Bussa: Barbados' First National Hero

“…King William was a friend of Bussa, the overall slave leader who was tried and put to death for his crime.”

This was taken from page 18 of this year’s edition of The Ins and Outs of Barbados, where the preceding paragraph discusses King William being the leader of the slaves from Sunbury Plantation House (the actual subject of the article) who participated in the greater Rebellion that they were all put to death for.

My question to the editors of this publication: Tell me: What was the crime that Bussa committed exactly?

Your article, doesn’t qualify your comment or discuss SLAVERY in Barbados, only the house in which the slavers lived. So why even put that whole paragraph this quote ends into the piece at all? Only to add a bit of ‘colour’ to the piece, because well we’re in Barbados after all?
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Tears, dances as Aborigines make history in parliament http://bit.ly/86uGsO

Every so often, some stupid shit pops up and I find the contrast between sense and nonsense just so glaring and pronounced, it warrants a comment. Fireal…

Me ain’t know about you, but apparently a furor has been brewing for a week or so about a ‘racist’ KFC ad aired in Australia. Being interested in Down Under (have no idea why, but I love the country, the Aborigines, the accent, and the insouciance of the Aussie character) and having several friends either originating from there, or currently residing there, I clicked this link in @mashable’s twitter timeline, and read their non-commentary about KFC’s embroiling by the American public taking offense to this ad.
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So I’ve just been to Tescos to get a half pack of cigarettes. I’m waiting for my mother to put some money on my debit card for me, and planned to check to see if she had done it as yet.

As I was walking out to the cash machine, unwrapping my pack of cigs, I saw two little girls puffing on ’something’ out of sight of the main door.

I didn’t really pay attention, went to the cash machine. My mother is sticking, the money wasn’t there yet.

On the way back to the house, I caught up to the two little girls, who were still puffing a little ahead of me. I recognised one of the girls. She lives here in the housing development where I am, pretty close to my cousin’s house.

I’ve seen her riding her bike with some of the other kids, and a couple weeks back, on a similar trip to Tescos, I saw her walking to wards me, kicking the ground and swinging a stick pretty angrily. When she passed me that day, there was a grim kind of distress in her face. I said ‘Hi,’ because we had talked before. She replied, but she was clearly distracted.

Tonight, the other girl dropped the cig and the little girl I knew cussed her ass and picked it back up.

As I walked pass them, I said hello again, and said softly, “I won’t tell,” when they looked up at me nervously.

So we were all going in the same direction.

The girl I know, she said to me, “I don’t care. I’m in foster care because both my parents are dead.”

Somehow I don’t believe the part about the parents being dead.

“Is that why you were so angry the last time I saw you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, but she clearly didn’t want to talk about it. “Don’t tell…”

“I won’t tell,” I assured them. I was hardly in a position to criticise, since I myself was smoking a cigarette at the time.

“I like your hair,” the other one piped up.

“Why thank you. Some people like it, some people don’t, but when you get to a certain age, you can pretty much do what you like when it comes to things like that.”

“So what’s your name?” The unfamiliar one asked.

I told them, and asked their names. The unfamiliar one was Stacy. The girl I knew, she was Tina… Tina the Tough I’ve dubbed her in my head.

I tried to talk to them about the smoking, but they were only curious as to how I pulled the smoke all the way down, and how my hair got like that.

“Is it extensions?”

Now this is the fourth or fifth person that has asked me that in Kent.

“No, it grows right out of my head.”

“How’d it get like that?” Stacy asked.

“I twisted it one day, and just left it. Now I just wash it…”

“Did you say you don’t wash it?” She asked, clearly surprised.

“No dear, I said, ‘Now I just wash it’ and sometimes I put it  up in curls, but most times I just let it fall down.”

“So you don’t have to brush it or anything?” Tina asks.

“No, no I don’t.”

“So how old are you girls?”

Tina is thirteen. Stacy is twelve.

“That’s much too young to be smoking, ladies. You don’t mind I’m smoking, I’m thirty and I was living in my own house, paying my own way in life when I started smoking.”

Stacy asked how long I had been smoking. I confessed, off and on for about six years.

Tina laughed and said, kind of proudly, “I’ve been smoking for seven years!”

“That’s not good,” I said, internally shocked.

“When I was your age,” I added, “I was dead set against smoking. My mother used to cut my ass for stealing her cigarettes.”

They both laughed.

We were rounding the wall of the complex, and Tina the Tough tossed away the still smoking butt she was sucking on.

Then they began to pull away, getting ready to go into the house.

“So you’re just off. No goodbye, nothing?” I protested.

“Aww…” Tina the Tough came back and gave me a hug.

“Aww… that’s a nice girl,” I told her.

As they began to cross the entry to the housing development, Tina called back at me, “Are you Jamaican?”

“No, no darling. I’m too good looking to be a Jamaican,” I said. “I come from the deep southern Caribbean, a little island called Trinidad and Tobago.”

“Oh I went there once, on holiday. We just scotched on the beach for a month”

“Did you enjoy it?” I asked.

“Yeah… it was nice.”

She went on, “I’d love to come from Jamaica. I’ve love to talk black and stuff.”

I am consistently amazed at the level of ignorance I find all over Kent, here where you can count the number of Black people you see on one hand. Shit, on one finger.

It’s as if they live in a racial bubble.

Then they were off.

I worry about Tina The Tough… so young, growing calluses around her heart, and a toughness that’s not really real.

Stacy… hmmm… dunno. I think she’s just doing it to be cool.

Me, I did my best with children that have nothing to do with me. But there is some good there… definitely some good.

When I first moved out to Kent almost two months ago, I explored the surrounding areas.

I went to West Malling, went to Maidstone, went to Strood.

The day I went into Strood, I stopped to have lunch at a little restaurant. First off, it took the waitress almost seven or eight minutes to come and take my order, even though the place was not packed and quite small.

When she finally came, I ordered something with chicken, I forget now. Then I had to wait another ten minutes for the food to come.

When it came it was very nice, but I had a premonition that someone had spit in it; but I shook it off. Maybe it was the way the waitresses couldn’t stop looking at me, or in one case, looking through me.

They were playing one of my favourite songs on the radio, so I just hummed along, singing a few words here and there. Then one of the waitresses, my server, seemed to be singing in competition with me. I shook that off as well.

So I’ve finished my food, had to wait forever for the waitress to come and move the plate, then forever for her to bring the bill. I put £10 on the table, and when she came she snatched it up a little forcefully, and off she went.

So I am waiting for my change. Waiting for my change. Waiting for my change.

After another five minutes, I look up and ask the guy closest to me behind the counter, “Umm, can I get back my change?”

The waitress comes back, because he didn’t even bother to answer my question, he just looked away and started calling her back. When she gets to my table and I ask her where’s my change, the little bitch sings out, “Oh, I put it on the table.”

“Indeed you did not!” I responded.

Then she starts moving the salt shaker and tomato ketchup, saying she put it on the table.

“No you didn’t. I would have remembered, and I would have left already.”

The guy behind the counter calls out, “Awww, go on (insert her name here) give it to her again.”

I looked across at him, and OH MY GOD, the cuss was forming behind my eyeball; it was coming, coming, coming. But I swallowed it back.

She went, got the change, and put it in my hand, again a little roughly. I bit my tongue and left.

The whole time I am standing there, I am saying to myself, “These motherfuckers are lucky I am my mother’s child, oui? Not, they would here how a Trini/Bajan Combermerian does cuss motherfuckers. Allyuh wouldn’t know what the fuck hit allyuh ass, oui?”

Shiiiiittttt…

What pissed me off most was the intonation I’m trying to cheat they slow ass service givers out of £2.50. What’s worse, the waitress was at fault and her supervisor person was so fucking stupid, he just let it go down.

Then there was this part of me pissed the fuck off, because part of me was sure that they were sitting there looking me, speaking properly, eating properly and obviously mixed race, (just another NIGGER) and they could talk to me and treat me that way.

Hence, it’s been the last time I’ve been to Strood.

I have a good mind to go back up there, and walk in, ask for the waitress and the man, then remind them of the incident and say, “Hello. I am an uppity nigger. I only came to tell you that the service was lousy, and allyuh fuck up meh change, and DAMNIT, FUCK OFF, oui?”

And talk very loudly!

Color Codes

by Adolph Reed Jr.

Whitewashing Race:

The Myth of a Color-Blind Society

By Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie,

Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer,

Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman

University of California Press, 2003

349 pp $27.50

Unfortunately, this is a very useful book. The authors have meticulously developed a case against the most respectable, and therefore most insidious, arguments that currently attempt to justify manifest racial inequalities. It should not be necessary to exert such intellectual labor to counter the same kinds of sophistries that have been around since Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley’s 1883 opinion overturning the 1875 Civil Rights Act. Recalling that Justice Bradley contended then that blacks no longer needed to be “special favorite of the laws” should give pause to those who maintain that positive anti-discrimination initiatives give blacks unfair advantage. Alas! That view has gathered steam during the last two decades, and the authors of Whitewashing Race provide an important public service in countering it. They challenge what they describe as an emerging “racial realism,” which claims that, as a result of the legislative victories of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, racism has been largely overcome as a significant determinant of black Americans’ life chances. According to this view, inequalities in employment, wealth and income, education, or arrest and incarceration have more to do with blacks’ own limitations than with discrimination or any systemic injustice.

Source: Dissent Magazine

Big Mami stands before the concert hall, and rubs two fingers together.

What is this?

It is the world’s smallest violin playing, “My Heart Pumps Purple Piss For You.”

10 years after end of apartheid

Afrikaners struggle to adapt to new South Africa

PRETORIA — A year after becoming South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela walked onto the field at the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup wearing the national team jersey.

For Afrikaners, to whom rugby is a passion, it was the high point of post-apartheid reconciliation. But today it has become a moment many look back to with bitterness.

As the country marks the 10th anniversary today of the end of apartheid and swears in its second black president for another term, many Afrikaners feel lost and marginalised in the country they dominated through a web of racist laws for almost half a century.

“Some of the changes are being implemented in a way which runs the risk of putting South Africa back into a sort of new apartheid,” said the last white president, FW de Klerk, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela for negotiating apartheid’s end a decade ago.

Afrikaners, the descendants of 17th century Dutch and French settlers, make up 59 per cent of South Africa’s 4.3 million whites. But they are only 5.6 per cent of the overall population of 45 million.

They complain their language is disappearing from schools, courts and government offices, and they feel threatened by affirmative action policies for blacks held back by apartheid.

“They feel there is a risk of white South Africans being relegated to a sort of second-class citizenship,” De Klerk said in an interview with AP.

But during apartheid times it was the blacks who were treated as second-class and even denied South African citizenship. Even now, the white minority, 10 per cent of the population, remains far better off than most of the impoverished black majority.

For all the griping, Afrikaans culture actually seems far from dead. Instead it has thrown off its apartheid trappings and become the vehicle for a new kind of rock music and literature, shared by whites as well as millions of South Africans of Asian and mixed-race descent.

De Klerk and others acknowledge things could have been much worse. On the eve of South Africa’s historic all-race elections in 1994, many whites were stocking up on fuel, water and cans of baked beans in expectation of a bloodbath.

To their surprise, there was no violent revenge. Government continued to function. The phones still worked, the lights stayed on.

Mandela went out of his way to allay Afrikaners’ fears with well-chosen gestures such as travelling to Orania, a town that is one of the last outposts of white separatism. There he had coffee with the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister who was apartheid’s chief architect.

Still, Afrikaners have battled to come to terms with their disempowerment in a country they dominated for 48 years, and which many had come to regard as their God-given right to rule.

The change was all the more painful for having come after they had finally shaken off their own second-class status under the English-speaking whites and started enjoying middle-class prosperity.

“It was quite a dramatic fall,” said Herman Giliomee, a University of Stellenbosch professor who has written a history of his Afrikaner people. “People are still grappling and struggling to redefine themselves.”

Afrikaner nationalism, the political movement that had united Afrikaners since they fought and lost against British hegemony at the turn of last century, has rapidly disintegrated.

The renamed New National Party, which in apartheid times could count on the unquestioning loyalty of most Afrikaners, won less than two per cent of the vote during April 14 elections that resulted in a second term for President Thabo Mbeki.

The Dutch Reformed Church, whose teachings once enshrined white supremacy, is losing members.

Militant white separatists, once the biggest threat to a peaceful transition to majority rule, have become a source of ridicule.

Despite constitutional guarantees, some Afrikaners feel their cultural identity is under threat in South Africa’s new “rainbow nation.”

Under white rule, Afrikaans was one of two official languages. Now it is one of 11, and English is becoming the common tongue.

Afrikaans-speaking schools and universities have had to integrate students who don’t speak the language or identify with the culture.

Some streets and cities honouring Afrikaner heroes have been renamed after black leaders, and new public holidays have replaced those honouring Afrikaner history.

Some Afrikaners have retreated to parties seeking to protect minority rights. Others have thrown their lot in with the majority. Four Verwoed grandchildren have moved to all-white Orania. Another has gone the opposite route and joined Mbeki’s party, the African National Congress.

So has Pik Botha, foreign minister in apartheid times.

Whites too were “liberated from the plague of apartheid,” said Botha.

The world has opened to South Africa, and there are more opportunities than ever before, he said.

The younger generation is showing the way, freed of church elders and government elders who for decades defined Afrikaner culture. (AP)

I had to take this out the comment box:

Okay, let me quantify that by saying I do not feel sorry for the Afrikaaners who are looking back on apartheid as the good old days.  

I do not sympathise with their discomfort coming from a place of wrongful occupation, subjugation and hateful behaviour towards the indigenous population of South Africa. I’m not sorry they are fucking having trouble adjusting. As far as I am concerned, they can like it or lump it.

I am glad that there are so many young South Africans of all ethnicities reaching towards greater unity. However, let us not think for a minute that the white Afrikaaners who lived liked fat cats during apartheid, do not hate their current state of ‘equality.’

So a few nights ago, I was watching some Access Hollywood programme airing on VH1 about all the hot young Hollywood stars. They did a segment on each actor or actress, recounting some of their exploits and who they were dating. All of them were white. The one young African American actor they featured, Donald Faison, did a three minute segment where he ran around with a paintball team and goofed it up. They never once recounted his past exploits or explored who he was dating. Instead I was struck by the mnstrel type quailty of the piece in which this young man allowed himself to be seen only as a someone that can be laughed at. There were other comedic actors included in the programme, he is the only one that was painted in such a one dimensional light.

What is interesting, is that at the beginning of the segment, while the camera crew filmed him changing his clothes to get ready to go play paintball, he pointed to biker short clad prosterior and said to the camera, “You see that ass? That’s Hollywood ass.”

Riiiiiggggghhhhhtttttt….. I am inclined to agree.

I am amazed that in this day and age, that such caricatures are still allowed to propagate. I wonder if Faison actually knew what he was being filmed for. It is not inconceivable that is the producers told him the clip would be included in a programme that did not feature such glowing reporting from a number of ‘experts’ in Hollywood commenting on each actor and actresses rise and claim to fame. None of those experts made any commentary on Faison at all.

The entire clip was him running around playing paintball and being almost over the top funny…. not naturally so, the humour seemed forced.

However, the out of place nature of Faison’s piece in this programme has me a little suspicious of the motives.

Where was Faison’s publicist?

What were the Access Hollywood people thinking? How can they legitimise their choice to include the clip at all?

I turned off the TV immediately following, not impressed.