In less than two months, Anguilla has been rocked by the gruesome murders of two young men, and injury to others. To this end, the Evangelical Association and the Christian Council issued the following statement, which reads in part: “The Evangelical Association and the Christian Council anguish with all the residents of Anguilla over the senseless murder of another young man. We mourn with the families and pledge to support them by our prayers and counsel. We are deeply concerned by the spiraling of violence. In this environment, it is easy to become the complainers and accusers. The demand upon us is to develop short-term and long-term strategies with all the stakeholders to arrest this alarming trend. We pledge ourselves to work with all for the well-being of the community.”
The following is a seven-part series which seeks to discover the root causes of violence perpetrated by young men against each other, and its attendant ills on society in general. After an analysis of these ills, most of the series will be solution based.
SERIES 1
ROOTS
(Slavery and Colonialism)
The enslaved was property, to produce goods and services for his/her master or mistress. That was the lot of our ancestors who were sold or captured from the motherland Africa, and brought to the Caribbean and the Americas. The one-word which describes the institution of slavery is domination. It was total domination in every sphere of life: social, economic, and political. Domination by the planter class gave them a superior status; and, conversely, it conferred on the enslaved Africans and their descendants an inferior status. This also meant that social and cultural retentions from Africa were not allowed to be practiced – as the planters feared it could lead to rebellion and other forms of organized protests. Key to this denial, was the subjugation of language and the destruction of the family. Language is the prime mode of communication which gives meaning to all other forms of communication; therefore, without their native languages, the enslaved Africans were not only handicapped – inferiority was further engrained.
With the end of slavery as an institution in 1834, and the coming of Adult Suffrage in the early 1950s, domination by the planters was slowly replaced by the colonial administration in England, but in a much more organized and calculated manner. Administrative structures, orders in council, laws, constitutional reform among others, had their refinements and necessary changes accented to in England and, as we could expect, the interest of the metropolitan country was paramount. Slavery and colonialism, therefore, left the territories with a dependency syndrome. This syndrome, and its related deficits, will be discussed in Series No.2.
