Submitted by Pachamama
In the national waste paper, otherwise called ‘The Nation’, we see Hilary Beckles praising that ‘organization’ and more importantly reverting to a language from his previous life in an effort to achieve two competing and contradictory goals. First, Beckles is seeking to promote a reparations agenda which he feels will bring resources to institutions that pretend to act in the interest of the country/region. Secondly and on the down side, in his mind, by appearing to resort to a language of confrontation, Beckles may be seeking to somehow insulate himself from the collapse of the neo-liberal project which, with the aid of buddy Owen Arthur, he has greatly benefitted from, now that what he sees as his legacy is in great and mortal danger.
To put this artificial and renewed interest in Black empowerment, which Beckles now feels confident to mouth, it is necessary to locate his circular and convenient logic within its proper historical context. Beckles came back to the region some decades ago and located himself within a bureaucratic apparatus which was to give him certain protections. It was, and still is, an institution which suborns narratives about Black disenfranchisement, by people like Keith Hunte, as a lever for their personal advancement. So like Hunte, Beckles, in this most recent reincarnation in using the same idiom for personal advancement. This is a brazen initiative for self. Not even his mentor, Keith Hunte, came back to that narrative more than once.
That Hilary Beckles has the gall to now make reference to the ‘‘Mutual Affair’’, in public, after selling out his compatriots, actively refusing to recognize those events in his professional profile and by assigning the book that chronicled those events to a publisher’s death, must represent a grotesque socialpathic or sociopathic or psychopathic mind. A mind that is incapable of having a real sense of feeling for Black people, unless in pretense, when imposing itself on us as some though leader. We strenuously object. Beckles does not and should not have the moral authority to represent the sufferings of Black peoples after his most recent crimes against us.
When Beckles was taking money and land from White people in Barbados, a pittance, in whoever’s interests, it was then inconvenient for his to be a truth speaker. We vividly recall him like the proverbial Sambo and with a deceitful smile on his face taking money from Geoffrey Cave. Now that he has mustered a false courage to speak truth again we must wonder whether the well of White patronage has dried up. We must wonder whether it is now impossible to avoid a narrative that the whole local political-economic structure is at an end. We must wonder whether this new found interest for Black empowerment and Black economic citizenship is not about the narcissistic personality of Beckles. A narcissism will rooted within the Bajan elites.
Any gains made during The Mutual Affair were to be squandered in the service of the personal advancement of Beckles. For it was Beckles, as a careerist, who aided the corporatists at The Mutual, now Sagicor, to demutualize the organization. Thereby turning a company that was owned and controlled, ostensibly, by the policyholders of Barbados and the Caribbean, into the private fiefdom of elite corporate interests. This is the man who now comes with the unmitigated gall, after surrendering the most valuable ‘public’ asset to private hands preaching about the empowerment of Black people. Herein lies the Becklesian contradiction. Yes, your interest in Black enfranchisement must be limited to the likes of Harold Hoyte and Dodridge Miller and other Black elites. For you were never really interested in any real democracy or freedom that you could not control, benefit from or not of your own making.
Now that he has gotten the five million dollar a year for the so-called high performance centre, the buildings in Bridgetown and in Cave Hill, a number of acreages of land from various interests and the personal directorships on various boards, this traitor feels that it is now time to cuss White people again. We must ask what was happening for the last 15 to 20 years? It was the very Beckles, who witnessed Owen Arthur, close up, creating conditions in Barbados where questions of land reform, reparations, Black empowerment and income mal-distribution were left to deteriorate. In fact, thanks to his buddy Owen Arthur’s free market project for the commodification of land in Barbados land reform may now be an impossibility.
As a member of the boards of Sagicor, WICB(C) and LIME the ‘Black talk’ will not normally be encouraged and Beckles is no man well known to rock any boat unless some scheme is afoot. We suggest that the mask be stripped from this interloper as Chenwezi demanded. He has never earned and does not deserve the trust of the peoples of the Caribbean. As though using the playbook of Hunte, Beckles, ‘this big Black empowerment figure’ slavishly accepted a knighthood from a queen of the colonial power under the guise that it was really a Barbadian honour. He was not like the Great George Lamming who rightly told Sandiford where to put that dishonor which was improperly directed. So today we are to live with the irony that this miscreant could walk about here with a title stained with the blood of African peoples while, in a perfunctory fashion, shouting ‘Black enfranchisement’, ‘Black economic citizenship’. What is load of poooooooh!
Let us look to the radical legacies of John Cumberbatch, Leroy Harewood, Bussa, Glenroy Straughan and the other real heroic figures from our recent and not so recent history. People from the 1930 and the 1960’s and 1970’s who had a genuine commitment to empowerment of all dispossessed peoples. Down with Beckles the, consummate lackey!
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