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.
