To be free!

July 30, 2001

Once again the time has come to mark our emancipation from the physical and material shackles of slavery. But how "free" is this "freedom"?

Anglican pastor, Rev Canon Clive Griffith, now Kwame Mohlabani, of the Parish of St Clement, is right when he contends that we are tired burying African people with unfulfilled dreams, writers who did not write, singers whose songs remained unsung and hard workers who never enjoyed the fruits of their grinding labour while others benefited.

The most psychologically devastating aspect of slavery was its delinking of our sense of self from any association with or attachment to ownership, first of all ownership of our own labour power and secondly, ownership of the fruits, or the results, of our labour power.

Anyone who owns his/her own labour power and has therefore to assume full responsibility for his/her own preservation and development, has to hold, control and defend "space" and territory within which one's labour power can be expended in order to guarantee continued existence through the generation and accumulation of surplus or wealth in whatever form.

It is the generation of that surplus that guarantees the fulfilling of dreams, the proper and open utilising of talents and skills, the scheduling of plans and the attainment of goals. Otherwise we can only expect to endure meaningless lives.

"Kwanzaa", which means the celebration of the "first fruits", has been introduced by Kwame Mohlabani and significantly has been developing rapidly in recent times. This pastor of St Clement hopes through Kwanzaa to touch and change people's lives. We hope that it will lead to a renewed sense of self and purpose based on full control of all aspects and tenets of African existence, for Afro-Trinidadians more than anyone else need such a moral and spiritual injection.

Kwanzaa was first conceptualised and developed by an Afro-American, Maulana Ron Karenga, who studied ancient African culture, and based his Kwanzaa theses on the seven principles upon which ancient African communal social order and collectivisation was founded.

What is most interesting and intriguing is that there is evidence that a quite similar harvest festival of the "first crops," called "Salaka," was celebrated in Trinidad in the areas between Guapo and Point Fortin by people from Carriacou who settled around the oilfields there.

In these celebrations all the food offered was derived from "corn" which harkens back to the ancient tradition of corn as the basic staple, as well as the philosophic symbol of self-continuity. It was said that "the first born was like a stalk of corn which produces corn which in turn becomes new stalks which reproduce in the same manner" so that there is no end to lineage.

Only recently JD Elder and organisers of the Tobago Heritage Festival likewise paid homage to people from Carriacou who settled in Pembroke and were the ones that observed and preserved the Salaka celebrations in Tobago.

Canon Kwame Mohlabani should attempt the necessary in-depth research to link Kwanzaa and Salaka and so provide the basis to take the festival of the first fruits onto another level in the course of our efforts to re-establish our significance of self.

We said elsewhere that "...at any given moment in time an individual is representative of the sum total of his/her people's collective history. The only way this assumption could be deemed untrue would be if that individual were to drop abruptly from the sky devoid of any human lineage and connection.

"A lot of what any individual may or may not do in the concrete has a lot to do with the metaphysical; that flow of seeming, abstract stream of consciousness to which he/she is connected by dint of place and time and circumstances of birth, growth, moulding and development.

"Nowadays no one (should) accept any longer the ridiculous view that African people brought over on the slave ships were devoid of culture, were barbaric savages. There is enough recorded evidence to the contrary even in the writings of some captains of slave ships.

"What is most dangerous is when many among us come to accept the view that the African came with nothing and could have been stripped of his culture. The African came with himself and, even if naked, stood as the best and surest manifestation of his culture...

"To destroy a man's culture, his way of seeing and doing, you have to kill him and everyone like him, his entire progeny must be consigned to exacting genocide. As long as he exists and breeds, his culture will be manifested in what he does and how he does what he does. Amen..."

But there is more to this. What has now come to light is that plantation owners in the Americas ordered slaves from specific areas of the African continent relative to particular skills and expertise. No one ever said that before.

For example, slaves from Sierra Leone showed techniques of rice planting and irrigation, tidal agriculture, to the slave masters of Carolina. Other slaves made them aware of the requirements of tobacco propagation. Angolans and Africans from north and south of the Congo river were in particular demand for what was described as their "mechanical-minded" abilities.

The slave masters knew and recorded which slaves from which part of Africa would most likely be most "dexterous," the best carpenters or the best seamstresses who they could "hire out." They even recorded which ones were likely to have strong personal "odours" as well as those who had absolutely no odour whatsoever.

For some insights into what African slaves brought to the American landscape, the book Slaves in the Family, a white version of Alex Haley's Roots, written by Edward Ball, a descendant of slave owners, is required reading.

To which of course we can add the fact that the slaves in the Caribbean experience were also noted in early plantation records for their quick mastery of the chemical processes of sugar production. Nothing less could have been the case for we are a people of great substance whose history began thousands and thousands of years before slavery.

In the final analysis a lot depends on how history is read and how a people utilises and engages their significant sense of self as the basis towards their ultimate fulfillment.

Reflect deeply come this 2001 Emancipation Day.