Orville Taylor | Heritage weak: Jamaica is a black African country

Walking hundreds of miles in shackles, stored like pigs in the dungeons of the Cape Coast Castle for three months and more, we endured months-long odysseys in the hold of deep ships, packed like sardines but smelling infinitely worse.

After suffering the ignominy of three centuries of enslavement on an island that thankfully strongly resembles where we were snatched and sold from; we must now give that up as if there is nothing special about us except that we are changed diasporic Africans?

Tomorrow marks the beginning of National Heritage Week and apart from those brought out by provocation to wrath, my ethnic fabric is not the Ashanti Kente; it is Jamaican Bandana, a Madras cloth, representing our multicultural, yet African ethnicity. Being Jamaican is perfectly compatible with being African.

True, some of us escaped enslavement and managed to maintain more of the continental culture in a hybridised ethnicity, strongly patterned on the Ashanti and other Akan peoples. However, all Jamaicans of traceable African descent are as ‘indigenous’ as any of those who escaped earlier. Hybridity does not make us less African. Let this soak in, ‘hybridised’ Swahili, spoken by 267 million Tanzanians, Congolese, Ugandans and Kenyans, has around 20 per cent Arabic content. We are just a different set of Africans, enriched not bastardised by Asian culture, epitomised by the best curry goat in the world; more than the sum of our parts.

No issue with our national motto ‘out of many one people’. A country’s identifier is its dominant demographic. Let me make this absolutely clear; this is not a black supremacy argument. Every citizen of this nation has, and should have, 100 per cent the same rights, privileges and freedoms.

It is a simple assertion; a black person, legally born citizen of Denmark, Sweden or Norway, is racially African but doubtless he is a citizen of a white Scandinavian country. Jamaica is a black country and let us accept that and move on, as long as we do not officially or implicitly discriminate against any minority. For the record, Israel at last count was only 70 per cent Jewish. South Africa is only 80 pet cent black, with an Asian population proportionally larger than Jamaica.

SINISTER INTERPRETATION

Yet for some strange reason, when we adopted the black, gold and green in 1962, our political leaders put a sinister interpretation to the obvious. According to the British BioMed Central at least 60 per cent of Jamaicans are Akan or more specifically Ashanti (Asante). This is not surprising, because the syntax of Jamaican language, Patwa, is almost identical to Twi, the dominant and official Ghanian language. True, the vocabulary is different, but the rhythm is the same. Indeed, off the bat, I can think of at least 30 words which have survived. So, I step in the ‘dutty’ ‘poto poto’, ‘nyam dukunu’ on the banana leaf, eat ‘esham’, and observe the ‘akam’ on a piercing gone wrong,

Abeng might be special to the Maroons, but it only means animal horn in Twi, and we call the owl potoo, eat susuwa (susumba), okra, cassava, afu and puny yam ... and the other type too; same name. We still have the (b)ankara baskets, use ka(ta). Having more African content does not make Maroons separate from the rest of us.

Burials are almost identical, with grave digging, eight-night and wakes too. And yes, the Akan reverse into their homes at night to avoid ghosts following them in. Even the biting of one’s fingers after pointing on a funeral or cemetery is common. If you don’t speak well, you are ‘mumu’ and ‘bafan’ if clumsy.

Don’t be mistaken, if you do not speak Twi, and the Ghanian doesn’t speak English, communication is hard. However, you will comprehend the facial expressions, the kissing of teeth or the ‘kimbo’ and flashing of hands. Even the ‘cut eyes.’ By the way, some Ghanaians speak Ga or Ewe but no Twi or English.

DIFFERENT WAVE

For the record, as symbolic as the crowning of Jah Jah, Haile Selassie I, was in stimulating a different wave of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism and of course our indigenous Rastafari, the most global black religion currently, my flag is the Jamaican tricolour.

Third among ethnicities with the same combination, we are behind South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) and the modern Ashanti kingdom. Adopted in 1912 the black in the ANC flag refers to the natives.

Similarly, the modern Ashanti’s, adopted in 1935, the same year that the black workers began their three-year tsunami in the southeastern Caribbean, culminating in Jamaica in 1938, black symbolises their people.

This would not have been lost on Norman Manley, who never embraced his blackness, as his ironically less-white son Michael did, or on Alexander Bustamante, who according to sources, self-labelled ‘white’ when travelling. In an act of self-denial and disrespect, spitting on the dreams and ideas of Garvey, whose manifesto both leaders poached, the weird significance of the black in the flag was ‘hardships’.

‘What, this flag?’ brings an acronym to mind; because we for years thought it, like Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) flag inaugurated in 1920, referred to the majority of the people here on the land.

Finally good sense prevailed when a 1996 committee, headed by Afrocentric Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Rex Nettleford, determined “… that many Jamaicans make a link between themselves and the colour black and are affronted by the negative association with hardships.”

Of course, Nettleford was a man who walked his talk, and left several legacies in which he helped to create an indigenous, yet Africentric dance form, he neither wore colonial suits nor bowed to take a knighthood.

By the way, which is more plausible, the Taino ‘Xaymaca’, ‘land of wood and water’, or the Akan, ‘Gya ma ya ka ha? Meaning, ‘are we stuck here?’

I chose the latter and love it, ‘gye nyame mek ya,’ land we love!

Akyire yi yebehyia (Likklemore)

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com