Still looking for comments

More on the subject of Creole nationalism:

Challenging colonial rule requires the advancement of a new form of identity, one that replaces the pseudo-national identity of colonial subject with that of a territorial citizen – Jamaican colonials, British subjects all, are transformed into Jamaicans. Fostering such an identity requires challenging the mythologies constructed by colonial rulers and the intellectuals who bolstered their rule between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, this requires defining the colonial state as driven not by humanitarian concerns to advance the best interests of subject peoples, but by the predatory desire to exploit those peoples and the lands in which they lived through the maintenance of established hierarchies and assumptions about the proper exercise of power.[1]

This transformation involves making three basic claims:

(1) That the colonised people of the West Indies, or specifically of the individual colonies, constituted a nation, or nations, formed by history out of the disparate peoples who settled or were settled in the territory.

(2) That continued colonial rule prevented the subject people from developing their inherent creative powers and achieving their proper destiny in the world. And, consequently, that colonial rule needed to be brought to an end.

(3) That the experience of colonial rule had prepared the subject people for independent action in a Western-dominated world either by their complete Westernization or by the blending of Western and non-Western elements into a new national culture.

These claims form the core of what we can call “Creole Nationalism” as a political doctrine. In the West Indies, British high culture had been wedded to African peoples and their cultures and practices and Asian peoples and their cultures and practices to form a new Creole culture Western in orientation yet containing elements from all the sources that made up the West Indian peoples. In other words, colonial rule had prepared the colonial subjects for independence and no further tutelage would be needed.

In reality, the claim of West Indian Creoles that they were ready to govern themselves faced two challenges over the period between the abolition of slavery and the Second World War. The first, which we will discuss in greater depth in the next chapter, was the white racist belief that people of colour, whether African, South Asian, or any mixture of the foregoing, were inherently inferior and incapable of self-government. That Africans and Indians had been governing themselves for millennia before the arrival of Western colonialism was brushed aside as irrelevant. Religion, science, and imperial arrogance united in the assumption that persons who were not of northwestern European origin were inferior to those who were and thus ought to be under the control of their betters.

The second was a reaction to the first. This was the view that there were inherent differences between black and white, and that in response to white European imperialism black people had to seek a common identity and common political unity on the basis both of reaction to colonialism and imperialism and of racial and geographic unity as Africans. That is to say, black nationalism and Afrocentrism were seen as forming the proper basis of political action and all persons of African descent were supposed to give their loyalty to a common African polity. The black nationalist conception of politics and identity involved two different, but related approaches to resolving the dilemma resulting from an African presence in the Caribbean (and the African diaspora in general). One was a return to Africa in order to escape both the places of enslavement and the memory and effects of that enslavement. The other was the creation of Afrocentric polities in the diaspora as extensions of a reified Africa that would, in the aftermath of colonial and imperial rule, come to be united on the basis of racial and geographic unity.

The belief that continued and continuous white supremacy was backed by the intellectual power of British savants who spoke and wrote in justification of the globe-spanning empire that reached its full fruition in the late Victorian period. Its Afrocentric opposite reflected folk beliefs, and what Anthony Bogues calls a prophetic tradition, with the harshness and arbitrariness of colonial rule as the best arguments for it.

In between, Creole nationalists struggled both to lay claim to the Western intellectual heritage and to an African heritage which, if less valued, could not be denied and would eventually be celebrated as an essential ingredient in the West Indian pepperpot.

---

[1] F.S.J. Ledgister “Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Eric Williams on Race and Rule in the West Indies”; Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, XXVI (1999), 1.