RISING TO THE CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURYTheme for Emancipation 2000
This year is the 162nd since Africans walked off the plantations in the then British West Indies as legally free men and women. It has another significance which impacts on the theme that the Emancipation Support Committee has adopted for its observance:
Rising to the Challenges of the 21st Century
On January 1, 2000, the world observed the dawn of the Western calendar’s new century (millennium even) with extravagant show and ceremony. Psychologically we have entered a period of renewal where peoples all over the world are driven to look at things with a fresh vision. But under the brilliance of fireworks and in the shadow of celebration, lurked anxieties about the present and future, too real and immediate to be concealed by sound and spectacle for more than a histrionic moment. Within weeks, tens of thousands of people were on the streets of Seattle, braving tear gas and pepper spray, as they vented their hostilities against the World Trade Organization. Months later, its sister institutions of global authority, the IMF and the World Bank, came under attack from the mobilized masses in Washington.
The Challenge of the Global Power Structure
The concerns of the demonstrators in Seattle and Washington - policies that are grinding greater numbers of people into poverty, increasing inequality within societies and globally, destroying the environment - are issues of global concern and they strike at the heart of challenges that we all face in the twenty first century. They are part of our reality here in the Caribbean. Whole economies in the region, dependent on bananas, are threatened with collapse by WTO rulings that favour the rich and greedy. Corporate interests are the other side of the global power structure spreading misery and accumulating wealth. The private exercise of power includes free wheeling finance capital which is ruthlessly shifting investments and plant across international borders, uprooting jobs and disrupting communities in the unceasing hunt for greater profits.
Uneven distribution of burdens
The effects of the global centralization of power, divorced from responsibility, are more damaging in some areas than others, and more detrimental to some peoples than to others. Since the patterns of exploitation and domination that emerged in the last 500 years have shaped the present, Africa and Africans, devastated by the slave trade and chattel slavery, are at a major disadvantage.
Most of Africa is on the periphery of the modern world, along with parts of Asia and Latin America. Even at the centre, in the industrialized societies, large sections of the workforce are being marginalized as they chase elusive, ever-changing and lower-paying jobs. On the periphery poverty is becoming harsher and more widespread.
The Cultural Challenge
The challenges go beyond corporate plunder and the global institutions that are amassing enough power to constantly erode areas of authority of national governments. The challenges are cultural as well as they are material. Psychological balance is threatened, not only by the disruptions in the job market and the encroaching impoverishment, but by the cultural trauma of dramatic and constant change, change driven by the same technological developments that are overhauling the global economy and the global configuration of power. American author, Alvin Toffler used the term “future shock” to describe the impact of the rapid changes in technology and its application on lifestyles, commonplace material things in our daily lives, values, information overload and all the factors that induce uncertainty and insecurity in people. This he defined as equivalent to culture shock within one’s own culture.
But pre-dating the effects of rampaging technology in the last few decades, all non-European peoples were already suffering from culture shock in various degrees, struggling to cope with the imposition of Western European culture through centuries of conquest and colonization, the subversion of the educated elites, and media bombardment in the present. We all come with additional psychological handicaps therefore in dealing with the specific impositions of the modern age.
The African Crisis
Africans experience the deepest crisis in this respect, Africans in the West who were forced to suppress names, language, religious practices and all detectible outward aspects of their culture and identity during slavery; and Africans in Africa whose civilizations were largely destroyed and whose historical memories were warped in Western educational systems. No other historical experience could have resulted in as profound a culture shock, could so have shattered a people’s universe as the brutally inflicted mentacide and cultural genocide against Africans.
To add to the internalized mental confusion, which is now compounded by “future shock”, we are consistently confronted with external negative images which demean our personhood. The image of Africans globally has been so trampled that even pokemon pokes fun at Africans. The products’ Japanese creators introduced the most vilified stereotyped image (in the form of a doll) into a line of toys that took the world by storm. The accumulated damage to African self-esteem is extreme enough to produce self-hate. Africans therefore face the greatest challenge in recognizing and consolidating an identity that can serve as a viable basis for maintaining wholeness and direction in a complex environment. It is an environment that is perplexing and disconcerting even to those who have not suffered the same assault on their Being and whose historical experience, initiatives, values and goals are at the core of the new transformations.
The Challenge of Ethnic Diversity
In seeking to deal with the insecurities of the present one of the retreats of peoples all around the world is into ethnic enclaves, with increasing antagonism towards the “others” causing dangerous fragmentation in multiethnic societies such as ours. At the international level countries are forming close alliances around common cultural factors. As tighter economic integration takes place globally and information, misinformation and images circulate at electronic speeds, giving a greater sense that we live in a global village, the peoples of the world increasingly face the challenge of developing harmony in diversity or at the very minimum managing ethnic diversity without destructive conflict.
The Challenge to Trinidad & Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago is a small, divided, multi-ethnic society, with a history of colonization, slavery and indentureship, in a region that is not a part of the developed and privileged world, one therefore that can have its interests overlooked or trampled. Each of these factors helps to shape the nature of the challenges we face as a nation as we confront the realities of the twenty first century. The way in which we manage our ethnic diversity, in particular the relationship between Africans and Indians, will determine whether we have lessons to teach the world in its response to this challenge or whether we suffer the fate of many other societies where differences have deteriorated into bloody strife. It will also play a major part in determining whether or not the nation can achieve a level of cohesion that will allow us to progress in our encounter with the other challenges of development.
As a nation we have to be part of that embryonic movement of humanity seeking to assert itself against a system that is fundamentally anti-human. We have to face the challenge of asserting our national and regional interests, people interests that we hold in common with others, at the levels of decision making and power. That is an aspect of the direction for emancipation in the 21st century.
Emancipation and the African Challenge
Africans in our society, apart from dealing with the issues of economics, politics and social relationships as they affect the nation generally, have to deal with the very specific issues which affect us uniquely as Africans in this society and in the world at large. Emancipation presents the most dynamic opportunity for us to address the hard questions and move collectively to confront the internal and external challenges which confront us. It is a time of optimism, a time when we draw inspiration from the genius and imagination that put us in the technological forefront of the world for many millennia, a time when we garner courage from the struggles and sacrifice of our ancestors who endured and eventually triumphed over chattel slavery.
As we observe emancipation in 2000,we review not only the difficulties but the resources that we bring as a people for our own liberation and to contribute to the development of our society, 162 years after emancipation and 100 years after one of our nationals, Henry Sylvestre Williams, organized the first Pan African Conference in London. Our innate resources of scientific genius, academic prowess, cultural resilience, creativity, courage, stamina and other qualities exhibited in our journey of glory and pain will inevitably be augmented by the capital windfall from reparations due. Every period in our history - from the emergence of human beings in Africa, to our development of the first great civilization in recorded history on that great continent, to our courage, and even achievement in captivity (as inventors for example)- gives us the conviction that we can shake off the mental shackles, out-think and out-manoeuver those who still seek to hold us in subjection, and rise to the challenges of the twenty first century.