The single greatest question West Indian societies have had to answer in independence is how we go about transforming former slave societies into actively liberal ones; and there are two lesser aspects of that one great issue, one of which is almost always overlooked (or even deliberately unseen).
Caribbean people don’t think about this kind of thing much and don’t talk about it at all, but most of us were brought here by force and kept here, by the remainder of us, for hundreds of years, by unrestrained, exquisite violence.
If you read the source documents or contemporary accounts, the bitter realities are exposed as plainly as the crowd of Blacks parting for the white pudding-and-souse buyers in George Lamming’s In The Castle Of My Skin. That – the damage to the enslaved and their descendants – is usually the only side we can ever get to, if we raise this fundamental matter at all.
Now it is right and just that we should reach that aspect first, for it was far more damaging, in slavery, than the other.
But, in liberty, the other aspect actually needs to be dealt with first because it is far more damaging: how can we succeeded in transforming former slaves into free, responsible citizens without first making the same out of former slave-owners? No human being worthy of the title would seek to own or control another, and no citizen can contribute to his society without the freedom – and respect – to allow it.
Every day, all of us, whatever our backgrounds or forefronts, will encounter the passive resistance that galls – and subverts – civil Caribbean society. We have no difficulty in recognizing when we are getting “attitude” from someone who, we suspect, resents being placed in a position we all resent, with good historical, and often contemporary, reason: not one of us voluntarily occupies a position of relative disadvantage because we all at once remember how total advantage used to be in these parts, and not so long ago, either.
We can all easily see how such attitudes contradict and deny freedom.
But most of us fail to discern how much more harm is being done to the development of free, liberal democracy in the West Indies by the people in charge of anything here, regardless of what they look like.
What passes for authority in the West Indies has not changed much, in essence, in 400 years. A boss, whether of an oil refinery or a sno-cone cart, brings to bear upon a worker a high-handed attitude that, first and foremost, must prove who is boss. The executive in his modern air-conditioned office today is, far too often, no different from his forebear on a horse in the sweaty fields of yesteryear – although he is far less likely to have the same physical appearance.
To have a chance of developing – and freeing – our societies completely, we must first engage in respectful, open debate. You can’t sell a man a defective product and, when he brings it back, chase him from the door – but that is exactly what happens in what passes for Bajan commerce daily. If you fail to see the citizen in the cane-cutter or the dental surgeon, you fail the republic entirely.
But you can comfort yourself with the notion of how good you look on your horse and how well the whip matches your outfit.