Peter Espeut | Jamaica: our inheritance and gift

Slavery was, and is, an evil and heinous institution. For hundreds of years (maybe thousands) much of the world was so morally undeveloped that slavery was supported by law and philosophy – and even by some religions. Slavery of human by human could not survive unless underpinned by racism, the belief that some races are less than human, and others are genetically superior.

Slavery, of course, was not an end in itself; the development and operation of capitalism was dependent on exploiting the labour power of human beings either through chattel slavery or wage slavery; it was important to conquer and hold colonies (to establish empires) by military might to gain access to raw materials and labour. And so capitalism and slavery went together, along with imperialism, colonialism and racism.

One does not have to look far to find persons in Jamaican history who have supported capitalism and slavery, imperialism, colonialism and racism; and our modern predicament fraught with gangs, gunmen, garrisons, murder, and extortion, as well as poverty, unemployment illiteracy, squatting, and social deprivation, can be traced to our political class who seamlessly stepped into the shoes of the colonial plantocrats who ruled our plantation society.

Genuine fault can be found with everyone in whose honour statues have been erected and streets named, as well as some good, however small, they have done. Queen Victoria may have presided over empire, but Full Freedom came under her watch. Columbus brought Europeans to this land, but how responsible he is for the genocide which followed is debatable.

Norman Manley took Black Icon Marcus Garvey to court, and on one occasion, invited him to “step outside”. It was Busta’s Independence government which borrowed money from the World Bank to build second-rate secondary schools for black people.

SUBVERTED

It is my view that Busta and Manley – and the political parties they founded – subverted Jamaica’s independence, and put us in the gang-gun crime pickle we now find ourselves in; their statues must be the first to fall.

The names of Jamaica’s counties, parishes, towns, streets, hills and rivers reflect the names and origins of our colonial masters, and the places from which they came. Even the family names we bear smack of slavery and colonialism; I am descended from the outside child of a slave owner named Espeut; other slave owners had names like Holness, Phillips, Lazarus, and Shepherd.

How do we treat with our history, so wracked with racism and oppression? Shall we indulge in a surfeit of iconoclasm and renaming? Shall we reject everything European as evil, including clothing and language? And make Jamaica into New Africa?

St Lucian poet and thinker, Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, penned an essay titled Musing on History in 1974. I end with an extract:

“ I accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper ‘history,’ for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon. You were when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave buyer, men acting as men, and also you, father in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men, your fellowman and tribesman not moved or hovering with hesitation about your common race any longer than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to you inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strange thanks. I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift.”

Peter Espeut is an environmentalist and development scientist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.