DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
Speaking of Culture - A Conversation (Part 1)
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Understanding different cultures allows you to be more open, accepting, and tolerant of other people and having a healthy conversation can reveal commonality as well as valuable differences. Diverse cultural perspectives can inspire creativity and drive innovation and make this world a better place. In a special two-part episode, three former guests and authors have come together to share and discuss their cultural history, perspectives and experiences, Claudette Douglas, Harish Jani and Dele Ogun.
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debbiewilliamspodcast.com
Welcome to storytelling. Understanding different cultures allows you to be more open, accepting and tolerant of other people, and having a healthy conversation can reveal commonality as well as valuable differences. Diverse cultural perspectives can inspire creativity and drive innovation and make this world a better place. In a special two-part episode, three former guests and authors have come together to share and discuss their cultural history, perspectives, and experiences. Please welcome Claudette Douglas, Harris Jani, and Deli Ogan. Hello, Harry, Deli, and Claudette, and welcome to the podcast. Hello, I'm going to ask you all individually to introduce yourselves. Harry, can we start with you? You can, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Debbie, my name is Harry, also known as Harris, a name given to by my parents, but I changed it, anglicized it when I came here in 1968 at the age of 18. I was born in East Africa, came here for studies and did various things, and yeah, loved it all really. So that's me.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. And over to you, Delhi.
SPEAKER_00Hi, I'm uh Deli Ogan. I was born in Nigeria, came over in 1969 as well, but at the age of seven, and I'm uh author and historian.
SPEAKER_01Thank you very much. And Claudette?
SPEAKER_02Hi, my name is Claudette Douglas. I'm a poet, performer, and ordained minister. I grew up in Gloucestershire, went to Jamaica at 15 and came back to find my roots and discover myself and my own identity and God. I'm an author of a book, Black Blessed and British, and really looking forward to sharing and learning with my fellow guests.
SPEAKER_01Thank you very much. Delhi, you have done a lot of historical research with Africa and India.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Can you tell us a bit more about the research that you've done?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's uh this was the work that I put in to produce the history of Nigeria, uh, titled A Fatherless People, and then more recently, a history of the slave trade titled A Slave Ship Called Jesus. But one of the headline points that I addressed in The Slave Ship Called Jesus was this. People say to me, why is the transatlantic slave trade talked about so much more than the Trans-Saharan one? And my answer has actually a bearing on our discussion this evening. What I say to them is this the Trans-Saharan one really created new identities in a way that the Transsaharan one did not. You see, the transatlantic one, new islands, islands that were populated by indigenous India were wiped out and repopulated with Africans who were being traded in that trade. And the connection with India is this that it was uh super profits from the slave trade that made the industrial revolution possible and gave the British the leverage to now propel themselves in the conquests of India. And the process of colonizing India produced what we now know as the Indian populations in Africa, like Uganda, where uh Harrick comes from, and you find them right across the east and southern coast of Africa, in South Africa, in Zambia. And so you can see how these identity issues all flow from that what I call the original sin of the slave trade, uh, which then fed into the Industrial Revolution and fed into colonization.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Harry, what is your experience? Because you grew up in Uganda. Yeah. What's the experience like for you?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so I I hear about the slave trade, and you know, Delhi has uh done a little research behind it. It's my take on all this is that this is one of the many things that happened, which was quite wrong, incredibly wrong. And I think this exploitation that happened happened a very long time ago. It has had horrendous implications, you know, and you're right, it was a very profitable trade, you know, people made a lot of money, and there's evidence, even now, where people won't get rid of statues and so on. Now, in in East Africa, where I was growing up, the slave trade had long gone, but there was the British rule. Uganda didn't get the independence until 1962, uh, as indeed most of the other African countries started getting, because India got it in 1947, and then obviously the different countries were getting their independences at different times. Kind of experience really was that the colonial power as it was then, because Africa was divided up between different colonial powers, as everybody knows. But British had probably the lion's share of the continent. And yes, I know Delhi has done an awful research on slave trade. To my mind, it is a chapter that is pretty nasty. I think most people know that slave trade was incredibly bad, but unfortunately, it wasn't just perpetrated by the whites. I mean, I if you go to Zanzibar where I went a few years ago, you know, there was a slave trade which is conducted by the Arabs as well. And uh, if you look at other parts of Africa, like Egypt, in the very old times, they had people who built pyramids, etc., that were not short of slaves either. So I think there is a lot in the human history that is awfully wrong, awfully bad, and we all have to be aware of it.
SPEAKER_01One of the things that is a result of the slave trade is finding our identity, because sometimes when we're looking back in history, our history doesn't start at the slave trade, it's way beyond there. And and I know identity is one of your key things, Claudette, in terms of where am I now, where have I come from in the past, and where is it all leading to? How does it all fit in?
SPEAKER_02Definitely, it starts with intercultural intersectionality. And I think what both Harry and Delhi were saying was about the way that all of our lives on this planet intersect with each other. And when we look back at the history, we look back at, of course, many of the wrongs that were done, but there was more than wrong that was done in our history. But our history on the planet is so interconnected, but so much of it is scarred and characterized by the oppression that we've seen. And many people say, Well, hasn't there always been oppression? Hasn't there always been slavery? Haven't people always been enslaving themselves from biblical times? That may be the case, but I think what we're talking about is maybe in the last thousand years or so, when we look at the map of history and how history has been shaped in many ways by greed and I think by wickedness in some senses, but yet still within that, we're able to find our identity and find ourselves as human beings. And that to me is what's amazing that we can still find our humanity when we find out who we are. I believe that we're all created by a supreme being, whether you want to call him God, Allah, it doesn't matter to me. Some supreme being created us, and I believe that our identity is in our humanity, and in our humanity we find each other and we find ourselves.
SPEAKER_01Yes, thank you, Claude. Deli, one of the things that you're quite keen to do is to change the narrative of our history. Can you tell me why it's been so important for you to do this research and for you to share your knowledge?
SPEAKER_00Yes, I because I think that modern race relations is still very much infected by the legacy of the slave trade and slavery. You see, if we take ourselves back to the beginning, the British entered the slave trade in 1560. At that time, certainly the west coast of Africa was stable and peaceful, and India was not yet a colony. If you consider the state of international relations at that point, there would have been a greater degree of respect between the continents, between the people of the Caribbean, between the people of India, the people of Asia. We weren't really at the people level. Everybody was in their own space and largely content with their own resources. What this slave trade engendered was the overflow of greed, if I could use that expression, that now drove people out in the pursuit of the resources of other territories. Now, uh I picked up a point from Claudette that the comment has often made, hasn't there always been slavery? I think what I wanted to get across in my writing was for people to understand that because of the constraints of the human language, we can use the same label to describe very, very different situations. So the slavery as it was even in the days of the Roman Empire was not the kind of systematic brutalization and working to death that characterized plantation slavery in terms of the narratives. This was also sort of a distinction between slavery in the Arab lands, which was largely domestic as opposed to the commercial slavery of the plantations. It was that drive for profit that pushed people to work people to death systematically. But the, as I said, the important point was how this form of slavery changed the world, changed identities. Harry would not have been born in Uganda, but for, when you trace it back, the colonization of India by the British. And that colonization of India was made possible by the super profits of the slave trade. So this is how identities were changed. Likewise, Claudette, it was a lottery that her parents of forebears ended up in Jamaica. And then from there to England. And this is how identity was changed through the ultimate impact of the slave trade. So this is one of the points that I wanted to get across. The other point very briefly. When I was doing the research, I found that the colonization phase, because India was colonized much earlier than parts of West Africa and East Africa. So India was a colony as early as around 1820s, 1830, by virtue of the East India Company, you know, these charter companies that they used. So what I found was that some of the experiments that were carried out in India in terms of how to control and contain people, those that worked were replicated in Africa. Those that didn't were changed and altered. And so there were many lessons from the history of India in the course of my research.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so you mentioned about the East India Company. I do know the history of India pretty well, Delhi. And what happened was that the East India Company, which was one of the first companies formed as stakeholders with the Sheikh capital, et cetera, they went out really purely for commercial gains. And at that time there were Dutch also into the archipelago. Portuguese were also eyeing for trade. So basically, the whole of the Western world were looking towards the east to make money, bringing in all the spices, all the rest of it. Kind of the whole journey started purely for making profit. And I think when they sort of got into India and they found that its people were quite peaceful by and large, they were very trusting, and all the things that happened, I mean there's a whole history behind it, but the East India Company managed to divide and rule and created a situation where eventually it wasn't the East India Company, it just became under the influence of the British government. And then, as you said, Ali, the Indian independence movement really started quite early. It actually started in 1847, it was the first time they raised arms against the subjugation. But I think the history from different parts of the subcontinent were effectively indentured labors, you know, to build the uh East African Railway. By that time, a lot of merchants had traveled from India to Africa, again, uh, purely for commercial business, and a lot of people had set up businesses in Africa, late 18th, early 19th century. I have a slightly different take on the fallout from slavery. I mean, slave trade was an awful, awful business, but I don't think we can say that slave trade was a central pillar of the reason why for the imperial power. It wasn't, in my view.
SPEAKER_00I disagree with that. But although we don't want to get into too deep a discussion on the economic slave trade, I just very briefly throw in the fact that you see China was ahead of Western Europe in the 16th century when the slave trade began. It was by virtue of the super profits from that trade that Europe was able to leapfrog Chinese developments. When you look at what China has achieved since, and bear in mind China became a colony in its own right, although it was colonizing in a different way. Different European powers took slices of it, basically. But just imagine if China had been involved in the slave trade as well and the super profits. The industrial revolution, I dare say, would have begun in China rather than in Britain. It's not that the British were more clever than anybody else. When you have profits, as you know, Harry, once you have profits like that, you and super profits, you can afford to devote resources to research and development and produce and develop products. But I don't want to take it into the economics. I mean, the identity issue is so important. We are all speaking English now. Harry, myself, Debbie, and Claudette. This is all a product of the colonial experience. And I say that that flows directly from the slave trade, but it's really an identity issue. We are, I think what we all have in common that I observed from the introductions is that we all came from another land. But for colonization, I would not even be Nigerian. Nigeria is a bit like India, it's an aggregate of identities. There are 371 ethnic groups in Nigeria. My true national identity is Yoruba, with a language to go with it. But we are Nigerian by virtue of that colonial experience. And Harry is Ugandan by virtue of that colonial experience. So this is where our identity issues have come in from.
SPEAKER_02Prehistoric traders, architects, laborers, merchantile vendors, uprooted embers, limitless harvest, all of whom first traveled here when they were free. From the earliest seekers, hardcore reapers, planters, teachers, we continue to mold new vessels of ourselves. You see, our history hinted we would be differently tinted by thirsty sun and genetic perfection. This is my situation, not a fragmentation, but a hybrid aggregation of the part of everyone that was and is I come. For I was demonized, dehumanized, colonized, yet self-liberated, I come. Many different views, many different clues, in shades of skin, of chance of creed, cultures collide, yet we persist by way of faith. Intercultural intersectionality offers a new definition. This is my recognition, expressed through the offspring of embarkation, entwined in this space and time, a newer generation. Now migrant wanderers stand facing shipwrecked ponderers who are crossing continents again. And so that's my take on identity. As a black woman coming from the cradle of civilization, I know God doesn't make mistakes, so I'm rooted where I needed to be. And once I understood myself historically and understood where I come from, as we've said way before slavery, I understand my purpose. And so I think that identity is very much found within oneself. And Deddy, when you spoke about Nigeria, for me, going to Nigeria, I've been a couple of times luckily on tour with plays. And going to Nigeria was one of the most seminal moments in my life when I came face to face with myself. I've got a friend there who said, You can't be ambastanted in Nigeria, you're owned by somebody. And straight away you were home. And that connection with self, with your own history, with the knowledge of your kings, your queens, your past, it does something to you. Something is recognized within the spirit. You recognize yourself, and so you come home to yourself within yourself. And that's what I was trying to express in that poem. But I think we're basically, I mean, it might be semantics, really, isn't it? But I suppose what is identity and whose identity is it, really, isn't it? I believe that each one of us has got a divine purpose, and part of that purpose is finding out who we are, what is it that we're on this planet to do, yet still understanding that with all the history, the baggage that we come with as human beings, and why has it been designed this way? And we could argue about this. The whole connection of who we are, and as we said, of our language and our history. The fact is, what do we do with that knowledge and how do we make our lives and the lives of other people better because of it, really, isn't it? How do we enlighten each other and share? And we don't always have to agree, the Bible says iron sharpened iron, so sometimes it that's how it can be. But to be able to expand our minds and listen to other people's viewpoints, to me, that's what's beautiful about this situation. So thank you.
SPEAKER_01Part two of this discussion continues next week, but it's a little bit more.