Another Augus mawnin
published: Sunday | August 1, 2004
Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
Queen Victoria gi we free
This is the year of Jubilee
Augus mawnin come again...
I'VE NEVER liked that ever-popular folk song, sung with such gusto in every mancipation observation. First thing is, Queen Victoria must have been a don. For she stay up into farin an give a bunch of people something that she knew they wanted, was in their better interest, but just couldn't work for, on account of the system. So she just packed up 'free' into a barrel one day and shipped it. Due to the level of technology in travel at that time it took four years to arrive. It is said that people sat down on the bridge in Manchioneal till the boat docked and on beholding the barrel of 'free' being unloaded by Her Majesty's faithful servants, they erupted into spontaneous jubilation, praise and thanksgiving for her Majesty and her unbounded, unshackled generosity.
And so it is that from that day on we stretch out we hand fe everything that we want in the certain knowledge that one day, smaddy from farin is going to pass, look pan us chu dere binoculars, pity we likkle and abolish anyting name visa so that we could liberally inherit of the land of the free and the brave. Jack Mandora, me nuh choose none.
WORLD CIVILISATION
Is must so it go. For it is not possible to believe that we understand our history and continue in behaviours so detrimental to our present and future, and scornful of the contributions that we have made, since time immemorial, to world civilisation.
Furthermore, sometimes we seem completely unmindful of that which has been stolen from us and the need to be ever vigilant over what remains. That is the emancipation Langston Hughes would want us to know when he wrote that if they come for me in the morning dem nah skin up fe kick dung yu door under cover of darkness.
Before you begin to find fault with the people consider this: A few days before the burial of the Right Hon Hugh Lawson Shearer, I was in the company of the very astute staff at the Division of Culture reading The Gleaner like most Jamaicans.
In two minutes flat you finish the headlines, tick off what you really want to read till time come. Headline: Something bout Columbus 20th generation coming to visit Jamaica. I found it hilarious. 'Him mussi hear bout Miss Gloudon play...hahahaha and with that I turned the page'.
PERCEPTIVE SECRETARY
'No hold on', that's the very perceptive Secretary, 'him wouldn't just come here so, go back and read the article." I nearly have a conniption. The man was to arrive when we still a bawl from the funeral. Highlights of his visit, were to include a citation from the Mayor of Kingston, the keys to Spanish Town, boat tour of Buccaneer City Port Royal, wreath laying ceremony at his predecessor's monument in St. Ann, Public Lecture at UTECH and such delights.
The Spanish Ambassador to Jamaica has duty to fete him. After all, according to the article he was His Grace. A title conferred on Sir Christopher by the King at the time who also proclaimed that such title was transferable to all his heirs and successors till thy kingdom come, O God, even if they accomplished nothing with their own lives, Christopher, like Jesus, had done it all. Dis-Grace!
QUINTENCENARY
Our Governor-General refuse to receive him because that is not good for our chances to learn Spanish and realise that patois is not the language of commerce and seafarers. But twelve years after indigenous and disenfranchised peoples around the world placed Rethinking Columbus on the agenda of human development, consequent on the forced international celebration of the Quintencenary of this great gran-puppa lick that exterminated the Indians, building catholic cathedrals over the dem temples; decimated the forest covers of the region till all now we have to have something name halting environmental destruction; collided with Africa till de coco inna my forehead nuh get better yet; plus the continuing psychological trauma that distinguished Jamaican scholar Orlando Patterson give Emancipation Lecture bout only two years ago up at Mona Campus, and countless other present-day assault that historian Hillary Beckles write up as connected to the Mission of Columbus, yu mean to say, we carry the man to Spanish Town and never leave him in the district prison in Marcus Garvey Cell as poetic justice?
You can imagine when him go back a Spain go talk bout de gratitude and love that was his reward? Him fool we, we fool him back, him go back home totally fool-fool and de whole a we enslaved into a cycle of ignorance and fraid fe talk, locked into a Memorandum of Misunderstanding. MUM is de word. What is the cost of reparation for that?
WELL-INFORMED JAMAICANS
Yu know how many sensible otherwise well-informed Jamaicans who skip through the paper like me tink sey is me meck it up, for dem don't hear one peep bout it. We sleeping! Or we out pon de Manchioneal bridge a wait pan Her Majesty's barrel. Ms Gloudon did fire off de first letter to the editor on the object, for we do not have the power to make him the subject of nothing. Couple more people write two-two paragraphs and there was a nice likkle letter entitled 'Surely you jest' into The Gleaner of Wednesday July 21.
Yu tink if we did go to Ghana an bring back Nanny great great grand somebody and give dem a tour of where she walked from Bump Grave to Accompong, and put flowers at the place where two rivers meet and Nanny kept a pot a boiling, and eyeballed de Missa Colonel Brooks him, yu wudda hear any polite exclamation like 'surely you jest'. Columbus' well-titled descendants would perform their version of road-blocking. The economy wudda sick again immediately with the usual tactics of lay-offs when policies and programmes are found to be threatening to the status quo and the Minister of Finance would be forced into spending for the reparation of that. All who can state quo bout illiterate black people taking things to extreme would be having Breakfast on the Club, Hot wid dem Power over those who can state nothing and be taken seriously. Like, 'What is this emancipation celebration about really? No we don't give money to that.
That's not a part of our marketing strategy. Not the kind of passa-passa at which we encourage up town and downtown to congregate. Who was Nanny anyway?
And did she catch bullets down there? So where is her grave for surely if there is no evidence of where she died how do you know that she lived-and pass me some more champagne! Or did the Earl of Portland consume it all when he visited the very maroons a few years ago to re-enact the signing of the treaty that made them informers over any other slave that found the notion of freedom an attractive one?
Oh, that last part should not be mentioned. Just like how we shouldn't remember that Mister Shearer did run home Walter Rodney for grounding with the brothers in 1968, the year when Black people around the world began to come together around the question, then, who am I? Forget too that under his regime there was a frenzy to ban everything with the word black including the book Black Stallion; rastas get dem locks chop off with machete and black people were humiliated into further self-hate; and we are not supposed to ask what would we have become if that chapter of our history had unfolded differently. What have we become precisely because that is how our becoming has been presided over?
EMANCIPATION
So which part of Emancipation are we to understand in order to overstand the present and construct the future? De worl nu lebble. Garvey was right: a people without knowledge of their past kean do nuttin. Somebody should pay to construct, equip and staff a college dedicated exclusively to studying the opinions and philosophies of Marcus Garvey as part of a reparation package. We should demand a title of honour to be bestowed on Nanny's heirs and successors and put on the reparation agenda free education into African civilisation for the part bout the disrespectful rumours and innuendoes bout Nanny's parts. How about acquiring the rights to Rodney's 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' for every high school student of Spanish as reparation for the fact that the first sentence many of us learned in Spanish class was that 'Cristobal Colon discubrio Jamaica...' and then get serious reprimand for asking for an examination of the implications of the word 'discovered'. You tink you bright, teacher just tink you out of order.
And we are still being punished for the mere desire to be exposed to the full truth. Ask Helms-Burton what really happened to Superclubs in Cuba. Ask the Minister of National Security how come our ratings in the fight against drugs go up and down as whimsically as our economic performance.
Ask if we forget that the United Nations did declare this 2004 a year to commemorate how black people history tie up with the 200th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by Haiti. Ask if the history is distorted, one-sided, edited, and continues to celebrate the architects of our degradation if dem nuh expeck sey de house gwine bun dung and we gwine tink sey it Irie! Augus mawnin will come again when we remove the shackles from our minds!
