Many Jamaicans are obsessed with slavery and hug it up as if they were the ones enslaved. Yet, what we know about slavery is from ancient, white people. Slavery history is evidenced in primary sources, archaeology, ethno linguistics, ethno biology, science (as in carbon dating), and white men’s writings, discoveries, records, etc. They know black history as they pursue a hunch, live cheap; stay with a dig for years, which no black did or does.

I lived there as South Africa paid to find archaeologists with Arabic for the Timbuktu project, as digging dirt is not sexy to blacks. Despite many thousands in Windrush — some as mine from St Mary banana bush, no blacks in the UK went to free agriculture college, then or now. Farming be damned, black people with choice don’t choose the soil at any time!

History is long ago news, evidenced then or since by artefact. It’s not logic or argument. It is set in time, place, social, and legal context, so racy language for or against or using 21st century values makes little sense. No other country in the Caribbean — not Barbados, Dominican Republic, or revolutionary Cuba — has our rear-view focus on slavery.

Jamaica looks back a lot and is the only West Indian nation that did not prosper for even a decade since Independence. Is there a link? We had no winning revolution or coup, though we outnumbered whites, but we chat, are abusive to minorities — “coolie two fi one, Chiney nyam dog” — and plantation whites, who were first, take comfort in their profits. Our “out of many” are tense, yet Cabinet has no race, hate or equalities law or agency and Justice Minister Delroy Chuck seems oblivious to this need.

Today, race activists commodify slavery as the extant economic salvation doctrine is reparation. So “fake history” in support stirs emotions of even black nations which should be arraigned for selling their kin. To them production is second to pieces of sliver for long dead ancestors. So to hype slavery is their thing, but the soul of our nation is in peril?

Cabinet must support issues which enure to growth so, for instance, Black History Month is right for America, but we need Jamaica History Month to teach us of Taino, close neighbours as Cuba, British and Africa brethren. We now have local and overseas writers masking advocacy as history and misleading youth. A TV parson told of an owner who put a screw in his slave and turned it. The audience was tearful as he ended, “Give your heart to Jesus, give generously, and don’t be screwed.” This barefaced lie was just to make money!

Slavery was universal. White people enslaved each other and Romans made chattel slavery law before black Africa was “discovered”. Many Jamaicans hug up slavery, which they never knew, but Africa may one day write its history and confirm or say different. Today slavery is still universal and Africa still on point.

Of some 167 countries, Jamaica is 112th with 7,000 slaves ( Jamaica Observer, July 2, 2018, Richard Browne reporting). To many, West Indian slavery is soap opera — wicked whites, good blacks, and we have “fake history” now reparation is Caricom’s main economic policy — so from the comfort of white America, Britain, Canada, the scion of West Indians write and collude. Some cite an act of cruelty in a British source and elaborate ad nauseam; but was it a majority? Or just as I have to tell English friends that all Jamaicans do not flog their kids with machetes these writers mislead the masses.

This focus on transatlantic slavery as if it is unlike other African export slavery is strategy. Slice it, or dice it, slavery was in ancient Africa for debt, to subsist in drought or famine, farm labour and spoils of war. Close neighbours — Arab, Indian, Berber — were the first foreigners to buy kinky hair black people to work sugar and date plantations and mines, hundreds of years before the Caribbean was “discovered” by Europe.

Our slave history sources are of Europe, India, Arabia; not much China, which prized medicinal plants and exotic African animals as they had abundant labour. The UNESCO history, funded by Americans, shames Africa, and our Walter Rodney wrote more African history than them. Most African history is written by whites, but no black writes European history though millions live there — strange?

We spent years in the British, Spanish, The Gleaner, Smithsonian archives, and now see that nations frenetic on slavery and reparation fit a certain profile: All were gifted freedom, independence;, but none won it in war as Cuba or Dominican Republic. Why are West Indian men (yes, all men), centuries removed, testy on slavery? Are they mental? Ashamed ancestors did not fight and win? Then so many resent English which they speak badly, yet are all majority black nations with black rulers. French and Spanish islands, majority brown (not Haiti), speak their languages with pride. An arrogant black, caressing his French as Rex Nettleford his English, is a thing of beauty! Next, though endowed with bauxite, oil, minerals, tourism product, English and proximity to America, all failed at sustainable growth, are poor and resent the International Monetary Fund, which helps when no other bank will. Why? Call the psychiatrist?

If Cuba, Dominican Republic spoke English, or Barbados had our mass, they would be superpowers. Do Jamaicans under-develop Jamaica? In Part II we figure out why all ethnic groups had African slaves but Africans only enslaved blacks. One love!

Franklin Johnston, D Phil (Oxon), is a strategist and project manager; Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (UK); and teaches logistics and supply chain management at Mona School of Business and Management, The University of the West Indies. Send comments to the Observer or franklinjohnstontoo@gmail.com.