YeKengalé

I gave this speech at the Rotary Club of St Andrew yesterday. The live video was defective so I present the information here in this format. Ultimately I will integrate the powerpoint and release as vlog.

Every generation of mankind has a duty to the species of legacy. We receive the gift of life and all its treasure to ‘pass it on’ in time as well as space … to impact our own generation, and those who come after us, and to justify the gift we received from those who came before us, and from those in our lifetime who contributed to our growth and development. The greatest legacy gift is not what we have but who we are. 

 Identity is the greater wealth. To pass on material wealth without spiritual value is great disservice both to wealth accumulated and to those who will inherit it, for both will be corrupted or destroyed. However, if identity is intact, wealth can always both be recreated and preserved.

Our species has evolved because of our development of identity-transmission mechanisms to convey values, purpose and meaning: language, ritual, and art. When these tools are properly employed, memory and imagination survive individual death and become the collective property of the species. Mankind advances with the successes and failures of each individual. However, when these technologies are forgotten or misused, a collective blindness and amnesia leads to breakdown of the social fabric as the collective thread of civilization unravels. 

Notwithstanding the form of this presentation, intellection is highly overrated. Mothers and teachers understand all this instinctively without having to consult a dictionary. Both are masters of the art of character formation, wielding the tools of language and ritual masterfully to transmit codified bodies of value and meaning. Both understand instinctively that character is habit and habit is character. They instinctively know how to ritually and methodically impart systems of knowledge and ways of behavior that become deeply engrained and integrated into the being of their charges. They are the chief nexus of generations, the connection to the wider social milieu. 

All are celebrated in the month of May: Children, mothers and teachers. May seems to be the month collectively chosen to honor the sacred obligation to ‘pass it on’. 

Rituals and traditions (like Child’s Month, Teacher’s Day and Mother’s Day) transmit identity because they codify Memory and Value. Their power is compromised when meaning is lost, when purpose is forgotten. Memory is all that stands at the threshold of purposefulness and profanity. Intentionality unconnected to memory leads eventually to chaos. 

 Let’s take for example another May ritual observance: Labor Day, celebrated in Jamaica on May 23^rd. Instituted as a national ritual and sacralized as a holiday in commemoration of the Labor movement that produced the nationalism that resulted in the reality we now call the nation of Jamaica. The labor movement reached its pinnacle of expression in the Frome riots of 1938 which directly led to the independence movement culminating in 1962. This is the seed from which Jamaica was born.

It was the spark of workers protesting exploitation that produced the nation of Jamaica. May 23^rd was chosen to replace Empire Day which was the ritual that preceded it much in the same manner that Indigenous Peoples Day replaces Columbus Day. It is a marker of identity. It represents a turning point in human consciousness where the impulse for freedom triumphed over the impulse to exploit and dominate. This was the meaning of Labor Day and in the early days of its celebration, it was marked with political rallies celebrating the triumph of the worker over the plantation owner, labor over capital, freedom over systemic slavery. 

This is a world-wide movement. International Labor Day is celebrated generally on May 1^st  commemorating the Haymarket Affair in Chicago which sparked riots around the world in 1890 almost 50 years before Jamaica’s Frome Riots. In Britain, one of the major protestations was against child labor. The industrial revolution exploited children by forcing them to work in mines for up to 16 hours a day under hellish conditions, denying them rights and privileges we now take for granted, such as education, health care, protection. Should we forget this journey and the meanings, values and lessons learned along the way, we open the door for  repetition because Memory is all that stands between profane and purposeful living. 

This year the celebration of Labor Day was pushed forward to May 25^th because the 23rd fell on a weekend. Unfortunately, this bounced Africa Day off the school-day calendar. Why this must be compensated for is the subject of this entire piece which centers on the plight and promise of the Jamaican child in respect to  African identity. 

The Jamaican child who has been told that “Out of many One” means a surrender of African Identity (Yes, deniers will deny but we understand the wiles of Satan; Peter didn’t write his song in vain. ) has been robbed of the richest source of human identity, creativity, agency and dignity that there is. This may appear to be a boast, but is in all actuality simply a statement of truth.  One needs only look at Jamaica’s contribution to the world to recognize it.

The African identity unlocks the entire spectrum of humanity in all its diversity by virtue of being not only the geographical source of humanity but also the cradle of civilization. Africa is the mother and teacher of all humanity. And those familiar with the values encoded in her high cultures would also recognize she is the predecessor of all egalitarian philosophy. One only needs for verification to read the opening chapter of the most ancient book preserved whole on the planet, The Teachings of Ptah Hotep which espouses the principles of Maat, retained and repackaged by axiologies across space and time, maintaining the standards of justice first articulated there whether now called by other names or invoked by other means, or appropriated by other systems of religion, jurisprudence and political philosophy. Africa is the Ground Zero of humanity. 
 

Unconnected to this wellspring of meaning, The Jamaican and Caribbean child is living in somebody else’s backyard, is a tenant in someone else’s dream, whose highest ambition is to access the crumbs from someone else’s furnished table and whose greatest fear is upsetting Bakra (the White man) because, all memory can recall is that when Bakra Maasa gets angry, everybody suffers. 

When the Jamaican child thinks of the ‘powers-that-be’, he /she thinks outside of self, because the world neither belongs to him/her, nor can he /she aspire to own it. The rich and the powerful are a class permanently outside of his/her category. S/He has not been taught that Africa Day is the result of the vision and action of a Jamaican. That the OAU / AU was one culmination of the impulse of the UNIA, the brain child of a Jamaican. That when we see Africa today, we are partly responsible for it. They do not realize that almost every single African Liberator or their parents (Africa Day was initially called African Liberation Day) were card carrying members of the UNIA and hailed Marcus Mosiah Garvey as their father of philosophy and Nationalism. When Marcus Garvey was born, there was not a single self-Governing Black nation in the world, with the sole exception of Ethiopia, (which explains why the birth place of the OAU is in Addis Ababa and the central figure in the photo of the original presidents is Haile Selassie); or that it was Marcus Garvey’s intentionality that helped change that predicament, memorialized in his famous declaration: 

“I looked for the great men and women of Africa, those of kingship and high estate, and when I did not find them, I knew it was my duty to bring them to life.” 

That young school child will have no clue what to do when it seems that the world is not working for him/her, with no appreciation of the contribution Jamaica made to Haiti, the only slave revolt in the history of the entire world that resulted in sovereign nationhood and the world’s first Black  Republic. Haiti’s constitution was the first document on earth to encode the notion of the moral impropriety of the ownership of other human beings, that made personal freedom a basic human right. Not even the bible had that idea. It was championed by Haitians and became adopted by the UN and now is recognized universally as a human right. It took spilled blood to enforce the universal relevance and acceptance of this idea. Jamaica has part in that through Boukman, one of the main leaders of that revolution.

But if the narrative embraced by Jamaicans disconnected from their truth and from their ancestors is that Haiti is cursed, African religions are demonic, and Imperial Britain, responsible for mankind’s greatest genocides and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the greatest high crime against humanity ever perpetuated by a people (which would include their cousin, Hitler’s Germany and nephew, the equally genocidal American States)  is blessed by God Almighty (because of their ‘christianity’) envied by us (because of their wealth, however appropriated) and we, as the beneficiaries of their largesse owe our freedom, our civilization, our culture and our economic survival or whatever semblance of stability we do have to them; if that paradigm guides our young, what choices of life will they make, how stunted their creativity, how limited their horizons?!?! 

How will they navigate the uncertain future now arriving at our doorstep where notions like national sovereignty no longer enjoy commonality of respect nor effective protection by international consensus? How will they embrace the exigencies of survival which demand a revisitation of the original dream of Caribbean Federated states and consolidated regional power if they never knew that Jamaican independence was Plan B, and that the original intention of both founding fathers, Manley and Bustamante initially, was actually  Caribbean Federation under one commonly elected president? Busta’s grouse was that he believed (rightly so) that the British should have financed the process and when it was clear that they would not, he was not going to defend saddling Jamaica with the entire burden of the smaller, lesser-developed islands).

Suppose they never realize that the Labor riots which led to independence were a common phenomenon throughout the Caribbean and that we might have been living today under a Caribbean president were it not for a few hundred votes in a referendum and that the whole fate of the Caribbean turned on Jamaica’s decision?  

What if the child doesn’t understand that CARICOM is the next embodiment of the dream of a united Caribbean Power and that a single Jamaican is hailed as the author of that dream; so much so that the Treaty of Chagueramas, which like the inaugural OAU conference in Addis Ababa, initiated the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) was signed on his birthday? How then can that child credibly believe he/she has power to shape his/her world unless they recognize that Jamaicans have been doing so for centuries and that the privileges and powers we presently enjoy, and much if not most of what is good about the world, we created and continue to create?  Without that narrative, that truth, aren’t we but poachers in someone else’s paradise? Extras on someone else’s set? At best, the grass in the garden, not the prize rose or rare orchid.

Jamaican visionaries and creatives have always espoused Freedom, Justice and Unity (in that order) as our highest aspirations. Our national motto must be interpreted within that hierarchy of value and that understanding of process.

The book of Proverbs warns us : 

Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set. Prov 22:28 

The Ministry of Education did a splendid job last year in ensuring Africa Day was observed in every school throughout Jamaica. It must ensure that this continues and is never interrupted for any reason. Each milestone serves as a marker of our journey. Mothers, teachers, workers, liberators, leaders, give us our legacy of identity. If one milestone falls, all the rest can be imperiled.