What
Value Myth Over History?
A
speech prepared for delivery at the May 2016 Anguilla Literary Festival[1]
There
is a question about history that has troubled me for years. The question is, which will serve us better
in striving to construct the Anguillian civilisation: fact or fantasy, history
or myth? Should we try to know our own
history in an accurate sense, or are we better off building on a mythology that
meets our present ideological and psychological needs?
The question arises because I regularly hear
Anguillians with a reputation as intellectuals, or at least as public speakers,
distorting incidents in Anguilla’s history.
Whenever that happens, I am tempted immediately to correct the
error. Then, as I realise how much the
audience is relishing the falsehood, I pause.
I ask the question, is there perhaps some value to the myth being
presented as history?
I start with some local mythologising. Every Saturday morning in Anguilla at 10:00
am, there is a popular radio talk-show on a local radio station. The programme begins with a presentation by an
African American lady on the psychologically damaging, long term effect on
Black US slaves of the vicious doctrine taught in the Willie Lynch speech. While the lady announcer relates what is, in
reality, no more than her promotion of the latest self-improvement book she is
selling, the panellists sit around the studio table, listening to their programme’s
introduction, looking solemn and sorrowful.
The American author’s breathless prose assures us that,
As a race of people, we will never
be physically free until we free ourselves mentally. It is about understanding that hundreds of
years ago, a system was designed, by Master, to build a Mental House of Slavery
that would control our ancestors and destroy our race from within. This system is no longer forced upon us;
therefore we voluntarily decide to live in Master’s House. If we come together, as a people, to stop
pulling each other down and start lifting each other up, we can create a new
system, build a New House, to reclaim our greatness, wealth, and success, to
become a united race of people.
As her narrative progresses, she summarises Willie
Lynch’s speech. He was a West Indian
slave-owner who was invited to the colony of Virginia in the year 1712 to teach
his divide-and-rule methods to slave owners there. The secret for assuring control over the ‘Negro’
for at least the next 300 years, he explained, was to take the differences
among the slaves and make them bigger.
He says,
I use fear, distrust,
and envy for control purposes. These
methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work
throughout the South. Take this simple
little list of differences, and think about them. . . .
. . . You must pitch the old Black male vs. the young Black male, and the
young Black male against the old Black male.
You must use the dark-skin slaves vs. the light-skin slaves and the
light-skin slaves vs. the dark-skin slaves.
You must use the female vs. the male, and the male vs. the female. You must also have your white servants and
overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and
depend on us. They must love, respect
and trust only us.
Black academics and historians have
conclusively established that the Willie Lynch speech is a hoax. There was no slave-owner known as William
Lynch in the West Indies during this period.
No credible historian has ever written about the Willie Lynch speech. None of the abolitionists of the anti-slavery
movement mention him or his alleged speech.
None of the tactics he outlines was important to slave-owners during the
eighteenth century. The divide-and-rule
tactics he espouses are completely different from the real divide-and-rule
tactics used by the slave-owners. The
terms “fool-proof” and “re-fuelling” in his alleged speech are twentieth
century terms that did not exist in the eighteenth or nineteenth
centuries. In 1712, there was no
geographical part of the American Colonies known as the South. The evidence suggests the Willie Lynch speech
was composed as recently as the year 1993.
Louis Farrakhan made it famous when he mentioned it in his 1995 Million
Man March speech.
Professor Manu Ampin, of Oakland, California,
a professor of Africana Studies, specialising in African and African American
history and culture, urges us to rely on first-hand research, instead of myth,
as the most effective weapon against the distortion of African history and
culture. Primary research, he urges, is
the best defence against urban legends and modern myths.[2]
As Professor Ampin so ably argues, we will
not solve our problems, and address the real issues confronting us, by adopting
half-baked urban legends. If there are people
who know that the Willie Lynch speech is fictional, yet continue to promote it
in order to sell books, or even to “wake us up”, then we should be very
suspicious of these people. They lack
integrity, they openly violate our trust, and they willingly lie to us in the
pursuit of their personal profit.
Surely, it is now time for critical Anguillian thinkers to bury the African
American myth of the Willie Lynch speech and take a more mature, West Indian
approach, one more suited to our new Caribbean Civilisation.
There is another fictitious story that is regularly
heard on the radio, and at gatherings of Anguillians who discuss Anguilla’s
struggle to become self-sufficient and self-governing. That is the epic tale of the refusal of our
ancestral Anguillians, newly freed from slavery in 1834, to be forcibly removed
from Anguilla and deported, as the Chagos Islanders were, to the new colony of
British Guiana. We are assured of the
fact, by persons who appear to know, that the colonial authorities put pressure
on our forefathers. They were told they must
leave the drought-stricken and infertile land of Anguilla and emigrate to the
lush and welcoming fields of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo. However, the stalwart Anguillians stoutly
resisted, refused to be moved, and clung patriotically to their beloved “rock”. As a result, we are informed, the British
were blocked in their plan to strip Anguilla of its black “indigenous”
inhabitants so that they could re-populate the island with the white,
unemployed and homeless of Britain.
As usual, this myth springs from a genuine
historical event. The records show that,
after the short-lived Apprenticeship Period ended slavery in Anguilla, some
three boat-loads of newly-freed Anguillians boarded ships and sailed to British
Guiana. The correspondence between the
Governor of the Leeward Islands and the Secretary of State in London reveals
that the Anguillians had been lured by promises of free land, to be given to
them if they would help to populate the supposedly uninhabited interior of
Guiana.[3] Far from encouraging the Anguillians to leave
their island, the colonial government was concerned at the Guianese attempt to
rob the Leeward Islands of much needed, newly-freed labour. The Governor in Antigua begs the Secretary of
State to register a protest with the Governor of British Guiana, and to demand
that he stop stealing Leeward Islands citizens.
And so, we read in the records that it was with
much relief that, some three years after they departed, the Governor of the
Leeward Islands reported to London that the majority of the emigrated
Anguillians had returned to their island, disenchanted with the snake-infested
conditions they met in the jungles of Guiana.
Each time I hear the story repeated,
questions flash through my mind. What
role does this myth of the valiant Anguillian resistance to the alleged British
effort to deport them to Guiana play in the development of a modern Anguillian
consciousness? What could be the agenda
of the persons who perpetuate this urban legend? Is it a foundation-part of the conspiracy
theory that the British are out to destroy Anguilla, as some suggest? Is it intended to drive us to self-hurting actions
that will damage our own long-term development interests? Is it a deliberate effort to drum up racist
discord against the British for political ends?
Or, is it a genuine misunderstanding of the historical record? And, is it a positive myth that will help
Anguillians to become stronger and more self-sufficient?
Maybe Barbados can teach us a lesson in
honest historical research. Barbados,
after all, is the centre of one of our great seats of learning, the Cave Hill
Campus of the University of the West Indies.
We all know the important place that “General Bussa” plays today in
Barbadian national consciousness. Which
educated West Indian does not know the tale of the heroic role that the slave
Bussa, a Ranger on Bayley’s Plantation, played in resisting the cruel system of
Barbadian slavery, resulting in his death at the hands of the white Barbadians
plantocracy in the Bussa Rebellion of 1816?
The only mention of Bussa in any contemporary
record is the Report of the Assembly on the Rebellion, published in
1818. It includes the testimony of five
slaves, only three of whom mention the slave Busso or Busssoe (never Bussa) as
one of the participants. There is
nothing in the contemporary record that suggests Busso was the leader of the
Rebellion. It is only in the narratives
written many years later that he begins to be given a prominent role in the
Rebellion.
After independence, and with the introduction
of a National Heroes system, there was an obvious need for there to be a
genuine Barbadian National Hero of the resistance to plantation slavery. The void was soon filled. Barbadians now enjoy several detailed,
completely made-up, biographical studies of this genuine hero of the two-day
Easter Rebellion: the plantation Ranger,
Bussoe. Out of the thinnest of
historical fact has blossomed an entire industry, circling profitably around a
mythic biography of the Right Excellent Bussa, National Hero. A large, imaginary statue of Bussa, broken
chains of slavery dangling from his wrists, exults in freedom in the centre of
the ABC Highway.[4] As a result of what we might call ‘this
little white lie’ about General Bussa, countless Barbadians feel prouder of
their heritage. No doubt, the Bussa myth
serves the admirable purpose of whipping up patriotic sentiment, and feelings
of pride and national identity. But, it
is not history.
I ask myself, what damage must this tale of
the fictitious “Bussa” do to the psychology of the objective black Barbadian intellectual
who bothers to do the research, and who must eventually realise that his feelings
of pride and self-worth have been constructed on a modern fabrication? Should he encourage this fraudulent strategy
for the development of a national consciousness, or should he insist on the truth? What torment must honest Barbadian academics
go through who are too terrified of political and social back-lash to speak out
against the promotion of this fiction as truth?
The problem of ‘white-washing’ history is not
unique to us in the West Indies. The British
are notorious for misusing their own history for national purposes. There is an interesting article by Simon
Akam, an Oxford-educated Reuter’s correspondent in Sierra Leone, in The New
Republic[5]
in which he explores the question, “Why
don’t the British teach their students about imperial history?” He points out that
There is no British Imperial
History 101, so to speak. As it is,
instruction of British history is wont to concentrate on “Hitler and the
Henrys”—World War II and the colourful Tudor monarchs of the late fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, Henry VIII and his six wives first among them.
And,
he concludes that
The lacuna in the British
curriculum, the refusal to discuss imperialism in-depth, is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that Britain as a
nation has not settled on its own view of its past.
Why is the history of the British Empire and
of British Colonialism cleaned up and bowdlerised in their High School
curriculum? Could the answer be that the
historical facts are too shameful? Would
the real truth about colonialism make British people cease to feel so proud of
their Britishness? Is the myth of the
decent British administrator bringing civilisation to the savage colonial a better
narrative for the present-day British soul?
Historian David Abraham urges that myths are
important to human civilisation.[6] Myths existed before art, before language or
the written word. The mythic cave
paintings of Lascaux in France and Alta Mira in Spain are over 30,000 years
old, created long before modern languages developed.
Myths have a role to play in human life and
imagination. Myths are undoubtedly
important for the growth of human civilisation.
Myths sprung up long before religion.
The stories in the Book of Genesis are a retelling of universal mythic
themes such as the Creation of the World, the first Man and Woman, Heaven and
Earth, the great Flood, Dragons and Serpents.
The great mythic themes were known before literature. All great works of literature are based upon
mythic themes or stories. Noah’s Ark,
Jonah and the Whale, Moby Dick, and even the movie Titanic, are all stories
about man’s struggle with the sea of the unconscious.
Myth was before philosophy and science. The same questions that religion used to ask,
our sciences now try to answer. Even
though we are now more enlightened and technological, we still need to feel
protected, warm, well-fed, happy, and doing good.
Could it be that feeling proud about
ourselves and our heritage is of such great importance for public wellbeing and
social cohesiveness, that it justifies tweaking the past, replacing the facts
with myth. Is there, then, a legitimate
role for myth in national consciousness?
Is there is a valid reason, in terms of national development, for
powerful myths to become more important than accurate history? The answer to the question I posed at the
beginning becomes clear. It is never
justifiable for myth to supplant historical fact.
This is the view of most serious academics
and historians. Sir Anthony Seldon,
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, urges[7] that
History teaching should always be
honest, or it is merely propaganda by powerful interest groups. The history of the British Empire was not all
bad, and not all good. Understanding its
subtlety and its importance to British and world history is essential for every
single student.
Why does it matter what happened a long time
ago? Professor Penelope Cornfield of the
University of London has written[8] that
history is important because it is inescapable.
It connects things through time and encourages students to take the long
view of connections. All people are
living histories.
We speak languages we inherited from the
past. We live in societies with complex
cultures, traditions and religions that were not created on the spur of the
moment. We use technologies we have not
ourselves invented. Each individual is a
personal variant of an inherited genetic template, known as the genome, which
has evolved during the entire life-span of the human species.
Understanding the linkages between the past
and the present is absolutely basic for an appreciation of the condition of
being human. The study of the past is
essential for rooting people in time.
People who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lives. Some of us, unfortunately, lacking a sense of
roots, grow up with a weak or troubled sense of our own placing. The result has been the rise of the gangs and
the taking up of guns that we see in our towns and villages today.
The only cure for ignorance is
education. The Anguilla Public Library’s
radio jingle that “Reading is fun-damental” must take root, so that the next
generation of Anguillians will pay more attention to learning the facts and
avoiding the half-truths and untruths that our present generation seem to enjoy
so much. There is, in my submission,
nothing intellectual or excellent in the promotion of historical myth.
It is only by encouraging in Anguilla the
writing and publishing of poetry, plays, novels and academic texts that an
intellectual tradition will be established in Anguilla. The founders and promoters of this Anguilla
Literary Festival are to be congratulated for leading the way in this effort. This celebration of local authorship, and the
enjoyment of regional and international art and literature, introduces into our
community an urging for the supremacy of intellectual excellence.
[1] A
speech prepared for the delivery at the May 2016 Anguilla Literary Festival,
but not delivered when I realised it was too long. I gave a summary instead.
[3] CO.239/56,
Despatch No 61/71 of 28 November 1838. Sir William Colebrooke, Governor of the
Leeward Islands, to Lord John Russel, Secretary of State.
CO.239/55, Despatch No 40/2040 of
10 July 1839: Colebrooke to Lord Russel.
CO.239/59, Despatch No 34/1620 of
15 July 1840: Colebrooke to Lord Russel.
CO.239/59, Despatch No 35/1624 of
18 July 1840: Colebrooke to Lord Russel.
CO.407/6, folio 184, 23 January
1840: Lord Russel to Colebrooke.
