Identity and Marginalisation

Jul 06, 2008 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

In our last article, we developed the thesis that concurrent with the abolition of physical African slavery in 1834, the British had crafted a methodology for enslaving the minds of the natives of newly conquered India that it was to deploy across the Empire, including Guyana.

The outlines are summarised in the “Macaulay Minute” of 1835 and the major instrumentality deployed would be “Education”, with a capital “E”. The Education was intended to create “brown Englishmen”, who of course, would struggle futilely to become “White Englishmen”.

First defined as subhuman, to justify their enslavement, after some had converted to Christianity, Africans were accepted as human but placed at the bottom of the great “chain of being”. Other races were to be positioned between these two poles based on the British evaluation of their social evolution.

In India, the facticity of ancient achievement was airbrushed away as the contribution of the Aryans who, of course, were “invading Europeans”. Indians were placed a tad above the Africans and were derided as “wogs” who were cowardly, weak, passive, docile, cunning, shifty, fawning, otherworldly and superstitious.

Their literature was dismissed as “absurd legends”; their philosophy was “other-worldly” and unscientific; they lacked “political consciousness”; their social practice was defined as dominated by casteism, child-marriages, prohibition of widow remarriage and cow worship; their religion was a mass of depravity, idolatry and superstitions such as suttee or wife-burning. They needed help, which was going to be the white man’s burden.

Africans, of course, much earlier on, had been stipulated to have barely clawed their way into humanity much less capable of possessing literature, political and social organisation, etc.

Egypt, Mali and other African civilisations were evidently not part of Africa. In India, the class of Hindus that had served the Mughals eagerly accepted the new dispensation – it was “payback time” for them; the Muslims were generally aloof.

In Guyana, there was a class that had already struggled to occupy the position of helpmates to the rulers – the Coloured offsprings of white planters and African slaves.

Many of them had already been freed and sent to England to be educated and they returned to Guyana eager to prove that if they could not be white (to which position they were never “hailed”) they at least could be faithful facsimiles.

The most noted feature of this stratum was their obsession in keeping out interlopers who they saw as literally beneath them. In India, these despised beings were the menial castes and in Guyana, they were initially “full-blooded” dark Africans.

In the years following the abolition of slavery and the introduction of the British hegemony, we have seen an interesting evolution of the social categories especially those countries that had a nexus with African slavery.

In my assessment, the two poles White/Black or British/African have shifted in absolute terms but not relatively – it appears that White/British, which has become White/European, needs its Black/African antithesis to define itself as “naturally” superior.

It all has to do with maintaining power by aestheticizing the physical force that always lies behind it through the discursive practices and their institutional performative realities. The whites, of course always maintained the apex position.

In Guyana, their first move was acceptance of Africans who educated themselves, behaved “properly” and were willing to “marry up” (read whiter) as “Coloured”.

The remaining Africans imbibed the definition of themselves as the lowest stratum and strove mightily to become “Coloured”.

The tragedy, as Lamming has noted, is the dignity of African labour was dishonoured and “Education was a means of escape from the realities of labour, a continuing flight from the foundations of society.” And this remains the dilemma of the ordinary African to this day as he constructs his identity.

The introduction of Portuguese indentured servants was the second move – they were not only allowed, but also facilitated, to enter the status of the Coloured stratum – just below the whites.

The Africans reacted violently against the Portuguese in the 19th century because, in more ways than one, the Portuguese were hindering their escape route. The Chinese, with their fewer numbers, slid in behind the Portuguese, with lesser fuss.

The introduction of the Indians was the third move. The numbers introduced by the British were so large that they not only checkmated the African strategy for higher wages (and possibly creating greater respect for labour) but facilitated the Indian creation of a self-contained community that could, by and large, sequester itself outside the societal valuations, as stipulate its own status signifiers.

The Indian, imbibing the British overseers’ evaluation of the African who refused to work for the pittance, consistently derided the latter claims to being more “civilised” (by imbibing British culture) in retorting, “Africans had no culture” – another British claim.

Today, we still evaluate each other through the language of the hegemon; and herein lies our predicament: the African is marginalized because his very identity is marginalized in that language. And when you live on the margins you look at the world differently.

The Indian’s willingness to convert swampland (received in lieu of their contracted return passage to India) into a successful rice industry was facilitated by the planters because it suited their purpose that the ex-indentureds could supplement (and thus accept) their meagre wages from sugar.

It provided some Indians, however, with an independent platform to enter the “wider” society and its social relations after indentureship – including the valued professions of law, medicine and business.

But their success here acted to close off the accepted “upward mobility” of the Africans masses just as the Portuguese had done earlier and precipitated hostility not only from them but panicked reactions from the Coloured stratum.

Mittleholtzer describes the scorn and hostility displayed by his high-Coloured family towards the Luckhoos, the first Indian lawyer in Guyana, in his book “Swarthy Boy”.

Ironically, the name of his book alludes to the stress on complexion by the Coloureds since Mittleholzer was a bit darker than his parents and was humiliated by that fact.

To jump ahead to the present, one cannot but conclude that there are larger active forces at work to ensure that Africans remain marginalised across the globe because of the successful penetration of American popular culture that defines whiteness as “normal” and Africans on the margins.

The experience of the US is instructive because they have taken over the mantle of protecting and projecting the “European/white” hegemony that is based on the White-Black dipoles. Their experience inevitably reverberates in Guyana.

After slavery and reconstruction in the US, the floodgates of immigration were opened up to poverty-stricken Europeans who quickly were facilitated to bypass the Africans who then remained at the bottom of the barrel. And blamed for their “failures”.

The most interesting development, however, for the point we are developing is that even though some of these Europeans (such as Jews, Irish and Italians) were initially seen as analogous to Africans, they literally were allowed to “become white” by the fifties, and to enjoy all the privileges that group enjoys as a matter of course.

After unimaginable sacrifices, when legal equality was won in the courts via the civil rights struggle of the fifties and sixties, the floodgates were opened once again by the authorities – this time to Asians and Hispanics who had earlier been rejected.

With all the success of the growing African middle class of which Barack Obama is a sterling example, we are in the midst of a gradual transformation of those Asians and Hispanics into “Whites”, which will leave the African Americans once again out of the mainstream – and marginalised.

We have to examine empirically how much of these attitudes have percolated into Guyana.

(To be continued)