Moko_Ananci said:Hotep
This issue comes up in every African-centred interactive site I’ve ever been on, which is good since it means that this problem is being talked about. The problem here is really one of ignorance of the other’s situation. The solution calls for serious analysis and discussions (such as what we are doing here). As that recently departed giant of a scholar, economist, political and social analyst and activist, Lloyd Best used to say, “Talk is the action.”
Going through the older and recent posts I noticed strains of the same sense of resignation that one comes across in other discussions of this nature. I have come to believe that that it is partly because of our immersion in a mindset that only sees progress or success when it comes in instant solutions. It certainly is rooted in ignorance of recent history for there was a lot of cross-identification with each other's struggles during the post-WWII years and even before b/c in Trinidad dockworkers refused to offload Italian ships in 1935 after the invasion of Ethiopia. From what I gather, during the 1950s when Ghana achieved its independence, there was widespread rejoicing throughout the Caribbean and that even before, Native Africans and Afri-Caribbean peoples in England linked with each other: Kwame Nkrumah was introduced to the Trinidadian who he would later pick to head his Ministry for African Affairs, George Padmore, via another outstanding Trinidadian thinker CLR James. I believe he also knew about Garvey through James. Indeed, there were very strong bonds between Africa and the Caribbean right up until fairly recent times and to some extent those bonds still exist, partly because in the Caribbean a lot of the indigenous African cultural traditions and languages were preserved – sometimes in an even purer form that in parts of Africa itself.
However, what has plagued relations, and this is something we cannot overstress and must keep as the basis of any discussion of this nature, is that we left too much to assumptions that each would automatically embrace the other simply on the basis of shared ancestry. We have not yet fully dealt with the question of why there is friction among native Africans and African-Americans (who adopt the same arrogant attitude at times towards Afri-Caribbean people, truth be told). One common thread among all three sides is the systems of schooling (often confused with education) did not and does not teach, except perhaps at university level, by which time the damage has already been done, the proper history of the African to the African-American; the African-American to the Caribbean; the Caribbean to the African and so on. How could it have done that anyway? It was set up by respective European/Euro-American elites who had and still have their own agendas and I don’t think there is enough awareness of that, otherwise we would have worked out how to go around it.
So we really have to identify the problem and its causes. During this identification we have to be prepared to either toss out or scale back on the Saxonised aspects of our current outlook. Indeed first we, on this side of the Atlantic, have to admit that we ARE Afro-Saxons and that we are the products of Western socialisation no matter how much we set about restoring our conscious Africanness. Many African-Americans and Afri-Caribbeans, with the best of intentions, go to Africa with ideas of Western capitalism, free trade theories, Western Christianity and Arab Islam, as if they did not have enough of that already. We go with ideas created in 19th C industrial Europe and post-WWII USA as if Durkheim, Locke, Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes had any knowledge of or regard for the realities of Africa’s/Afro-America/Caribbean social, political and economic history. In fact, during the wars of liberation in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and so on, many African-Americans went over there to rebuild promising aid from Colgate, Palmolive, Price-Waterhouse Coopers, Shell, Bayer, Firestone and Cadbury’s: the same companies that were funding white mercenary operations and experiments with poisons and nerve agents in some of the most hushed up dirty war campaigns of the 20th C. No wonder Africans are indifferent if not downright hostile.
And this thing about having ONE unified Africa or ONE goal in the USA or the Caribbean is another thing I tend to view with caution. Even at the height of its glory Africa had different forms of worship and governance although there were certain core principles – which is what we should be really look to develop and build around. We need to recognise that this idea of centralised anything, while SOMETIMES having its value, is an ideal that is more rooted in not just Western, but a patricentric or masculinist philosophical outlook and this is another thing we have to consciously identify as a problem and deal with (not an easy or pleasant task). Instead we should look at making use of diversity and develop strategies based on agreed core principles but taking into consideration the realities of the differences of our geographies, histories and current realities. Indeed, the core African-centred principles should be the first thing that should be agreed upon with that in mind.
At the same time we have to recognise that in Africa, particularly after the invasions following the 1884 Berlin Conference, their own educational, social and political systems were shattered and have remained in limbo even after decolonisation. Western powers didn’t just go away any more than the US government just left formerly enslaved Africans in the US after 1863; they set up cyclic systems of dependency and conflict all over the Caribbean and in the US and they did the exact same thing in Africa.
So the situation is not hopeless. We just have to start – or rather start back – dealing with it. The solution may not come during our lifetime, but so what? The state of Israel did not come about during the lifetime of the Zionists and pan-Jewish lobbyists of the 19th C either, but they built a foundation and that’s what we should be doing too.
I only have ONE response to this, from a historical standpoint. When you speak of African-Americans who "adopt the same arrogant attitude toward Afri-caribbean people", this goes BOTH ways and historically, a lot of this "attitude" can be traced to the Battle of New Orleans and how Blacks from the West Indies were used as troops of the British army to INVADE the Louisiana territory in and around New Orleans.
