Dear Editor,
Interpellated, as they would say, by two media ‘events’ of the last few weeks, one reacts.
The first is an item in the Guardian of London on a weekend of this month, referring to agitation seeking “reparations” for slavery, led by Caribbean people and benefiting from the attention of the Caricom Secretariat. The coordinator of the efforts is Dr Hilary Beckles, and, we had read earlier, the local organisers include Eric Phillips of ACDA.
The Guardian article quotes Beckles as saying that it is not really the raise that we await, but some sign of contrition and the proffering of excuses, a resounding and collective mea culpa from those identified as the minds, hands and investments behind the horror that saw perhaps 10 to 20 million Africans transported to the New World.
The initiative clearly emerged from the anglophone sphere. It took energy from a precedent in a recent decision in the courts that condemns the British to pay damages to the Mao Mao captured and tortured during the independence struggle in Kenya.
It ignores the fact that in the francophone world, our Sister Christiane Taubira from neighbouring French Guyana had, in 2001, passed in the French parliament a resolution depicting slavery and its trade as a “crime contre l’humanité”, that is a human rights crime, and that the act, without an attendant commitment to pay anything to anyone, had not budged by one millimetre the attitudes and general economic conditions of the enslaved, their descendants, or the communities from which they were taken.
Which is to say that even if the initiative in the Commonwealth comes to anything, the psychological satisfaction we derive therefrom, and the pat on the head that goes with it, will bring greater indemnisation and reward to the actors in the drama than to the sufferers of all sorts shipwrecked in this modern world and cut off from the roots that sprouted them.
It requires perhaps time passed in proximity to the cultures and peoples that disgorged the slaves, indentures, and other fruitless labourers history has produced, to realise that the problem was not solely isolated/entrenched in the European culture of the age, but enjoyed a still present co-genesis in the societies that provided the human raw materials.
It is known that among the Akan peoples from which many in the English-speaking world are descended, slavery was a socially accepted practice. The Ashanti kingdom is said to have grown rich in part from the purchase or capture, husbandry and sale of “the unfree.”
Here in France the African population is made up principally of Soninke, Wolof, Fulani and other West Africans for many of whom caste, and status not far from slavery, is still ascribed portions of the home populations. They would start exporting bodies tomorrow if universal conditions allowed.
They bought, sold and exported slaves for hundreds of years. They committed the crimes. They reaped the profits. But it is considered useless to press these unfortunates, long fallen on hard times, to subscribe to the reparations fund. A status, in terms of our legal imagination, assimilable to that of the minor is now their lot. They did not apparently know better.
The Europeans, led by the British, having liberated their serfs (and slavery abolished in Britain perhaps in the thirteenth century) then move, after emanciaption in the colonies, to liberate the largest slave group on their home soil (Indian Gypsies on what was then Wallachia-Romania-Moldavia). Then, without cease, they continue to press the inhabitants of slave-generating countries to improve conditions “back home.” Pitiable. But we hardly think of looking at the other parties to the crime. The African is imagined as hapless and naïve selling his brother for beads and mirrors – as a being without “agency” and thus exculpated in the worst sort of way. Cleansed of a crime that rests as yoke on a single shoulder. The other end of the yoke obscured by our wish or unconscious desire to redeem ourselves and our own.
We learn a certain narrative of our servile past. We learn that the Europeans started the slave trade and bought and sold Africans “for beads and mirrors.” I saw in this newspaper some years ago in a Project Syndicate article with someone bearing an African name repeating the absurdity. In fact slavery was international commerce. For merchandise of value on both sides. The Africans were good businessmen. Practised in the commerce of human bodies. Labour, as a factor of production was what they contributed to the creation and rise of the modern world. Labour as raw material that, in its human dignity and nature, transforms itself and would rise. The Arabs, whose role in the trade only recently comes to full light, were also good businessmen. The volume of the total export trade as business suggests that the specialisation in untransformed raw material that still marks African economics, had an early manifestation then. But the argument that Europe somehow “under-developed” Africa, invalid as it was half a century ago, becomes even less convincing as we acquire facts beyond the history that we learned, and the narrative that bore it.
The second media ‘event’ is the apparition of a Cuffy 250 committee, doubtless newborn and vigorous, but whose nascence I only gleam from a recent letter by Dr David Hinds. The letter suggests that we are victims of things in the system and the minds and behaviour of others, and including our own indolence perhaps, and need to move faster to the attitudes that facilitate economic independence.
Which is all right.
We have had, from two persons that David Hinds knows well, concrete proposals in this direction. I think that the cooperative movement was promoted by Eusi Kwayana as a method to help the entire Guyanese poor class, Africans included. The renaissance of the village movement, insisted on by the late Clarence Ellis, was an idea that particularly targeted African conditions.
The development economics of it being that, once certain conditions are in place the poor will uniformly prosper.
The paper fifteen years ago by Klaus de Albuquerque (Race Ethnicity and Social Stratification in Three Windward Islands) and James McElroy demonstrated that, with independence, blacks in three examples of Caribbean islands studied, moved not only into the higher ranks of the public administration, but also into the upper ranks of the business sector. We assume the same history and gene pool as here. Which is to say that Afro-Guyanese could and should, as far as is possible in our economy, liberate themselves from dependence and strike out.
Dr Hinds quotes Dr Jagan twenty or more years ago stating that everywhere blacks are found they are located at the bottom of the ladder. The statement required explication and refutation. But the argumentation, both pro and con, has been little developed.
Plus, as I have noted and all observers of the Afro-Guyanese condition have also underlined, conditions peculiar to African settlement and economic history here need to be taken into account.
As in France, rules for occupants of civil service positions specify that commercial activity could not be undertaken at the same time. It is something I remember, true or false, from my own family’s civil service experience. The extent to which such laws, framing a culture, are still in existence says much about a mentality that developed.
Of course the entrepreneurial instinct does not burst into flower spontaneously or in the presence of certain stimulus. It is a cultural given or acquisition that explains why the one-time richest man (Carlos Slim) in the world come from a Lebanese immigrant family settled in a poor country such as is Mexico. Lebanese immigrant families are business culture families usually. Why the richest black man in the world (Aliko Dangote) comes from a Fulani/Hausa (also a business culture family in a poor country such as is Nigeria (and why certain families and ethnic groups (from India: Parsis, Gujratis, Punjabis, etc) are mobile, specialised in commerce or materially prosperous).
The transformation of conditions of opportunity in Guyana since 1992 proves that its opponents had absolutely no idea about the culture the PPP intended to bring into the country. Let us say that it was a culture that facilitated business. Despite the Marxist attitudinising. I have said that they have a different “paradigm of empowerment.” It is not the functionary’s worldview, values and cues that mark the goal orientations of many in the group they represent. It is a system of values that is hard to call into being by simple preachment and exhortation. It is a culture that validates and valorises material acquisition and the sacrifices and works that make it possible; to say that, even without the PPP, Indo-Guyanese would have prospered in their own small way. The mechanism the party and PPP government put in place to facilitate the economic rise, would have been unimaginable perhaps to most in the PNC. But there is no cause for despair.
Therein lies material for further study.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
