Forsooth Wild Coot! I prithee peace.
In the old time days, around 1625, fellows used to walk about or sometimes sail about looking for new worlds. Many of the ships’ crew was lowlife. Columbus was one of them, although he was not so low. They used to be commissioned by their king or queen and by rich people to go out and tief. They tiefed gold, silver, precious diamonds, pieces of eight, and land.
Well one day some fellows happened to stray a bit east of the Caribbean archipelago and said that they discovered an island called Barbadoes because it had a lot of bearded trees and people. It might have been so named by earlier visitors. This they must have been told by the natives, because there was no sign.
Just like how when you find a silver dollar on the street you say “finders keepers, losers weepers”, so they assumed ownership of the place which the Portuguese had already visited and respected the “ownership” of the people who dwelt there; people who probably came from the South American continent. They called it the right of settlement by discovery, a right that they took unto themselves by laws passed by themselves.
And so they claimed ownership. How in God’s name they could have owned the island. They did not pay anything for it. You reach from gallivanting all over the Atlantic, come across an island, and huff it just so. Are you playing draughts? The island was so pretty and conducive to life (in those days) that they exported to it from England all their scum and riffraff as punishment to labour in tobacco. They treated it like a brothel, finally getting paid for the enslaved blacks imported there without paying for their services.
Would you believe it that in 1966 some of the most learned and sensible men in Barbados, went up to England to beg back for something that all along was not England’s. Such was the unfairness of the matter that if our people black and white had said “get to hell out of here and haul your tail”, we would have been like the Malvinas in South America. For over 330-odd years these people treated the island like their fiefdom; making it a slave sub-station for men and women whom they brought there and treated like cattle having exchanged them for trinkets and guns.
We have rights to reparation, not for bringing us here but for the inhuman treatment here that up to now is embedded in our psyche. But we’re not going to get it Sir Hilary and Mr Comissiong, although it is our due for their having prostituted the island, no matter how many commissions are set up. The sad thing is that they still and surreptitiously still, extract taxation in a convoluted way by exploiting our tourism by the APD imposition.
We should not be writing in the newspapers anything about England having “ownership”, like a fellow did the other day. There was no ownership. Toussaint Louveture beat off the French for the Haitians. America was strong enough to defeat the poachers and never had to beg back. As a matter of fact it was Thomas Jefferson who coined the immortal words: “We hold these truths to be self evident . . . inalienable rights . . . among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” You just saw a few weeks ago how we pursue happiness (Crop Over). That is why America celebrates the 4th July dating back to 1776.
Poor Barbados, it had no army. When fellows like Bussa tried to declare their independence, they were hounded, tortured and hanged by the scruff of the neck. What foolishness we talking about ownership. When slavery was abolished, it was not out of the goodness of their heart, it was an economic necessity. Blacks sold blacks to the perpetrators who brought the black slaves while singing hymns. Will reparation be sought from Scotland, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo, Senegal, Congo? Their countries benefited too.
Having had no army with which to fight an imperial force, we took the only peaceful route. Beg. And again we are begging. We seek to scratch a living out of tourism. Could it be that they are extracting vengeance for having lost a “cash cow”, like two people in the throes of divorce?
But Wild Coot, did not Walter Rodney, my friend and contemporary say the African countries suffered setbacks on account of the slave trade?
• Harry Russell is a banker.