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Black Aotearoa: Sketches of a Global Decolonial Imagination

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Black Aotearoa: Sketches of a Global Decolonial Imagination Black Aotearoa: Sketches of a Global Decolonial Imagination Robbie Shilliam Tēnei te mihi atu ki te ngākau kaha o ngā tāngata o Xamayca. This document is a sketch of a project that I have been working on for the last couple of years. It is a sketch because I don‟t have all my sources and resources with me here, where I am writing this, at the Centre for Caribbean Thought UWI. Much of what follows is retrieved from my memory. Therefore I am not referencing in the standard way and so this document should not be cited for this reason. It is also a sketch because there is much more thinking that must be put into this project and in what follows I am collating some of my thoughts rather than presenting a finished argument. Moreover, I am taking this opportunity to relate my thoughts and sketches directly to the historical struggles of the African Diaspora in Jamaica and the Caribbean at large in order to affirm the global importance of ideas and practices that emerge not from big continents but out of “small islands”. So this is the spirit in which I am sharing this work and I hope it will provoke further thought. The working title of my project is Black Aotearoa, Aotearoa being the Māori name for New Zealand – “land of the long white cloud”. But why “Blacken” a set of islands so far away from the Caribbean? Let me try and explain, firstly by stringing together a couple of stories that run over the course of 150 years. In 1840 Māori chiefs (rangatira) from many tribes (iwi) signed a Treaty at Waitangi with the British crown. To the Māori the treaty was supposed to govern the wayward actions of the British settlers by placing Māori under the protection of the British Queen but allowing Māori to continue to govern themselves and their land through their own spiritual, economic and political practices. To the colonial governors and settlers, the Treaty meant something quite different: Māori had ceded their sovereignty – persons, lands, practices, souls - to the British. Just a few years later it started to become clear to Māori that the spirit of the Treaty was not being honored. Having translated parts of the Old Testament of the most holy book of their new neighbors, the Pākehā (whites/Europeans), some Māori started to identify the British forces with Babylon and themselves with the Biblical Israelites. By the 1860s a full-on civil war had erupted over land encroached upon by the British settlers. One response by Māori was to try and unite the tribes into a King movement, the Kīngitanga, which had its own propaganda mouthpiece in the form of a newspaper. Over a number of issues the writers relayed the story of the Haitian Revolution, told to them by a French Catholic priest. The Haitians, the newspaper reasoned, had formulated the correct response to European invasion. Therefore the writers suggested: “Wait a little and perhaps the Rangatiratanga [chieftainship] of this island will be like that of Haiti; possessing goods, authority, law ... Perhaps God will protect his black skinned children who are living in Aotearoa”.1 One of the most (in)famous historical personalities of the civil war in the East Cape of the North Island was Te Kooti who was (mistakenly) arrested for activities against the Crown and transported with others to a prison settlement on the Chatham Islands, at least 500 miles east into the Pacific.2 There, Te Kooti contemplated a biblical vision whereby he would lead the whakarau (prisoners) – the Israelites – out of Egypt – Wharekauri (the Chatham Islands) - back to the land of Canaan - the North Island. Te Kooti led a guerilla warfare campaign against the British forces for many years following. In the mid 1980s in Ruatoria, a small town on the East Cape, a group of disaffected youth left their gang lives to honor the calling of Te Kooti, a calling revealed to them in part through the teachings of Rastafari and the divine image of Haile Selassie. They fought a protracted – and sometimes violent – battle with local Pākehā, local authorities, and local Māori of their own tribes in the attempt to reclaim land upon which they might live self-sufficiently and autonomously.3 Here is how Hone Heeney, the present rangatira (chief) of the Ngāti Dredd4 understands the calling: “The Baldheads decided to plant all our whenua [land] in pine trees, plantation work. Cutting down all our native trees, making our lands desolate … They, the Baldheads, set it up so we are the „niggers‟ working their „cotton picking pine plantation‟ … We laid our hands down on the table for the War-God-Jah-Tumatauenga, colonization, western imperialism, them all be Baldhead words of slavery, standover tactics. It is our honor and glory to go on the battlefield under the banner of Jah, to fight against the dark forces invading and consuming our holy land, Aotearoa.”5 1 This story has been retrieved by Lachlan Paterson at the University of Otago. 2 The image is of Te Kooti‟s flag; it is assumed that the letters, WI, refer to the Holy Spirit (Wairua Tapu), the crescent moon to a portent of a new order (tohu) and the fighting cross of Archangel Michael. 3 The image is a sketch I found by Hone Heeney. Te Ahi a te Atua means the fire of god (2 Kings chapter 1). Fire has many connotations in both Māori and Rasta cosmologies. Compare with the image reproduced below by Tigilau Ness. 4 Ngāti is not natty in New Zealand patois. In the Māori language it indicates the name of a tribe. 5 This is from a book called Moko - Māori Tattoo. I don‟t have the full reference on me. The picture is of a Ruatoria Dredd from back in the 1980s. They were/are expert horse riders. *************** Two sets of islands in two different oceans: one populated by indigenous peoples who then experienced encroachment and attempted genocide by European colonizers; the other experiencing a mostly successful genocide visited on the indigenous peoples by colonial forces then to be mainly populated by enslaved Africans as well as indentured Indians and Chinese. Looking on the map one would expect little to connect the two groups of islands. Nevertheless, maps can be deceptive. For example, the breadfruit that is a staple in the Caribbean was brought there by Captain Bligh from the South Pacific to be an expedient source of calorific intake for the burgeoning enslaved populations: that is the real politics of the Mutiny on the Bounty, not the mutiny itself! Indeed, stories exist in many Pacific Island locales, including Aotearoa NZ, of enslaved Africans arriving on French and American commercial and whaling ships, jumping ship and fleeing into the hinterlands to throw themselves on the mercy of native tribes. We are not talking massive and sustained population exchanges here. Nevertheless, just like the Maroon communities in the Caribbean, the search for liberation brought indigenous and African enslaved peoples together in a social and marital weave. And just when it seemed that the struggle against slavery in the Atlantic was approaching the ascendant, so the practice started in the Pacific. From the 1860s to the end of the century, Melanesians - which to the Europeans were the blacker, more “negro” looking (hence “savage”) Pacific native as opposed to the lighter, less-savage Polynesians - were “blackbirded”, stolen and shipped away to work the sugar plantations of Fiji and Queensland Australia. Additionally, the colonial governing class was a transnational one itself. Governors of Aotearoa NZ also worked in South Africa, India, and the Caribbean. For example, Edward Eyre, the Governor who executed George William Gordon for his part in the Morant Bay Uprising, had previously served as Lieutenant-Governor in Aotearoa NZ. Incidentally, I would contend that in the British colonial circuit of the 19th century, such transnationalism allowed the word “negro” or “blacks” - and its pejorative “nigger” - to be circulated around the world to apply to all “incalcitrant” native populations… and, perhaps, landscapes.6 The point is that Euclidian maps, stripped of story and subject, do not allow us to glean the deep set of global linkages and inter-relations that were created or re-forged through - and increasingly against – colonialism; and neither, perhaps, does a geographical imagination that sights connections only in terms of material relations of cause and effect. As the above stories would have revealed, the anti-colonial / de-colonial imagination – that which spies out the possibilities and shapes of liberation – is, and has for a long time been, a global one... global enough to match the global material structures of European colonialism. This imagination - philosophical, aesthetic, affective and ideological - binds together fates in a way that makes it utterly inadequate to understand the thought and experience of (post-)colonized subjects only in terms of their relationship to the colonizer. While this relationship is, of course, a fundamentally powerful one, it also takes on a fantasy-like security for the Western Academy. In truth, the slave/master 6 Search on google maps for “Niggerhead, Canterbury, New Zealand”. Niggerhead is a slang term for a tussock grass. relationship has never constrained the imagination of (post-)colonized subjects and the practices that emerge from it, a global, imaginative, creative, searching, repairing and re- integrating imagination. My working title, Black Aotearoa, supports the legitimacy and authority of this kind of global decolonial imagination. My intention is not to provide another easy narrative of how we have always been globalized. I am far more interested in valorizing the particular situatedness of lived experience under colonial rule and at the same time exploring the global coordinates of the imagination that seeks to decolonize this experience.
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