Farrakhan in West Indies

From his platform as leader of the Nation of Islam in the U.S., the Rev. Louis Farrakhan has built a well earned, if sometimes controversial, reputation for his activism on behalf of African-Americans. It is not too well known that he is of West Indian heritage, but his father was from Jamaica and his mother from St Kitts. Towards the end of last year, approaching eighty, he visited several Caribbean Islands and this week he appears bent on completing’ his ‘heritage tour’.
Last year’s itinerary between December 2011 and March 2012 encompassed Haiti, Jamaica, St Kitts, Antigua, Cuba and Trinidad and Tobago. This year, starting on November 21 his five-nation Caribbean tour started in Grenada from where he will proceed onto Barbados, Dominica, the US Virgin Islands (St Thomas and St Croix), Belize and the Bahamas.
Guyana is not one of his stopovers and maybe that might be related to an incident last June when one of his International Advisors, Akbar Muhammad was detained briefly by the police. It appears that the Guyanese police were tipped off by the CIA that Muhammad was involved in ‘terrorism and drug trafficking’ but he was quickly released without being charged. Min. Louis Farrakhan called then President Bharrat Jagdeo. Muhammad publicly announced that he expected an apology from the government which never came.
Mr Farrakhan himself had visited Guyana and his major messages have remained unchanged: self reliance and self-sufficiency at the individual level and unity of the Caribbean at the political level. In his opening address in Grenada last week he emphasised that the unity he advocates must go beyond CariCom and encompass all the islands, including Cuba and Dominican Republic. As Mr Farrakhan himself has pointed out, unlike the case in the 1970’s it would appear that the appetite of most of the present crop of leaders for unity has waned. Only Guyana and St Vincent have been vocal in recent years for greater integrative efforts.
In his visit to Trinidad last March, Mr Farrakhan had pointed out the need for greater production of foodstuffs in the region from two perspectives. Firstly, there is the drain on the regional treasuries to the tune of over US$3.5 billion which is spent on extra-regional food imports. While local leaders have constantly bemoaned this expenditure, it was only in the last month that T&T finally took up former President Bharrat Jagdeo’s offer of Guyana’s vast agricultural potential to its regional partners in CariCom. Maybe as Mr Farrakhan repeats the message on this trip, there will be more takers of the still-opened offer.
But Mr Farrakhan’s second point on the need for increased local food production is oft neglected by local leaders: to halt the importation of high-fat and high-caloric foreign foods that have now been proven to be very detrimental to our health. The dangers of cultivating a “foreign palate” goes both to a colonisation of the mind and well as to the destruction of the body.
On his last visit to T&T, Mr Farrakhan also echoed some ‘tough love’ words first uttered in Guyana during his 1996 visit to some who complained that some ethnic groups were dominating in business and the professions. He advised that the lagging groups must emulate the hard work and determination of the envied groups: equality of opportunity will not deliver equality of outcome without the individual’s commensurate contribution.
One of Farrakhan’s pertinent rationales for a wider regional unity, apart from the benefits of larger size in a global economy, is that it would end the artificial divisions deliberately fostered by competing European empires. Finally, in a very candid assessment of the main factor militating against increased unity – the ‘little Caesar syndrome” – he suggested that “it is better to be the tail of something, than the head of nothing.” And the individual territories of the Caribbean will never amount to ‘something’ without increased unity.