Hating your own food
WEEKEND WITH FREDDIE
Kaieteur News
July 31, 2004
The people of the colonized world, stretching from Africa to India, down to the Caribbean thousands of miles away are now freed human beings.
They have their own place in the sun that the European Empires can no longer touch and which must respect them. The people of the post-colonial world are now free to stand equally alongside the countries that once dictated and shaped their fates. But how psychologically free are post-colonial people.
They still regard their culture, language and their economic productions as inferior to Europe and the USA. The most striking analysis of this psychic destruction is Franz Fanon’s book, ‘Black Skin, White Mask’.
This is a power indictment of the psychological colonialism non-white people still live under. There is no other vivid representation of this psychic contortion than the writer, V.S Naipaul. He feigns an English accent, hates his native Trinidad and has an obsessive quest to put down everything that exists in the Third World
If Naipaul irritates you, then the worst is yet to come – the Bollywood film industry. To become an actor/actress in the Mumbai film industry, you must be lily white with blue eyes.
As a matter of principle, dark-skinned people or those with brown complexion are not welcomed. There has never been a leading actor/actress or even second-tier actor/actress with sapodilla skin colour in the Bollywood film industry.
How the world has tolerated this nonsense for so long is stranger than the support East Indian capitalists in Guyana have historically given to a communist party that hates businessmen.
Arab leaders are solely responsible for the tragic confrontations that Muslim countries now seek with the West. The over-bearing psychological colonialism of Arab leaders has alienated their people to the point of violent resistance.
Arab leaders just love everything that is American and European, even marrying wives from those parts of the world. What a laughable irony that a staunch Muslim like Pakistani cricketing hero Imran Khan chose to father an out-of-wedlock child with an American socialite, then marry a British billionaire’s daughter. He failed to win Muslim votes when he went back to Pakistan to become a politician. Like V.S Naipaul, Imran Khan is a Third World citizen with a European mind
Local food has been the biggest casualty of Third World psychological colonialism. Let us apply this to Guyana. Forbes Burnham was the purest anti-colonial advocate of buy local but his style of rule caused people to reject what he said because you must be a generous democrat if people are going to listen to you.
Burnham was on good ground when he appealed to Guyanese to love their foods but because he was a hated figure, people wanted to distance themselves from it, thus the failure of his message
If you want to see how Guyanese hate their own foods, go to the mini-marts attached to some gas stations. I live near to one of the most heavily patronized gas station mini-marts.
My wife and I are regular visitors there because she loves the local tamarind balls and I am hooked on the local fudge this place sells. Sometimes I stand and watch in embarrassing amazement as Guyanese of all walks of life would stack their baskets high with all the foreign products. People who should know better are the most hypocritical ones.
In this gas station mini-mart, you will find businessmen whose livelihood depends on selling local products devouring all the foreign products that are on the shelves.
The middle-class wives only buy BICO ice-cream from Barbados. Now mind you, these people are buying these things not because of superior qualities but because of psychological colonialism. A majority of these shoppers would never touch tamarind balls and fudge because they are made in Guyana.
But just slap a foreign label on these very goods and you will see the mad rush for them. Oh my! The kids would love this stuff! So in the basket, the Belgium- made fudge would go. In the basket the American-made tamarind balls would go.
Guyanese have contempt for locally manufactured goods, but within this contempt lies their own self-destruction. When you buy local, you virtually keep your country alive. Take Polar beer. If it is allowed to be smuggled into Guyana without duties paid, then it kills Banks DIH. Think of the thousands that this company employs.
Think of the billions it contributes to the treasury. The same goes for DDL. Here is a Guyanese transnational company that brings in valuable foreign exchange through its impressive export record. When you buy DDL juices, then you keep DDL workers alive and you keep Guyana going. Ah! But there is a counter-argument. What is it?
Polar beer is better and foreign juices are superior. But who says so? This is where psychological colonialism comes in. Our juices are superior. And Banks beer is a world class beer. The people who drink Polar beer have an identity problem. They want to be like the Bollywood entertainers.
So they feel they are part of foreign society when they go to the beer garden, and with arms locked tightly with their girl friends, they show off with the Polar beer in their hands.
But it is an illusion. They drink Polar beer because of a mental reason not because it is a better beer. Of course, they soon come crashing into reality when they go to the US Embassy. They go to the wicket. A young high school graduate is the consular interviewer – she barely has any experience of the real world and within minutes the interview is over and the visa is denied. But there is still some consolation. The world of make-belief goes on. On Sheriff Street that night, they go back to their girlfriends and the they show off their Polar beer habits
Let me conclude this argument. Here is this essay with reprints of two examples I mentioned in previous Kaieteur columns of mine many moons ago on the need to buy local. I once wrote that we have a small supermarket a block away from a Baptist Church.
All the American Baptist missionaries who visit our supermarket only call for American made soft drinks. “Hello, good morning, have you got Pepsi or Coke?” They never will try a local soda. Finally, I saw this leading Guyanese figure of ACDA in the gas station mini-mart some years ago whose hands could hardly have held all the bottles of apple and cranberry juices that were purchased.
ACDA will have a food booth for tomorrow’s Emancipation Day at the National Park. I am going to buy my cranberry juice there, hoping to be emancipated .