Booker T Washington, former slave and role model for other liberated North American slaves in the 19th century, used to admonish his fellow Negroes to ‘dip your bucket where you are”.
He was taking this saying from an old text that told the story of a ship that believed itself lost at sea, and whose captain, on being approached by another ship after long days of thirst and distress, had been advised by the captain of the other ship to dip his bucket in the waters in which he had been becalmed. He would find that he was actually bobbing on sweet, rather than salty waters. Salvation for him and his crew was just an arm’s length away.
Dip your bucket where you are, indeed. The problem is that many in our own beloved country would take this as an invitation to dip and drink till they’re bursting, and not share any around.
We have seen too many examples of how so-called black empowerment is manipulated to justify this particular way of behaving. And we do not need to reiterate, of course, that this is merely aping much of the behaviour of those who benefited from white empowerment in an earlier dispensation.
Greed can be grafted all too easily on to the human gene from without. You can become so hypnotised by greed that you start seeing nothing wrong with walking round in a yellow jacket and dark glasses, pretending that it is everyone else who looks like a fool.
But let’s get back to what Washington really meant when he made that potent suggestion, ‘dip your bucket where you are”.
His target audience was black people who had been stranded on the shores of the distant Americas by what was then the most modern interpretation of the institution of slavery.
Until the 16th century, most societies across the globe, Africans included, had indulged in one form of slavery or another.
There were many historical justifications for enslaving other people — from the idea of one society being superior to another to the sheer hard facts of economics. You couldn’t possibly build the pyramids of Giza or the Parthenon in Athens or the great amphitheatre at the heart of the city of Rome simply from the sweat of your own brow. You had to get someone else to sweat for you, by force if necessary.
The difference with modern American slavery was that it elevated the institution to encompass the newfangled concept of racial purity. For the first time in history, slavery became acceptable only if the victim was black. Enslaving white people, including the Slavs who had given the modern institution its name, and who had been popular as involuntary labour in Europe for centuries, was no longer acceptable. ‘Slave” became synonymous with ‘black”. And in too many cases it still is today.
Steve Biko used to say that the greatest tool in the hands of the oppressor was the mind of the oppressed. When black people also started to think of themselves as slaves it took a rare and exceptionally pig-headed individual to break out of the mould and attempt to revolt against the label.
Given the huge numbers of Africans taken into captivity, there were remarkably few rebellions. The massa-boss had hypnotised his captives into such a state of terror that he needed precious few resources to keep his hordes of captives in silent acquiescence. ‘Bad” niggers, those who dared to try to break the stereotype, were castrated or had their breasts cut off, were disembowelled while still alive, had red-hot pepper seeds and gunpowder rammed up their rectums and vaginas and were left to hang from burning trees as an example to others. Terror has always had its own logic.
The question now is what to do with the legacy of that terror? Fifty percent of the United States army that has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and looks set for a long occupation under hazardous and hostile conditions, is made up of the descendants of the oppressed: niggers and Chicanos who have themselves only signed up for indefinite servitude under the American flag because they, too, have been oppressed, unto their own generation, as the Bible prophesied.
The military is the only way out. The bomb under the army truck or the MPG fired from an obscure alley down a street you do not know in a town whose language you cannot understand might well prove to be an agent for taking you so far out that you actually never get back on to solid ground again. They’ll find your boots with your name in them four streets away, and your helmet rolling lazily down the gutters of another suburb, if you’re lucky. Small comfort for the folks back home.
Back home in America, life goes on as it ever did. It is alarming to see the levels of apathy in black America, the indolence, the latent, self-centred violence, the taken- for-granted dallying on the stoep between hamburgers, the waste, the lack of growth.
Did Martin Luther King and Malcolm X die for nothing? Answer: yes.
It ain’t my business, but I have to wonder when the days of slavery, slavery inside your head, will come to an end.
Even under George W Bush, the US is one of the most accessible spaces on the planet. But the brethren and sistren are still failing to dip a bucket in Brooklyn and pull up gold in Harlem or the Bronx. And meanwhile Haliburton, Dick Cheyney’s company, is doing quite nicely out of a $1,7-billion contract to rebuild the ancient Iraq that his own armies destroyed, thank you very much, protected by poverty-stricken bloods from the Projects in New Jersey and Alabama who go to make up the American army.
It’s hard to dip your bucket when you’re standing on stony ground.