 36 square blocks with a population of 15,000 African Americans. And when the lower-economic Europeans looked over and saw what the Black community created, many of them were jealous. When the average student went to school on Black Wallstreet, he wore a suit and tie because of the morals and respect they were taught at a young age.
The mainstay of the community was to educate every child. Nepotism was the one word they believed in. The main thoroughfare was Greenwood Avenue, and it was intersected by Archer and Pine Streets. From the first letters in each of those three names, you get G.A.P., and that's where the renowned R and B music group the Gap Band got its name. They're from Tulsa.
Black Wallstreet was a prime example of the typical Black community in America that did businesses, but it was in an unusual location. You see, at the time, Oklahoma was set aside to be a Black and Indian state. There were over 28 Black townships there. One third of the people who traveled in the terrifying "Trail of Tears" along side the Indians between 1830 to 1842 were Black people. The citizens of this proposed Indian and Black state chose a Black governor, a treasurer from Kansas named McDade. But the Ku Klux Klan said that if he assumed office they would kill him within 48 hours. A lot of Blacks owned farmland, and many of them had gone into the oil business.
The community was so tight and wealthy because they traded dollars hand-to-hand, and because they were dependent upon one another as a result of the Jim Crow laws. It was not unusual that if a resident's home accidentally burned down, it could be rebuilt within a few weeks by neighbors. This was the type of scenario that was going on day- to-day on Black Wallstreet.
When Blacks intermarried into the Indian culture, some of them received their promised '40 acres and a mule' and with that came whatever oil was later found on the properties.
Just to show you how wealthy a lot of Black people were, there was a banker in the neighboring town who had a wife named California Taylor. Her father owned the largest cotton gin west of the Mississippi [River]. When California shopped, she would take a cruise to Paris every three months to have her clothes made. There was also a man named Mason in nearby Wagner County who had the largest potato farm west of the Mississippi. When he harvested, he would fill 100 boxcars a day. Another brother not far away had the same thing with a spinach farm. The typical family then was five children or more, though the typical farm family would have 10 kids or more who made up the nucleus of the labor.
On Black Wallstreet, a lot of global business was conducted. The community flourished from the early 1900s until June 1, 1921. That's when the largest massacre of non-military Americans in the history of this country took place, and it was lead by the Ku Klux Klan. Imagine walking out of your front door and seeing 1,500 homes being burned. It must have been amazing.
Survivors we interviewed think that the whole thing was planned because during the time that all of this was going on, white families with their children stood around the borders of their community and watched the massacre, the looting and everything--much in the same manner they would watch a lynching.
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