Brain blackout

Most of the older generation of Trinidadian intellectuals are Afro- Trinidadian. Most of the younger generation of Trinidadian cranks are Afro-Trinidadian. So there is no racial basis for being smart or stupid. But part of the stupidity of the younger generation of Afro-Trini commentators is their readiness to falsify science, history and ethnography to bolster racial convictions (a predilection that, with a perfectly logical irony, Indocentrists such as Maha Sabha spokesman Devant Maharaj also have). Thus, PNM propagandist Joel Primus, in his Guardian column of July 23, 2004 writes about the “undeniable fact that a significant part of our population, by their genetic composition, would be described as African as compared to Asian and Caucasian.” Oh, really? In his book Mapping Human History, science journalist Steve Olson, measuring a generation as 20 years, points out that 40 generations (or 800 years) ago, the number of our ancestors would have exceeded the number of people alive in the world.

This means that 800 years ago, our ancestors included much of the adult population who lived in that part of the world. “Now factor in the consequences of human migration,” Olson suggests. “Suppose that an emissary from Ethiopia married a woman in the court of Henry II and had children. Today, all Europeans are descended from that Ethiopian — and from other Africans who married into the European population and had children in medieval times. Similarly, all Africans today descend from Chinese traders who visited Africa, and undoubtedly fathered children, early in the 1400s.” This calculation refutes Primus’s “undeniable fact.” And the arithmetic is backed up by biology. A team from Yale University, headed by Professor Kenneth Kidd, took DNA samples from various ethnic groups and found that, for almost every single African population, there was more genetic variation than for every other non-African group put together.

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his book The Mismeasure of Man, asks, “How, therefore, can we lump ‘African blacks’ together as a single group, and imbue them with traits, either favourable or unfavourable, when they represent more evolutionary space and more genetic variety than we find in all non-African people in the rest of the world?” Mind you, if the Afrocentrists had their way, the Human Genome Project wouldn’t have been allowed at all. Another Guardian columnist, Attillah Springer, upset that DNA analysis had showed a serial rapist in Britain (where, like a true Trini revolutionary, she lives) to be of Caribbean descent, argued, “That this whole investigation into DNA will become another means of trying to divide and subvert is a foregone conclusion.” She concluded, “If as the indigenous peoples of the world have been saying for years, that all this genome business is tantamount to biopiracy, then what’s the difference between the genome scientist and the serial rapist?”

The answer, of course, would be obvious to anyone whose brain hadn’t been debauched by Afrocentric nonsense. Yet even Primus and Springer are models of reason compared to UWI student Tyehimba Salandy, who writes a column in the Sunday Mirror. In an article titled “Science, ancient wisdom and self consciousness,” Salandy displayed a nearly complete ignorance of history, anthropology, physics, biology, and philosophy. He writes about the early Greeks “who, though they were the beneficiaries of African knowledge in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, science, medicine, architecture, engineering and philosophy, claimed it as their creations, never acknowledging the source of their information.”  In fact, not only did the ancient Greeks learn very little from the Egyptians (who weren’t the “dark-skinned, kinky-haired Africans” Salandy claims were so advanced) but they had great respect for the antiquity of Egyptian religion and civilisation.

Salandy even manages to confuse linguistics, geology, and cosmology, finding a connection between the dark matter of the universe, carbon, and black Africa: “Scientists are now discovering what the ancients knew: that the universe, and (indeed) [sic] all human beings are rooted in a cosmic blackness.” And, with a quite unconscious irony, he concludes, “The mass of ignorance impacting upon the individual, through the mechanisms of the family, media, education system etc, results in an individual that [sic] is not the master or mistress of his/her destiny, but an individual who is disconnected, insecure, and acts on impulses, ego and on the scripts that have been given to him/her to act out.” This kind of mindset may well provide a clue as to why Afro-Trini students are not performing well at the higher academic levels. The bogus beliefs that Primus, Springer and Salandy share are symptomatic of a deeper malaise: a preference for simplistic answers which provide emotional comfort. But who, in Salandy’s phrase, is giving young socially conscious Afro-Trinis these pseudo-intellectual scripts to act out?

Their false facts and shallow-brained ideology are imported unchanged from African-American academia (because, like all ethnocentrists, they think it’s not cultural imperialism if alien ideas come from people who look like you). But the ground of ignorance was seeded by the PNM’s policies, beginning with Dr Williams’s sidelining of intellectuals and ending with DEWD, and continuing today with Patrick Manning’s born-again hypocrisy and CEPEP. And the poisonous fruit is nurtured by the adults put forward as counsellors and exemplars for Afro-Trini youths: people like pastor Clive Dottin, child educator Anna Maria Mora, electrical engineer Stephan Gift and literature professor Selwyn Cudjoe. The economist Thomas Sowell, in his book Conquests and Cultures, argues, “Human capital must not be confused with formal education, which is just one facet of it, and still less with the growth of an intelligentsia.”

The post-colonial intelligentsia, he adds, is “prominent among those fostering hostility toward more advanced groups, while promoting ethnic ‘identity’ movements. Newly educated and semi-educated classes have often sought positions in government bureaucracies, rather than in industry and commerce, for which their education has given them few skills likely to be useful in the market-place.” Favouring young Afro-Trinidadian males for COSTAATT or requiring lower entry qualifications for the University of Trinidad and Tobago won’t change this.  Instead, I would argue what is needed is a cultural overhaul wherein rational and empirical thought is promoted. Without that, all the ancestors not in this world will be unable to help their African descendants.