SHABAKA KAMBON
ON MAY 4 the Newsday published a letter to the editor by Fatima Mohammed under the title "Kambon vs Maharaj: Pot calling kettle black." Mohammed used the letter to endorse the irresponsible and now infamous race mythology attributed to Pundit Satyanand Maharaj that 'Urban miscreants…with the same complexion, from the same ethnic group' are involved in co-ordinated or premeditated attacks on Indian citizens.
Despite admitting that her support for Maharaj's statements were based 'only on memory, experience and observations,' Mohammed proceeded to condemn the broad cross section of the national community who rightly took issue with his divisive pronouncements and singled me out for special attention:
'Kambon has accused Maharaj of incitement of racial hatred and violence but he himself has led mobs of people to rename Milner Hall at UWI to Freedom Hall in 2018. He campaigned for the removal of Christopher Columbus statues across the country. Isn't this a calculated reckless, racial hatred against white people? The next step is for him to pull down Mahatma Gandhi's statue in Port of Spain.'
The fact that Mohammed cannot see that something is wrong with Maharaj's statements and that she confuses my efforts to end the glorification of racists with race hatred speaks volumes about our post-colonial education.
In our haste to create enlightened citizens that would be pillars of our emergent democracies, we in the Caribbean chose at independence to focus on issues of access and participation rather than content and organisation.
The tragic consequence of this is that we inadvertently amplified the reach of the socially corrosive values embedded in the colonial pedagogy ensuring that a white supremacist world view which accommodated genocide, slavery, indentureship and apartheid would cast a long and burdensome shadow over our present.
Reverential monuments to the likes of Alfred Milner, Thomas Picton, Ralph Woodford, Lady Young and Christopher Columbus are the tangible manifestations of this colonial pedagogy. According to the research of British social anthropologist Alfred Gell, 'agency can inhere in [these] graven images,' they can be vectors of the values of those whom they glorify and those who erected them.
In other words we maintain with taxpayers' money vectors of the values that are at the core of our current nexus of problems. In the grip of this reality, poor Mohammed cannot see the contradiction between her concern for the memorialisation of Gandhi and that of Milner.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an anti-colonial Indian nationalist who lead the successful non-violent campaign for India's independence from British rule.
Lord Viscount Alfred Milner was a self-proclaimed 'British race supremacist' who championed aggressive military colonialism in Africa and India as the God-given right of the English. He played a pivotal role in the creation of racial apartheid in South Africa and the brutal Indian indentured servitude there and disparaged people like Gandhi as 'dange
