Dear Sir,

I wrote a letter about Marcus Garvey, published in The Royal Gazette, which also spoke of our migration from the West Indies in the late 19th century. Intentionally, I also gave a small comparison of the socioeconomic difference of post-emancipation black Bermudians and some instances of the comparatives within in the United States. Not surprisingly, I was attacked by a few individuals, including a former premier. In the main, their arguments dismiss any separation or distinction of black Bermudian history from that of West Indians. To them, it’s one history.

One would have to live in a cocoon of naivety not to know that there was a world of differences within the Atlantic slave trade. The vast majority of slaves went to South America to places such as Brazil and perhaps 20 per cent onward to the West Indies and North America.

There were huge differences between the modalities of slavery in Brazil and the Americas. There were differences between the Southern plantations and the more industrial north, just within the US.

There is such a thing as a black American whose own idea of themselves as former slaves separates them from West Indians and everyone else. Just because there are expressions of differences in slave modality and post-slavery outcomes, which can be clearly demonstrated, how does that speak against the commonality of all the people involved? So why is there such an uproar among a certain sector whenever someone differentiates or explains the uniqueness of the black native Bermudian experience?

It’s because there are those riling against stories of whites telling blacks “they are better then the West Indian”, who they now hate to give credence to or believe there is such a thing as a native black Bermudian. If such creature exists, they run the narrative of some docile coloured incapable of standing for themselves without the nudge or exposure to the West Indies.

This is the 400th anniversary of blacks who direct from Africa were in 1616 introduced to Bermuda.

By 1656, they were producing more babies than the white population and by 1675, with scarcity of opportunity, a law was passed banning the importation of African or Native American slaves. Which means with only a few encroachments from 1675 to 1880, Bermuda generated its own local stuck, accent and ethnicity. During the American Civil war, black Bermudian sailors joined in the war to liberate slavery in the US, supporting Abraham Lincoln — one was my ancestor, John Williams. From where did they draw their militancy?

The Bermuda slave modality was such that it loaned itself to a high number of persons purchasing their freedom (one fifth) and greater levels of entrepreneurship for blacks. Booker T. Washington had developed the philosophy of liberation through entrepreneurship and education, which summed up the basic DNA of the Bermudian, post-emancipated slave.

One of my great-great-great-grandfathers, Joseph Deshield, came around 1820 as a freeman sailing his own ship from Haiti. He helped to build the first black church on Cobb’s Hill. Of my eight great-grandparents, two were from the West Indies — Samuel Augustus Davis from St Vincent and Clara Mallory Otten from Turks. I have Sabian, Welsh, French and English also running through my veins, but ostensibly came out of the local stock developed between 1616 and the 19th century, which carry the names Darrell, Stowe, Williams, Wilkinson, Harvey etc.

I celebrate it all, dismissing none, in spite of a few narrow-minded hecklers. Let’s both cherish and celebrate our 400th anniversary; don’t let any try to diminish or take away from our existence.

KHALID WASI