Nigerian Recording Artist Paid Courtesy Call on Entertainment Minister
Commentary
It is good to see us keeping alive cultural links with our African “relatives”. We are not clear who our true descendants are as we were colonized by the the Spanish and then the British.
There have also been inter marriages and other races like the Indians came to Jamaica as migrants and indentured slaves/workers. Chineses have also settled here. That is why we are so beautiful because we are a melting pot of races and cultures all mixed up. The real question is who is a true Jamaican?
Our motto addresses this issue “Out Of Many One People”
Record Keeping
In time, we suppose, studies will no doubt be done and geonoligy experts have or will attempt to trace through records how we came here to Jamaica etc. and who our fore parents really were.
Records were not always kept of slaves or their origins. Based on anecdotal accounts many slaves were rounded up, held and shipped to the West Indies. Many died in the middle passage, tossed overboard in the sea and some were savagely drowned to lighten the load on slave ships when “drinking water and food got dangerously low”.
Some died of diseases for which they had no immunity like Yellow Fever.
We may never know who we are as a race, based on what has been stated above.
Some slaves were not only raped by their slave masters but used as a means of providing a “breeding stock”. This abominable conduct also complicates the race issue. Many female slaves were kept as house slaves and the white slave masters raped them … they were his “property” so they were used as the master chose.
All slaves were not equal as was argued in “Birthday Cake For George Washington” … posted in Vision. You can research same.
World Athletes
We are mixed up in terms of race, colour shades and backgrounds. Yet we are proud of what we have become in athletics, Academia, etc. and that is why we told British PM Cameron that we do not want any “Prison Gift”. We have the fastest male in Usain Bolt and the fastest female in Shelly-Ann Frazer-Pryce.
See poem “Respect” for “Poetic Commentary” on same posted in Vision.
Hopeton O’Connor-Dennie is Senior International Correspondent & photojournalist for Vision Newspaper Canada.