AFRICAN DIASPORA SHOULD DEAL WITH PAST AND MOVE ON

The African Diaspora should seek to deal dispassionately with its slave and colonial past and move on. All other Diasporas have been hurt throughout history and many have been victims of prejudice, slavery and indentured labour. But the African Diaspora rather than keep stressing the negatives should seek to focus instead on building themselves and the countries in which they live through a conscious upgrading of their efficiency. The Diaspora must see education and excelling in or at least having a firm grasp of the sciences, arts, technology and vocational skills as the rungs of the ladder to upward mobility.

It does not make sense, in fact it is a cop out, merely to sit back and blame slavery and colonialism for the burden of the Diaspora’s ills without making the required effort to make the most of the educational opportunities offered. There must be the determination to make the most of history. What amazes me is that there are members of the Diaspora, who are prepared to lay back and affect to analyse the evils of slavery and colonialism. They insist that these negatives are responsible for everything from male philandering to all too many women having six and seven children out of wedlock, each for a different father. And for a disproportionate percentage of African descent nationals being underachievers, without making the effort to at least change around their own lives and reverse their fortunes.

Admittedly, there are crucial differences between Diasporas, such as the length of the period of the physical slavery of the African Diaspora and its continuing economic exploitation. There is also the inescapable fact that the Europeans having enslaved the Africans sought to justify it on the basis of the utterly false assumption that Africans and other colonised people were inferior to them. In turn, having conquered African countries by superior weaponry, they purchased their agricultural produce and their goods and services at the lowest possible prices, employing the vicious theory of the Law of the First Price. And worse, when socially aware African thinkers and thinkers of the African Diaspora assumed toward the end of World War II, that the victory of the Socialist British Labour Party would have meant an improvement to their lot, they discovered there was no difference between the colonial policy of the Socialists and that of the Conservative Party.

Indeed, Ernest Bevin, a man to whom I have long referred as a right wing Socialist, would say when he became Britain’s Foreign Minister in the 1945  Labour government: “If Western Europe is to achieve its balance of payments and to get a world equilibrium, it is essential that (African) resources should be developed and made available.” (Cited by Walter Rodney in his work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Page 233). Bevin’s statement with respect to what he and his government had clearly held to be justifiable exploitation, could have been British policy applicable to India, for example. The exploitation of India was no different, and the British publication, Economist, would carry on Page 17 of its August 16, 1997 edition, that during the 200 years of United Kingdom colonial rule in India that there had been an average net transfer of capital to the UK from India of 1.5 percent of India’s Gross Domestic Product! I had referred earlier to European policy of justifying colonialism and/or slavery by claiming that colonised (or enslaved people) were inferior. In the 19th century, somewhere in the 1880s, the nakedly racist French anthropoligist, Paul Topinard, actually “developed” a chart on the noses of different ethnic groups in an effort to “prove” his point about European superiority.

James Anthony Froude, the arch 19th century British imperialist, of whom late prime minister Dr Eric Williams would be particularly caustic in his lecture series at the then Port-of-Spain Library in the 1950s, resorted to “craniological measurements” to “prove” that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Richard Waswo, in his The Founding Legend of Western Civilisation: From Virgil to Vietnam (Page 229), touching on Froude’s claim would write: “The history of this aberration — racism justified by the empirical objectivity of occidental science — is well known...” Froude’s froudacity, that of so called “scientific” proof of non-white racial inferiority, based on “craniological measurements” later yielded pride of place to 20th century “scientific proof” of such “inferiority,” this time based on IQ measurements, which ignored, as one writer tells us, the established effect of malnutrition and undernourishment on brain development. Colonialism made Europeans feel superior. It is because of this that David Ricardo in his book, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Page 56), could claim that the poverty and underdevelopment of colonised people were the result of  “The ignorance, indolence and barbarism of the inhabitants.”

It is this hammering home by European writers and writers of European descent and the arrogance of the European imperialists, accompanied by a stifling of initiative and a policy, up to and immediately after World War II, of limiting the access of colonial people to upward mobility that would have a terrible effect on the colonised and on their self-esteem. I hate colonialism and any form of imperialism with a passion, no matter the clothing, no matter the well-crafted public relations images of the propagandists of imperialism. But the African Diaspora and indeed any other advantaged Diaspora must seek to put the hurt of history behind, and not use it as an excuse to retard their own development. I remember the words of an old San Fernandian on Independence Day: “Trinidadians and Tobagonians will advance and keep advancing, providing we seek to profit from history, understanding always that although the past may not always have been easy, the first and succeeding rungs of the ladder awaiting us as a new nation, lead to the mountain top.”