DAWN RITCH
LAST WEEK, I said that historically the Haitians had put too fine a point on race. 'Whites weren't to own land, mulattoes weren't to have political power, and only Negroes were to be presidents'.
The person most notorious for putting too fine a point on race was Adolf Hitler. He gassed the Jews and the Roma, or gypsies, and wanted to preserve the purity of the Aryan or white race.
There can be no denying that human beings vary dramatically in skin colour, hair, physiognomy and even temperament. Geneticists are now forecasting that by the end of this century, red hair will be a thing of the past, blond hair will be a rarity, and the majority of the world's population will be brown.
I don't know how the blacks and whites are going to feel about that then, but I won't be around to find out. Since only two countries in the world and throughout history ever banned miscegenation the United States and South Africa the forecast does not surprise me.
Even black Romans appeared on vases, the shards of which have been discovered. Most of them would have been exposed on the mountainside when they were babies, along with the physically disabled babies. But Roman law discriminated against illegitimacy, and a dramatically darker-skinned baby was a dead giveaway. Nevertheless some blacks are commemorated in bas-reliefs on Roman vases.
In ancient times people in the Mediterranean were much darker anyway. It is unlikely that Jesus Christ was a white man, because at the time only the barbarians were white, or had red or blond hair. The Romans built walls to keep them out. They were the barbarians at the gate.
Ironically, their descendants rule the world today. But not before the Moors of Spain reconnected them with classical antiquity, literacy, science and medicine. Trade the Moors kept to themselves, foreshadowing the great European explorations by sea in search of spice.
CHINESE EXPERIENCE
It was exciting last week, therefore, to see the Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations chairing the emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously approved the resolution to send international troops to Haiti.
To hear him speaking Chinese while authorising a bunch of mainly white folks to resolve a black country and restore order, was a priceless experience.
The Chinese are tremendous at the art of miscegenation, and invented the concubine. There is a book out now called 1421, which sets out to prove that the Chinese discovered America in that year. The book is wonderfully argued, but the proof is awaiting confirmation from a number of other on-going investigations, most of them to do with carbon-dating and DNA.
That having been said I wouldn't want to be buried alive with any dead Chinese Emperor, or consumed alive in the flames of the funeral pyre of an Indian maharajah.
Nor would I want to be a cannibal as was the case in Eastern Caribbean where they had the Caribs, and in parts of Africa where human flesh was thought tasty.
In comparison Jamaica is most congenial. We've had no coup d'etat, no revolution, no assassination, and enjoy democratic elections. Today, it is the culture of the island however, which has become base and degraded, largely because of a relatively recent emphasis on our African heritage.
Why it should become necessary to distinguish the African to the exclusion of the Chinese, Indian and White in us is beyond me. Any white Jamaicans that you see about are only nominally white, the tar brush having been spread far and wide.
So there ought not be this national obsession with how people look, personified most of all by the attire of the Most Honourable, who frequently dresses in the most ostentatiously African way.
Needless to say along with the dress has come a deterioration in his behaviour. As when he told the nation from his seat in Parliament "Faggedit", when asked for a referendum on removing the Privy Council.
Why should he bother to seek our consent on this anyway, when he's already proceeding to republican status for Jamaica and didn't ask us about that either. This is the kind of thing that Haitian Emperors and African dictators don't think twice about doing.
SO MUCH FOR DEMOCRACY
This is a new sort of rule, therefore, being experienced in Jamaica. Since the Most Honourable is touted as our first black prime minister, it seems we were ruled by mulattoes and white people before.
Yet when the mulatto Michael Manley became unpopular as Prime Minister and was booed in Montego Bay a clear sign that he had lost the support of his people he, mindful of his democratic upbringing, declared that he would call the general election at the earliest possible time.
This respect for democracy doesn't seem evident under our black leaders. Neither Aristide who was prepared to see the Haitian people slaughter each other rather than resign. Nor Patterson, who was prepared to seek international help to keep Aristide in power, against the will of his own people. So much for democracy.
Bear in mind that the Haitian Government has been republican since the fall of the Emperor Dessalines in 1806. So what's there to like about being a republic?
A republic in the hands of a black politician is a passport to hell. The best thing for us is the Westminster model with a Prime Minister and a Governor-General representing the Queen. A Prime Minister and a president is a confusion of meaning, and guaranteed to cause a lot of quarrelling and political conspiracy.
This combined with a Caribbean Court of Justice as the new final court of appeal, with judges of dubious selection and inevitable political interference, could turn our island into a virtual prison.
Future generations of Jamaicans will flee from it by boat, just as the Haitian refugees do their own country today. Once the arbitrariness of political power is institutionalized there can be no personal freedom and prosperity. One either belongs to the elite, or the devil take the hindmost.
Already even the Haitian refugees on our shores would rather be in the U.S. That must tell us something. It says that although a democracy, Jamaica today doesn't look much different to what they left behind, except that our buildings aren't burning yet.
Any political regime which operates on the basis of race is doomed to failure, and always in the most spectacular fashion.
