Melville Cooke
ONE OF the most enthusiastically sung lines from Bob Marley is his delivery of Marcus Garvey's command to "emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/none but ourselves can free our minds". While it is generally recognised, if not embraced, that Christopher Columbus did not discover anywhere and the African people did not begin their existence as slaves, emancipation from mental slavery goes beyond the general rewriting 'our story'. In our daily lives, as a people, we celebrate and elevate the very things that enslave us to positions of pride.
And I will not even mention the obvious bleaching and 'brownings'.
GHETTO TAG
Ghettos (call them inner-city communities if you will) are not places to be celebrated. They are places that people who live there should either seek to improve so that they lose their ghetto tag, or move out of. There is nothing glorious at all about squalor. However, I cannot count the number of times I have heard an entertainer 'big up' favoured ghettos on stage, or encountered someone who identifies themselves by affiliation with one ghetto or the other.
I do not expect or wish anyone to be ashamed of where they come from. However, when it becomes a badge of pride to come from a ghetto and have no intention of bettering yourself or your community, something is wrong. Lest we forget, Bob Marley did sing "we come from Trench Town/they say nothing good comes from Trench Town" but he bought Island House on Hope Road, very much uptown, where the museum is today. And when he sang of the government yard in Trench Town ('No Woman No Cry') he sang of a sense of community that he remembered as well as the hypocrites, of course. He did not celebrate squalor. Those who do sling around terms like 'rich and switch' to typecast those who try hard and achieve.
Similarly, many people glorify poverty. Again, it is a situation that one must try to get out of, not wear like a badge of honour, like it is some wonderful achievement. The poor are those who are susceptible to something that Marley advised against "never let a politician grant you a favour/they will want to control you forever" so the mental slave becomes the political slave. (Did I hear somebody say Tivoli? Did I hear someone say Tawes Pen?)
A BRAND IS A BRAND
Branding is another widespread example of mental slavery, this notion that something acquires added value because of a name-tag. Take an ordinary T-shirt or cap, scrawl some name on it like Von Dutch or Hilfiger, and it becomes expensive. This is a rather potent example of mental slavery, for whether it is in your skin or work over your skin, a brand is a brand, OK. This time, though, we are paying for it. And, lest we forget, if you go to the Bob Marley Museum you will see Marley's favourite performance outfit in pride of place, a simple jeans suit ('bellas', too). No name brand.
Finally, mental slavery exists when we allow those who would control us for personal profit or to enshrine their elevated positions in the society to define what is important to us, mainly through the media. Hence, for me, the social scene pages exist only for wrapping fish and sopping up fridge water. Why should the inane spouting of some politician or the other mean more to me than a 92 year-old woman being raped? Why should nearly 200,000 people dying from a tsunami mean more to me than that same number of people dying in Africa from AIDS in well under a week?
Yet, by their relative placement in the print and electronic media, one would be persuaded to believe that the politician and the tsunami are of paramount importance.
Emancipation from mental slavery is about self-determination and self-definition, not just a line in a song.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer
