Ian Isidore Smart, Ph

1

Ian Isidore Smart, Ph.D.

The Role of Cultural Diversity in the Development of the Americas

This is a study commissioned by the Unit of Social Development, Education and Culture of the Organization of American States under the following terms of reference:

Using the hemispheric reality as a foundation, preparing a study of the theme: “The role of Cultural Diversity in the Development of the Americas”. The impact of cultural diversity on the economic, social reality and development of the Americas should be measured/studied at the national, regional, hemispheric levels.

Including:

The Ministers of Culture of CARICOM (and associated members) have a mechanism of meetings and permanent consultations, taking that reality as a foundation,

1.What focus or foci have been given to cultural diversity?

2.What capacity does cultural diversity have in the construction of national identity?

3.How can ancestral cultural diversity be maintained while simultaneously allowing for the achievement of modernization/development?

4.What role has been given to diversity as a possible instrument/catalyst of development?

5.Do all (some) of the countries affiliated with CARICOM (and associated members) have regional or national cultural policies that include cultural diversity as an engine/catalyst for development?

6.What strategies can be implemented with the collaboration of International Organizations, the IDB and World Bank?

7. What quantitative and qualitative information supports the thesis of the document?

Introduction

The idea of diversity has tended to ground the traditional approach by academe to the Caribbean. As we move into the twenty-first century this approach has to be revisited. Our paper will begin with a review of the very concept of diversity as it applies to Caribbean reality. Having clarified this issue, the study will proceed. Since Carnival is so central to Caribbean culture, our study will be centered on the Carnival phenomenon and will respond specifically to the questions posed in our mandate.

Cultural diversity has been the basis of academic approaches to the Caribbean reality. The assumption is made that each of the islands and territories of the region has developed a peculiar, sui generis cultural tradition. This assumption has been diligently promoted by scholars and, therefore, uncritically accepted by the policy makers in the governmental, nongovernmental, and academic spheres of each of the nations and territories of CARICOM (and associated members). As a result, the man in the street of the region tends to view the Caribbean as a culturally very diverse entity. On the other hand, many are the voices of the practitioners of culture, which proclaim the cultural unity of the region. One such voice is that of Black Stalin, one of the renowned oral poets (griots) of Trinidad and Tobago. In his 1979 Kaiso, “The Caribbean Man,” Stalin declared:

Them is one race

The Caribbean man

From the same place

The Caribbean man

That make the same trip

The Caribbean man

On the same ship

The Caribbean man. (Quoted in Central American Writers 5)

Black Stalin’s view of the regional cultural reality is generally shared by the artists and intellectuals who are native to the region.

In 1948 the British colonial machine established a native university in the Anglophone Caribbean. It was called the University College of the West Indies and was sited in Mona, Jamaica. It was intended to be the West Indian University, serving all of the English-speaking islands and territories of the region. These included British Honduras (now Belize) and British Guiana (now Guyana), and they were all at the time British colonial possessions. The University of the West Indies still serves Belize, however Guyana has created its own institution of tertiary education, the University of Guyana. A CARICOM university has existed, then, for over a half century. The University of the West Indies is still a single entity with major campuses now in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago in addition to the flagship campus in Mona, Jamaica. In spite of this basic manifestation of cultural unity, the majority of the very academics who staff the regional university appear to have accepted unquestioningly the cultural diversity paradigm as the preferred one.

In the United States, one nation under God, every one of the fifty states has its own system of institutions of tertiary education. The University of Maryland is quite distinct and different from the University of California, etc. etc. However, scholars routinely propose the melting pot (or at least the salad bowl) model as the appropriate point of departure for discussing the cultural reality of the United States. The various nations of Europe have moved towards a political unity expressed in the European Union. A French citizen who was born in 1860 and lived for eight-five years would have experienced in his flesh and blood three explosions of savage tribal conflict between the Gauls and the Germans, namely, the Franco-Prussian War, World War 1, and World War 11. This person’s grandchildren live in a world in which France and Germany have become merely units in an overarching European state. Clearly, French and German are still two quite distinct languages. Clearly, French and German cultural traditions are quite distinct. The cultural diversity paradigm would appear to be quite appropriate for a study of the European Union. However, the academy has tended to focus on the cultural unity rather than the cultural diversity of Europe.

In a watershed article, “African Philosophical Systems  A Rational Reconstruction,” the Trinidadian scholar, Lancine Keita posits, “modern African thought is equipped, therefore, with a foundation on which new structures could be developed” (170). Keita has followed in the footsteps of Cheikh Anta Diop who was the most impressive of the twentieth century scholars to present arguments for the cultural unity of Africa. Keita cites also, for example, J. Olumide Lucas who “argues for religious, cultural and linguistic kinships between the Yorubas of West Africa and the ancient Egyptians” (177). The academy, which accepts so readily the cultural unity of Europe, rejects outright any argument for the analogous unity in Africa.

In May 2000, we had the privilege of being invited to speak at the University of Birmingham, England under the auspices of the Department of Spanish. We were politely but firmly chided for suggesting a profound kinship between contemporary Africans, such as the Yoruba, and the people of Ancient Egypt. We were deemed to be “romancing Africa,” to be unfaithful to the cultural reality. Our response on that occasion is instructive. We affirmed categorically the right of Africans (even those who happened to be born in the Caribbean or in the Diaspora) to speak authoritatively on things African. Statements of this kind are to considered privileged by non-Africans, whose most fitting response would have to be one of respectful and attentive silence.

Keita affirms in his article:

On the other hand, there is no historical evidence to show that there are any cultural affinities between Greek culture and that of, say, the Gauls and Vandals of Europe. Yet the philosophical writings of Descartes were inspired mainly by Greek thought and not by the traditional beliefs of the Gallic or Norman people. And there is nothing in Leibniz’ writings to suggest that the rationalism he espoused was derived from the lore and myth of the unlettered Vandals. (178)

Indeed, the romantic movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century was hailed as a vindication of the indigenous northern European genius vis-à-vis the Greco-Roman (Mediterranean) one. The latter is classical, whereas the former is romantic.

Keita continues:

And although there is no known evidence that there exists any relationship whatever between the purely indigenous belief systems of the pre-modern peoples of Europe [the romantic tradition] and classical Greek thought [the classical tradition, per se], all Europe claims the Greek heritage. One might venture to argue that classical Greek thought was accepted as the intellectual foundation of modern Europe thought mainly because it satisfied the criteria of philosophy, that is, that the Greeks were the first Europeans to articulate cogent and systematic theories about the nature of the world. (178)

The European scholar, Martin Bernal, published in 1987 (a decade after Keita’s article first appeared) the first volume of his groundbreaking work, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. On the first page of the main body of his text Bernal declares:

These volumes are concerned with two models of Greek history: one viewing Greece as essentially European or Aryan, and the other seeing it as Levantine, on the periphery of the Egyptian and Semitic cultural area. I call them the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Ancient’ models. The ‘Ancient Model’ was the conventional view among Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages. According to it, Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilized the native inhabitants. Furthermore, Greeks had continued to borrow heavily from Near Eastern cultures. (1)

One full generation before Bernal, in 1954, George G. M. James, a scholar from British Guiana (now Guyana) penned the powerful volume, Stolen Legacy, with the very explicit if somewhat cumbersome subtitle, The Greeks were not the authors of Greek Philosophy, but the people of North Africa, commonly called the Egyptians. James’s arguments are compelling. Although Bernal has declared explicitly that he was unaware of the work of James, Black Athena is beyond doubt the intellectual child of Stolen Legacy. Furthermore, there is reason to suspect that contrary to his written declaration, Bernal was indeed very aware of James’s work before he wrote Black Athena.

Bernal asserts:

Most people are surprised to learn that the Aryan Model, which most of us have been brought up to believe, developed only during the first half of the 19th century . . .. According to the Aryan Model, there had been an invasion from the north  unreported in ancient tradition  which had overwhelmed the local `Aegean’ or `Pre-Hellenic’ culture . . .. It is from the construction of this Aryan Model that I call this volume The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985. (1-2)

It is not without significance that the “Fabrication of Ancient Greece” is exactly coterminous with the development of the “Enlightenment” and the establishment of “modernity.” We have argued that there is a profound connection between these phenomena.

Europe at the end of the eighteenth century had become outrageously wealthy as a consequence of the enslavement of Africans. Yet the “Ancient Model” affirmed unequivocally that these Africans (deemed by the framers of the United States Constitution to be three-fifths human) were the originators of civilization. The French intellectual Count Constantine Francis Chassebeuf de Volney was a contemporary of the framers of the United States Constitution. The Frenchman, however, understood the primacy of Africa, declaring in his work, Ruins of Empire:

There [in so-called “darkest Africa”] a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems that still govern the universe. (Quoted in Amazing Connections 13)

Unwilling to give up the immense wealth generated by the greatest of crimes against humanity, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Europeans opted to rewrite history. They, as Bernal put it, “fabricated Ancient Greece.” They called this process”enlightenment” and declared it the beginning of modernity. It was, in effect, obfuscation and the installation of white supremacy.

Keita sums up poignantly:

As was indicated in this paper, the origins of Greek thought were non-European, but latter-day European nationalism sought to ascribe an independent origin to Greek thought, hence, the concept of the Greek miracle. Greek thought, like the religious movement, Christianity, was important for European civilization in that it fostered cultural homogeneity over a culturally disparate group of peoples. Witness, for example, the significant fact that the heritage of the Greeks is maintained even in modern mathematics by the purely arbitrary usage of Greek letters as mathematical symbols. Europe claims the Greek heritage, but the concept of Europe was alien to the Greek mind. European philosophy is best seen, therefore, as an artificial construction serving the function of maintaining the cultural and racial integrity of those peoples who live west of Asia. (178)

Keita goes on to assert: “On the other hand, a stronger case can be made for important cultural links between the civilization of ancient Egypt and other African societies” (178). In the more than two decades since Keita first wrote his article the evidence has become overwhelming not only in support of the “African Origin of Civilization” but also of the “Cultural Unity of Africa.”

The cultural unity of Africa under girds the cultural unity of the Caribbean and especially that of CARIOM (and associated members). It seems utterly unbalanced to posit the cultural homogeneity of European peoples while downplaying or even downright disparaging the cultural homogeneity of people who number some five million and who speak the same language. In the introduction to his 1978 book, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, the Jamaican scholar Franklin W. Knight states quite clearly:

The concept of the Caribbean endorsed in this book emphasizes cultural commonalities rather than political chronology, without neglecting the importance of the latter. In my view, the region comprises one culture area in which common factors have forged a more-or-less common way of looking at life, the world, and their place in the scheme of things. All of the societies of the Caribbean share an identifiable Weltanschauung, despite the superficial divisions that are apparent. The difference in belief, values, and attitudes of the Trinidadian and the Guyanese is perhaps no greater than that between the English and the Welsh, or the Castilian and the Andalusian. Moreover, the Caribbean peoples, with their distinctive artificial societies, common history, and common problems, seem to have more in common than the Texan and the New Yorker, or the Mayan Indian and the cosmopolite of Mexico City do in their respective nations of the United States and Mexico. (xi)

The time has come for us to put to rest forever the approach to the study of the Caribbean which privileges the concept of cultural diversity. This approach is posited on the Machiavellian principle of divide and conquer, divide et impera. The principle of unity in diversity is on the other hand one of those systems referenced by Count Volney as having been founded by Africans on the study of the laws of nature. It is one of the cardinal epistemological principles. Arguably the most important application of this principle is a passage “from a hymn to the god [Amun] that was written in Dynasty 19, probably during the reign of Ramesses 11, on a papyrus that is now in the Netherlands National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden” (Allen 182).

James P. Allen, a contemporary white American scholar, who is the curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, has given the academy one of the most cogent presentations on the Leiden papyrus. Allen’s translation of the powerful passage is as follows:

All the gods are three:

Amun, Re, and Ptah, without their second.

His identity is hidden in Amun,

His is Re as face, his body is Ptah.

He goes on to declare:

This passage, the most famous in the Leiden papyrus, recognizes the existence of a single god (in the singular pronoun “his”) but accepts, at the same time, three separate aspects of the god: existing apart from nature (as Amun), yet visible in and governing nature (as Re), and the source of all things in nature (as Ptah). These lines have been regarded as the ultimate expression not only of Egyptian creation accounts but also of the entire 3,000-year history of Egyptian theology. (183)

The overwhelming majority of the citizens of CARICOM (and associated members) are of African ancestry. It is most fitting, therefore, that they, as the direct descendants of the discoverers of the civil and religious systems which still govern the universe, be the primary beneficiaries of the most fundamental of the systems bequeathed by their ancestors to all humanity. Rather than thwarting their aspirations to full development with the burden of cultural diversity, the academy must begin to promote the thrust toward full empowerment through the mechanism of a productive and liberating heuristic paradigm. This paradigm is cultural unity in diversity.

There is no better manifestation of the power of the unity in diversity principle than Carnival in CARICOM (and associated members). The Trinidad and Tobago Carnival is widely regarded as the most prominent of the Carnivals in CARICOM. However, Carnival is central to the cultural life of every single CARICOM nation. Most importantly, Carnival is the most significant engine of potential development for all of these nations individually and for the region as a whole.