We Lost Our Way
Look here, I know we are a young country in the new world and our ancestors were brought here dehumanised, chained on boats, from Africa or from deep bowels of poverty in India, and subsequently systemically dehumanised until independence.
I know that our first leaders had to become brown Englishmen (always the master plan). They had to beat the criminal colonisers at their own game, which we initially did, often spectacularly.
That’s why Eric Williams, ANR Robinson and Ellis Clarke were Oxford men. They returned but only to serve at the highest level.
Sir VS Naipaul, CLR James and Sam Selvon defected to England as if fearing strangulation of contemplation by the perpetual noise (music, pan, chatter, radio, fetes, limes).
We’ve ignored the death of intellectual leaders who understood that we are a really young country. A country filled with people who have suffered a very recent brutality. A people who needed healing, shoring up, shepherded to safety.
When the oil came quick, it flowed like molten lava into our upstretched hands; the drugs came so easy, guns softly unloaded on shore in the light of a full moon, sold for a handsome profit.
Who had time for healing? There was money to be made. What that did to us is criminal. There was healing from slavery, possibly the worst crime against humanity. No healing from indentureship.
Language is the gateway to civilisations, to our own origins, to ourselves. Stripped of African and Indian languages, and religions, given Christian names, our identity was reduced to scraps, to motifs that we trot out on specific days, a museum: Perhaps dashiki, a sari, some vegetarian dishes in a generic curried powder consumed on a leaf.
To forget our trauma we also forgot there are 54 countries in Africa, and 29 states in India each rich with languages, separate cuisines, histories. We did not look back. We did not keep up with where we came from. We lost our way.
Very little is our own, no manufacturing, no farming, no industry except for the Godgiven oil run by multinationals, and the entertainment industry–Even here, no costume preserved in a museum of Carnival, no pan tune is written in a book. We are an embarrassment of riches thrown at the wind and on the road.
We won’t look. We don’t look at our distant or recent past. Too painful. We won’t remember our leaders. Our schoolchildren don’t know the brilliance of our early leaders. They don’t know the works of CLR James, VS Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Eric Williams.
They don’t know a word of Swahili, a language spoken by 100 million Africans. They can’t speak Hindi or Urdu, spoken by almost a billion Indians. But we are being taught French and Spanish.
We go trick or treating. We speak of ‘summers’ and ‘Thanksgiving’ and a ‘Black Friday’ sale.
It’s tragic—This Dutch Disease, this Pavolvian thing, this mind-numbing aping. It’s true we first used amnesia to block out the brutality of our arrival here. But it became a habit. We do the same thing again and again and expect a different result, a definition of madness.
With the aborted mission of knowing ourselves we became a nation of fatalists without agency, minus an ability to connect the dots, who vaguely feel ‘someone should do something’ about littering or the highest carbon emissions in the world.
We don’t see the link between being the KFC capital of the world and having the highest rate of heart disease; no link between low literacy in schools and drugs on the streets; no link with reluctant service and dead tourism; no link between absent fathers and the rise of drug lords; no link between an unmanned coastline and the highest murder rate in a non-warring country; no link with lawlessness and a slow justice system; no link between every man for himself at the top and those at the bottom; no link between neglected youngsters and unemployment; no link between persistent unchecked (also forgotten) corruption from the days of O’Halloran and Calder Hart and an empty treasury.
Its cricket, Carnival, Christmas, an unbelievable number of public holidays, rinse and repeat which would have been tolerable if we weren’t held perpetually hostage to crime and if so many people in an oil rich country weren’t still living in poverty. We never learned to self-regulate.
But step back, step back, look at the bird’s eye view, look at the formations. Our beauty and our ruin. Reclaim ourselves, that’s what the dead voices of the early heroes of Independence and our ancestors who once lived free and within the richness of civilisations would tell us.