06 September 2001, 832 words
In the Caribbean, the most frequently used quote is probably Bob Marley's "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery". Ironically, though, I find that the people who most cite Marley's lyric are often persons who are themselves textbook examples of mental slaves.
Being a truly free thinker requires you, first and foremost, to treat all your beliefs critically. Bertrand Russell once remarked that education must be subversive if it is to be meaningful. "It must challenge all the things we take for granted, examine all accepted assumptions, tamper with every sacred cow, and instill a desire to question and doubt." This is the first step towards real independence in any society: having a critical core of persons who can think for themselves. When that core exists, a matching freedom of attitude (though not of intellect, which requires particular gifts) permeates the wider society.
"None but ourselves can free our minds," sang Marley and, though I'm sure this wasn't his intent, that line means that, analytically, your concepts and opinions should be formed on the basis of fact or logic or both. Interpreted from the creative point of view, the line is even more interesting: it means - though, again, I'm sure this wasn't Marley's intent - that you must look to yourself and your immediate environment to free your mind.
What that means, in turn, is that all these ideologues in our midst who hark back to Africa or India, or who cleave to outworn ideologies like communism or socialism, are just as much mental slaves as those who worshipped all things British in bygone days. In fact, they are more so, because one of the fundamental characteristics of the dependent mind is its capacity for self-delusion. That is why ethnocentrists always try to portray their ancestral cultures as flawless and complete: which of course requires distortions of historical events, social practices, and even scientific knowledge.
Moreover, the argument that Afrocentric and Indocentric paradigms are somehow less foreign to us than a Eurocentric one is a premise that can hold only if racial memory actually existed, which it does not. Nor does the argument that you cannot be a fully-developed human being without your ancestral culture hold any water. Do Sat Maharaj or Khafra Kambon impress anybody as having more self-confidence, more tranquility, or even a greater sense of self than other Trinidadians who get along quite happily without dashiki or kurta?
What our ethnocentrists generally promote are attitudes of fear, insecurity and paranoia. Real freedom of thought requires effort and bravery, which is why most people prefer to believe whatever they are taught by their peer group and whatever gives them a sense of status. (It is no coincidence that one of this country's most vocal Afrocentrists used to have his Black maid wear cap and apron.)
Many of the arguments about our lack of true independence also confuse insularity with independence. Economically, jumping on to the globalisation train is a necessary measure for prosperity. It doesn't mean surrendering our economic or political or cultural independence. Indeed, it would seem perfectly obvious that prosperity, no matter what its source, is always more likely to result in cultural independence than proud poverty. I find it quite telling, for example, that the main tourist economies in the Caribbean - Barbados and Jamaica - are also the countries which, to much of the outside world, define Caribbean music and culture.
Another point often overlooked in these discussions about cultural independence is that the Caribbean is part of Western civilisation. When this truth is acknowledged, it is usually to lament the fact. But the difference between Western and other civilisations is that, to quote scholar Jacques Barzun, "borrowing widely from other lands, thriving on dissent and originality, the West has been the mongrel civilisation par excellence." No other great civilisation - not Chinese, Hindu or Islam - has been so curious about other cultures or so willing to absorb what they have to offer (even if such absorption often occurred during conquest).
The Caribbean, and Trinidad in particular, is thus very much a product of Western civilisation, with all that civilisation's good and bad attributes. There is no fundamental characteristic of Western culture which prevents us from developing a distinct culture of our own. The same is not true of Hindu and African cultures - at least not in the way they are promoted in this society.
How, then, do we build a truly independent culture and state of mind? We do it by paying attention to what our own conditions and needs are. And we have already begun. Creatively, Carnival, calypso, chutney and Phagwa are very much our own, whatever coincidental resemblances they bear to European or African or Indian cultures. And, analytically, we already have a small core of persons, like Denis Solomon and Lloyd Best and Keith Smith, who can think without ideological crutches. But I'll tell you how you'll know when we become truly independent: you won't see people wearing three-piece suits in this tropical land.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh