Wasting the freedom dividend

As I start to reflect on the making of history, with President Obama now in office, I look at two areas where black people have had the chance to be 'leaders of the world'. I think of Africa and the Caribbean.

Much of the continent of Africa was under colonial rule for many years, in recent times, but the continent has had centuries of freedom of political and economic activity. The Caribbean countries were made up of slaves, and people gained their personal freedom with emancipation in the mid-1800s and gained political independence gradually from the early 1960s. But what have those two blocs done with their freedom? What have they done to advance any recent political agendas for freedom?

In the case of Africa, the perception is that oppression and limitation of individual and collective freedoms have been too commonplace; tribalism is often blamed for that. There is not really much fundamental difference between tribalism and racism as seen for many years in the USA. Few African leaders have really fought a strong fight for freedom (Mandela is a notable exception), but have often been seen as doing as much as possible to hold onto power and suppress opposition. This has often resulted into civil wars that have decimated the countries' abilities to advance as many young and able bodies have been killed.

Africa has then seen itself spiral down from a continent of greatness to one of abject poverty. It likes to blame others but I see much self-destruction.

In the case of the Caribbean, we seem to have focused a lot on what I would call 'small peas'. Our small physical and economic size can be used as some weak defence, but we have shown that these limitations do not matter as we have produced excellence in many fields: literature, music, sport, culture in a broad sense. We have sought to cement divisions between small islands and countries rather than embracing unity.

It's ironic that a true African-American (Kenyan father, American mother), with a name that bears no Anglo-Saxon tinge, who came from no slave background, rises to the top of the pile to lead a country so long identified as a power bastion of white people. he was not allowed to forget his African heritage, in part because he carried his true name; and it is a far cry from the created names now popular in some black communities.

We in the Caribbean have forgotten much of our African heritage, in part due to being Anglicized or Frenchified, or Hispanisized. In the English speaking Caribbean the names we carry are in a sense ridiculous, and we go crazy to find people with the same Anglo names, that came from slave owners and overseers. We are not Thompsons, or Smiths, or Williams, or anything else. But we do not know who and what we are; we lost our roots.

Maybe President Obama will help us in the Caribbean and those in Africa rediscover who and what we really are. We have lost a lot of time.