c qoi o jus' ? ki sa sa ki sa yé ?

AIME CESAIRE : ADAGIO POUR LA DA

  

    N'oublions pas la Da qui berça le petit Aimé.

    En Martinique on appelait la nourrice d'un enfant sa Da, en Guadeloupe on disait la Mabo (de “ma bonne”). C'était, dans les familles qui pouvaient se le permettre, la seconde mère, la servante attentionnée qui était attachée à l'enfant et veillait à son confort et à sa bonne éducation.

 C'est sur la Plantation Eyma à Basse-Pointe, dans le nord de la Martinique, qu'Aimé Césaire naquit et passa son enfance. Sa Da était d'origine indienne, comme le sont encore bon nombre d'habitants de l'endroit. Âgée, cette dame avait libre droit d'accès en Mairie de Fort-de-France même en période de crue, pour voir l'enfant devenu écrivain, puis maire, puis député - car celui dont elle avait été la nourrice ne l'avait pas reniée. Les comptines en Tamoul dont elle le berça restèrent dans sa mémoire. Il les évoquait à l'occasion.

YOU ARE INDO-ST. LUCIAN IF...

(The way it used to be...)
You know you are a St. Lucian Indian or Indo-St. Lucian...

If you refer to yourself as coolie,
If you have a relative that is a mechanic,
If you or a relative drives a transport,
If you or a relative drives a dump truck,
If you have a relative that is a fisherman,
If someone in your family is a businessman,
If you have more than five alcoholics in your family,
If you always have that one relative in the rumshop,
If you like white rum,
If your grandparents/great-grandparents call their children beti or €œbeta
If you refer to speaking Hindi and as speaking Indian€,
If you know what a chamar€ or jungalee means
If anything with curry, you call it Indian food,
If you like fish broth
If you can make dahl puri,
If someone in your family is a Methodist or Catholic,
If your grandfather has been accused of taking people for devil€,
If you have to ask a boy/girl that you want to check if you are related to them before you go out,
If you lime in a group of 3 or more,
If you always threatening to chop a man with a cutlass,
If you listen to Country n Western,
If your family knows the value of a ten cents,
If you like cricket because we have another one as Captain
If you or a family member is fond of cows or horses,
If you are or have Dougla-s and Indians in your family,
If you have a drop of Indian blood running through your veins,

If your ancestors
Were indentured servants...

James Rambally

B&W photo, Rambali family in the 1970's

Courtesy J. Rambally.

Special thanks.

 

NELSON MANDELA : GANDHI, THE SACRED WARRIOR

■ India is Gandhi's country of birth; South Africa his country of adoption. He was both an Indian and a South African citizen. Both countries contributed to his intellectual and moral genius, and he shaped the liberatory movements in both colonial theaters. He is the archetypal anticolonial revolutionary. His strategy of noncooperation, his assertion that we can be dominated only if we cooperate with our dominators, and his nonviolent resistance inspired anticolonial and antiracist movements internationally in our century.

    Both Gandhi and I suffered colonial oppression, and both of us mobilized our respective peoples against governments that violated our freedoms. The Gandhian influence dominated freedom struggles on the African continent right up to the 1960s because of the power it generated and the unity it forged among the apparently powerless. Nonviolence was the official stance of all major African coalitions, and the South African A.N.C. remained implacably opposed to violence for most of its existence.

    Gandhi remained committed to nonviolence; I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Unkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to our struggle. Even then, we chose sabotage because it did not involve the loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Militant action became part of the African agenda officially supported by the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.) following my address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in 1962, in which I stated, "Force is the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without some sort of violence."

    Gandhi himself never ruled out violence absolutely and unreservedly. He conceded the necessity of arms in certain situations. He said, "Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor ..." Violence and nonviolence are not mutually exclusive; it is the predominance of the one or the other that labels a struggle.

    Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893 at the age of 23. Within a week he collided head on with racism. His immediate response was to flee the country that so degraded people of color, but then his inner resilience overpowered him with a sense of mission, and he stayed to redeem the dignity of the racially exploited, to pave the way for the liberation of the colonized the world over and to develop a blueprint for a new social order. He left 21 years later, a near maha atma (great soul). There is no doubt in my mind that by the time he was violently removed from our world, he had transited into that state.

    He was no ordinary leader. There are those who believe he was divinely inspired, and it is difficult not to believe with them. He dared to exhort nonviolence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded on us; he exhorted morality when science, technology and the capitalist order had made it redundant; he replaced self-interest with group interest without minimizing the importance of self. In fact, the interdependence of the social and the personal is at the heart of his philosophy. He seeks the simultaneous and interactive development of the moral person and the moral society.

- Nelson Mandela.

SOURCE

1933 : A MESSAGE FROM GANDHIJI (click to enlarge)