Stand up and be proud

THE EDITOR: This is an acid and vituperative response to the comments appearing in newspaper articles under the headlines “Blacks have only themselves to blame” and other such nonsense.  I do not feel a lot of goodwill towards all those who analyse the “Black Community” and find them wanting. Who in blazes is this “Black Community?” In the first case, when you call people out of their name, they do not have to answer you. There are no people called “Blacks.” Until Trinidadians of every hue and their type ranging from silvery white lank hair to dadder head recognise that there are no people called Blacks we would continue to stumble around trying to find out what is wrong.

These dark hued curly headed people, some with hair so tightly curled that a strand forms a series of perfect circles no bigger than the diameter of a slim pencil, are Africans. Are you afraid to call us that because our skins and hair stand as a reproach to the wealth the lank haired people of Europe accumulated from exploiting our free labour in the West, the islands as well as the two continents, North and South America? Are you afraid to call us Africans because it would give us a distinct identity, and make us the natural inheritors of all the greatness that was Egypt, Mali, Ancient Ghana Songhai and Zimbabwe? Are you afraid to call us Africans because we will then have a distinct place to relate to, and would daily ask ourselves if this position, highest unemployment, and all the other negatives, held by so many in Trinidad and Tobago who are African originated is a natural one, or an artificial construct engendered by continuing racial attitudes, economic deprivation, and a determination on the part of the people with economic power to keep the society so structured that a few will win and many will lose?

Are you afraid to call us Africans for fear that we demand equal place in the history books for the stories that are ours? Are you afraid that we would seek to replace the stories of European aggression against the rest of the world, culminating in the present Iraq war, with the more positive stories of African origins? Sometimes I watch with pity and disgust the prominence given to the misdeeds of the young Africans in the society, whose continuing sense of loss spills over into antisocial behaviour. This is portrayed in the local media; with the acrimonious condemnation that this arouses; but the almost sweeping under the rug of the terrible cases of murder within families committed by other groups, with no social analysis as to why a piece of land is worth a brother’s life, or why a man would kill his wife of twenty-five years and just walk away wiping his hands as if he had just slain a goat of a fractious pig.

LINDA EDWARDS
Port-of-Spain