Earlier Caribbean generations grew-up under post-Slavery colonialism with minds sunk deep in mental slavery.
African-based spirituality was frowned-upon by West Indian Christians who saw any reference to ‘a Black Christ’ as blasphemous, but saw nothing wrong with statues of The Devil being depicted as Black.
Likewise, early efforts at pastoral indigenization through introduction of Conga Drums and local musical instruments were also resisted vehemently by the local Roman Catholics who loudly opposed changing the language of the ‘Holy Mass’ on Sundays from Latin to English.
In the 1970s, the Black Power Movement influenced better appreciation of the Caribbean’s Africa connection among progressive politicians, youth and students who’d long yearned for more exposure to their hidden roots and cultural origins.
Race issues still factor in Caribbean politics today, particularly when elections are approaching – and Saint Lucia is no different, where a recent statement by an opposition politician evoked a storm of public reaction.
Castries businessman and opposition politician Timothy Mangal last weekend used the phrase ‘Black like Philip J. Pierre…’ to compare the difference between how roadside projects looked (in his eyes) in the Castries East constituency Pierre represents in parliament, vis-a-vis the neighbouring Castries South-East constituency (where he once unsuccessfully contested).
He spoke on a United Workers Party (UWP) campaigning platform, but his words would so haunt Mangal later that he was embarrassingly forced to repeatedly fail to do the impossible by explaining the inexplicable.
Mangal simply couldn’t convince Doubting Thomases he didn’t mean to associate ‘Black’ with negativity.
But then, what’s the history behind this foolish chequered debate about black and white in Saint Lucian politics?
It all goes back to the 1990s, when the derogatory term ‘Little Black Boy’ was used by the region’s privileged classes to describe local young men the neo-colonial system had failed.
This insulting label so angered Trinidad & Tobago’s legendary calypsonian ‘Gypsy’, that he wrote and sang a positive anthem for the young Caribbean men labelled and condemned by those who blamed their sufferance and wretchedness on their colour.
Gypsy’s song ‘Little Black Boy’ was released in 1997.
But it wasn’t about what was meant by the lighter-skinned high-ups in UWP, who pointedly applied the term to Pierre for daring to become a Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP) candidate for the Castries East seat in 1997 against the supposedly indefatigable sitting UWP MP (Romanus Lansiquot).
Due to Pierre’s humble beginnings (his father was a policeman and his mother a teacher), he was seen as insufficiently pedigreed to win the electoral horse race against a UWP thoroughbred.
But the young Pierre (just back as a University of the West Indies graduate) was seen as ‘just another’ poor boy from just-another poor family, who didn’t have what it would cost to defeat Lansiquot.
But Gypsy wasn’t singing about well-educated and good-mannered young Caribbean men like Pierre.
Instead, his song was about those who ‘Went to school, but never learned’, those ‘Only caring about how to dress and pose, but with no job’ and ‘ending-up living lives of crime, or being shot dead in the head by the police…’
Gypsy urged them to ‘Go to school and learn,’ because ‘Education is key to get off the streets and off poverty…’.
‘Don’t be a fool, keep yourself in school’, he sang a clarinet call for ‘Rude Boys with rings in their noses’ who got hooked on coke’ to ‘Stop taking life for a joke’, but instead to ‘Take a look at yourself and put your pants on the shelf…’
He urged the badly-branded Caribbean youth to ‘Find your place and don’t stay in the back just because you’re Black.’
Gypsy invited the region’s troubled, neglected and rejected young men to ‘Think about your race and find your place’ — and to ‘Be Black, but also be conscious…’
The positive young man in Philip J. Pierre obviously listened well-enough and followed Gypsy’s sound advice — and has, since 1997, turned-out to be the very opposite to what he was framed as through the dim lens of his vision-impaired critics: he won in Castries East and has been re-elected five times.
The degrading title was revived in 2016, when, as the new SLP Leader, Pierre pledged to defeat the UWP (then led by Prime Minister Allen Chastanet).
Chastanet and Pierre’s stark complexion contrasts – like their class interests — are as plain opposite as black and white.
Yet, Chastanet’s short-sighted critics even claimed ‘Saint Lucians have shown they don’t want a Black prime minister’, echoing another claim that Saint Lucians “always prefer Prime Ministers with un ti couleur wa-ya-yai…” (“Prime Ministers with lighter skins…”)
The supposedly ‘Red-eyed’ Prime Minister Pierre has however proved his jaundiced UWP critics wrong nine years later: As promised in 2016, he led the SLP to a sound 13-4 victory in 2021 that broke earlier trends and was soon enhanced by two former UWP ministers who’d contested as Independent Candidates (one a former prime minister) joining Pierre’s SLP-led Cabinet
With a 15-2 parliamentary majority, the Pierre administration removed the island from the Privy Council — and indicated his interest in the island also becoming a republic.
So, this ‘Little Black Boy’ in Saint Lucia has delivered on every lofty dream Gypsy had for the likes of him across the Caribbean, while continuing to utterly disappoint those who might have anointed him rightly, but for the wrong reasons.
Mangal’s sorry reference to Pierre’s complexion is, therefore, simply another tired expression of the UWP’s unending regret that this this Prime Minister has done and delivered so-well to date in his first outing, that more and more UWP supporters who’ve seen his light are willing to publicly say he deserves a second term.
And they, like the vast majority of Saint Lucians today, will willingly creatively invoke and rephrase the question begged by the legendary American singer Tina Turner in her ever-popular hit song and ask: “What’s COLOUR got to do with it?”