A Redemption Song

Illuminations on Black British Pastoral Theology and Culture

Hall

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780334060741
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

This landmark text offers critical reflection and practical tool for pastors working and leading congregations where there is a large percentage of African Caribbean worshippers and other marginalised communities.Drawing from real-life pastoral examples, socio-political analysis and the theme of Eucharist as a means to human healing and restoration, it outlines and explores what a black British pastoral theology might look like.

1. The Effects of an African Caribbean Heritage: Living as a Problem

Introduction

The phrase ‘what you see is what you get’ is not always true. In this chapter I will sketch some of the darker, untold and unacknowledged aspects of African Caribbean life. The term ‘African Caribbean’ charts a specific group of people: those whose cultural history includes the horrendous sojourn of the Middle Passage – a subject to which I will refer later in the chapter.

While writing, I run the risk of being classed as the stereotypical angry Black man. However, I will leave the reader to make their decision. Angry or not, this is a view of an African Caribbean man in understanding the effects of an African Caribbean heritage of living as a problem within British society.

Heritage and its various meanings

What is heritage and who decides what it comprises? As a simple word with multiple meanings, heritage refers to something that is handed down from a previous generation and, as argued by Peter Howard (2003), it is those things people want to save, collect or conserve. Heritage is recognized, designated and self-conscious by definition. Emphasizing its importance, Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles (2007) argue that heritage should be ranked equal to human rights because as a concept it demands that individual and group identities be respected and protected. Furthermore, they stress that heritage insists on the recognition of a person’s or community’s essential worth. Heritage, then, relates to human existence and significance. The inclusion of human significance is a major development with concerns about monuments, historic sites and buildings. For this chapter I will use Brian Graham and Peter Howard’s understanding of heritage, recognizing the complex linkage it has with identity. Using a ‘constructionist position, they conceptualize heritage as referring to the ways in which selective past material artefacts, natural landscapes, mythologies, memories, and traditions become cultural, political and economic resources for the present’ (Graham and Howard, 2008, p. 2). What is of social worth to a specific group of people cannot always be understood by outsiders of the cultural group. Furthermore, there is danger when one cultural heritage considers itself more superior than others. Describing an African Caribbean heritage is complicated.

African Caribbean heritage

For African Caribbean people living in British society there is a contextual similarity to the time when W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk (1994). He was asked, ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’ This labelling was not an incidental moment in the lives of African Americans in early twentieth-century America but is the daily experience of most African diaspora people. One never acclimatizes to this way of life but learns to live painfully with it; however, an anecdotal account illustrating a counter narrative may be helpful.

In May 2010, I presented a paper at the Caribbean Studies Association in Barbados. Before the conference started, I rested for a few days and had an unusual experience which needed exploring. After quite some time of reflection it became evident why I had sensed this unfamiliar freedom. First, I was with Black people, and I was one with the dominant population. Second, I felt connected to the land even though my parents were of Jamaican heritage. I had never felt such psychological/existential liberation in England, the land of my birth. This experience, while not the focus for analysis, serves to highlight the plight of many African Caribbean people living in Britain as being somewhat estranged.

It must be emphasized that ‘an’ African Caribbean, or ‘the’ African Caribbean heritage does not exist. The Caribbean is not a homogenous group of islands or a people group. Each island has areas of particularity and its own peculiarity. One of the common features comprising African Caribbean heritage is the legacy of the institution of enslavement. Slavery permeated the whole of the Caribbean, but the island exhibiting the most symptoms of enslavement is Jamaica (Fletchman Smith, 2000). The violent past began in 1492 when Christopher Columbus arrived in the West Indies (Grant, 2007). While praising his expeditions, the history on Columbus often omits the elimination of the Arawak Indians, the natives of Jamaica (The Gleaner, 1995). Through history, and with various nations fighting for control of Jamaica and other Caribbean islands coupled with the institution of enslavement and empire, Jamaica experienced gratuitous forms of violence for over 500 years; hence, it seems logical that behaviour concomitant with a history of conflict, violence, subjugation, exploitation and extreme suffering would transpire. Thus, it is argued that the protracted process of dehumanization affected the enslaved on the plantations and subsequent generations right to the present day (Akbar, 1996).

Enslaved Africans were ‘drafted’ in to work the plantations and were then laid off by the abolition of slavery, due not so much to William Wilberforce but more to the fight for liberation led by Baptist deacon Sam Sharpe (Dick, 2009). The abolition of slavery rendered the enslaved redundant, without a welfare package.

African Caribbean heritage: the makeup of myths and stories is exoticized through the lens of excellent cuisine and music, in particular reggae, calypso and the steel pans, and by dance, fashion and literature. But the underbelly of African Caribbean life is demonized, marginalized and counts for nothing. The question remains: given its horrific history, is it possible for a heritage to exist?

The existence of African Caribbean heritage

Heritage, whether good or bad, is heritage. The possibility of a heritage is similar to the question asked by African American historian John Henrik Clarke when as a boy he told his schoolteacher he wanted to learn about Black people’s history. He was told in no uncertain terms that Black people did not have a history or a culture (Clarke, 1998) – a belief still held by many today (James, 2020). What must be vehemently argued is that if there are people existing today, then a heritage must be present that has passed through previous generations. If heritage is the transmission of the essentials of life vital for ontological existence, then an African Caribbean heritage exists that includes the historical effects of conflict, violence and dehumanization. The continual mistreatment has become a part of the African Caribbean psyche that has attached itself like a limpet influencing Caribbean life and culture. The effects of this will take up the rest of this chapter.

The effects of an African Caribbean heritage

It is not possible to exoticize all Caribbean life. The problem with ‘exoticization’, the ‘charm of the unfamiliar to the eyes of Europeans’ (Rousseau and Porter, 1990), is that it fails to consider the brutal Caribbean past that renders national healing almost impossible. The question must be asked, ‘Is there a need for clinicians to have an awareness of the effects of the African Caribbean legacy on its descendants today?’ Having an awareness of the history is insufficient. Colin Lago, counsellor and supervisor, commenting from a counselling context, asserts that many counselling approaches focus on the present, but it must be recognized that a relevant understanding of history is necessary to understand current events (Lago and Thompson, 1996). While there is a phenomenon called empathy, it is almost impossible for people of the host population to empathetically comprehend the depth of pain, trauma and suffering of people living in a civilization that was not created for them. As an outsider you can conceptualize oppression but not experience it. The Caribbean proverb ‘He who feels it knows it’ is apt. Race awareness training comes a poor second in attempting to help non-Black people understand the dynamics of race and the experience of being Black.

The history of the dehumanization of African Caribbean people has been detrimental and the effects are still not fully known. A negative psychological effect of a Caribbean heritage is one of self-loathing. Self-hatred is a destructive by-product of hundreds of years of enslavement, when the black body was simultaneously an instrument of torture and a receptacle of European projection.

Leaving aside for a moment the physical brutality of enslavement, colonialism also must be considered as another form of dehumanization. Just as enslavement was appropriating black bodies as objects of property to produce sugar (Patterson, 1969), so colonialism was the commandeering of the property and minds of African Caribbean people. The capturing of African Caribbean people took place under British rule, and created an unconscious veiling of the Black self. I spoke recently with an African Caribbean woman in her mid-eighties who migrated to England in the early 1960s. She commented, ‘We were born in Jamaica, but we never knew Jamaica.’1

The arrival in sunny Britain

During the ‘Windrush’ epoch, migrants arrived in Britain with a strong desire to embrace English values (Banton, 1953). England, in the Caribbean, was described as the ‘Mother Country, where the streets were paved with gold’ and was the Promised Land. African Caribbean people were schooled in the belief that they would be welcomed, embraced, and accepted as children of the Empire. In the main, this never happened. The rejection of African Caribbean migrants and their subsequent labelling as a societal problem is well-documented (Beckford, 1998). Gus John (1976) makes it clear that the negative response highlighted fissures and weakness within British society. In highlighting the fracture in British society, Kenneth Leech (2006) argued that the British government had a real opportunity to educate the nation on race relations but caused greater exclusion and demonization with the development and implementation of the 1968 Race Act.

Another effect of an African Caribbean heritage is historical amnesia. Many African Caribbean people living in Britain do not know who they are. There is often marginal or no knowledge of an African or Caribbean history. Many African Caribbean people have accepted the exoticization of their islands without any consideration of its past. A stark analogy with African Caribbean people not knowing who they are is that of adopted children who were never told about their adoption. One day, during adulthood and searching through old papers in the attic, they discover, to their dismay, that they were adopted. Other people knew important, personal and intimate details about their existence, but they did not. Some African Caribbean people sense that something is not right, but opt to ignore their existential rumblings because their current life is comfortable, so why rock the boat? For some, the uncovering of the past is too painful, so best leave it alone. The fact remains that most African Caribbean people of a certain generation can only trace back as far as their great-grandparents at best − or at worst. If mass historical amnesia exists, what are the psychological, emotional and existential consequences for people who cannot lay claim to their unique history? Marcus Garvey’s comment is noteworthy here. He writes, ‘A people without the knowledge of their past, history or origins is like a tree without roots.’ Garvey’s philosophical analogy contains much truth and indirectly suggests another dimension. If an observer ignores or denies the plant, they invariably deny the existence of the roots of that plant. Paul Grant uses similar language in supporting Garvey’s comments. He states, ‘If you don’t know where you are going any road will do, and if you don’t know your culture any culture will do’ (2007). This historical memory loss leads to another danger.

Failure to examine or attempt to understand the extensive historical and intergenerational trauma of a people group often leads to inappropriate and ineffective treatment in the restoration and rehabilitation of African Caribbean people who suffer from an array of mental illnesses. There is always danger in only considering the present. Of course, it is possible to talk of awareness of the different other, but what effect does ‘an awareness’ play in affecting or influencing the methods of diagnosis, which are Eurocentric constructs assuming universal applicability? An example illustrates the partial inadequacy of Eurocentric concepts. Some years...