In the Grips of Neocolonialism

I am happy for the opportunity to make a contribution to this first edition of Our Afrikan Heritage. Goodness knows that a publication dedicated to Pan Africanist thought and progressive ideas is long overdue in our society.

For those of us who have moved beyond the neo-colonialist, conservative mentality which still grips so many of our brothers and sisters have long felt stifled in the expression of our views by the traditional organs of mass communications – i.e radio, television, press.

You only have to read the editorial of the local press, for instance, to recognize the appalling level of colonial stagnation in the thinking of those who run these media. One publication, in particular, seems to be striving hard for the ignominious record of being the most anti-black, anti-African newspaper in the western hemisphere.

In a predominantly black country, with black leadership, this paper thinks nothing of launching attacks on African countries and people, sometimes bordering on racism. Equally remarkable, the society, by its silence, appears to see nothing wrong with this.

So this magazine is filling a very large void in the literary landscape of our country, and I hope it will do so with audacity and purpose.

In this first issue I would like to share with you some of the thoughts and ideas I advanced when I was presented with the Clement Payne Awards ceremony earlier this year.

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 .

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.

It is now 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 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 still wearing the master’s 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.

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. 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 bring them up on FM radio; 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.

These are days when television entertainment for young people is almost limited to the mindless noises that pass for music nowadays, and the vulgar gyrations of semi-nude young women. 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 and business people.

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 in Barbados 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%!

We’re not raising our young people to be bright, young sparks; instead we pollute their minds with gaudy entertainment. Where is the intellectual stimulation that is so necessary for the development of the mind in “raise yuh hand and juck” or in shouting out and bigging up?

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.

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 descendants of a privileged minority – and nobody in Barbados sees anything wrong with that.

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 car 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.

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 – I hope you are too.