So there I am, minding the PNM's business, and Whaddax!, my pardner BC Pires sneaks up and wallops me with oppressing black people, somehow managing to get four million dead Africans into the picture. I'd been heading to a discussion of contemporary blackness anyway, based on Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book, Between the World and Me, and BC has given me an entr�e. Thanks buddy.
But first, Trini Blackness as a specific and unique instance of American Blackness. Black/Indian business is a natural if minor consequential issue (to American Blackness if major to T&T). Why am I so interested? Because it affects me and keeps recurring, and people, not just politicians, use "Blackness" as a shibboleth, and no one seems to know much about it. To our collective detriment, as Dr Rowley seems to understand, since he keeps talking about the need for a "real" history of T&T.
So let's look at some Trini black history which, it might surprise many to know, is not a series of riots to a steelpan soundtrack. Much of what's below is in Bridget Brereton's Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, required reading for anyone wishing to understand the race issue in T&T.
At the end of slavery the small population of Trinidad was comprised of three major groups: Europeans, Free Coloureds, and formerly enslaved. In 1832 there were about 4,000 Europeans, 16,000 Coloureds and about 20,000 apprentices. The important group was the Free Coloureds who were educated mixed-race people, who saw themselves as natural inheritors of the colony from Europe. They did not identify with the formerly enslaved; in fact, they owned slaves.
Their world view was articulated in Trinidad's first major piece of civic literature: Jean Baptiste Philipe's Free Mulatto (c 1824). Formally titled An Address to the Earl of Bathurst, it appealed to the Secretary of State for the Colonies for the civil rights of the coloured population, which were being trampled by the early British governors.
Philippe was a doctor. His descendant, Michel Maxwell Philip was a formidable legal mind and the first non-white solicitor general of the colony. This class persisted as a distinct entity well into the 20th century. Separate and apart from it were the formerly enslaved, who would form a peasant base. From this indigenous peasantry would come people like JJ Thomas, Henry Sylvester Williams and CLR James. Eric Williams, incidentally, was a hybrid of these two groups.
But there were other small groups of importance, like the Black American soldiers who had sided with the British in the War of 1812, who were settled as immigrants in the Company Villages in south Trinidad as free men during slavery. There were also about 4,000 West Africans who came as indentured immigrants to Trinidad between 1841 and 1861 who practiced their African dress and religion, and were a group apart in 19th century Trinidad.
But, to repeat, these were relatively small in number. Trinidad's population swelled with a continuous influx of immigrants from the end of slavery to the present. Indenture provided only one stream. The black population was augmented by immigrants from other islands, and these were not the best and finest–just the opposite, unfortunately. They formed the core of the "jamette" class. They settled in the slums and suburbs of Port-of-Spain, and formed a cancerous underclass. This crystallised in the phenomenon of the barrack yard out of which the Canboulay riots and 19th century street gangs and much crime came.
The barrack yards, now romanticised, were described in CLR James' Triumph, and Minty Alley, and by Alfred Mendes in The Man Who Ran Away. The narrative perspective of those stories, of macabre curiosity of the black middle class narrators about the underclass, is most revealing.
But it was the coloured and black peasantry who formed the political, professional, and semi-professional backbone of the island. Their culture was Eurocentric. JJ Thomas formed the Trinidad Athenaeum in 1871 to study classical culture, and there was high regard for Victorian manners and knowledge.
The indigenous black society was loosely connected in a network of Masonic and fraternal societies like The Gardeners, The Oddfellows and The Mechanics. The immigrants were outsiders.
So AfroTrinidad has never been and is not monolithic group of former slaves. But you wouldn't know that from the simplistic version of popular history these days, which boils down to Carnival and the Canboulay Riots. Thomas, Maxwell Philip, CP David, and James would be horrified to be identified with the Canboulay Riots.
You might well ask when this changed. Simple: from 1956 onward, with emigration and immigration. The pre- and post-independence periods were environments where people of talent, ambition and intellect were redundant, and they emigrated. They were, as discussed last week, replaced by immigrants from the smaller islands, and the frenzy we call "culture" today, was created to distract from the bleeding of social capital.
The overriding point here is that the black history spewed from the academe and populist and state media for public consumption is toxically wrong. It's largely made-up, but it's found its way to centre stage, shouting down the facts, subtleties, and the wonders of Trinidad, which are very different from US history, to create a narrative of oppression, hatred and vice as the pillars of culture.
It also provides a remedy for out-groups. Much like the medieval papacy selling indulgences, anyone can acquire favour in the present dispensation by reciting the litany of oppression of Africans.
It allows a convenient trope for people like my pal BC who wish to express generalised and well-intentioned frustration at the way things are, and score some ethnic points, without any actual facts or analysis however uncomfortable they might be to the soi-disant "oppressed."