Independent Colonials & The Politics of Disempowerment

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FRANZ ROH in a 1925 critique on German painters, is said to have coined the phrase “magic realism” (magischer realismus). The painters’ works, he observed, were marked by sharply-defined images of figures depicted surrealistically, on subjects often imaginary, outlandish and fantastic, which he described as “magic realism.”

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By the 1940s the term began to be associated with certain kinds of fiction, and by the 1980s, Latin American writers, particularly, were being associated with a kind of fiction that involved mingling of bizarre, convoluted, fantastic plots, which used dreams and fantasy, and myths, juxtaposed with real events.

It is believed to have been conceived as a response to the Latin American reality.

As countries previously ruled despotically, as colonies, and now navigating through new-found independent status with no long-established institutions or freedoms, they allowed for information to easily be manipulated or commandeered by power groups.

It made truth a provisional and relative entity; more communal and collaborative, rather than as residing in individual perceptions.

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“What’s the story of Latin America, if not a chronicle of the marvellous in the real,” Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier observed.

Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, commenting on the same technique used in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, noted, “you can get people to believe anything if you tell it convincingly enough”.

They, the new writers of Latin America’s newly independent, sovereign nations, in an outpouring of nascent literature, were writing about the Latin American reality, which, now with a prospering guns and drugs trade, extreme poverty in the midst of plenty, political unrest and social unease, to all the world has come to mean one thing — corruption, corruption, corruption.

Their reality was not much different from our own — built on nepotism, corruption, favouritism, short-sightedness and self-centredness. Like the Latin American people who surrendered to the marvellous rhetoric of their charismatic leaders, in gaining our Independence we surrendered our sovereignty. And they, our leaders, little more than sons of massas themselves, donned the massas’ threads, the massas’ indifference to the slavishly loyal flocks, and the massas’ sense that the public purse, and power with which they were entrusted were theirs to do with as they pleased.

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Fifty-eight years ago, when Queen Lizzie and the Brits symbolically packed their bags, we were given a country — black and brown and blue and beige of us, and told we could call it our own.

Emerging out of what we believed to be an alien, oppressive colonial regime, and now free to govern ourselves, in mythological terms it was like the Miltonic paradise regained; a new world, our own,

which we could fill with whatever we wished. The possibilities were endless.

The sky was the limit. What the imagination could conceive it could believe.

That’s the power the politicians were given. And because the new leaders were of own: our own colours, of own histories,our own cultures, our own sense of oppression, we surrendered to them our sovereignty, allowing them to rule because, illiterate, impoverished people emerging still yolked with the mentality of oppression knew no differently than to follow.

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For their rhetoric, they were the men, we believed, of vision. They had read books,travelled abroad, led delegations to overseas missions, could even eat with knives and forks, speak the Queen’s English in

the Queen’s accents, just like the old massa, so they were the ones who would lead us to the promised land of plenty, or that’s what they led us to believe. And we believed – all that was told to us in obviously fantastic, unrealistic, election manifestos, and campaigns, and by the new spin doctors. Because they were from our own colours and cultures and histories.

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Whereas maturing democracies were insisting that their leaders ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country; fledgling democracies like ours were allowing leaders to ask what the country can do for me, and what more, and what more, and we continued to justify their continuous milking of the public purse, though it meant our own children will go without milk. Because they were of us, our own leaders of our own colours and cultures and histories.

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Now, wearing independent status not in their hearts but on their sleeves — like medals and decorations from no more Her Majesty The Queen, but by His – now Her – Excellency The President, 58 years on, those sleeves are stained with evidence of all the times they have wiped their mouths on them, with all that they have greedily consumed.

For their rhetoric, they were the men, we believed, of vision. They had read books, travelled abroad, led delegations to overseas missions, could even eat with knives and forks, speak the Queen’s English in the Queen’s accents, just like the old massas, so they were the ones who would lead us to the promised land of plenty; or that’s what they led us to believe.
And we believed…
Dr Kris Rampersad Independent Colonials & The Politics of Disempowerment

And because they are of our own colour, and history and culture, we ignore it, or at fantastic best see the stains as decorations of heroism of leaders who have been served.

The good and bad of our institutions are what we inherited from the colonials.

The replacement, independent colonials have done little or nothing to advance or improve upon them.

The legacy ofthe colonial education system, for instance, may have been the cornerstone of equalising opportunities among the races, through implementation of recommendations like those of the Moyne Commission and Keenan Reports.

That it continues to fail us with high failure rates; high levels of still-illiterate high school graduates, is because we have still been unable to adapt them to our needs and the needs of our children.

School building, or any kind of building project for that matter, is but a fitting opportunity of payback for political patronage of those of our own colours and cultures and histories.

The political system, the judiciary, the magistracy, so many of the social services — all still seen as existing to serve the few, little different to colonial times, except now they are manned by men and women of our own colours and cultures and histories. Today, at 58, we can celebrate our immaturity as independent colonials still unaware and unawakened to our realities as interdependent global citizens in an interconnected planet.