Peter Espeut | European or African, or Jamaican?

“There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors came from India … There can be no Mother Africa for those of African origin, and Trinidad and Tobago society is living a lie and heading for trouble if it seeks to create the impression or to allow others to act under the delusion that Trinidad and Tobago is an African society. There can be no Mother England and no dual loyalties; no person can be allowed to get the best of both worlds, and to enjoy the privileges of citizenship in Trinidad and Tobago whilst expecting to retain United Kingdom citizenship. … A nation, like an individual, can have only one mother. The only Mother we recognize is Trinidad and Tobago, and a Mother cannot discriminate between her children.”

The above was written in 1962 by historian Eric Eustace Williams (1911-1981), first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), as he sought to transition the land of his birth from colony to nation-state. The task of his generation – which grew up learning British History as their own – was to differentiate what was Trinidadian from what was British, to understand the nature of their exploitation so well that they could deconstruct and reconstruct their society and polity into an image and likeness all citizens could own. His history books are still in print.

His challenge was that the people of Trinidad and Tobago were almost equally of East Indian and African extract, each with their cultures and religions, with powerful European, Chinese and Lebanese minorities. From this mix was it possible to craft a unified society?

Self-consciously out to build a nation, the National Anthem of T&T has this line: “Where every creed and race find an equal place, and may God bless our nation”. Their national motto is “Together We Aspire, Together We Achieve”. Who could quarrel with that?

But would this nationalist fervour overcome the divisions intentionally created by the colonising power’s “divide and rule” policy? One could argue that the project of synthesising Mother TrinBago is still incomplete – or is stillborn – as deep ethnic divisions in TrinBagonian society and politics remain.

SUPPORT VISITORS

This was clear when many in the home crowd would support the visitors when India and the West Indies would play cricket.

Jamaica’s equivalent of Eric Williams was probably Philip Manderson Sherlock (1902-2000). He recounts that while teaching at his alma mater (Calabar High School), he asked the headmaster: “Couldn’t we teach some West Indian history, some Jamaican history? I will never get over the fact that he looked at me with a rather pitying smile and said: ‘My boy, you have no history’. And this was something he wasn’t saying in a cruel way. It was something that was accepted. We have no history. I began to question it”. Sherlock went on to co-author Caribbean history textbooks for schools, and works on Jamaican culture.

If we were to be a nation among nations, it was important to document Jamaican history and culture – not all of it pretty (every people have their dark days), but all of it ours. A whole generation of patriotic Jamaicans – not professional historians – spent their spare time digging up Jamaica’s long buried history and obscure folklore, and publicising it, for example, in newspapers and the bulletins of the Jamaica Historical Society and the Archaeological Society of Jamaica; people like S.A.G. Taylor, W. Adolphe Roberts, H.P. Jacobs, C.S. Cotter, F.J. DuQuesnay, Ansell Hart, Lily G. Perkins, Carey Robinson, Inez Knibb Sibley, Jack Tyndale-Biscoe, just to name a few. Jamaica does have a history and culture made by ordinary Jamaicans which is part of our identity, the heritage we pass on to future generations.

“We are out to build a new Jamaica” was the anthem of that pre-Independence generation. Knowing our history fraught with racism and exploitation, the new nation had to find a way to move onward and upward. They selected as Jamaica’s national motto “Out of Many, One People” which, like Eric Williams, spoke of a fecund “Mother Jamaica” which has given birth to something new – not European or African, but Jamaican.

One of the founding fathers, Norman Washington Manley, put it this way:

“We have in Jamaica our own type of beauty, a wonderful mixture of African and European, and it is for our artists and writers to discover and set the standards for the national loveliness in the national gift of thought and expression.

“We can take everything that English education has to offer us, but ultimately we must reject the domination of her influence, because we are not English and nor should we ever want to be.”

We are neither English nor African. We are Jamaican, with our own culture, of suite of cultures – a thing of beauty and loveliness!

Barbadian historian and poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1930-1020) in his book on Jamaica states:

“Here, in Jamaica, fixed within the dehumanizing institution of slavery, were two cultures of people, having to adapt themselves to a new environment and to each other. The friction created by this confrontation was cruel, but it was also creative.”

CULTURAL CONFRONTATION

The Jamaica that is rasta and reggae and revival is the Jamaica of ghettos, garrisons and gunmen. This painful cultural confrontation produced a Jamaican creole culture more powerful and more creative than either European or African culture. But in this blessed land we see “Mimic men” reverting back, trying to recapture the primordial European or African culture, while overlooking the powerful and creative Jamaican folk culture we now have. European Mimic Men want to reinstate European culture in Jamaica. African Mimic Men want to reinstate African culture in Jamaica. Mimic Men of both extremes deny the value and power of Jamaican culture and wish to minimise or eradicate it, and substitute for it a “bastard imitative culture”, to quote the great Kamau.

Social media and cable TV is making the latest generation into clones of North America and Western Europe.

Next week I will be 70 years old. I have watched from a front seat all of Jamaica’s 60 years of political Independence, and have suffered the disappointment of the dream of a new Jamaica unrealised. The people who stepped up to lead us have not fashioned a society of equality, peace and justice, and I fear that the nationalism and patriotism of previous generations has waned.

Undaunted, I pick up my pen. Maybe a fire will be rekindled somewhere.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com