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Monday, July 14, 2025

All a Black Fallacy

by

1808 days ago
20200801

In the ear­ly 1970s, the Mighty Com­pos­er (Fred Mitchell) com­posed and sang a ca­lyp­so en­ti­tled Black Fal­la­cy in which he showed that many peo­ple to­day and ‘’from since in the be­gin­ning” con­tin­ue to use the word “black with a de­grad­ing twist,” to de­note racism, prej­u­dice and big­otry in their deal­ings with Africans and African de­scen­dants.

He named words like “black-jack, black-mail, black-lie, black-book, black-eye and black-list,” and went on to state that they do so out of spite, for they “know that these words don’t ex­ist.”

The ca­lyp­so was a hit with the “Black Pow­er” crowd in the 1970s for Com­pos­er ex­plained to his Caribbean, di­as­poric au­di­ences that Whites and big­ots “made up the Eng­lish lan­guage in such a way, to be­lit­tle my black broth­ers every day,” hop­ing to make the world be­lieve that “every­thing black is evil.”

Now in this era of “Black Lives Mat­ter” and right on our doorsteps dai­ly, I am drawn to tele­vi­sion pro­grammes where Caribbean seer-men, in their quest to make a dol­lar in these COVID-19 times, are sell­ing their ser­vices to Trinida­di­ans es­pe­cial­ly, with a view to the root­ing out of “Voodoo, Black Mag­ic and Obeah” from the pop­u­la­tion.

For the op­er­a­tional records, every time I turn on my TV to watch “Be­yond the Tape” on TV6 with Roger Alexan­der and Mar­lon Hop­kin­son, and “Crime Watch” with Ian Al­leyne on Syn­er­gy TV, I am bom­bard­ed with ad­ver­tise­ments from these prog­nos­ti­ca­tors telling me they have the pow­er to save us Tri­nis from the evil of “black mag­ic, voodoo and obeah.”

What makes these ad­ver­tise­ments more dis­dain­ful and be­neath the di­am­e­ter of hu­man re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is that 99.99 per­cent of the sooth­say­ers are Hin­du pun­dits.

In fact, I count­ed 17 of them on Supt Alexan­der’s show yes­ter­day; they hailed from San Juan to Ce­dros and boast­ed of their an­ti-obeah skills and their cer­tifi­cates for pro­vid­ing cures for voodoo.

It is a fact that if we ad­here to the many books and films of racists, voodoo has been shown by these au­thors to be prim­i­tive acts of stu­pid­i­ty and sor­cery (con­trol of evil spir­its) that even aim to wor­ship Sa­tan and al­low evil spir­its to be cast up­on de­cent folks to the ex­tent that many of the saint­ly ones, al­though good-na­tured and re­li­gious, be­come in­un­dat­ed with dis­eases, men­tal and oth­er­wise, that can­not be ex­plained by mod­ern med­i­cine.

Worse, voodoo for the racists, af­fect main­ly Africans who when they fall un­der its evil spell, turn in­to mur­der­ous beasts and mad­men who can­not live with hu­man be­ings. Hence, racists preach the need for the pu­rifi­ca­tion of such black souls.

If we study his­to­ry, how­ev­er, par­tic­u­lar­ly African and Caribbean his­to­ry, we would know that Vo­dun (plur­al Vo­du) which was high­light­ed first in Haiti is the syn­the­sis of the tra­di­tion­al re­li­gions of Da­homey, Yoruba­land and the Kon­go which the en­slaved brought from Africa dur­ing the pe­ri­od of African en­slave­ment in the Caribbean, and in­fused it with cer­tain as­pects of Ro­man Catholi­cism to which they were ex­posed in French Saint Domingue, as a way of adap­ta­tion to their new en­vi­ron­ment. CLR James in his fa­mous book on the Rev­o­lu­tion in Haiti, Black Ja­cobins, re­ferred to their Vo­dun re­li­gion as “Africa in the West In­dies.”

Ac­tu­al­ly, the Vo­dun re­li­gion had two parts: one was named Ra­da af­ter the Da­home­an city of Al­la­da and the oth­er was named Pe­tra or Pe­tra-Lem­ba af­ter a leader in Haiti called Don Pe­dro and the Heal­ing So­ci­ety from the Kon­go dis­trict of Haiti named af­ter Lem­ba.

Both Ra­da and Lem­ba are African-in­spired spir­its and spir­i­tu­al events and both, joined to­geth­er, al­low African peo­ple in Haiti to be­come em­braced in a re­li­gious Vo­dun where­by they ho­n­our their an­ces­tors and wor­ship Almighty God—to the Catholics, Olorun to the Yorubas, Mawu to the Fons of Da­homey and BonDieu to many Haitians. Cer­tain­ly, be­cause of the fact that Africans in Da­homey, now called Benin, and those in Yoruba­land wor­shipped and be­lieved in One Supreme Cre­ator, it was easy for them to adapt to the Ro­man-Catholic, Almighty God in Haiti.

Many of us in Trinidad would know too, that the Ra­da re­li­gion was prac­tised here by the en­slaved and freed men in Bel­mont Val­ley Road, Bel­mont, in the late 18th and through­out the 19th cen­tu­ry, so that many of the shrines, ar­ti­facts and sym­bols of the faith, in­clud­ing the Ra­da ceme­tery can still be found in the holy lands of the sa­cred area, which the en­slaved called “Free­town.”

Africans be­lieve that spir­its man­i­fest them­selves by “mount­ing” the bod­ies of their devo­tees, and in Haiti, as Vo­dun prac­ti­tion­ers, they be­lieved that Catholic saints did the same, by way of mir­a­cles. We in Trinidad in the Kalen­da be­fore Car­ni­val car­ried our sticks to the ceme­tery to be mount­ed by spir­its in prepa­ra­tion for the cel­e­brat­ed stick­fights. Af­ter Car­ni­val, the mount­ed sticks were tak­en back to the ceme­tery—a re­turn to the spir­it world.

Hence in Vo­dun, spir­its mount the be­liev­ers to do good, to heal the sick, to bless chil­dren and mar­riages and to fore­cast evils that may be in the way. Racist whites, how­ev­er, spread the lies that Vo­dun priests were all dev­il wor­ship­pers who were bent on putting evil on whites and plan­ta­tion own­ers, as a form of re­mon­stra­tive re­sis­tance to en­slave­ment.

Hence, they changed the holy term “Vo­du” to an evil “Voodoo,” rep­re­sent­ed of­ten by a black doll stuck with pins.

Those of us who are old enough to re­mem­ber would know that Prime Min­is­ter Forbes Burn­ham, when Guyana be­came in­de­pen­dent, pro­nounced that “Obeah was the re­li­gion of the en­slaved.” As such, he le­galised obeah in Guyana as the re­li­gion of African de­scen­dants.

In Com­pos­er’s ca­lyp­so, he ex­plained that the term “black mag­ic” was, in fact, obeah; it is Africa re­blend­ed.

The sooth­say­ers of to­day who ped­dle all this voodoo non­sense are preda­tors. They seek to ex­ploit peo­ple who, now quar­an­tined in their homes, have be­come de­pressed and are there­fore vul­ner­a­ble to swindlers. They seek to bring dark­ness to our world of spir­i­tu­al light. They are in fact do­ing the dev­il’s work.

One won­ders that in to­day’s fool­ish world of In­di­an mag­ic, Arab mag­ic, Chi­nese mag­ic and white mag­ic, why would learned, Hin­du pun­dits yet seek to fo­cus on and spread the term “black mag­ic?” Sure­ly, if oth­er groups must show re­spect for Africans, es­pe­cial­ly at this time when we cel­e­brate Eman­ci­pa­tion, and if so­ci­ety must tru­ly un­der­stand that “African Lives Mat­ter,” tele­vi­sion sta­tions in Trinidad, as well as Roger Alexan­der, Mar­lon Hop­kin­son and Ian Al­leyne must all say no to the cast­ing off of “Voodoo, Black Mag­ic and Obeah” from the no­ble hearts and minds of Trin­bag­o­ni­ans. They must seek to dis­pel such garbage from their knowl­edge­able pro­grammes.

The Mighty Com­pos­er end­ed his ca­lyp­so by say­ing that when we suf­fer from a “bad” day, we nev­er call it a “white day.”

Why then must we have in our lan­guage “a Black day, a black-jack and a black Fri­day.”

Ac­cord­ing to Com­pos­er, “This black thing, that they in­still­ing in we, is what breeds in­fe­ri­or­i­ty.”


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