No image is more didactic of the plantation experience than the windmill such as this one still found on the Whim estate in St Croix; though it is still intact, the quarters that once housed enslaved Africans is entangled in bush, also speaking eloquently to the neglect that typifies the majority class’ psychosocial and socio-economic security. The plantation was the flashpoint of existential contradictions; for over three centuries, seven European nations that ruled the Virgin Islands’ roost – principally Denmark.
“Since Columbus encountered and named the Virgin Islands (he landed on St Croix on his second trip in 1493 at Salt River), many countries have planted their flags on our shores. St Croix switched hands the most of any of the Virgin Islands and has a rich cultural past having flown seven flags over the island: Spain, England, Holland, France, the Knights of Malta, Denmark, and finally, the United States. In 1733, France sold the islands to the Danish West India Company and Denmark ruled the island colonies for almost 200 years.”
(http://my-stcroix.com/transfer-day-in-the-virgin-islands/).
The question of celebrating or commemorating Transfer Day is a very troubling one; it rubs salt in unassuaged wounds of some Virgin Islanders who consider their neo-colonial status criminal as Denmark usurped the citizenship rights of Africans who had been emancipated for 69 years and those who had never been enslaved and were free were also denied autonomy when in 1917, the so-called three small islands were sold to the United States of America for $25million (over $509 million in today’s money).
I journeyed to St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix to engage with people there to figure out how they defined their identity politics ahead of the 2017 centennial of said sale. The ethnographic engagement threw up an existential maze; US colonialism has all but trumped (if you’ll pardon the unfortunate expression), memories of Danish (and German) colonialism – those being the penultimate, somewhat double-headed flags to fly. It is very complicated how this duality comes about; Denmark and Germany (then Prussia) fought two seminal wars (and there is a symbolic lion that embodies the exchange of land that resulted although of course, lions do not grow in Europe but the incorporation of such symbolisms into Eurocentric cosmological representation is a whole nother story).
Anyways, after the decisive 1864 war, much of what used to be Denmark became Germany; a Danish minority was left behind in the South while a German minority remained in the North. So technically Germany was interested in the transfer and from a self interested point of view too but then the USA took up the offer that by-passed Germany, for strategic geo-political reasons, the most popularly cited being that it provided access to the Panama Canal. The onslaught of the first great European war was then imminent and the alignment against Germany was also important.
So that is how the Virgin Islanders got caught in this mega chess game; people bitterly recall the decade after Transfer when martial law was instituted when people would be brutalized in the streets by army officers who felt entitled to use openly racist tactics to control a bewildered population. I went searching for memories of Danish colonialism and although I found that, it was so enmeshed in the imperative of US hegemony that it seemed difficult to even discursively detangle this many stranded paradox.
So I wrote a poem that captured some features of this contradiction.
Two sides of the Coin
Where I come from
We have a proverbial
Saying
What is joke to you
Is death to me and
beyond language barriers, that saying
Is self-explanatory
Celebrating rum wealth
As romantic myth
Of colonial legacy
Denies the mess made
During slavery
Or in politically correct
Terminology
the Holocaust
Of African enslavement
By selling colonized territory
In Ghana in 1850
And Virgin islands in 1917
What Denmark was really bent
On doing
Was historical
Denial of
our common
colonial legacy
in three instances
Europe, Africa
and Caribbean
fantasy
[carried beyond…]
Mistakenly
named West Indies
The post colonial project?
to erase this criminality
from living
memory
and
the collective
cultural psyche
so in Flensburg today
we find people that say
This is Rum City
Nowhere near historical honesty
there is celebration of wealth
while truth exited by stealth
with no thought in mind
of inhuman trafficking
of people
from East, West, North, South
Central and every other part
of the African continent
And the centuries of tortuous plunder
Being dis-connected
To exploitation of limb and labour
To produce the firey liquid
That built the fine houses and
Legacy that made merchant
Families
proud and scornful of the
rebound on the people
Who paid rum’s cost
With blood sweat and tears
While some with fanfare hail
2017’s centennial
Of Denmark-USA-Virgin Islands
sale
of the land and people
for twenty five million US dollars
unrested souls’ wail
rent the silence
of complicit politricks
Reparations advocates say
Denmark and
Nay
Also Germany and USA
Must pay
That transfer value
Is over 509 million today
This is a travesty
Robbery of people labour
And justice
This autohypnosis odyssey
Writ large
Constitutes political psychosis
and involuntary
loss of memory
plus simultaneous
Schizophrenia regarding
Moral responsibility
A plague on rum’s great houses
Adding insult to injury
You feign invisibility
Yet without timidity you
Ask me
Sugar in your tea?
One or two in die koffie?
Drinking colonial
Legacy
While my cup of sorrow
Runneth over
We all desire reconciliation
From clinging horrors still haunting
our present situation
colonialism
Racism
Sexism
Classism
And
All otherisations
And isms
And schisms
But reconciliation
requires the responsibility
Of re-membering
Transitional justice
Now quoting Marcus Garvey
A people with no knowledge of its past
Is like a tree without roots
Sankofa!
We have to go to our roots, bloody as they are
Fetch the memories
And taut as a bow
Shoot revolutionary arrows
To the Future
Next post will pay homage to the people of the three small islands, so called by Flensburgers who do not really know how monumental their significance is in the cheme of things.
Contact: Dr. Imani M. Tafari-Ama
Flensburger Schifffahrtsmuseum
@itafariama
Email: tafari-ama.imani@stadt.flensburg.de
