BY: EARLE CLARKE — 10|10|2022
“When the month of the elderly comes around in October, there should be radio and television programmes highlighting the contribution those elderlies have made to the advancement of the Federation, lest the younger generation feel that their present standard of living was always the way it was. TREMENDOUS sacrifices were made by preceding generations, so that the younger generation could now enjoy what they are presently enjoying. If the true history be told, greater appreciation would be shown for what they have today and pay tribute to the sacrifices made yesterday.” — Kennedy Earle Clarke
When the proclamation of the abolition of slavery was announced in 1835, the slave masters who had us working for them for free and reaping humongous profits all those years, demanded compensation for the loss of their slaves, whom they deemed their property. While they haggled for compensation for three years (1835-1838) we were supposed to be freed, but continued working for them with chains on our hands and shackles on our feet. Having been satisfactorily compensated in 1838, the chains and the shackles fell off, but we still had to turn around and work for our former slave masters under the same slave-like conditions and under their terms, for we did not possess any bargaining power!
The only thing free were our hands and feet, but we were still slaves, working under the same slave-like conditions sunrise to sunset. In the 1804 Haitian Revolution, the French slave masters demanded from the victorious Revolutionaries that they be compensated for the slaves who were working for free all those years, but joined the Revolution to free themselves from the same slavery. The Revolutionaries were threatened with invasion and the other capitalist countries threatened not to trade with them, if they did not compensate the French slave masters. What a crooked world we live in?
They, who worked the slaves for free for some 400 years, reaping huge profits from their toil and misery, were compensated, but now the freed slaves are demanding reparations for their enslavement all those 400 years, it is too great a topic to be discussed? This dehumanizing, exploitative, oppressive capitalist system: In what way, in what form, can this unjust economic system be used to really and truly liberate the Black Race? Will somebody please point out to me how this Mission Impossible could be made possible? If a white man steps on my small toe, I am going to push him off, because I am feeling pain and, if a Black brother steps on my small toe, I am not going to grin and bear it. I am uncomfortably feeling pain and discomfort and I am going to shove him off, because pain is pain and oppression is oppression. The capitalist system reeks of oppression, degradation, exploitation, squalour and, be it white or Black oppression, it is all the same, because that is the nature of the system called capitalism, which could never liberate my people!!
History is a subject which forces us to take a look back into the past, for, if there was no past, there could never be a present and a future. Yet, so many of us are mortally ashamed and afraid to even glance back at where we came from, we are so hell bent on giving the false impression that we are, who we are not and we expect people to take us wholly and solely for the fakes we pretend to be. People have to respect and accept Kennedy Earle Clarke for who he is, because the song, “The Great Pretender,” was never his favourite. It was the hymn, “Just as I am without one plea,” that has always been his favourite. When others accept and respect you for whom you are, you can act your natural self. You don’t have to be afraid of any unwarranted exposure!
There was a time when there were no flush toilets; people defecated (bowel movement) on the pastures, on the bay sand, in cane fields; some used a potty and then dumped the content in a bucket placed somewhere in the yard for that purpose. Some would go near that bucket, ease their bowels, scrape up the contents and place it in that bucket. When that bucket was filled, my grandmother would wake me up at 3 or 4am, and I would accompany her to New Town beach, where she dumped the stuff, cleaned out the bucket with shrubs growing on the beach and then returned home. There was a young man who was always drunk called Peter, who charged 3 pence (6 cents) to dump your bucket for you and he would take three buckets, one balancing on his head and one in either hand.
For cooking, we cooked on three stones in the yard, using either wood or dried sugar cane as fuel. The affluents (well offs) used coal pots and charcoal as fuel. A clay pot was cooked in and the more fortunate used an iron pot with three legs to stand on; there was a piece of wire attached to two hooks on the side of the iron pot, which made it easy to place it on the fire, or to take it off. I forgot to mention that we knew nothing about toilet paper; our toilet paper was castor leaf bush, lizard tree bush, barricader bush or the dry husk of the sugar cane. If construction was taking place nearby, we would gather the cement bags, tear away the soiled cement part and used the clean parts as toilet paper.
What did we know about relish with our breakfast at mornings which consisted of bread and bush tea, or the dried cassava bread and bush tea? If you knocked down a ground dove, took out its entrails and roasted it in the fire hole of the coal pot, then you had relish, but you had to share the delicacy with your brothers and sisters. If you were sent to buy the bread in the morning and they just came out of the oven, you could ask the shopkeeper to run the red butter ladle across those bread and you had bread and butter for breakfast. We had to head water from the lone standpipe in the street and we had to arise 4 and 5 am to fill up the buckets, the tubs, the bath pans, the goblet because our mother washed for the white people in the city.
The reason why we had to arise early to start heading water was that water was locked off every day at 9 am and everybody had to fill up their tubs, bath pans, goblets and every available utensil that could hold water, for it was not returning until about 5 or 6 pm. To facilitate the bathing of skin, the Government of the day erected public baths and toilets (boreholes); the baths were alright, but for most times the toilets were unusable because the users did not leave them for other users to enjoy. When the public baths were used, there was a male and female section. There was no use of soap; the water ran over our bodies and what did we know about bath towels? By the time we ran home from the bath, our skins were dried.