The African / Indian Question

08, May 2000
The difference between Africans and Indians created a basis for distrust, suspicion and misunderstanding The dynamism of the Caribbean society has always been a result of the entertwining of race and class.

The dynamism of the Caribbean society has always been a direct result of the entertwining and interaction of two crucial social phenomena: race and class.

Historically, the subjugation of Caribbean people to the dictates of imperialist capital manifested itself in a two-fold manner: the African slaves comprised a class within Caribbean social structure exploited by developing capitalism for the creation of surplus value and accumulated wealth that served as means in the industrialisation process of the Northern Hemisphere.

At the same time the African slaves, a specific race of people, were as a whole exploited and subjugated by another race the European caucasians.

Similarly the Indians, like the Chinese and the early poor-whites/plantation overseers, both quite minuscule in number by comparison, were a class of indentured people tied to the exigencies of capital accumulation, but the Indians like the Africans were at the same time exploited as another non-European race of people though with their own distinctiveness.

The conflicts and antagonisms the war between labour and capital twined with the three-way jostling for self-preservation and development between the race and ethnic groupings have made the Caribbean a seething volcano.

Each race of exploited people as well as each section of the working mass, be it, at first, slave or indentured servant, and then later waterfront worker, agricultural/estate worker, oilworker or sugar worker had/has their own particular relationship to capital and its processes. Those who do not understand this, understand nothing about the Caribbean experience.

Moreso the experience of people in Suriname, Guyana and T&T. It is this experience that has made us who and whatever we are and determines even today how we view each other. Our fears, our aspirations, our prejudices, our most deep-felt emotions and motivations have all been fashioned by these specific relationships to capital in this said environment.

To all concerned we say listen and listen well as you read the following: the African masses had been uprooted by force out of Africa and remade in a process that was supposed to purge them of their traditions and African-ness, and they had already existed as slave workers within early capitalist socialised production on the plantations for over 300 years battling Europeans and European capital in hot, constant race/class warfare where they, in rebellion, destroyed machinery, burnt cane (also a major portion of capital), slaughtered masters, maimed themselves, murdered betrayers, self-aborted (ie choosing not to bring forth more human capital for master), etc, before the Indian masses came into the situation.

The Indian came from any entirely different background, in this case a highly conservative small peasant environment in which, like all feudal-type societies, philosophical traditions determine behaviour.

He was allowed to practise all aspects of his religious and social traditions precisely because his traditions were, in fact, the best means with which to extend his conservative tendencies.

The difference in consciousness between Afric-ans and Indians at the point of their meeting in the Caribbean created a most fertile basis for distrust, suspicion and misunderstanding. Capital, as the dominant social force, exploited and played on the different levels of consciousness of these two majority groups in places like T&T.

By the time we entered the 20th century, the wielders of capital, from day to day experience, always knew what to expect from either of the two people in any given situation and treated them accordingly.

In 1917, after the Indian indenture system was abolished, the president of the then Chamber of Commerce of T&T expressed how deeply perturbed he was now that the Indians were free from the direct control by the plantation system and therefore "could no longer be a substantial safeguard against trouble with the negroes (sic) and vice-versa."

The relationships indicated thereby were different. That is not to say that capital treated any one of the two people better than the other both Africans and Indians were victims to the same amount of harsh brutality yet there was a qualitative difference though the quantity of pain was the same on both sides.

That qualitative difference we shall examined in more detail in our next column. What we must be mindful of is that there are many dimensions to our people's struggles and therefore the biggest damage we can do to our people's history and their struggles for greater fulfilment is to be myopic in our treatment of their past efforts, particularly as we seek to define phenomena such as "Black Power".