Junkanoo and Socialism in the Caribbean Region
The African working class must take science and culture out of the hands of the bourgeoisie..
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This need was recently brought to light in the midst of this current crisis.
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During the pandemic the political leadership in the Bahamas at the time, like other countries around the world, created laws that mandated that the people had to stay indoors.
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They also made laws that restricted or halted the people's ability to work.
Then the political leadership announced that after everything was under control the people would hopefully be allowed to prepare and participate in the annual Junkanoo rush out at the end of the year.
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What's so crazy about this is the fact that within this entire period the government in the Bahamas has never even tried to initiate a scientific process that involves two or three or five persons even attempting to make our own vaccine.
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We have many brillant minds in this country but for some reason all of that brillance came to a halt when our backs were against the wall. The political leadership in this country was content on just telling it's people to listen to what C.N.N. says we should do, and whatever they say do, then we should do it.
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If necessity is the mother of invention, then why hasn't the Caribbean region, except for the Socialist Republic of Cuba which has created 5 such vaccines within this pandemic, created its own vaccine to help its people.
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The reason: the national bourgeoise in the Caribbean region is not in the business of nurturing true scientific and technological development within it's own people. This lack of interest is based on the fact that their class interest is not based in developing a mode of production - a way of life - based in the interest of the people, but instead their real interest is based in being the administrators of the State on behalf of white foreign capital, who are really in control of the mode of production or what we create in the Bahamas and in this entire region.
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They want the people to believe that only the White World or Capitalism has the power to create.
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They create while we wait.
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To add insult to injury, the Caribbean bourgeoise then suffocates the burning desire that delves within African people to create their own tools and build a world that's based in their own interests, by only allowing them to express this desire in Junkanoo.
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The national bourgeoise in the Bahamas know that we love Junkanoo.
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Junkanoo derives from John Kenu, an African leader on the Gold Coast at the start of the 18th century who went to war for more than 20 years with 3 white imperial powers. John Kenu wanted to trade. The white invaders wanted to conquer and enslave. This revolutionary period against the white man on African soil has never left the minds of African people. That's why John Kenu's name crossed the ocean through the African Holocaust and is still celebrated in many countries in the Caribbean region today; including Jamaica, Trinidad ànd the Bahamas. His name is even celebrated amongst the Africans in the Carolinas.
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In the Bahamas every year thousands of people without any payment collectively mobilize themselves deep into the belly of African working class communities where they spend many months and countless hours drawing, painting and creating a Beautiful World made out of card-boards and steel drums, and what ever material they can get their hands on. Then at the end of the year in December and at the beginning of the year in January the people joyously display this Beautiful World of art, sport and dance in front of a national crowd on Bay Street. In the Bahamas we call this Junkanoo.
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But Junkanoo is more than just a celebration of a revolutionary period.
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Truth be told, Junkanoo is the remnants of the ancient mode of production that existed within Africa people way before the coming of the white man to Africa.
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This ancient African mode of production can be observed and glimpsed in Africans from Jamaica and Africans from the Bahamas to this very day.
When Africans from Jamaica see a steel drum they add fire to it and turn it sideways into a grilling machine for jerk chicken, jerk pork and all kind of grilled delights to feed the people's belly.
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When Africans from the Bahamas see a steel drum we add fire to it along with the goat's skin and turn it upside down into a musical machine that creates sounds to feed the people's soul.
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Both of these uses of the steel drum are important to African people and both of them represent African people - under colonialism - trying to grapple with their material environment - in an attempt to create and recreate a better of way of life based in their own interests.
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We say better because even though Capitalism would have African people believe that before the coming of the white man to Africa, Africa was dead, and that Africa and African people did not create anything, this is of course not true.
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As Chairman Omali Yeshitela has repeatedly stated, African people did not gain a better way of life when they came to the West, they actually lost a better way of life.
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When the white man landed on Africa he met an alive people and a creative people who had been developing - through trial and error - their own tools and methods, for thousands of years way before the coming of the white man. Benin was such a place. Benin was a kingdom in which Africans had developed techniques to master and bend metals whereby they were able to create their own tools for farming and instruments for the enjoyment and preservation of life. Artifacts from that ancient African kingdom are still being uncovered up to this day.
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C. L. R. James once wrote that the political leadership in the Caribbean region has yet to unleash the tremendous social power within Junkanoo/Carnival for national mobilization and for national production.
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This tremendous social power must be directed towards spiritual upliftment and national celebration. But it must also be unleashed and directed towards fishing, farming, construction, sports, trade and scientific development.
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Within this social power we have the potential to provide food, clothing and shelter for our people.
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We need to connect this social power to modern science, which was developed out of the sweat and blood of African people, to reconstruct a new social system with a new mode of production based in the interests of the African working class and poor people. This is real social justice.
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We need this social power to build the Bridge to Africa.
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But these Caribbean leaders only want African people to create and dance to the rhythm of the white world which is capitalism.
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Whether we trying to eat or beat, its time for African people around the world to create and dance to our own rhythm; the rhythm of Africa.
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Within this rhythm we will find our true identity to build a Unified Socialist Africa.
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Go Saxons!
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Uhuru
One Africa. One Nation.