Who is popular today?

THE EDITOR: May I dare hope that the mention of reparations will see a movement from extempo for applause to some serious and deliberate action? It is a travesty that the local reparations committee has been non-functional since 2015. On a related matter, the UN Decade for People of African Descent is almost at an end. It may be churlish to mention but our Caricom neighbours – Antigua, Grenada, St Vincent, Jamaica and Barbados – are doing the work.
This is not a question simply of a calculation and the cutting of a cheque. An opportunity is being missed to address the many issues that still burden a country where our leaders look like us but seemingly do not see that a lack of recognition, visibility and respect for African achievement and contribution to national and international spaces must be addressed as a matter of urgency.
Our great Pan Africanists, Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore, CLR James, Kwame Ture, remain unheralded here at home. Eric Williams's monumental scholarship has still not found its way into our secondary schools. Ture's house is still on Oxford Street. The East Port of Spain enclaves from which our pan and kaiso and mas emerged still look pretty much as they did in the 19th century.
There is an African proverb that says the child that is rejected by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I feel like a stuck record repeating the same line – our education system continues to fail African children. Not simply in terms of the many micro-aggressions our children face for having African names or for wearing small symbols of African spiritual practice. There are numerous situations of over-crowded classrooms, curricula that are seemingly deliberate in their exclusion of the African contribution to anything from science to philosophy to culture in this country. Teachers openly complain “black people chirren doh want to learn” but what is the inherent value of what they are being taught?
I strongly believe that official support for the reparations movement can be a vehicle for addressing many of these long-standing issues. The movement to introduce an emancipation holiday came from more than a decade of demands that emerged out of the 1970 Black Power Movement. It was almost grudgingly granted so that now we can boast that we were the first in the world to declare a public day of recognition for emancipation. This celebration is now hailed as the largest Pan African festival in the Western Hemisphere.
Has this impacted how we promote our country as a heritage tourism destination, say in the manner of the hugely successful “Year of Return” mounted by the government of Ghana or even the projected impact that the slavery museum being designed by David Adjaye in Barbados will have?
Perhaps a first small step (with minimal financial input) that our government can take on the road towards having the language and comprehension to begin to address the question of reparations with its citizens would be to pull down the names of enslavers who are being consigned to the “buying scrap iron” vans in their own homelands. It is mystifying how desperately we cling to them while we bawl insipidly “is we history.” Ellie Mannette is also our history. Thisbe is also our history. Balidaan Tola is also our history.
The People's calypsonian, my Brother Valentino, said “Trini have a funny funny way of forgetting.” Surely there are some students of history in our government who can intervene before we are forced to revisit those 70s days of thousands of black feet marching. Surely they realise that some of us are ready and willing to put our boots back on.

EINTOU PEARL SPRINGER

via e-mail
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