Ending African Cultural Marginalisation

Aug 24, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I wish to continue a discussion that was initiated earlier with Mr Eric Philips of ACDA. What follows was offered in 2008, as I watched the chickens coming home to roost from the heady days of the Buxton Resistance. I mentioned, inter alia, the seduction of young Africans by “political sophisticates” (Mr Kwayana’s phrase) for the fast life of nihilistic violence.
“And it is to this destruction of African social capital that I wish to comment today: why is it that we have this pool of young Africans who can so easily be seduced by the “dark side” of violence and nihilism. And let us not kid ourselves – they are not confined to Buxton. We have seen reverberations in Agricola and we will see more all across Guyana once we do not get to the root of the malaise. Once this pool is in the society, we will see politicians, who are either opportunistic or who have genuinely given up on the present system to deliver justice, dipping into it.
During slavery, a hierarchical, pyramidical society was created in which class and race were coincident: Europeans/Whites at the top, followed by Coloureds/mulatto – all perched on top of the African slaves, who were chattel owned even by some Coloureds, and as I pointed out before, defined the condition of “marginalisation”. With the abolition of slavery, not much changed – excepting that very quickly, the Portuguese and Chinese were inserted even ahead of the Coloureds, to the latter’s great chagrin. he masses of indentured Indians were initially seen as sojourners and outside the grand order.
They retorted by utilising their own criteria for assigning status etc and became a self-contained community up to the end of indentureship. For the African masses upward mobility was defined for them as “joining the coloured stratum” through the prescribed routes of education, “marrying up (lighter complexion) and “proper behaviour. Most of the rest internalised the racist premises of the society remained culturally as well as economically marginalized.
This was a very rigid system that lasted well into the independence era – by which time the Indians had largely accepted many of the premises of the society begun to enter its bastions setting off the fears in the Coloured elite that has survived into the present. The agitation by the League of Coloured People in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s that Indians were invading the Civil Service, was symbolic of this fear. For the longest while the African lower classes could maintain some self-respect by looking down at the heathen, miserly, uncouth “coolie” as he was called.
But with the evident success of the latter group – by the criteria of the evolving economy – a great questioning of African group worth was precipitated. Comparative studies have shown that when exhortations to compete are made to the lagging group, they exacerbate the humiliation of the colonial experience (much less the slave experience) of the backward group by signaling that the group they had despised had now actually mastered the modern skills necessary for success more completely than they.
The Coloured middle class, like most classes, has historically been consumed with its own preservation and has historically undermined the lower class African community by co-opting those individuals from the lower classes who demonstrated initiative and drive. While the middle class has been severely decimated from the seventies, their orientation towards the lower class Africans have remained almost unchanged. They are expendable cannon fodder.
And we arrive at the child-soldiers of Buxton and Agricola, and potentially in other African communities in Guyana. Their experience of being marginalized, which has historical antecedents – and possibly present triggers – can easily be pandered to by “political masterminds” who are mostly from the comfortable middle class.
Any program to address the results and consequences of the marginalisation of the ordinary African must deal with their cultural dislocations as well as their economic marginalisation – they are dialectically related. Elder Eusi Kwayana’s ASCRIA was a valiant effort to deal with the former problematic but the Co-operative approach to deal with economic empowerment, echoing Ujaama socialism, foundered in its own contradictions. The African lower class and all Guyana, lost “corn and husk”.
We welcomed the formation of the African Renaissance and we believe that the government has to work with such groups – making sure they are “grounded” in the African community – if progress is to be made. The work of rebuilding psyches will not be accomplished with proclamations. On possible (and charged) present economic discrimination, we suggested last week the introduction of  the “disparate impact” test that deals with institutional biases and require no proof of intent.
India is in the midst of introducing an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in the wake of a study that demonstrated the  ‘disparate impact” of discrimination on the Muslim community there. Activists here should also devote some energy also to the related policy of Affirmative Action in areas where a historic pattern and practice against a particular group can be demonstrated, and for which we called since 1990.
Ravi Dev

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