The African Predicament

Jan 08, 2011 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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(The UN has declared 2011, “International Year for People of African Descent” and requested rigorous examination of the African condition and action to rectify same. The following is offered as a discussion point.)

The years following the abolition of slavery and the introduction of the British hegemony (mental slavery), witnessed an interesting evolution of social categories – especially those countries that had a nexus with African slavery. While the two defining poles – White/Black – shrank in absolute terms its binary nature remains unchanged.
It would appear that White//British/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) into the favoured “Coloured” stratum that had originated from the rape of African slave women by whites. 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 facilitated, to enter the status of the Coloured group – just below the whites. The Africans reacted violently against the Portuguese in the 19th century because, in more ways than one, the Portuguese were blocking their escape route. The Chinese, with their sparser 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 checkmated the African strategy for higher wages – and possibly creating greater respect for labour. It also facilitated the Indian’s creation of a self-contained community that could, by and large, sequester itself outside the societal valuations, and stipulate its own status signifiers.
Imbibing the British overseers’ evaluation of the African who refused to work for the pittance, the Indian 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 African masses, just as the Portuguese had done earlier. Predictably, it precipitated hostility not only from them, but panicked reactions from the Coloured stratum. Mittelholzer describes the scorn and hostility displayed by his high-Coloured family towards the Luckhoos, the first Indian lawyers in Guyana, in his book “Swarthy Boy”. Ironically, the name of his book alludes to the stress on complexion by the Coloureds, since Mittelholzer 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 marginalized 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 allowed them to “become white” by the 1950s, and to enjoy all the privileges that group enjoys as a matter of course.
After unimaginable sacrifices, when legal equality was won by Africans 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 yet 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 marginalized.
We have to examine empirically how much of these attitudes have percolated into Guyana.

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