I made many explosive statements in part 1 and promised to back them up with facts and findings. The degree of deliberate confoundment which has been invested in obfuscating the truth on this matter is so voluminous, widespread and sustained, it requires much more than one or two articles. Thank God we have a whole month to focus on these matters…and that we have systematized the conversation calendrically.
I want to start by exposing the ruse of invoking the Jamaican national motto in a bid to suppress African identity (and I will use African and Black interchangeably throughout the discussion although I know the obfuscators have made that in itself an issue where none exists; but I’ll take that up later). Many will resist this proposition vehemently. Others will find it absurd. Neither have a leg to stand on and are equally deluded, the only question is by whom and how.
There are many ethnic/racial/civilizational identities and heritages that contribute to the Jamaican social-scape. Every one of them have contributed to Jamaican culture and are generally celebrated for that contribution and their heritage honored and acknowledged. Jamaican Jews (or Jewish Jamaicans) are proud of both heritages. The same is true of Indians, Chinese and even Europeans. (Nb I identified these Jamaicans by their racial heritage and nothing seemed awkward in doing so.) I challenge any researcher to go to any Jamaican school or church and verify that it is not only not awkward but customary to identify people in Jamaica by race (and without stigma) with only one stark exception. Call a Black Jamaican child African and you will typically get a quizzical response if not outright repudiation. The African identity has been deliberately and systematically suppressed throughout Jamaica’s history and has become a matter of instinct.
It has become systemic and therefore concealed in our approach to education, religion, governance (as recently revealed in Parliament in yet another expose on the colonial mindset still haunting that space). Jews know their Jewishness is not in competition with their Jamaicanness. They both compliment each other. The same with every other identity. Even in spite of the proud resistance from African cultural crusaders in the arts, language, religion and politics, who have pushed back significantly on the endemic anti-Africanism retained in Post colonial culture, the roots still remain and what the out-of -many-oners seek to do is not to establish a multi-racial democracy as they deceitfully pretend, (were that so, why suppress any racial identity?) but under the guise of post-racialism, the blatant hyporcrisy of which should by now be obvious to the fairminded, to dispense with having to answer for the historic and current anti-African ethos that infests Jamaican systems as a means of social control.
Much more can and will be said before the month is out and afterwards. I particular intend to take on the bastion of post colonial, racist, anti-African, eurocentric bile – because it is the most concealed, the most systemic and the most effective – religious doctrine and ritual. Coming up next.
YeKengalé 