Honouring Black ancestry in search of wisdom
By Festus L. Brotherson, Jr.
SUPERIOR coverage and an editorial in the Guyana Chronicle last week on the ceremony to mark African Holocaust Day, on Tuesday, October 12, 1999, swept me on positive excursions of reflection. I recalled a small gem of a work, `The Lessons of History', by Will and Ariel Durant who were persuasive on the importance of learning from the past in order to take effective hold of the present and plan for the future. Springing to mind too was the observation of political theorist, Sheldon Wolin. In `Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought', he reasoned that: "If history is not the source of all wisdom, it is at least the pre-condition." The African Cultural and Development Association (ACDA) organised the ceremony in honor of African Holocaust Day. The event, said the Chronicle, "brought to the fore of our consciousness some of the range of human destruction waged during centuries of the nefarious Middle Passage when the Atlantic Slave Trade tore Africans from their continent and made them into chattel and units of labour to fuel European industrialisation." Marking this day highlighted the timeless essentiality of symbolism in politics through standard forms that include rituals and religious practices. There are, for example, traditional marches in Guyana on Labour Day for workers to demonstrate solidarity and respect for labour activity. There is also the announcing the selection of a new Pope by the tradition of smoke billowing from the chimney of the Vatican. For African Holocaust Day, ritual was the content of symbolism. It took the form of a floral homage at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean off the Georgetown seawall to the spirits of African ancestors "who never made it to shore in the course of the Middle Passage." It also took the form of many participants dressed in traditional African attire. This was powerful symbolism. As David I. Kertzer explains in his `Ritual, Politics, and Power', "Symbols instigate social action and define an individual's sense of self. They also furnish the means by which people make sense of the political process, which largely represents itself to people in symbolic form." Symbolism, expressed through ritualistic behaviour, marvelously complements political ideology by providing added guides, meaning and strength to social action in search of objectives. In `The Myth of the State', Ernst Cassirer said, "Through ritualised action, the inner becomes the outer, and the subjective world picture becomes a social reality." Kertzer adds that, "Ritual helps give meaning to our world in part by linking the past to the present and the present to the future," in the manner that earlier musings on Will and Ariel Durant and Sheldon Wolin conveyed. University of Guyana (UG) English lecturer, Adeola James, captured the social activism/action aspect of the ritual during her remarks at the Holocaust ceremony. She spoke of the need for people of African descent in Guyana to pursue understanding of their heritage rather than try to ignore it by "lame excuses." She cautioned that Guyanese of African descent may never know the true meaning of freedom and economic independence unless they liberate themselves through education and the assumption of leadership roles. Relatedly, THE major challenge for blacks in the Diaspora remains the omnipotent stereotype of inferiority that stamps us as a people more than any other race. African American Nobel Prize Laureate, Toni Morrison, has been forceful on this point where blacks in the USA are concerned. She says that for white Americans and non-black immigrants, a certain tradition is compulsory. A hostile posture towards resident blacks must be struck at the Americanising door before it will open and provide full acceptance and emotional and material rewards to the discriminators. There must be, she says, coded race talk and assumptions as an "explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than pressing African Americans to the lowest level of the racial hierarchy." There must occur, "negative appraisals of the native-born population. Only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimilation complete." Blacks in the Diaspora experience these offences routinely. They cope daily by wearing a mask upon leaving home for work or play. They pretend not to hear and not to see. Rather, they choose their battles carefully. To do otherwise is to be stuck in self-flagellation. The better response is to excel at whatever task or job is performed. And this is why Professor James' advice on education to repudiate new 'mental' slavery is timely. Britain's Sir Harry Johnson in 1899 thought, "the Negro has been marked out by his mental and physical characteristics as the servant of other races, a born slave." US Senator Bill Tillman in 1907 believed that black "minds are those of children, while they have the passions and strengths of men." The truth is Africans and their descendants are very forgiving people, e.g., South Africa and Zimbabwe. When they look at others, their minds do not automatically focus on skin colour but on human beings. But many swear that when whites and other non-blacks view Africans and their descendants, skin colour is usually uppermost in mind with accompanying stereotypes. So, what is the truth about blacks? Let us educate ourselves a la Ivan Van Sertima and others because "if history is not the source of wisdom, it is at least the pre-condition."
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