Legacy of Black Power is more than just dashikis
by
20100511
Ravi Ji
The Hon Prime Minister challenged Chief Servant Makandal Daga to account for an episode at a Catholic church during the Black Power days of the 1970s.
He has also signaled an alarm to Catholics. Mr Manning, in my mind, reduces the entire seventies–Black Power, African identity, opportunities for all beyond colour of skin, relevant education, freedom from prejudice lingering in post-independence institutions–solely to the event at the church in which Black Power protestors draped black cloth across white statues. Mr Manning also derided Daaga for still wearing his African dashiki. I will not condone desecration to a sacred place. But was this an act of desecration?
This is why we, including the Hon Prime Minister, have to be educated about the seventies. Given that 2010 marks the 40th anniversary of the Black Power Revolution and 125th Anniversary of Jahajee Massacre, this is the kind of discussion, the TT Commission to Unesco could have engaged in this year of Rapproachement of Cultures. So, was it a desecration or a ritual of reclamation? Was it a dramatic ritualising by black children of Africa, staking claim to the God they had come to accept in lieu of their own demonised God, Oludumare, and re-making Him in their own black image and likeness?��This is important, since identity, self-esteem and loss of culture were critical to the Black Power movement. For Africans, black is not skin deep, but a deep prejudice and a heavy burden; listen to composer's calypso, Black.
This anthropophagic phenomenon is universal and expressed in diverse ways and intensities. The Chinese look of the Indian-born Bhagwan Buddha evolved through gradual artistic ritualisation and so too has Carnival music. African slaves employed the reverse of this art of survival in masking their divinities under the guise of Catholic saints. It is also instructive that the Cathedral was not vandalised, as were, say, mandirs in T&T, on August 4, 2007 and 2008, back to back.
The Prime Minister's reductionism of the seventies to the lone episode at the church is a disservice to the many leaders of Black Power and calypsonians like Stalin and others who have immortalised the seventies, like Bro Valentino who sang,"Doh matter how they try to tarnish those sacred memories, I will never forget the Roaring Seventies," and Chalkie who advocates, "Say thanks to Daaga!" The disservice extends not only to Daga, Khafra and Eintou but to all–including Indians and Catholics who sympathised and participated in the Black Power movement.
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Legacy of Black Power is more than just dashikis | The Trinidad Guardian
