Black Heretics, Black Prophets (Africana Thought) by Anthony Bogues

Author:Anthony Bogues [Bogues, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317958253
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-12-22T08:00:00+00:00

The Text

A small booklet (sixty-eight pages), Groundings elaborated a global perspective on black struggle, yet it was rooted in the struggles of radical urban unemployed Caribbean youth. Groundings with My Brothers begins with a statement on the Jamaican situation that reviews the aftermath of the riots which occurred after Rodney’s banning. The statement identifies the nature of the Jamaican postindependence economy, defines the black political elite as “lackeys of imperialism,” and places emphasis on the “creative social expression on the part of the black oppressed masses.”22 Singling out the Rastafarian group as central to the emergence of black power in Jamaica, Rodney suggests that his meetings with this group gave him a sense of humility. He breaks with the Jamaican class conceptions of race and color when he writes about the local middle-class views of poor black Jamaicans: “The system, says they have nothing, they are illiterates, the dark people of Jamaica … but with the black brothers you learn humility because they are teaching you.”23 Rodney then makes a point that is still being ignored in the discussions about and analysis of Caribbean culture: “You know that some of the best painters and writers are coming out of the Rastafari environment. The Black people in the West Indies have produced all the culture that we have, whether it be steel band or folk music. Black bourgeoisie and white people in the West Indies have produced nothing.”24 Such a statement in 1968, six years after independence, was remarkable.

However, there were three other things about the text: first, its attempt to give a race/class analysis of the postindependence Caribbean; second, its exposition of the relationship between historical studies and revolutionary practice; and third, its detailing of a position on the relationship of the revolutionary intellectuals to mass activity and revolutionary politics in general.

In explaining the workings of race and class in the Caribbean, Rodney identifies a white economically powerful class, a brown (mulatto) and a black middle class who were the beneficiaries of the 1938 workers’ rebellions that swept across the English-speaking Caribbean, ushering in the modern Creole Caribbean nationalist movements. In his effort to break down the ethnic barriers that exist between the Indian and African populations in Trinidad and Guyana, Rodney locates the arrival of both groups in the policies of British colonialism and racial oppression, making the point that the Indian population arrived in the Caribbean as indentured servants. Here I might suggest that if the Caribbean was conceived through the genocide of the native Amerindian population, it grew up through the horrors of racial plantation slavery and came of age with Indian servitude, making the region a laboratory of racial oppression and colonial servitude labor.

Rodney observes that Afro-Caribbean persons often view the Indo-Caribbean population through the lenses of white normativity, and in turn are viewed by the Indo-Caribbean population in like manner. Given the racial context of Guyana, Rodney was not blind to the position of the Indo-Caribbean population. Therefore, in Groundings with My Brothers he applied

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