What is wrong with Ms Dynamite’s request to David Farquarson?
What has surprised
me most in these past centuries of human enlightenment is that it has not carried all human sections in its wagon. It seems that many of us are still fully blinded to a few complex phenomena of human existence. This is, for instance, the case of those of us who have not yet realised that Western Negroes from their respective Western nations actually work in tandem with their fellow Caucasians, sharing the proceeds of their activities around the world.
This is even the reason why, on the question of the slave trade and the brutalities that Black people went through in the hands of White people, I find it pretty irritating to see people talking in terms of apology and compensation demands between these two Western entities; I mean, the Western Negro and the Caucasian.
On one of the programmes that were dedicated to the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, in 2007, I saw Naomi Mclean-Daley, the English pop singer known as Ms Dynamite, on television, trying to pressurise David Farquarson, the White Jamaican descendent of an English slave owner, to apologise for living ‘in a beautiful house in the middle of paradise knowing that the only reason he was able to live that type of life was because his ancestors had tortured, raped and stolen from a whole set of people.’
I must confess that I have always had serious trouble making sense of Naomi’s request; because if we choose to go down this way, we may end up with no idea of who should apologise for what. Perhaps today’s Western descendents of slaves – such as Naomi herself – should begin to apologise to their own ancestors for enjoying word class education and health care delivered in universities and hospitals that were built out of the proceeds of the torture and rape of their own ancestors; not to mention a myriad of other types of public facilities that they enjoy in England and that were all built out of the blood of their ancestors. I would normally have expected them to boycott all these institutions and facilities for that reason. Quite bizarrely, they don’t. In the meantime, they expect, and even request Mr Farquarson to boycott his assets, whilst they themselves do not boycott theirs. What type of mind can reason like that? Does this even merit being referred to as reasoning of any form?
The question here is: is Ms Dynamite’s own paradise in England any different from David Farquarson’s paradise in Jamaica whilst much of both paradises was built out of the proceeds of slavery?
I am now tempted to believe that if we look a bit further into this trend of thinking (if I may refer to it as a form of thinking at all – thinking is a very noble activity!), we may realise how appropriate it would probably be for today’s Western Negroes to leave a will to their great-grand-children in their turn to apologise to the great-grand-children of today’s African Negroes for the continual rape of African lands and the massacres and mutilations of today’s African Negroes, all plotted by Western powers for the enrichment of their nations out of African gold, diamonds, oil, uranium etc. etc. and the proceeds of which the Western Negroes share collectively without even thinking about it.
This is what happens when you are not sharp enough to make the difference between ‘evil’ and ‘system’; when you are not perceptive enough to see how much of a beneficiary you may yourself be of the proceeds of a system that may have brutalised some groups in the past, and that may still be brutalising some other groups at present. But this is just not the point that I am interested in making here. My point is that, beyond the blame mentality and the marketing cult, there is a difference to make between here and there.
It is the African Negro’s own weakness, his inability to defend himself in his own world – because any system of exploitation that has ever existed in human evolution has always had its roots planted on the heads of the weakest amongst the parties of the enterprise – that has made it possible for the people of the West (formerly Whites only, but now Blacks and Whites together) to live in paradise out of the African Negro’s blood.
In the end, I am not of the view that anyone should apologise at all, except the Negro himself, to himself: to apologise to himself for being so weak as to allow others to treat him the way they have done and still do – because this is what happens when you are not good enough to say NO! When you think that you are not as good as they are! When you believe that you can’t do without them! This is what happens in the end.
Source: New Book: “What is Wrong with Black People? – How Post-slave Psychology and Afrocentricity are joining with Colonialism to undermine Black Africa’s Cultural Integrity” (2007), by Joe Mintsa. For more info, please visit http://www.JoeMintsa.net