31 August 2000, 800 words
I derive considerable amusement from how alike Afrocentrists and Indocentrists are. Both define themselves primarily by the continents their ancestors came from. Both assert that it is their particular ancestral group which created all higher civilization. Both claim a superior sense of identity. Both dislike individualism and promote a group mentality. And both are bigoted, insecure, fascistic and dishonest.
What amuses me is that it is their alikeness that causes them to dislike one another so much. And I actually laughed out loud when I came across this summary of the work of anthropologist C.R. Hallpike, author of The Foundations of Primitive Thought, which he defined as follows: intuitive, dogmatic, preoccupied with essences, opaque to logical abstraction or arrays of the hypothetically possible, views words as entities with power unto themselves.
In one short paragraph, all the Hindu columnists and all the Emancipation Support Committee members were surgically delineated: superstitious, impervious to reasoned argument, convinced there is something quintessentially "Indian" and "African", bereft of either logic or imagination, and deathly afraid of being called "Trinidadian".
The Indocentrists are worse in these respects than the Afrocentrists, hence the reason they are more obnoxious, narrow-minded and vicious. Devant Parsuram Maharaj, in a newspaper column about the coup in Fiji, writes, "Indians abroad have to do exactly what the British minority in India did to hold the land and people together. They had military and police on their side."
And Rajnie Ramlakhan, writing about the recently concluded World Hindu Conference, says it brought the "simple but enduring message of Hinduism of peace, love and unity" and then proceeds to badtalk Christians and Muslims for the rest of her column, which she ends by saying "When your home is under attack, you protect it."
One has to feel pity rather than anger for these people, who apparently live in perpetual terror that Blacks, Christians and Muslims are out to get them. Pity must not, however, blind us to their real agenda.
Their ethnocentrism is not primarily fueled by a desire for equal respect for Indian, or even Indo-Trinidadian, culture. This is obviously so, because none of these ethnocentrists, for all their rhetoric and supposed intellectualizing, have ever been able to define what they really are. They cannot. Ethnicity, you see, is based on two intersecting frameworks, one mental, one physical.
The mental framework is culture, which is defined as follows: it is a product, is historical, includes ideas, patterns and values, is selective, is learned, is based on symbols, and is an abstraction from behaviour and the products of behaviour. The physical framework is, simply, appearance: colour of skin, texture of hair, shape of nose and so on.
The mental framework of so-called "Africans" and "Indians" therefore makes little sense in the Trinidadian context. Given that nearly everyone has been here for three or more generations, it is perfectly obvious that experienced history - i.e. history that has occurred within our grandparents' lifetime - would make the descendants of Africans and Indians, culturally, Trinidadians.
To be sure, that is a wide, even amorphous, definition. But of this we can be certain: these descendants are not now, ethnically, the same as people from Africa or India. That is another reason why they have so much in common, and it is why all ethnic definitions here boil down to how an individual looks.
What this also means is that ethnic activism is nothing but a cover for political ambitions. That is their true agenda. Such ambitions are, of course, entirely legitimate, but these people are fanatics and fanatics can never be satisfied with anything less than total hegemony. They are hardly likely to achieve this goal. But, if they can exacerbate existing tensions in our society, they may do real damage before they are drowned by the tide of history.
And drowned they will be. Renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his book Consilience, writes: "The big story in recent human evolution is not directional change, but homogenization through immigration and interbreeding...The historical atlases of Europe and Asia, when their pages are flipped chronologically through five millennia, become film clips of changing ethnic boundaries...
"The mixing sharply accelerated when Europeans conquered the New World and transported African slaves to its shores...In recent times it has quickened through the spread of industrialization and democracy...Some ethnic enclaves will probably endure for centuries more, but the trend in the opposite direction is unmistakably strong. It is also irreversible."
One other thing is certain, too: that irreversible process will be completed in the Caribbean, and especially in Trinidad, sooner rather than later. When that happens, and when people stop harking back to mythical memories of India and Africa, then maybe today's holiday won't be as ironic as it presently is.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh