It’s Emancipation Day, and one of the truly amusing images attached to the holiday this year is the picture of Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan straight from the continent, dressed in western garb, complete with cowboy hat, being greeted by Kamla Persad-Bissessar in full West African regalia from head wrap to dress, along with her Parliament similarly dressed.
I have long since wondered about our penchant for gallerying in multi-ethnic garb without the slightest clue about its origins or meanings. But I know that Kamla’s handlers are thorough people and must have researched the particular garment she wore to the airport yesterday.
This Emancipation Day is a likely to be a crucial one for Trinidad and Tobago, because I sense that moreso than any Emancipation Day in the last 2 years, this year’s celebration will be a call to the clans. Whether supporters of this government wish to acknowledge it or not, this government’s policies have been tinged with elements of ethnic prejudice, and whether the Emancipation Support Committee knows it Afrotrinbagonians are hopping mad at the injustices, real and perceived, they are experiencing. But I doubt sincerely that the ESC is in a position to channel the outrage and frustration felt by the community.
But we needn’t fear, Trinis are always on the lookout for a messiah figure, and the People’s Partnership with their rotten, effed up approach to governance (that its supporters are now blaming on the PNM….it never gets old you know, every mistake they make is the PNMs fault. Apparently Kamla dont have a mind of her own…oh wait!) has managed to do the Impossible….make an ailing, formerly despised PM, a man who was enthusiastically voted out of office, into a triumphant returning hero.
With Manning returning to Trinidad last night on the eve of Emancipation and walking out of the Piarco International Airport on his own steam, Kamla and her government of relatives and missteps have just become their own worst enemy. Not even the Court of Appeal resurrecting an old case about annoying language against him will detract from Manning’s star power now. In fact all The Patos has to do is continue to sit quietly in Parliament and the government’s inability to reduce crime or charge Calder Hart will be his vindication. With two more years to go the facts of Manning’s weaker administrative policies will fade into memory, and memory will become myth. All that will remain is the harsh reality of the PPs rapacious and greedy governance, and policies of ethnic parity, or is it dominance, by any means necessary.
The Keith also has his plate full coping with The Patos’ return. San Fernando East real like up their boy Manning because despite all his national foibles, word on the street is he pays attention to his constituents. There are many in Rowley’s Diego Martin West who complain about his service in their area…he’ll need to look at that. It remains to be seen how Manning’s return is going to impact on The Keith’s performance as a leader. It also remains to be seen how the other dynamics and factions within the party are now going to align, or realign themselves. Rowley’s tenure as political leader and as Leader of the Opposition has lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. He remains efficient and competent in attacking the Government, yet is unable to seize the public imagination and firmly establish himself as anything beyond an interim leader. If between now and 2015 the party has the opportunity to select a new leader, expect Manning to be returned as political leader even if all that remains of him is a tombstone….PNM faithfuls will vote for that tombstone.
The cycle of waiting for the messiah for deliverance continues. In 2010 Kamla promised the country to do better than the PNM and serve the people. She promised the entire nayshun that We Will Rise. Eager to be rid of PNM corruption they voted them out in exchange for the rape of the treasury and government being run like a family business, while everybody’s favorite corrupt FIFA Official plays Kojak!
PNMites once again seem to be hoping that Manning’s presence will mean an end to their suffering. Not yet understanding that such power resides in their own hands. The Emancipation holiday still remains lost on them. So like Kamla, they will put on rich cloths that are full of symbolism, but empty of meaning in their ignorant state, and parade their ignorance for the world to see, while waiting for someone or something else to come to their aid.
Kamla’s pandering to the anger of the Afrotrinbagonian community by giving the ESC $4m and funding the state visit of the Nigerian President is hardly the real Emancipation story today….the return of Manning from political death is!
De Vice Cyah Done!
I’v seen many promising people come and go in politics and social organizations but very few actually emulating the ideals they pontificate when trying to ascend to their ultimate selfish goals.
It’s truly fascinating to see the fighters against injustice becoming the aggressors when they are in the same position.
One group fights to remove the other calling them corrupt/crooked but as soon as they get into office, they go on to do the same atrocities they once condemned, ….typical charlatans of virtue and justice.
One of the problems we face is the fact that people can’t seem to be able to put aside their selfishness and work together for the common good.
Everyone want’s to form their own group and to be the Alpha as opposed to working in harmony with others to achieve the desired social transformation.
Our history shows that Kamal represented the Muslim faction of the divide with Errol representing the Christian, where they conveniently supported the vile atrocities against their tribe based primarily on the same evils of selfishness and greed which personified the characteristics of the previous colonialist oppressors.
It should be obvious therefore that such vile despicable characters who would selfishly support such demonic acts of oppression against their own are worst than the ones they support.
Those characters are like the Africans who captured and sold their countrymen as slaves, the Indians who duped their countrymen into indentured slavery and the native Americans who helped the evil greedy white invaders to destroy their countrymen.
As in the words of Morgan Job
Imagine Kafra Kambon or the editors in our media, or Keith Rowley or Wendell Stephen constructing the thought: “We cannot continue to blame the white men, as Africans, particularly the traditional rulers, are not blameless.” Imagine Harvey Burris and the tribe of semi literate talk show hosts and their callers being confronted with the Truth: that they are ignorant Black fascists devotees of the worst racist ideas invented in Europe.
African chiefs urged to apologize for slave trade
Nigerian civil rights group says tribal leaders’ ancestors sold people to slavers and should say sorry like US and Britain
David Smith in Johannesburg
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 November 2009
Slave trade shackles were manufactured in Africa a millenia before Europeans parked ships opposite Goree Island or Elmina castle or anywhere along the Bight of Biafra to load cargo sold to them by Africans.
Shackles used to capture people to be sold into slavery in Africa in the 18th century.
African tribal leaders have been ordered to apologize for the role of their ancestors in the transatlantic trade.
Con men and pimps have blackmailed politicians and raided the Treasury annually to get millions devoted to promoting the pervasive banality of ignorance as the Emancipation Support committee’s vulgar racist narrative of slavery or Emancipation as a tale of bad white men and good Black/African victims. Taxpayers have been extorted for decades to promote shibboleths and a racist narrative straight from the books of Europe or the minds of Hitler, Petain, Malan, de Gobineau, Broca, Stewart-Chamberlain, Jim crow propagandists or the authors of Apartheid. Children need Emancipation from Kafra Kambon, Selwyn Cudjoe, and the racist propaganda of the PNM Cult and its Black fascist agents in the calypso tents and radio talk shows, if they will be ever free.
Traditional African rulers whose ancestors collaborated with European and Arab slave traders should follow Britain and the United States by publicly saying sorry, according to human rights organizations.
The Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria has written to tribal chiefs saying: “We cannot continue to blame the white men, as Africans, particularly the traditional rulers, are not blameless.”
The appeal has reopened a sensitive debate over the part some chiefs played in helping to capture their fellow Africans and sell them into bondage as part of the transatlantic slave trade.
The congress argued that the ancestors of the chiefs had helped to raid and kidnap defenseless communities and traded them to Europeans. They should now apologize to “put a final seal to the history of slave trade”, it said.
“In view of the fact that the Americans and Europe have accepted the cruelty of their roles and have forcefully apologized, it would be logical, reasonable and humbling if African traditional rulers … [can] accept blame and formally apologize to the descendants of the victims of their collaborative and exploitative slave trade.”
Estimates vary that between 10 million and 28 million Africans were sent to the Americas and sold into slavery between 1450 and the early 19th century.
More than a million are believed to have died in transit across the so-called “middle passage” of the Atlantic due to inhumane conditions aboard slave ships and the brutal crushing of any resistance.
Three years ago Tony Blair described Britain’s participation as a “crime against humanity” and expressed his “deep sorrow”. The US Senate voted for an apology this year.
Shehu Sani, head of the congress, said it was calling for traditional rulers to apologize now because they were seeking inclusion in a forthcoming constitutional amendment in Nigeria.
“We felt that for them to have the moral standing to be part of our constitutional arrangement there are some historical issues for them to address,” he told the BBC World Service. “One part of which is the involvement of their institutions in the slave trade.”
He said that on behalf of the buyers of slaves, the ancestors of the traditional rulers “raided communities and kidnapped people, shipping them away across the Sahara or across the Atlantic”.
Many slaves captured inland in Africa died on the long journey to the coast.
The position was endorsed by Henry Bonsu, a British-born broadcaster of Ghanaian descent who examined the issue in Ghana for a radio documentary. He said some chiefs had accepted responsibility and sought atonement by visiting Liverpool and the United States.
“I interviewed a chief who acknowledged there was collaboration and that without that involvement we wouldn’t have seen human trafficking on an industrial scale,” said Bonsu, the co-founder of digital station Colourful Radio.
“An apology in Nigeria might be helpful because the chiefs did some terrible things and abetted a major crime.”
The non-government organization Africa Human Right Heritage, based in Accra, Ghana, supports the campaign for an apology. Baffour Anning, its chief executive, said: “I certainly agree with the Nigeria Civil Rights Congress that the traditional leaders should render an apology for their role in the inhuman slavery administration.” He said it would accord with the UN’s position on human rights.
But the issue was not a high priority for most African citizens, according to Bonsu. “In my experience it’s mainly the African diaspora who want an apology. People aren’t milling around Lagos or Accra moaning about why chiefs don’t apologise. They are more concerned about the everyday and why they still have bad governance.”
Fred Swaniker, the founder of the African Leadership Academy, said: “I’m not sure whether an apology is needed, but it would be worth looking at and acknowledging the role Africa did play in the slave trade. Someone had to find the slaves and bring them before the Europeans.”
The shameful history of some traditional leaders remains an awkward subject on which many politicians prefer to maintain silence. One exception was in 1998 when Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, told an audience including Bill Clinton: “African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today.”
In order for any group to garner enough influence and support to win political control in this so-called democracy, they must submit to the established prejudices affording them a significant piece of the socio-economic pie to keep their selfishness and greed adequately satiated.
The same situation applies to Jack, Anil, Daaga, Ashwort and the African divide. There is also the elements of the upper/middle class elite of the ONR/NAR/COP who must also be facilitated accordingly.
You’re so right about a call to the clans. In case anyone wasn’t sure, the Nigerian President made that clear to everyone anyway: “the Emancipation march today is not to take all the people of Trinidad and Tobago to the promised land, but to take the black man to the promised land”
Great blog – you’ve inspired me to start one: trinimimicmen.blogspot.com
I really love the comment about the sartorial efforts of the two meeting parties. Each seem to be seeking something beyond their own grasp but then again, dis is not a fete in here; dis is madness! I’m simply lovin’ it all!