Lifeisannoying’s Weblog

 I was reading the  Black Snob the other day and one of her topic just struck me, it was about the  diaspora and the tensions and hatred that sometimes bubbles to the surface and the mutual distrust that  has grown up.

www.blacksnob.com/snob_blog/2009/4/20/why-cant-we-be-friends-the-diaspora.html

I am of west indian parentage and yes i am proud of my heritage, but that does not mean that i instantly disrespect or look down on any other part of the diaspora.I  was born and bred in England in the 1980’s and i grew in a large community of others of similar background, you were either white, black caribbean, asian pakistani or asian indian. that is as diverse as my hometown got. ther was only one african boy at my school and one boy did not dilute the overall caribbean flavor of the black community, we had carnivals and community evenings dances and thus it continued until the late 1990’s when we saw a lot of african immigrants mainly from southern africa and to a lesser extent Nigeria  and Ghana.

I couldn’t lie and tell you that there was rioting in the streets. But what we have is many communities co-existing that are mainly separate. The older generations i know generally were told in their youth under the british empire that  they were vastly inferior than white men who lived in britain, but even though they wereinferior to white anglo saxons in the mother country (England – what fucked up rhetoric that is !!), they were of course miles better than those other black people who had been cleeved  from them in the past.  Colonialism worked not only for the  advancement of the english language but for some very messed up racial ideals. the kind of racial ideals that asked people to devalue themselves   and invest in a racial hierarchy where they were almost always at the bottom, so colonist invented a hierachy where black people could place other black people at the bottom.

 My grandmother was amongst some of the more priveilaged black people in her island home, she grew up on a farm  that her family owned, her family employed others, she received an education beyond the reach of most of her peers she became a nurse. she recalls a missionary from scotland coming to preach, she was in her nursing station and remembers overhearing this missionary  preaching to sick children.

” You must strive to be as good as the pure white children in my parish in london, you must elevate yourselves above your  base instincts, above the savagery behind africa,you and your progeny must be above your own origins “

It was 1957.  My grandmother did not hear the end of his speech she had to tend  to an old man.

She assures me that she was fed a steady diet of such contempt for africa and aficans. her own grandfather was a white irish man who had married a black woman and her mother (my grandmother’s mother)  had angered him greatly by having babies with a man with an african mother. the “mullato” classes were socially engineering themselves to be less and less visabily black and those who flouted those convensions were punished harshly. It was the mental  and physical distancing of black people in the caribbean from slavery and africa, this was a country where to be black or african in appearance was to be a slave.

It’s understandable, i would not want to be a slave nor mistaken for one. thus began a west indian pathology that saw africaness as something terrible, something to be despised.African coming to the caribbean after the Emancipation in 1838 were speaking african languages,  some reminants of those languages survive but  that was all. their  languages were banned and mocked by the ruling classes as jabber, mumbo jumbo. it was seem in those less pc days as stupidity, any  person with a brain could speak english after all…

When my grandmother arrived in England after a journey across the atlantic to spain and a train from southern spain to northern spain and then a ferry to england to meet my grandfather. Her eyes were opened to the lies of her colonial upbringing. England was not the home of christendom ,most of the people there were not even as half as devout as most black people back “home”, she saw licentiousness on a scale she had never seen. She was told that in her homeland that black people were the base and carnal by nature and sexually incontinent. but she came to a land where it was all much worse!

After 3 months she met a fellow medic at work Dr (spelling may be wrong) Ateti from somewhere in West Africa she forgets (bless her she is an old lady after all). They shared many silent lunch breaks. one day they started talking and he confessed that he was  surprised that she was not loud, agressive criminal or ignorant as he had grown up believing west indians to be. they had cross words but then realised how they had been bamboozled by colonialisation. they had a good friendship until my Grandfather put a stop to it. He  was not having his wife form friendships with any other man. he was less educated he was not coming from a wealthy background and probably held the friendship to be a threat to the marriage based on the stereotypes he had been fed about african men.

The 70’s were a blur of confusion, some parents fed their children the same crap that they themselves had been fed about africa  and africans, until Reggae and Rastafarianism took off. The final nail in the colonial bs in my community was alex haley’s roots and the  tv series. that and actually meeting real flesh and blood africans, no they did not seem that different! they were not sexually incontinent, nor  the vicious villains of the colonialists.

I can only speak from experiance and cannot say what things were like on the african side of  the fence. But i can say it was not only a west indian to African line. Starting primary school i was ruthlessly teased and punched( to the point of nosebleeds) by lets call him AA, who joined in the racist bullying by calling me “blackie” i pointed out that he was black too but  that was apparently  not important since me reasoned  “yeah ,but you’re blacker than me!”  But i sweep him under the carpet.

I want to talk about my ExBoyfriend who is African his name is Brown,  we have a backstory if you want to know more check out my other blog  cold nights no romance.

www.noromance.wordpress.com

 we dated for 3 years in that time he called me jamaican (i am not jamaican),said things like “you west indians” in a tone i doubt he would tolerate about africans. “you are all the same so why can i not call you jamaican” (it takes 4 hours on a jet to get to jamaica from my island and there is not even a direct flight. he mocked my cultral  heritage glibly and refused to acknowledge it until we were screaming at each other and i pulled up something african and used it in the same  context. we parted ways on non ethnic basis BTW.

That is how far we have come, we can date  but  we need to realise that yes we can be proud of our cultral differences without it being a denial of someone elses culture, when i say Anansi stories are integral part of caribbean culture i am not denying it’s ghanian roots  what i am saying is that it is as much west indian as african. Anansi had to evolve in the middle passage, we have different stories and different situations. we owe you the chracter, but he is ours too!

i digress, we have to do a lot of soul searching all of us and recognise that we need to emancipate ourselves of colonial blinkers over our eyes.