Boris Johnson Must End Decades of Segregation Between Britain and its People in the West Indies
In 1987 the US President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin. There was a wall in Berlin. A wall that had been erected as a barrier between East and West Germany. It had been erected after WWII. It was erected due to a political divide between the West and East Germans. One had adopted the values of Soviet Communism, the other had adopted liberal Western values. They were the same people but war and political extremism wrenched them apart. People were separated from their families. There were tears. In 1987, Reagan called upon Gorbachev, then head of the Soviet Union, to make a difference. He stood at the Brandenburg Gate and delivered a speech calling for Gorbachev to pull the wall down. Two years later in 1989, the wall was officially torn down.
If Boris Johnson and the Conservative party want to make a difference on Black Lives Matter. If politicians across the spectrum are serious about tackling racism, we have to talk about the invisible walls that separate Britain from the British West Indies. We have to discuss cultural nationalism as the basis for Global Britain.
If we want to tackle racism we have to firstly get to its roots. The roots of racism are derived from the plantation economies where descendants of African victims of the slave trade were made property and considered to be second class citizens of British society and inferior to whites.
It is within the context of the slave plantation where ideas around black inferiority were designed. In order to keep the slaves in their place and to stop an uprising, the slaveholders needed to create a doctrine of black inferiority. Racial classifications were set up that considered anyone with African slave blood to be inferior to whites and they were racialised as black. Britain’s slave class in the British West Indies did not know themselves as Hausa, Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba or Ashanti. British West Indians knew themselves as black because of the context within which they lived. They knew themselves as black because they were different from the white ruling class and for centuries, the dark skin of Britain’s slave class was considered a mark of shame.
There is no evidence to indicate that amongst the societies of the Hausa, Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba or Ashanti people there was a racial context in which to place injustices. Everyone was black including the ruling class. There were rulers and masters and slave-owners and they shared the same skin tone as their slaves. The oppression that African slaves experienced in Africa was not meted out by the same ruling class as those who experienced slavery in the British West Indies and America.
There was no need for the African peasant or warrior classes that may have been enslaved by those with similar skin tones to develop a racial analysis because they did not exist in a colour coded society that placed whites at the top and blacks at the bottom of the society. At least not until the era of European colonialism, which did not last centuries and came some time after the birth of the slave plantations in the British West Indies and America.
Colonialism may have had its downsides but it was a unique, different experience from slavery and cultural genocide, through forced Anglicisation, that the people of the West Indies experienced. In most cases in comparison to the horrors of the slave plantations, colonialism was fairly mild.
The Windrush Generation arrived in Britain during a period of West Indian colonialism. They experienced racism but they were paid for their work. Kwame Nkrumah and Marcus Garvey were students in Britain during the time of British colonialism in Ghana and the West Indies. Alhassan Dantata, the Great-Grandfather of the richest native African man, Aliko Dangote, was the richest man in West Africa when he died in the 1950’s. He did not live to see a decolonised Nigeria but he became very rich trading with British colonials. He was not the only African trader to profit from the colonial relationship. Henry Sylvester Williams was a lawyer in London and John Archer became the Mayor of Battersea during the colonial era. Colonialism was not void of its horrors but in the context of Britain it was more about governance and national development than the type of sadistic racism that was needed to keep the slave plantations in check.
With independence from Britain, after about 50–60 years of colonialism in most places, African independence was led by native Africans like Nkrumah. This was not the case in the West Indies. Independence in the West Indies was mostly a push by the plantocracy for independence. There were not many white West Indians in the islands but they were in the position to negotiate independence more than the black population of the country who had historically been the victims of slavery and were not in the economic position to take the lead. Hence, in places like Jamaica, the first set of popular political leaders were not black. From Jamaican independence, except for a short term in the late 60’s, black leadership was not really seen as capable of running the nation. Definitely not by the ruling class and even the working people would have been sceptical because of the centuries of indoctrination of black inferiority and white superiority. It was not until the 1990’s with the election of London School of Economics graduate PJ Patterson as Prime Minister that the shift towards a post-racial society began.
Unlike African nations that on independence became African Republics, the islands of the British West Indies remained connected to the British Crown. At least in the beginning. As time went on some nations such as Trinidad sought total independence from Britain and the Commonwealth Realms and became a Republic too but nations such as Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis still remained as colonies with independent parliaments and the British Crown as the Head of State. This may have been because the plantocracy class was connected to Britain. In the case of Trinidad it is not clear that the black population led the push towards independence and the formation of the Republic. It is very possible that the indentured servant class that arrived from other parts of the world after slavery may have led the charge.
West Indians that arrived in the heart of the British Empire had come to know themselves as black by the definition of the plantocracy. They came to know themselves as black after being considered the “other” consistently over centuries. They came to know themselves as black because they were defined as black in Manichean opposition to the white population of the plantocracy. They were not technically natives- although many were born in the West Indies- they could not be defined as the Native peoples like in African colonies, they were defined as a colour that opposed white.
They could not be described in African-centred terms such as Ashanti or Hausa. They were not the property of an African master or an African society. They were totally in the British context. The islands were full of street and town names that reflected Britain. Places like Manchester. Parish names were Anglican. None of the African slaves named a town Djenne or Accra.
We were not natives, the British did not come to see us in the West Indies where we had formed our own society and named towns and villages after African villages that we had left behind and remembered fondly. We did not have a society that we transported from Africa as explorers or conquerors. We were put into an Anglicised context and encouraged or forced to become Anglicised blacks.
I am not discussing the advantages that may have come to us by being Anglicised. I am writing of the experience from the perspective of a people that are currently still being excluded from British society. Still not given respect at the airport. Still, queuing up like a foreigner. Still treated as an other, even though the experience of slavery is over and we are free. Still being told to go back home to mud-huts when we don’t have any idea of that tradition. Still being considered an other after more than 3 centuries of engagement, where we have become a clone, a Frankenstein monster birthed by the great British Empire.
Even as we have become more intellectual on the islands, even as we have produced graduates of LSE and Oxford; even as we have produced figures that have worked at international level within the governments of the British West Indies, we have not seen the level of acceptance that is needed to show us that our civilisation, the British civilisation, is not keeping up an apartheid system between the Anglicised black and white populations.
Like, Scottish and Welsh and Irish citizens of the United Kingdom, we have been Anglicised. However, the Anglicised blacks whose parliaments exist within a British context just as the parliaments and assemblies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and even London, are not given freedom to enter their cultural mother country like the other English speaking nations that make up the United Kingdom.
The whole media narrative that even suggests that Anglicised blacks that have come from nations within the Commonwealth Realms, in particular, could even be considered for deportation is a symptom of the apartheid that we are engaged in.
Racism in America has been discussed in the context of segregation. In America segregation sanctioned by the Federal Government does not exist. Black Americans are not refused access to certain states by the Federal Government. There are no barriers that stop black Americans from entering New York or Chicago if they migrate from the rural South. There may be some border checks but you are not refused entry. Black Britons are refused entry, faced with deportation and all sorts of unnecessary checks whilst in Britain.
The length and breadth of the British Empire means that Britain does not realise that those in the British West Indies are its people. People cannot fathom that there are British people that live in nations far across the seas, not only in the West Indies but in Australia and Canada. They cannot fathom that Britain has a historical black slave class, that it brought into being and since at least the 60’s has sought to abandon by the wayside in the name of European race politics. Pan-Europeanism.
I believe that it does not matter what the white British population want to say. It does not matter if they want to keep Britain white. It does not matter if the British population feel they have nothing to do with slavery. It does not matter if some white Britons are worried about gangs from the West Indies. Britain can only keep its moral authority by giving huge amounts of aid to its neglected black slave population and giving them access to British education, training, social security, healthcare and freedom of movement on crown land.
Until all black Britons, including those domiciled abroad in slave plantation economies are given access to British education, training, social security, healthcare and freedom of movement in the British Isles and other Commonwealth Realms nations such as Australia and Canada. Until the day when these clever race barriers that exist under the guise of nationalism are destroyed. Black Britain is always going to have a reason to be at war with the state. War inna Babylon.
ALT
