8 August 2002, 875 words
Anyone who is born and grows up in Trinidad is a Trinidadian. They are not Indian or African, except in the sense that these words are local shorthand for individuals who look a certain way. But there is no wider or deeper sense in which "Indian" or "African" has any meaning.
This point is not contestable. In Africa, people identify themselves primarily by tribe or nationality. In India, people identify themselves primarily by family and caste or village. There is no racial basis for describing someone as African or even Indian, and the words can serve as a general physical description only outside the African and Asian continents. But, beyond that, the terms are meaningless. That is why, if we are talking about someone from Nigeria or New Delhi, we must say they are "an African from Africa" or "an Indian from India".
When I say these points are not contestable, I mean that they are not logically contestable. (This, of course, will not deter the ethnocentrists from contesting it anyhow.) But, whether the ethnocentrists want to admit it or not, they are Trinidadian long before they are Indian or African or anything else.
This is not to say that there aren't differences between the Indo-Trinis and Afro-Trinis (or, as I prefer to say, between Trinindians and Trinafricans). But these difference are the result of history, not because of any inherent racial characteristics nor even because of ancestral cultural traits.
The enslaved Africans were of different tribes and brought here forcibly. The indentured Indians were of different castes and came here voluntarily. Both groups had to create different strategies to ensure survival and to attain status. The underlying basis of those strategies would have been sexual (i.e. the unconscious drive to perpetuate one's genes). In these different contexts, such strategies would obviously have varied between the two groups, and would have influenced which cultural traits would be seen as valuable or not.
The adaptation to the new environment would have been rapid, with some cultural traits being created and other traits vanishing even within the first generation. This is why, among the Indian group, caste prejudice, and even Hindu-Muslim enmity, disappeared so quickly. Once in the island, the presence of easily identifiable Others would have quickly caused Indians to bond racially, and remain culturally bonded even as they split along new lines of religion and class.
Indians, in fact, retained their modified cultural traits mainly because they were a minority. Ellen Dissanayake, in her book Art and Intimacy, notes, "Rituals not only reinforce group one-heartedness (belonging) and like-mindedness (meaning). At the same time, they are age-old ways of addressing the uncertainty and liminality that are inherent in the human condition. Many ceremonies are motivated by anxiety - or may even generate it - and are structured so they then deal with it in some way."
So the racial prejudice between Afros and Indos was not the consequence of any divide-and-conquer strategy by the white man. The tendency for group identification is inherent in the human species. Numerous experiments by psychologists, as well as all of human history, demonstrate this. Dissanayake explains, "The adaptive value of individuals living in unified social groups...seems clear. Cohesive societies would have prospered more than fragmented and uncooperative ones, and the individuals within them would have had better chances for survival. Individuals who felt intrinsically part of their group would want to contribute to it or defend it."
Dissanayake goes on to describe the basic attitudes that come with such ethnocentrism. "The in-group sees its members as virtuous and superior (and those members of the out-group as contemptible, immoral and inferior). It sees its own standards as universal and intrinsically true, its own customs as original and centrally human." (Here, in a nutshell, is the explanation of all the propaganda of Devant Parsuram Maharaj and Selwyn Cudjoe.)
Just because such traits are innate, however, does not mean that they are good or even desirable. The ethnocentrists argue that knowing one's ancestral cultures helps the individual build a sense of identity. This contention is usually refuted by their own personal deficiencies. In fact, these attempts to construct (not, mark you, REconstruct) an Indian or African past merely reveal a basic self-contempt: contempt for the environment that, good and bad, has shaped what you are.
Viewing oneself as Trinidadian requires the self-confidence to admit one's shortcomings. Constructing an African or Indian past allows you to fool yourself into believing that your ancestors, and by extension yourself, were perfect. But, if we are going to construct, why not construct a Trinidadian identity? That is, a set of cultural traits relevant to survival and progress in the environment we are born into.
This, of course, has been happening in an informal and unconscious manner for decades now. But we have now reached the stage where formal and conscious constructions are needed, not least to counteract the ethnic nonsense that is peddled as "identity". Yet few of our commentators and artists and academics really speak from a Trinidadian perspective. Without such constructions, however, our politicians will always be allowed to be incompetent and corrupt, and our country will remain unfocused and underdeveloped.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh