Who are we? We are Second-Generation Panamanians of West Indian descent! (Cont'd)
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The Bitter Truth!
The current struggling conditions of today can only be understood by studying the forces effective in the development of our education; which was determined prior and immediately after Emancipation in 1838 through 1848 in the Caribbean Islands by the British, French and Danes.
Brought from Africa by force and violence and cut off from their kindred and people, the uprooted slaves were mercilessly subjected in their new environment to forced and severe deculturation. In time, (in this case over 300 years) they were raped of their identity, robbed of their language, education and culture. It’s necessary to mention here that when people steal from other people, redress always comes, though not for a very long time and in unexpected forms.
After Emancipation, the British colonial methods of dealing with freedmen included cooptation of light-skinned blacks, cajolery, and inflating local pride. That is, they absorbed talented mulattoes into the bureaucracies as a buffer to reduce friction and unpleasantness between the tiny white elite and the black masses. They also promoted rivalry and jealousy among the Islands in order to prevent the formation of Pan-Caribbean sentiments that might lead to an anti-colonialist movement. Inhabitants of each island were taught that they were better than those of other islands. By permitting the British to determine for them the attitude that they should have toward their own people, resulted in the enslavement of their minds. After several generations of this mindset, the WIs found it hard to get along with one another, and thus, the statement, “The Negro mind tends to concern itself with trifles rather than with the great problems of life.” Quoting Dr. Carter Woodson, “When you control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions.”
Finally, the British elite developed new labor techniques that circumvented our forefathers’ natural desire for freedom from supervision. Sugar planters began buying cane from peasant producers and gradually induced dependence upon cash income that bound the blacks to the mills. They imbued artisans with pride in their work and in the larger enterprise of making the Islands’ economies productive. These British subjects came to prize their connection with the greatest nation on earth. To most, labor was the most important thing in life even for some with a “practical” education. (Except for mathematics and science, however, these practical applications had little value in the development of one’s mind.) Denied land and education, for the most part, the freedmen were assigned the hardest, and poorly paid jobs.
The British considered these controlling tactics one of their great achievements because it served to assure, over time, that this assembly of blacks from the West Indies would cease to remember that they were once held as slaves, and that they had been oppressed. However, when the Islands’ economies became a shamble, they soon realized that the Islands could never prosper and began encouraging their subjects to immigrate. As a result, they began "farming them out" to various countries in Central America as laborers. The very survival of the Islands required that a portion of the young men work abroad at all times. The British, however, sent some of their enforcers/best minds of this manipulative practice, to these countries to assure their colonial subjects were properly “supervised” and that their controlling mind tactics remained effective. (Cont'd)
