Every time, as a pedestrian, I pass outside State Insurance building on Redcliffe Street and I see Reg Samuel’s sculptured tribute to Fatherly Tenderness I am moved to a sense of the sublime. Everytime. Not transcendent. But an awareness of the transcendence created in the sculpture.

We who had come from the slave barrack-yard, knowing our children could be sold and bought; knowing that we, as "thing" could not claim paternity in any normal sense; we had become irresponsible and happy-go-lucky, even reckless fathers in the brutish realities of plantation life. We impregnated and moved on. Attachment, or commitment, had to be a rarity. For, the master could sell and buy our sons not even at his fancy, but at his whim. His fancy was reserved for our daughters whom he could have, willy-nilly, in slave gang or succeeding child gang.

Some 150 years after, Reg Sam was seeing the Black Man’s Redemption, as his acceptance of fatherhood, the parenting, caring responsible father, not as ideal, but as the real working to the ideal.

I do not lay claim to the technical competence to be able to lay bare how the maestro Reg Samuel, accomplished this marvel. I do not claim the artistic competence to know how the sculpture was moulded, how the lines between father and child, standing as if before the photographer’s lens, so unmistakably convey what a photographer cannot convey, the flow of tenderness between father and children, in some new bonding hoped for by the sculptor. The sculpture then anticipate the ending of the estrangement between person and person, through the inter-connectedness of the figures. This connection is enduring. Representing then the overcoming of the estrangement which has been our lot here since 1632.

Faith, I am reminded, every time I see this work of sculpture, is the substance of things hoped for. But here in Reg Sam’s sculpture we have it, that is, faith, as the evidence not of things unseen, but seen. In the "seen," the sculpture, Reg Sam presents, both the dreaded slave past unseen, but felt; and the present in a new future – a family as community.

I am going to make a leap, a leap in the realm of art. The "great" sculptors of our time, prop up slabs of Cor-Ten steel straight from the foundry, edgewise (Richard Serra). Or, another took General Electric fluorescent light tubes straight out of the box from the hardware store and arranged them this way and that (Dan Flavin). This was acclaimed as a great work of sculpture by, I suppose, a "Modernist". Yet another welded I - beam and scraps of metal together (Anthony Caro). The critics said that these "modernist" works expressed the material’s true nature. It’s "gravity". It’s "objectness."

I must confess that my understanding of the chemical properties of matter is limited to Chemistry 100 and Chemistry 201. And am prepared to accept that modernism in sculpture is beyond me. Until I found that a few of the best critics agreed with the modern playwright, Tom Stoppard, that "Imagination without skill gives us modern art."

In Reginald Samuel right here, in little Antigua and Barbuda, we have a riposte. For Reg combines both imagination and skill reducing the complexity of life to simple statements in stone. But these simple statements in stone, at one and the same time, suggest the complexities out of which they came.

Look again at the father’s face in the sculpture outside State Insurance and you will see, a face that has weathered many personal Luis’ and Georges’. The strath and strom of life, so to speak. Sometimes failing, and sometimes overcoming. But, with a quiet confidence, in spite of past failure and levelling, still assured in his inner-being of overcoming. So assured he presents his children to the world knowing that with or without his protection, they will be baffled by the enigmas of life, but their arrival, though not guaranteed, is certain for they have learned enough to endure. Endure to ripeness. Ripeness by struggle. And that "ripeness," as a great writer said, "is all."

But I come now to that remarkable picture floating in the air, at the King Court Pavilion. I hope one day, to see how Garibaldi, as liberator is celebrated in stone in Italy. I have seen Bolivar the liberator in Venezuela. Lenin, as liberator is celebrated in a mausoleum in Moscow, in living life, though dead, which too, I have not seen. Though demonised here as a "Communist" Moscow was never ever my Mecca. I have, of course, seen one or two sculptures of Byron, the poet of freedom in European lore.

But except when standing in front of the murals of Diego Riviera, of Orozco, and others in Mexico, never ever have I felt a surge of the Dignity of Revolution, as when standing in front of Reg Sam’s King Court on Independence Avenue.

The sheer dignity which Reg Samuel was able to impart in the flow of inanimate stone, so much so, that King Court of 1736, becomes animate in 2000, is to me personally, a marvel. An artistic marvel. The sculpture conveys the cultural revolution, the return to the essential African personality and way of being which is the real Revolution King Court planned to begin to execute. King Court, I aver, never intended to blow up Government House on October 31, 1736. He had no gunpowder. Not even a heap of stones was found as corroborating evidence. But let me return to the marvel of Reg Samuel.

Marvel, in that Reg Sam does not invent King Court, pictorially floating in the air, like "His Airness" with soldierly qualities. He does not use the soldierly to convey the revolutionary. The sculpture is somehow suffused with a dignity, of line and carriage, inherent in the personality, so that it reminds that King Court’s determination "to make ourselves masters of the island" is the only true foundation of human dignity in these particular circumstances. That determination, the artistry of the sculpture is conveyed without ambiguity.

I know of few art classes in this country, if any, which have required students here to study these works of Reg Samuel. They are accepted without thought. The artist in the face of such philistinism must feel that production is futile. I want to suggest that this atitude to our own authentic art and sculpture has deep historical, even ontological roots.

Yet, it is my view, that in the late 21^st century, in this very country, Reginald Samuel, may well be the most hailed individual of this now ending 20^th century. These words here will not survive till then but the prediction will, anonymously, be made manifest.

Regrets, Frank Sinatra sang in a famous song, I’ve had a few, too few to mention. One of my enduring regrets about UPP not winning the 1999 election, is that I was not in a position to commission Reg Sam, to work with reputed horticulturists and theme park creators, to create such a Millennium Park in Antigua. Such a Millennium Park featuring sculptures by Reg Samuel and works by other Caribbean artists, I believe, would have borne comparison with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But in this case a Garden of Liberation in Antigua. I do not claim that it would have been the eighth wonder of the world. Far from it. But it would have marvel, and above all inspiration to a nation.

At the very least, I am sure it would have been the premier site in the Caribbean, Cuba inclusive. Regrets I’ve had a few. This is one.

In an amorphous society, where no social group, adopts any project as representative of it, my disappointment is reduced. In such an amorphous arrangement as ours a community has not been formed and there are thus no community interests, or general national interest. A community has not been formed because we have not taken up King Court’s injunction "to make ourselves masters of the island". Nor have we responded to Reg Samuel’s inspirational and majestic sculpturing to rise on the dignity of national possession overcoming colonial dispossession in new community parenting. It can be said then, that Reg Sam came unto his own, but his own treated him with benign, even traditional, indifference, national honour notwithstanding. The 21^st century in its latter half will elevate him, I repeat, to the foremost pedestal, in its pantheon. In advanced countries, pranks that pass for "art" are hailed as works with "depth". For instance, a leaning wall of rusted steel smack in the middle of the Federal Plaza in New York called "Tilted Arc" by Richard Serra, was emblazoned with the sobriquet "greatness" in the face of its rejection. Here Reg Samuel, who knowingly countered this modernist trend, by celebrating the human spirit, ordinary but triumphant. Triumphant, "though stretched on the wheel". This in my view has elevated Antigua & Barbuda, into a topic of discussion, when in the 21^st century art becomes the touchstone and underpinning of truly human history, going well beyond the theft of alien labour time. It is Reg Samuel, his sculptures in particular, who will have placed Antigua and Barbuda on this exalted and global pedestal.

I come now to the last, but not the least of 20^th century thinkers and artists from Antigua and Barbuda. Such will come into their own in the 21^st century. They will be accepted and acclaimed by their own, only then, as our definitive contribution at the rendezvous of human victory over usurpers acclaimed in the name of Capital.

I shall not keep you in suspense. He is Dr Paget Henry. A man, a tenured Professor at the distinguished Brown University in the U.S., who returns here every year at Carnival and who is never asked, not once, by Radio or TV to say a word on what passes for culture here and now. Official society does not wish to know and does not wish society in general to know. Knowledge is the enemy.

Dr Paget Henry’s book Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua bears the long and difficult name of his doctoral thesis. Properly seen, it is the definitive History of Antigua and Barbuda. It can is, as such the most powerful tool given to Antiguans and Barbudans after independence, and in 1985, by which we could understand ourselves, our struggles, our apathy, our submission and subjugation, even our confusion. Globalisation makes this confusion twice confounded. Paget Henry his historical work provided a key to unlock the padlock of that confusion.

It is now a commonplace aphorism that a people without knowledge of its past history is like a tree without roots.

It is my view, that no Antiguan and Barbudan, can lay claim to be educated, that is, rooted, who has not read Dr Paget Henry’s history of Antigua & Barbuda.

It follows then, that it is my view, that for every fifth form and sixth form student Paget Henry’s book, should be required reading. It is not so. Not so because we do not see the work and struggle of and for decolonisation as our mission, personal and national.

One reason why Paget Henry’s book is not read here is that it very sharply contradicts the present. Dr Paget Henry’s book asserts that "where growth is dependent it leads inexorably to the denationalisation of the cultural system." It is that denationalisation we are now experiencing as the rulers trumpet false and dependent growth, based on Dato Tan or a Texan.

To the best of my knowledge, and I have read not a few, Paget Henry’s work is one of the first history books of the English speaking Caribbean, to assert on behalf of the people of Antigua and Barbuda, that here "African political tradition were kept alive by the symbolic crowning of kings of various ethnic groups." Hence King Court, which an English apologist for slavery, bastardised and fictionalised into "Prince Klass". We today accept that fictionalisation. We live, most comfortably, not with Claude Levi-Strauss ennobling myths, but with the fictions of our downpressors about ourselves. That is why we are as we are.

On the contrary, Dr Paget Henry in his work, tried to show how in shaping our culture, ordinary people, tried even symbolically, and long before the symbolists in art and literature, to preserve the essence of our African existence, against overwhelming odds.

In Paget Henry’s history of Antigua, is one of the most brilliant and insightful explanations of the Belief Sector, in the entire historiography and sociology of the Caribbean. I am suggesting that this prevailing religious practice, obeah, never spoken seriously and often hidden, is at the root of our deranged society. Let us see.

I am going to quote it at length. For every time I read it myself ( and I have done so more than a score of times) I am enlightened.

Dr Paget Henry argues, no, demonstrates, that from the time of our crossing the Middle Passage, what went on here was a process of "deculturalisation".

He wrote it this way: "In the belief sector, major losses were notable in the basic ontology [the theory of being] that unified the system of religious beliefs. Absent from the pyramid was the apex, or the supreme being, and the two sides that represented the nature-gods and the ancestors. Along with these were lost the mythologies that explained the creation of the world and the place of man in it." Straightforward, but make sure you grasp every word.

And now comes the gravamen of the matter.

"Essentially what was left" writes Professor Paget Henry "of the original pyramid was its base. Thus magic and some degree of ancestor worship became prominent features of the emerging Afro-Caribbean cultural system."

Now, this Paget Henry is a deep fellow. Though when you see him in the flesh, like Ralph Ellison’s, Invisible Man, he becomes invisible because "you refuse to see him." However, follow him carefully. He says:

"This magicisation of the belief sector resulted in the prevalence of a world-view [Hegel’s Weltanschung] among Afro-Antiguans that is still known as obeah."

This obeah then, is a kind of prism, if you prefer, a glasses, through which Afro-Antiguans see and interpret the world. That is a profoundly serious excavation of our true selves.

Remember well, we lost the essence, the apex rather, of our own African religion. What remained was the base. And it is the base that became the super-structure, the world-view.

And says Paget Henry "Like that of the Caribs, this magical world-view was largely devoid of religious devotion and centred around rituals for securing the assistance of evil powers in solving life-problems."

(I am not in agreement with Dr Paget Henry that obeah involves appeal to "evil powers". I think he falls into metaphysics there. Believers in obeah believe that, by its practice, they are fighting "evil spirits" which is the real cause of their woe and downpression, and which have been placed on them, by the alien other, their neighbour or former friend. All woe comes from the envy and evil of our neighbours and friends. The obeah practitioner is not seeking evil spirits. He or she is seeking to overcome all-encompassing evil. However, the disagreement is only a refinement, not a fundamental issue.)

Crucially, Dr Paget Henry continues ‘This (obeah) world-view assumed the existence of a number of vengeful, malicious, nocturnal characters called "jumbies". Jumbies were believed to strangle children, rob people, and frighten older people."

More correctly, the setting of jumbies on you, by another, was the cause of your downpression, illness and general woe, the real cause of poverty and misery becoming greater immiseration. The external exploiting enemy was not the cause of personal and national woe, but the neighbour, the friend. The problem was not caused by social forces, but by spiritual agents.

Continues, Professor Henry "From the existence of these beings, (Jumbies or Duppies) there followed a whole series of rituals of contacting them" [through a mediator between man and the spirit world. The mediator known as the Obeah man or more effectively the Obeah woman].

Invariably, one "saw" the obeah man or woman, not to initiate the setting of jumbies on another. But to ward off omnipresent danger. Or, because one was convinced that something had gone wrong in one’s life or family. Invariably the obeah man or woman confirmed the suspicion that it was a neighbour or friend who was the cause of the misery complained of, and not the system under which one lived. It was indeed a world-view and it permeated all levels of society.

With characteristic humour, Dr Henry adds, that "A popular and still well-known way of getting rid of a jumbie that you have unexpectedly run into is to take off your outer garment and to put it back inside out."

I suspect that with the coming of electricity one does not unexpectedly run into these spirit characters anymore, either as European ghosts or African jumbies. However, with or without electricity, the belief system persists. Especially in the political realm, in government and opposition, but no less in the daily realm of everyday survival, of everyday citizens.

Writes Dr Henry continuing ‘The roots of this world-view are clearly West African, as similar ones could be found there. On Antigua, however, they came to constitute the essence of a belief system that had lost its mythic and religious dimensions. Along with this magicisation, the belief sector also experienced a degree of hybridisation. That is, either because of its losses or subordinate position, the (obeah) system absorbed some of the magical elements of the European system. A good example of this was (is) the divining procedures based on the use of the Bible."

Then Dr Paget Henry makes the quantum leap to which his descriptive analysis has been tending, ineluctably. Says he:

"As in the case of the English cultural system, the arts and knowledge producing sectors of African cultural systems proved impossible to reconstitute. Compared to its vitality in traditional Africa and its close relationship to the belief sector, the arts system of the creolised cultural system that developed in Antigua was virtually dead. All that remained of this vibrant sector were music, dancing and vestiges of folklore. The rich tradition in sculpture, carving and painting did not survive as they did in Haiti, which broke out of peripheral domination much earlier."

Grasp the branch of the point and not the leaves. In Antigua the essence of the African religious system was lost by slave captivity and enslavement itself. Especially so with the polyglot of tribes which were thrown together at random and in subjugation here. Overwhelmed with the sorrow of alienation, the African could only hold onto the base of his once vital religion, through which he once determined his equal and dignified place in the universe. Subordinated in plantation degradation of his humanity into "thingness", mere labour power, to be owned and exchanged, he relied upon "spirits" to ward off the threats coming from both alien slave brother and sister, and moreso from oppressing master in plantation relations of production. The daily way out of this misery, this excruciating suffering, was found in dependence on jumbies, who would "guard" him or "her" against ever present disaster. This became the prevailing world-view.

"Man to man so unjust, you don’t know who to trust", "keep way from company"; "God made us high and low, and ordered our estate;" "only you friend can hurt you"; "partnership is leaky-ship"; "only His grace can save a wretch like me"; "don’t put ‘pon put"; "stoop to conquer"; "look out for number one". All these are but a few of the conceptions by which we live making all social cohesion, all class-interests, if not impossible, then, for sure, superficial.

Locked out of large-scale agriculture, large-scale commerce, large-scale industry and banking, the certified elite turns non-participation and non-involvement into Respectability. Respectability, in its essence, seeks reward in un-critical, undisturbed, long-service, satisfying only consumption imperatives, with honours from alien King or Queen, as ultimate reward.

Ever mushrooming schisms among Christian denominations cross divides and sub-divides the divided mass. Race, colour and variegated shades of skin compound the divisions of the social whole. A community is not formed. Foreign control becomes more foreign. Diversification of the economy becomes diversification of the foreigners in ownership and control. A people have been freed. But, a community has not been formed. And less and less so.

Remember in the Belief Sector obeah deals with this life concerns. Concerns such as love and marriage, promotion on the job, health, and general insecurities, in short all the fundamentals of life and living. While official religion deals with after-life. Each however, drawing on the other to create the delusionary world of an alienated existence. In the current context, unregulated entry of Caribbean migrants, mainly of the unskilled, intensifies the dislocations, the obeah practices, the worker-on-worker violence and the woman-and-woman contentions. Divisiveness, violence, crime and apathy increase.

Despite, or because of, the emergence of a local political directorate foreign domination manipulates the political-directorate, in government and Opposition, as though they were social putty, always softened by ‘anonymous’ donations. The political directorate, in turn, relies upon patronage and the cunning of the con-man, in matters large and small. And so they keep the divided, isolated, atomised and therefore, unconscious mass in their place. Then and therefore, do they maintain their toe-hold on political power. In sum too, this inauthentic Belief Sector, which mediates actual economic and political experience, supports the inauthentic and foreign controlled, but always volatile, social arrangement or derangement.

In this inauthentic potpourri, politics degenerates into singing-meeting and prayer-meeting. Added to this is the verbal hype of show-boating, or empty-headed populism, plus a substantial dose of modern razzmatazz, as new magic. The manichean division from the world of obeah, namely: They, scoundrels; and We, goody-two0shoes, predominates.

Only the most unrelenting critique of this inauthentic Belief Sector, while laying-bare economic and political realities, plus a categorical rejection of its simplistic populist ways, can lead to a new organisation of production in diversification. This, of course, with the producers democratically self-organised at work and in community. And too, in firm alliance, with an ideologically equipped and committed, but ever-expanding core.

Otherwise, the inauthentic Belief Sector mediates and reproduces the inauthentic economic and political sector, as now.

In consequence, not by struggle did we see ourselves becoming masters of the island, but by spirits, jumbies, by magic so to speak. And this plus say, the Psalms of the European Bible, became the way and the light, either to relief or personal salvation. Obeah was the sigh of the oppressed, the opiate of the oppressed masses, the illusion of a delusionary world. An inauthentic social derangement which reproduces itself, results.

Because, unlike Haiti, we were cut off from the vibrant apex of our African religious system we were cut off too from its rich traditions in sculpture, carving and painting which did not survive as they did in Haiti. Haiti liberated itself at the beginning of the 19^th century, while by the end of the 20^th century we were still not masters of the island, still dispossessed, still, as in the beginning, carriers of waiters and makers of beds for alien capital accumulation.

In sum then, Dr Paget Henry has shown that the economic situation is the basis of social consciousness. But other elements such as the Belief Sector, also exercise influence upon the course of historical life, and in many cases such beliefs predominate, in that they do not allow people to see their real conditions of life and the real causes of our wretched and dependent condition.

I kidded myself that in one article I could have discussed Reg Samuel and Dr Paget Henry. But you will have noted that if you do not understand Professor Henry, you cannot fully understand the Maestro, Reg Samuel. For in him, Reg Samuel the rich tradition of African sculpture and the European tradition have transcended the Creole hybrid, to become its own independent statement.

Moreover, Paget Henry, a 20^th century intellectual giant of Antigua and Barbuda, is one of the few historians, West Indian or Metropolitan, who discusses the Belief Sector both in its conception of Being and as a theory of Knowledge, and how that Belief Sector, mediates both the economic sector and the cultural sector. It is a triumph of history and historical writing.

(More on Dr Paget Henry next time).