What's in a Name?(1) The True Legacy of Slavery

With Britain currently commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Abolition fo the Slave Trade, it got me thinking about the real legacy of slavery on Black people, particularly in how we perceive ourselves and the names we use.


Names should be positive terms, but they can be cultural baggage. If you belong to a 'minority' group, what do you call yourself? The choice is easy if it has a definite historical, geographical or religious base. However, what if you are from the Caribbean but insist on being called African? Or an Asian who left your birthplace decades ago but still hark back to it as 'home'? Does all that really matter.

Take any name we call ourself: man, woman, doctor, priest, African, Caucasian, Asian. They all have one thing in common. They represent a specific persona as an individual, a member of a social and cultural group, and set us apart from everyone else who does not share the same background or characteristics. Names and titles are important for establishing individual identity, maintaining tradition, emphasising a particular skill or lineage, marking our place, unmistakably, in a historical and geographical context. Names are usually positive. We are meant to be proud of who we are and what we call ourselves. However, for Black people outside of Africa (like African Caribbeans) that is not always the case.

Black people living abroad have been desperately trying to come to terms with themselves for a very long time because of their chequered past and broken links with their countries of origin. Judged by their colour first, before anything else, it has been a painful demoralising process which some have managed to overcome but to which others have helplessly succumbed. Yet the answer to their anxieties lie in their eventful past. Whether they call themselves Melangian. African, Afro-Caribbean, African American or simply Black, there is a continuous search for a lost childhood, a huge gap in their past when everything happened but very little was spoken about it. Black people everywhere share this unique history.


Dirty Secret
They have been the only race, in modern times, who were forcibly ejected en masse from their place of birth and dispersed all over the world to be the slaves of another race of people. That one conscious slice of being Black, which continually haunts them, will never be understood by a White person in any number of lifetimes. It is such a powerful, pervasive and debilitating emotion, a kind of dirty secret scanning years of discrimination and entrapment, that Black strangers passing by only have to look at each other briefly in the street to share something instantly familiar, oddly binding and utterly unspeakable which hovers relentlessly through time.

It is not easy to appreciate, or empathise with, this legacy of slavery, because it is a legacy of displacement, not only in purely physical terms, but also in emotional, historical and psychological ones. For Black people of the African Diaspora there is a continuous sense of statelessness, of not belonging; of lacking the roots and experience of a promising childhood which was rudely torn apart, summarily dispensed with and utterly destroyed by slavers; cut short by something vastly alien, bewildering and shocking.

As a consequence of this brutal act there has been a marked absence of glory in anything black. No Black heroes, no great victories or inventions (those have been kept hidden). I was really surprised to learn, through the musical Black Heroes in the Hall of Fame, that the traffic lights were invented by someone Black! All my life, robbed of role models, I naturally assumed the inventor was White, my childhood having taught me that only White colonists did great things.


Serving and Obeying
Like a form of imprinting, White Europeans were the first 'parents' Black slave children saw, received their value from and had to serve and obey in a kind of sub-human state. This affected them not only for the rest of their lives but down the ensuing centuries through the generations that followed. How can one ever talk of true equality when one group started off being the slave of another, being deprived of basic human rights and freedoms, and their own dreams and hopes? If you start with a disadvantage, which follows you down the years, how do you recover from it to enjoy real parity with the masters who exploited you to build themselves and their fortunes? It is very difficult. That is why there has always been this desire, in the absence of anything positive about being Black, to use the White culture as a role model in all spheres. One only had to look at the way singers form the 50s presented themselves to the public, how 'White' they were made to look, or tried to be, in order to be 'acceptable'.

For a long time, devoid of ancestral role models and any sense of self, the lost children of Africa looked to the White race for inspiration, as well as guidance in decorum, style of dress, hair care and general behaviour. They did learn how to assimilate a different culture, in their desire to be recognised and to belong, but they lost something valuable in the process - their own identity, sense of worth and sense of direction. Black people saw the White aura and tried to capture it. They admired White inventiveness and tried to emulate it. But these White role models saw only their colour and forever damned it, especially through their language. This has left many Black people confused about their roots: stateless, nameless and, at times, unwanted caricatures of another race.