Garvey’s message of mental liberation still relevant, says son

The challenge to people of colour to emancipate themselves from mental slavery en route to achieving true freedom, which was articulated by National Hero Marcus Garvey decades ago and made popular by reggae legend Bob Marley, remains as relevant today as in yesteryear, according to Dr Julius Garvey.

Delivering the keynote address at a Black History Month/Reggae Month event at The Mico University College in St Andrew on Tuesday, Dr Garvey said that his father’s philosophies were influenced by Booker T. Washington, one of the most influential African-American intellectuals of the late 19th century in the United States.

Garvey’s directive came during a speech in Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada, during 1937, his son reminded the audience.

“He said that we must liberate our minds from mental slavery because while others may help us free our body, no one but ourselves can really free our mind. He saw this as our central problem because when we were kidnapped from Africa, we were not able to bring anything. All we had were memories, and over a period of time, from generation to generation, those memories became dim and also they were replaced with the violence, lies and the miseducation that occurred over four centuries,” said Dr Garvey.

“So we had a problem of miseducation, misunderstanding and misidentification and he recognised that,” he said at the event hosted by the Faculty of Humanities and Liberal Arts and the college’s United Negro Improvement Association Garvey Club.

Dr Garvey, a medical doctor and academic who specialised in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery, told his audience, which included students from the Marcus Garvey Technical High School and The Mico University College, that Blacks were the first human beings and operated from the Nile Valley in Egypt.

“All the civilisations which sprang from that area were the first and were transmitted around the world to places like India, China and even to the Americas. So civilisation did not begin with the Greeks or any of the Europeans, so when the Greeks and European after the Ice Age saw us in Africa, they were astounded at how beautiful we were, proud of our achievements and they tried to imitate our achievements,” he said.

However, they were never able to duplicate the achievements of these ancient Black civilisations and Black people need to learn – or relearn – about the greatness of their ancestors in order to take their rightful place in today’s society, Dr Garvey added.

“Many of us have forgotten because our education process over time has been a miseducation process and that’s where a teacher’s college like The Mico comes in: to teach us who we really are, to teach us our history in terms of where we are coming from, and when we know that, we will then we able to face up to all of the obstacles that are out there and to be able then to really free ourselves. We’ll be able to liberate our minds,” he reasoned.

KEY TO IDENTITY

Among his father’s many quotes, Dr Garvey considers this one most central to his vision of self-identity and self-empowerment: “God and nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own creative genius, we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and eternity our measurement.”

Dr Garvey told his audience that it is important for them to be educated in the right way, bearing in mind that education does not only take place in the classroom.

“ ... The best part of education is really going to be self-education – the education that you search for and look for through books, through listening to people with knowledge,” he said.

“Education is an interactive process. It’s not only what your teacher gives you, it’s not just the lesson plan but also what you bring to the table because it has to be interactive, you have to use your critical intelligence to use the facts and the knowledge that you need to really transform yourselves.

“That was the essence of Marcus Garvey’s philosophy in terms of self-transformation because he realised that we were disconnected from ourselves by propaganda and the long period of enslavement and he realised that we had to transform ourselves in terms of the freedom that we gained, through our different victories over people who had enslaved us, by people such as Nanny, Sam Sharpe, Paul Bogle, and so on,” he concluded.

christopher.serju@gleanerjm.com