Orville Taylor | Black history

Yesterday was 100 years since American ‘Blackademic’ Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) initiated the celebration of Negro History Week (NHW). Not a grass roots movement, the ASNLH was founded 11 years earlier in 1915, and incorporated, academics, teachers, professionals, business people and other civil leaders. Emphasising the need to highlight the “achievements of the Negro,” it took another 50 years, when however, the idea evolved into the global commemoration we now call, Black History Month. Democrat President Jimmy Carter, with a coincidental name in common, officially designated February as Black History Month. It is now 50 years since the presidential decision.

Two key figures in the anti slavery struggle in the United States, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, were both born in this week. The details regarding the reasons for Lincoln pushing for the abolition of slavery in America, are the subject of a discussion in a later commentary. However, Douglass is one of the most amazing products of the African diaspora. Born in slavery in 1818, he rose to become a historic narrator, author, newspaper publisher, banker, abolitionist himself and diplomat. His is a story, every person of known African descent should read.

Black History Month celebration is not simply window dressing. This is particularly important for the millions in the African diaspora, who were deliberately excluded from their history via, the transatlantic slave trade, plantation enslavement, and the entire colonial experience.

The enslavement of Africans in the Americas involved a process of ‘seasoning’ and resocialisation, accompanied with structural attempts to extricate any sense of connection and pride with their past.

National Hero’s Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s own admonition “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots,” is not simply dogma. Multiple studies have connected social pathologies to ‘disaffected’ or ‘unattached’ youth; young men, and women to a lesser extent, who are disconnected to historical ties and relevance.

Therefore, Woodson had his finger on something that even today, we still have no quite got, or we take for granted. True, when Woodson and his colleagues began this journey, slavery had long been abolished in the English-speaking world. Yet, his own America the seat of democracy, a country that fought off its own colonial leaders for its independence, had laws and practises which completely militated against any notion of equality among Africans in America.

Woodson’s project followed the mandate of W.E.B. DuBois, who gave a charge to the ‘Talented Tenth’ to use their skills, knowledge and other resources for the general uplift of the race; “leavening the lump” and “inspiring the masses.” It is a responsibility which today, too many Black men and women, shirk from; instead, patting themselves on their backs, prancing around in titles from the slave masters and having a vested interest in keeping the very status quo, which they wrote and spoke about, before being ‘lorded.’

Quite coincidentally, but absolutely importantly, DuBois had a mutually antagonistic relationship with our own great Garvey; an adversarial relationship which sometimes descended into petty name-calling, quite unbecoming of men of their stature.

An irony which is difficult to escape, is that the following day after NHW was inaugurated, was exactly one year to the day, when the incarceration of Garvey in Federal Prison in Atlanta, Georgia for mail fraud arising from the sale of stock in his famous but ill-fated, Black Star Line, began.

This second week of February is one full of history. Tomorrow is the actual date of Jamaican Independence, in that the government of the island signed an agreement with Great Britain for our independence that year. Same week in 1945, the US, USSR, the UK and France approved a peace treaty with Italy, which forced the latter to abandon its claims and ambitions to the throne of civilisation, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Patrice Lumumba, Congolese president and a man with Garveyesque vision, was assassinated like an animal this week in 1961. Thankfully after 27 years in captivity, this week, Nelson Mandela walked free in 1990, to eventually become the first democratically elected head of South Africa. While the present generation may know something of Mandela, Lumumba’s eerie similarity with Burkina Faso’s President Ibrahim Traoré is a flashback and flash forward.

Still, one of the criticisms, often justified, is that much of black history is about the narrative of slavery and the period after. Thus, we celebrate the lives and accomplishments of inventors like Elijah McCoy, George Washington Carver and ‘The Black Edison Granville T Woods and many others. Much of history is simply black history; period, given that Homo Sapiens emerged in Africa.

Myriad kingdoms existed in Africa when Europe was in the dark ages. And, this is not a prolongation of the Rastafarian narrative about ‘we all are royal kings and queens.’ Absolute nonsense! So, no ‘commoners’ or servants were in the palaces or around these monarchs?

Personally, I want no king of any sort, because the idea of someone being born and given an unearned title or respect due to some ascriptive norm, is repulsive to me. If by some accident it is discovered that my DNA is connected to the Ghanaian Asantehene; big deal! The PhD means more, because I earned it. The idea of a royal lineage being given special treatment, even if African, is anachronistic and certainly not what modern democracies, built on equality and human rights should be about.

By the way, there is a darker story about the enslavement of Africans and it is not about West Africa. The story of Christianity is the west, is not much different from Islam in the east.

Wiki ijayo.

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.