Without really understanding what it implies, people with
sage expressions arranged on their faces say something like: "How can you
known where you're going if you don't know where you've come from?" The
listener, aware that he is being straightened out with the warm iron of good
intention, also arranges his physiognomy in a manner compatible to the
conversation, and awaits his turn to be profound.
Lessons in history should be, in truth, much more than
platitudes. We make everything in our own image. What is different is often
hard to understand and might even be dangerous. Only as we grow in maturity and
understanding do we discover that differences can be used creatively and that
they are exciting and enriching.
This is why Trinidad and Tobago, in fact the Caribbean on
the whole, is so full of challenge, and so full of creative energy. There is a
chance here and now to create a new kind of society. These islands can be to
the world of today what the Aegean was to the world of Homer, Echnaton or St.
Paul: a place where many ideas and cultures are fused together, a place where
philosophy, science and the arts grow and flower, a world which knows that
unity is not the same thing as uniformity.
West Indian history shows what happens to a society that
promotes division and hatred, that puts a premium on prejudice and
discrimination. Turn for a moment to the history of the French islands, and
consider the manner in which history arranged itself with regard to the
"mulattoes", people of colour with both European and African
ancestors, of Martinique, Grenada and Haiti for example.
In these islands, there was at first no prejudice against
European men living with Carib or African women. Indeed, this was a general
practice. In theory, the children of those unions were free, but in fact the
boys did not become free until they were 20, and the girls until they were 15.
Many of the people of colour married French men and women. The crafts and
trades were open to them, with the exception of the trade of goldsmith, and by
the time of the French Revolution in 1789 thery were in that trade also. They
could own property - as in Spanish Trinidad -, though in Martinique there were
restrictions. Over the decades, free people of colour increased in number and
grew prosperous.
The French government was alarmed at this. It feared that
the growth of the free coloureds would endanger white supremacy.
Institutionalised segregation was organised for the setting-up of divisions
between Europeans, mixed people, and Africans on the basis of skin colour. Part
of an official report read:
"These people are beginning to fill the colony and it
is a scandal to see them increasing in number, mixing with the whites,
overtaking them in opulence and riches, they give refuge to vagabonds and
fugitives."
The work of division went from generation to generation.
Some restrictions read like those which the Nazis imposed on the Jews in the
1930s. The colour of a man's grandmother became important. African blood kept
some out of the judiciary, out of the militia, out of public service. A white
man who had a coloured wife would be kept out of those professions.
In Haiti, d'Auberteuil, the Governor, rejected the princile
that either the sons or the grandsons of emancipated slaves should be
considered worthy of being free men. Special laws were passed to prevent the
coloured mistresses of Europeans from inheriting property willed to them. There
were regulations on clothes that might appear too luxurious, against using
wheeled transport, and on holding dances.
In Haiti in 1792, the world exploded. Coloureds and the
slaves rose against the French in a storm of violence. But the lessons of Haiti
were not learnt in the British islands, because the same society that existed
in French slave islands existed in Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad: one where human
rights were denied to a vast percentage of the population.
In Trinidad, a significant individual, a man of colour, Dr.
Jean Baptiste Philippe, made a herculean effort to maintain the rights and
privileges of his people. In Grenada, Fedon staged a bloody revolution.
Toussaint L'Ouverture, the hero of the Haitian revolution, died in a French
jail and the coloured creole Simon Bolivar liberated the South and Central
Americas. We have travelled far since then, but in these days, when we face the
challenge of maintaining our independence, we need to remember that these old
prejudices die hard - they in fact tend to reverse themselves.
On Saturday night before Carnival, I found myself sitting
opposite to a black woman at a dinner party, whose anti-white-Creole,
anti-Indian views were the very same as expressed by white people I knew when I
was a boy growing up. I was intrigued. Not knowing history very well, she was
afraid of the future in much the same way as the whites were 200 years ago!
We can give a positive meaning to being independent as a
people, if we can commit ourselves to the idea that all human beings are
created equal. Already, as a nation, we have exploded the myth of racial
superiority. Already, we are progressing to a higher level of human
relationships that many countries do not know - in spite of some counterproductive
leaders such as certain calypsonians or politicians. For many, the terms tolerance
and acceptance don't even apply, as they imply that something or somebody needs
to be tolerated or aceepted.
We have to understand that we are each a part of the whole,
of each other. In the same way as two centuries ago, prejudices often arise out
of economic insecurities. In this time of opportunity and challenge in our
national life, let us learn the lessons of history, in that economic stability
comes about when, and only when, the majority of us are neither afraid of the
past, nor of the future. We have come too far not to have it our own way!
