“There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors came from India… There can be no Mother Africa for those of African descent, and Trinidad and Tobago society is living a lie and heading for trouble if it seeks to create give the impression or allow others to act under the illusion that Trinidad and Tobago is an African society. There can be no Mother England and no double allegiance; no person can be allowed to have the best of both worlds and enjoy the privileges of citizenship in Trinidad and Tobago while expecting to retain UK citizenship. … A nation, like an individual, can have only one mother. The only Mother we know is Trinidad and Tobago and a mother cannot differentiate between her children.”
The above was written in 1962 by historian Eric Eustace Williams (1911-1981), the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), as he sought to transition the country of his birth from colony to nation-state. The task of his generation – which grew up learning British History as their own – was to distinguish what was Trinidadian from what was British, to understand the nature of their exploitation well enough to deconstruct and reconstruct their society and politics in an image and likeness that all citizens could have. His history books are still in print.
His challenge was that the people of Trinidad and Tobago were almost equally of East Indian and African extraction, each with their own cultures and religions, with strong European, Chinese and Lebanese minorities. From this mixture was it possible to create a unified society?
Consciously to build a nation, T&T’s National Anthem has this line: “Where every creed and race finds an equal place, And God bless our nation.” Their national motto is “Together Aspire, Together We Achieve”. Who can argue with that?
But would this nationalist fervor overcome the divisions deliberately created by the colonizing power’s divide-and-rule policy? One could argue that the project of synthesizing Mother TrinBago is still incomplete – or stillborn – as deep ethnic divisions remain in TrinBagonian society and politics.
VISITORS SUPPORT
This was evident when many in the home crowd would support the visitors when India and West Indies played cricket.
The Jamaican equivalent of Eric Williams was probably Philip Manderson Sherlock (1902-2000). He tells this while he was teaching him alma mater (Calabar High School), he asked the principal, “Can’t we learn West Indian history, a little Jamaican history? I’ll never get over the fact that he looked at me with a rather pitiful smile and said, ‘My son, you have no history. And that was something he wasn’t saying in a cruel way. It was something that was accepted. We have no history. I began to question it.” Sherlock went on to co-author Caribbean history textbooks and work on Jamaican culture.
If we were to be a nation among nations, it was important to document Jamaican history and culture – not all of it beautiful (every nation has its dark days), but all of ours. An entire generation of patriotic Jamaicans—not professional historians—spent their free time digging up Jamaica’s long-buried history and obscure folklore, and publishing it, for example, in the papers and bulletins of the Historical Society of Jamaica and the the Archaeological Society of Jamaica; people like SAG Taylor, W. Adolphe Roberts, HP Jacobs, CS Cotter, FJ DuQuesnay, Ansell Hart, Lily G. Perkins, Carey Robinson, Inez Knibb Sibley, Jack Tyndale-Biscoe, just to name a few. Jamaica has a history and culture made by ordinary Jamaicans which is part of our identity, the heritage we pass on to future generations.
“We are out to build a new Jamaica” was the anthem of that pre-independence generation. Knowing our history filled with racism and exploitation, the young nation had to find a way to move forward and upward. They chose as Jamaica’s national motto “Out of many, one people,” which, like Eric Williams, spoke of a fertile “Mother Jamaica” who has given birth to something new—not European or African, but Jamaican.
One of the founding fathers, Norman Washington Manley, put it this way:
“We have in Jamaica our own kind of beauty, a wonderful mixture of Africa and Europe, and it is for our artists and writers to discover and set standards for national beauty in the national gift of thought and expression.
“We may take all that English education can offer us, but in the end we must refuse to be dominated by its influence, for we are not English, nor should we ever wish to be.”
We are neither English nor African. We are Jamaicans, with our culture, a set of cultures – a thing of beauty and beauty!
Barbadian historian and poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1930-1020) in his book on Jamaica says:
“Here in Jamaica, locked within the inhumane institution of slavery, were two cultures of people who had to adapt to a new environment and to each other. The friction created by this confrontation was cruel, but it was also creative.”
CULTURAL CONTROVERSY
The Jamaica that is rasta and reggae and revival is the Jamaica of ghettos, garrisons and gunmen. This painful cultural confrontation produced a Jamaican Creole culture more powerful and creative than European or African culture. But in this blessed land we see “imitation men” going back, trying to recapture primitive European or African culture, bypassing the powerful and creative Jamaican folk culture we have now. Mimic European Men want to restore European culture to Jamaica. African impersonators want to restore African culture to Jamaica. Imitators of both extremes deny the value and power of Jamaican culture and wish to minimize or eradicate it and replace it with a “bastard imitative culture,” to quote the great Kamau.
Social media and cable TV are turning the last generation into clones of North America and Western Europe.
I will be 70 next week. I have seen from the front seat all 60 years of Jamaica’s political Independence and I have suffered the disappointment of the dream of a new Jamaica not being realized. The people who rose to lead us have not created a society of equality, peace and justice, and I fear that the nationalism and patriotism of previous generations has faded.
Undaunted, I pick up my pen. Maybe a fire will rekindle somewhere.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send comments to [email protected]
