THE ONGOING PROTESTS in the United States, which became violent on August 12, when tempers flared over the removal of a statue of confederate era military leader Robert E. Lee from his lofty public perch in Charlottesville, have many lessons for Barbadians and the Caribbean.
The discussion concerning racism, slavery and colonialism is healthy and can only lead to change for the better for all concerned.
The victories won by persons of African descent in different battles where colonial statues have been removed need to be celebrated not only by African Americans and indigenous people in the north, but by us here in the region and indicate to us the road we have to travel in order to get social justice as colonised people.
I say this because as I travel across the region, I realise how much the colonisers have left their marks on this space by the erection of horrendous statues to perpetrators of genocide and destruction, and the naming of various places after people who committed perverse crimes against the humanity of the people of this region.
At the heart of the conversation is the belief by Euro-Americans and their descendants that protestors want to “change history”.
I believe there is much confusion about what is the difference between history and the past. They are not the same thing. The past is everything that has occurred before we were born, while history is only what is recorded of the past. So to speak about changing the past, as some allude to, is not possible, as nobody that I know can go back there and rearrange what happened.
However, “changing history” is something which is a constant feature of academia and it is not the sole purview of the social historian since there is a history of everything.
From time to time historians of whatever ilk are conscientiously compelled to revisit certain aspects of history, in order to bring records more in line with how things actually unfolded in the past. This is dependent on the availability of new evidence and also on the perspective of the historian or author.
What often disturbs me is that Europeans believe that their history is everybody’s history. This is an ethnocentric and racist assumption that needs to change.
Embedded in this mindset is the belief that only what is important to Europeans and their descendants needs to be recorded and paid attention to, and nothing else matters.
This includes the erection of likenesses of European “heroes” who caused untold suffering to indigenous people wherever Europeans went, and the mistaken belief that only they can be “civilised” and can feel pain, sorrow, happiness and other emotions.
I often use the following analogy to explain how very wrong this type of behaviour is:
A burglar forces his way into someone’s house, kills, maims, rapes and disfigures the residents, who are the owners, and then decides that through force and coercion, he has no intention of leaving.
To add insult to injury, he decides that he is going to rearrange the victim’s property to suit himself and brings in his children and grandchildren to live there as well, all the while erecting pictures of his dastardly deeds wherever he pleases and forcing the rightful inhabitants to support and maintain him.
When they protest and insist that he goes or at least removes the offensive painful pictures, he wants to know what is wrong and why the rightful owners want to “change history”.
This can only be described as the mind of a psychopathic megalomaniac, yet this is symptomatic of Europeans the world over, both past and present, who consider themselves normal.
I wish to reiterate that we need to celebrate the victories won by our brothers and sisters in the north and in other parts where colonialism left its ugly mark, and see what we can do to bring about meaningful change, that does justice to the lives of the people of this region.
In this regard, I would like to commend historian Trevor Marshall for his sustained attack and the dispersal of information on the statue of Lord Horatio Nelson and other iconographic anomalies in this country.
He has walked a long and lonely road but what has happened in North America is proof that his efforts will one day not be in vain.
– IAN A. MARSHALL