The Emigrant Ambassadors: a foundation for present-day Black Liberation

Abstract

In this polemical commentary on Canada, the author argues for the recognition of the crucial role played by West Indian, particularly Barbadian, women – Emigrant Ambassadors − of the 1950s and ’60s who fought in Canada against their supposed subordination in the West Indian Domestic Scheme so as to establish Black women at the forefront of a liberatory struggle and create the conditions on which the present Black Lives Matter Millennials can now build. Using the examples of Jean Augustine (first Black member of Parliament) and Mia Mottley (Barbados’ prime minister), who fought the ordained de-skilling and downward mobility of the neocolonial economic arrangements, he asks that we view them not as individual achievers justifying a neoliberal meritocracy but rather as part and parcel of Black liberatory politics, stretching from slave rebellions to the Black Power movements and fights against racism of the mid-twentieth century.

When it comes to current Black liberation and activist movements, we must speak of the women who got us here: Black women. Black women who left the warm volcanic and coral sands of the Caribbean to explore the physical and psychological depths of the ‘Great’ White North, a nation that was deemed a ‘White man’s country’ as the White men (and White women) continued to steal land from the rightful Indigenous inhabitants and claimed it as their ‘own’.

In 1960s Canada, we meet the Emigrant Ambassador. The Black emigrant women, specifically Barbadian and West Indian ¹ women, who came, and continue to come, to this country as activists and Black liberators; their very presence in this country was, and is, a form of protest. They may not look like the modern-day liberator or advocate and, because of this, we have forgotten much: the foundation they laid; the earth they cleared; the seeds they sowed.

We must recognise these women for the sacrifices they made as representatives of Black Pride, Black Power, self-empowerment and self-respect; they normalised their role not as the ‘exceptional’ Black achiever, but as the rule – demonstrating that all Black migrants had the potential to achieve greatness in Canada. Their neglected history contributed to the Militant Millennial mobilisation, characterised by movements such as Black Lives Matter, of the 2010s and 2020s and Barbados’ removal of the British monarchy in 2021.

Black women protagonists were at the forefront of deracialising racist and patriarchal Canadian immigration systems, particularly the Domestic Scheme (1955–1967) which meant their negotiating a gendered split labour market where Blacks were believed to be only suited for menial and servile occupations. ² These Emigrant Ambassadors not only embodied the postcolonial, emancipatory and Black liberation postwar spirit that swept Black nations across the globe, but their culture of education, collective understanding of Black Self and transnational habitus were framed under the Black Power movements of the mid-twentieth century. The collective empowerment of Black feminism, liberation and radicalism ushered in a new era for change abroad and at home; transnational and international change was driven by Black women from the West Indies. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense’s Ten Point Program in the 1960s and CARICOM’s 10-Point Reparation Plan are examples of Prime Minister Mottley’s Black liberation foundations.

Establishing Black women in the narrative

Canadian and North American society fears Black people. For a brief moment of time, post-25 May 2020, there was an oasis of hope. A mirage of change that maybe, just maybe, George Floyd’s eight minutes and forty-six seconds of public sacrifice would make him a martyr for true change. The world called it a ‘racial awakening’; those of us in this space waited for the virtue signalling to subside. We waited for the next bullet or knee. And we will not be silenced.

Militant Millennials of Black Lives Matter epitomise the collective activism of diverse Black communities speaking with one voice. Unfortunately, our narratives, advocacy and activism continue to be forced to the margins. We see activism and acts of defiance all over the news and social media, and the struggle gets lost as our feed scrolls by; what happened yesterday is forgotten and what happens tomorrow is unknown. We forget about those individuals, particularly those Black Barbadian and West Indian women who facilitated the emigration of an entire generation of Black people.

Yes, we live in a society where the Black woman’s voice is policed and silenced. Canadian history has deemed (her)story irrelevant and insignificant. We produce Canadian citizens who believe that a Black woman could not – and never did – exist as a building block of the Canadian mosaic; she is simply an adjunct to a colourless patriarchal narrative. Black women have been consistently and deliberately erased from the Canadian nation-building narrative. Naming our Emigrant Ambassadors is one step in a long process of recognising the rightful place of Black women in Canadian history and our present-day society.

When cis-het Black men take up – sometimes too much – space advocating on behalf of ‘our’ Black communities, we must pause for a second. We must pause and think about who got us here. Emigrant Ambassador activism may not look like ‘activism’ in the popular sense of the word: these were not academics in ivory towers, or youths advocating in the streets. They were women, in homes, in schools, in hospitals, in white institutions across this country, facing unimaginable misogynoir. They faced the horrors of physical, sexual and ideological abuse. Imagine that for a second. These women were young and educated. They had families. They had homes. But they left. Without understanding how they got here, and who they were, we will never truly understand that their very presence in this country was the foundation of twentieth-century Black liberation and emancipation.

The Domestic Scheme, education and the women who got us here

Similar to so many other West Indian women, Emigrant Ambassadors such as Grenadian-born Jean Augustine saw the Domestic Scheme as a means for greater socioeconomic opportunity. She came to Canada in the 1960s through the Scheme, and worked as a domestic in Toronto for a year before enrolling in teacher’s college and earning her permanent resident status. As the first Black woman elected to the House of Commons and serving in Cabinet as the Minister of State for Multiculturalism and the Status of Women, she faced barriers to her success in Canada. Despite having completed her secondary education and having worked as a teacher in Grenada, Augustine recounts her interaction with a receptionist at a teacher’s college in Canada: ‘[She] kept telling me I had to do Grade 13 and pushing my papers back to me. I just stood there. I would not move. She called the next person in the line, then the next person behind. I just kept standing there.’ ³ Eventually Augustine succeeded in her perseverance against racism, discrimination and bigotry: ‘a supervisory person came by and asked what the problem was. I said I had this letter and that document . . . the supervisor looked at them and said, “Yeah you have the qualifications”. And that’s my first little struggle.’ ⁴

The Emigrant Ambassadors were active agents of their respective West Indian governments’ strategic foreign policy. Particularly Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad used initiatives such as the Domestic Scheme, which saw over 3,000 women emigrate to Canada, as a means to circumvent the country’s racist immigration policy and in fact to act as the highly qualified representatives of their respective nations’ governments. Barbados, for example, trained and educated a population that was not confined to the island’s geographical boundary of 166 square miles. It operated within a system which saw education as a means for self-empowerment and growth within a liberalised and globalised environment. The late Austin Clarke wrote that, for young Barbadians of the early to mid-twentieth century, the Cambridge University Senior Cambridge Examination (Overseas)

determined whether we would qualify and go up to England by boat, third class, tourist class, with a borrowed winter coat, and enter one of the Inns of Court, and after eighteen months’ studying the law, return and flood the country; and get MP behind our name . . . It meant life and could mean death. ⁵

Education was the process and the product. It was a means to achieve and succeed in global colonial constructs. Formal education and credentials were vehicles for social mobility through government sponsored labour schemes.

As Makeda Silvera argues, the Domestic Scheme of 1955 ‘sought to transfer surplus labour from stagnant Caribbean countries to satisfy the need for cheap domestic labour in an expanding Canadian economy’, where these women were treated as ‘cheap, replaceable labour’. ⁶ It must also be noted that Canada only began to admit West Indian women as domestics once it became clear that British and other European women could not be recruited to fill the labour demand for this type of work. The class-based and racialised Canadian socioeconomic system capitalised on the prejudiced and discriminatory ideology of Black women’s worth and human dignity.

But these educated, potentially upwardly mobile Black West Indian women used the inequitable system to their advantage. Following the end of their one-year contracts, many left domestic work and enrolled in the Canadian education system in search of better and more meaningful employment; though, as Silvera points out, they often found barriers to their integration into mainstream society due to racial discrimination.

The women under the Scheme had high expectations prior to their arrival, but many met with disappointment as the employment and the people they encountered in Canada were cold, unforgiving and deceitful. The women were subject to racial housing and employment discrimination, and experienced strong distrust and non-acceptance of and by the Canadian population. ⁷ The women did have much better opportunities in Canada, but ‘for many the denial of civil rights . . . tarnished [their] experiences’. ⁸ They lived and worked under a system of ‘racism, gendered racism and immigrant/migrant status [that] interacted with class exploitation’. ⁹ The Black woman domestic servant perpetuated the malicious image of Black servitude created during enslavement.

This paradox defined the geographical and ideological space that Black West Indian women navigated, and continue to navigate. They defined their agency through the structure of White masculine patriarchy and ‘had to endure what has been referred to as the triple oppression of race, sex, and class: West Indian women as a group have, in other words, had to resist racism, sexism and class domination’. ¹⁰ It was the women who faced the day-to-day discrimination and exclusion, and it was the individual that stood up for her rights and advocated for fairness and equality. As Black liberators, the Black woman migrants were the trailblazers for West Indian emigration and challenged the added barrier of colour-blind sexism and gender inequality in western nations. Black women overcame the seemingly impossible; the Emigrant Ambassadors continued their pursuit of upward mobility in Canadian society.

However, some recent theorists, such as Stacy L. Denny at the University of the West Indies, have questioned the seemingly benevolent and innocent nature of the education of those who became Emigrant Ambassadors. She challenges the positive nature of education as the primary means of social mobility and substitutes the notion of edutocracy which ‘speaks to how colonial, plantocratic ideology shapes attitudes toward the purpose of [West Indian] education; attitudes in turn influence policies that emerge as curriculum, inform teaching practice, and affect learning outcomes’. ¹¹ Citing the work of Laurette Bristol, Denny argues that, ‘edutocracy’ is ‘a theory of dependency on Western ideas, knowledge, services, systems, and policies based on ideologies of intellectual hegemony, academic power, and legitimacy of imperial knowledge’. ¹² The Emigrant Ambassadors’ strength – their myopic pursuit of (colonial) education – simultaneously reinforced the plantocracy’s caste system of Black Barbadian and West Indian elitism. This was then used by the colonial structures as a benchmark for Black ‘excellence’ and acceptance to assimilate into oppressive frameworks of the metropole.

While the ‘first wave’ of Emigrant Ambassadors was a foundational product of Barbadian and West Indian edutocracies, I argue that they, and their respective colonial mid-twentieth century governments, were simultaneously aware of their ‘exceptionality’. Historical and structural restrictions of the mid-twentieth century forced the subaltern to capitalise on any means or agency in order to physically and ideologically challenge restrictive and exclusionary laws. The caution, then, for Militant Millennials is to use the lessons learned from the Emigrant Ambassadors as a means to create new paradigms of resistance that do not perpetuate the pacification and illusion of White supremacist ideals of Black ‘excellence’, neoliberalism, and the myth of meritocracy. For, as Kevin Gosine stated, excellence ‘is actually an elitist concept that veils and enables systemic racism and resultant inequalities. Embedded in the meritocratic idea of “excellence” is the belief that within it equality of opportunity flourishes, an understanding that, in turn, underpins an ostensibly colour-blind or “treat everyone the same” philosophy for creating an equitable society.’ ¹³ But understanding how the notion of excellence is part of today’s neoliberal obfuscation of structured inequality does not in any way denigrate the foundational gains won by the generations that came before us.

Militant Millennials: it’s our turn

A generation of Emigrant Ambassadors landed safely, struggled, succeeded, and established themselves as Canadian, raising Canadian children, educated in Canadian schools. What happens next? What are we, offspring of Emigrant Ambassadors, doing to advance the struggle against anti-Black racism? We are Militant Millennials, second- and third-generation Black newcomers in this country. White supremacist Canada, in the twenty-first century, still produces rhetoric that race, ethnicity, gender and class should not be barriers to inclusion in the Canadian democratic meritocracy. If all citizens have the fundamental right to equality under the law and are guaranteed racial and religious freedoms, how can we reconcile that with the reality of daily life for racialised and Indigenous peoples? The Idle No More and Black Lives Matter social justice movements are testaments to the fires that continue to burn amongst marginalised groups. ¹⁴

We must draw strength from our Black Emigrant Ambassadors. We must look to this gendered West Indian culture of resistance. We need to learn about Black Barbadian women liberators during enslavement like Nanny Grigg, at the forefront of the Bussa Rebellion of 1816, who was characterised as a ‘revolutionary ideologue’. ¹⁵ We, as Black Militant Millennials need to learn our history, particularly our history of Black women’s resistance, and adopt its principles in our everyday activism.

It is important to contextualise activism through the diachronic paradigm of abolition and emancipation framed by Barbadian-born and raised, University of Toronto scholar, Rinaldo Walcott. For him, ‘abolition wasn’t something of the past: it was an ongoing, contemporary movement, that would not be over until Black people everywhere were free, equal and safe’. ¹⁶ The foundations the Emigrant Ambassadors laid, and that the Militant Millennials inherited, began with the historical cognition that the Black enslaved ancestors of Emancipation (e.g., Bussa and Grigg) ‘both in theory and practice . . . literally had no autonomy or control over either their body or biological kin: the child followed the condition of the mother and thereby became at birth the white master’s property’. ¹⁷ The struggle against the reification of and legislation over Black bodies, particularly Black women’s bodies as chattels during enslavement beginning in the seventeenth century, was the same battle fought by the Emigrant Ambassadors in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it is the same battle being fought by Militant Millennials in the 2020s.

Situating Mia Mottley and CARICOM

Post-25 May, 2020, and what I have termed the Negro-Apocalypse – what many mainstream outlets referred to as the ‘racial awakening’ – we in Canada have the opportunity to pivot our axis of understanding of ‘Blackness’ beyond the African-American/Black American framework. We should turn our gaze back to the foundations of Black Emigrant Ambassadors in the Caribbean, and in particular, Barbados. Barbados’ first woman Prime Minister, the Honourable Mia Mottley, elected in 2018, challenges the ‘male-dominated political culture as well as persistent gender stereotyping of politics as a man’s activity’. ¹⁸

Compounding the Negro-Apocalypse with the economic and social destruction of the Covid-19 pandemic of the early 2020s, a pandemic that hit tourist-driven economies particularly hard, Prime Minister Mottley, achieved what had been tried for decades following independence. While not an emigrant, a Black Barbadian woman born in the 1960s, she attended Queen’s College in Barbados, the London School of Economics, and benefited from many of the same foundational social and educational programmes as the Emigrant Ambassador generation. This paradigm centres Prime Minister Mottley’s accomplishments on the global stage, as a Black woman, particularly her stewardship of the Republic of Barbados on 30 November 2021, and her contributions to the CARICOM Reparations Movement. All exploits driven by a Black woman that are not depicted as an extension of the centuries-long Black liberation and emancipatory struggles. ¹⁹

At CARICOM Reparations Commission’s (CRC) 6 July 2020 virtual discussion, ‘From Apology to Action – CARICOM’s Call for Reparatory Justice’, Mottley stated:

I do not know how we can go further unless there is a reckoning first and foremost that places an apology and an acknowledgement that wrong was done, and that successive centuries saw the destruction of wealth and the destruction of people in a way that must never happen for any society, to any race in any part of this world again.

She continued,

And the unbelievable failure of countries to first acknowledge that with an apology, and not that something wrong happened, but with a written and clear apology to say, ‘we were wrong, we will not do it again’, and more importantly, we must pay recompense for what was done. That is the first step of walking the walk. ²⁰

Prime Minister Mottley clearly articulates the interconnected push for liberation that is reflected in her nation’s vital role in the building of the wealth of the Global North. This is reminiscent of the role that Emigrant Ambassadors and others of the Windrush generation played in rebuilding the metropole and its settler colonial satellite, post-second world war.

Moreover, we can draw parallels between Mottley’s political leadership for reparations in the new millennium with that of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP) during the mid-twentieth century. For some small ‘c’ conservatives, this may seem like heresy; however, one may draw analogous conclusions through a close reading of the CARICOM’s 10-Point Reparation Plan and the BPP’s Ten Point Program. The CARICOM Reparations Justice Program (CRJP) argued that ‘these [European] governments, furthermore, served as the primary agencies through which slave based enrichment took place, and as national custodians of criminally accumulated wealth’. ²¹ Caribbean nation-state leaders established the CRC in 2013, ‘with a mandate to prepare the case for reparatory justice for the region’s indigenous and African descendant communities who are the victims of Crimes against Humanity (CAH) in the forms of genocide, slavery, slave trading, and racial apartheid’. ²² Enslaved people, and their progeny, ‘have a legal right to reparatory justice, and that those who committed these crimes, and who have been enriched by the proceeds of these crimes, have a reparatory case to answer’. ²³

It is a clear emancipatory position that epitomises restorative justice through ‘Black Power’. As the Trinidadian-born Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) stated, ‘We must not apologize for the existence of this form of group power.’ ²⁴ Furthermore, liberation and emancipation, as indicated by the 10-Point Reparation Plan is the abolishment of Black communities’ ‘dependent colonial status that has been inflicted upon it’. ²⁵ The CRJP’s position for reparations challenges the notion that ‘colonial subjects have their political (and economic) decisions made for them by the colonial masters . . . politically, decisions which affect [B]lack lives have always been made by white people – the “white power structure”’. ²⁶

The 10-Point Reparation Plan outlines the following: full formal apology; repatriation; Indigenous Peoples Development Program; cultural institutions; illiteracy eradication; African Knowledge Program; psychological rehabilitation; technology transfer; and, debt cancellation. ²⁷ This echoes the BPP’s emphasis on the historical denigration caused by enslavement, and the reparations needed to atone, in the articulation of its Ten Points on 15 May 1967. ²⁸

The CRJP’s ‘Illiteracy Eradication’ and the ‘African Knowledge Program’ highlight the foundational need for education as a means for prosperity, similar to the BPP’s demand for education of ‘true history’. The CRJP argues that such a programme is needed to ‘build knowledge networks that are necessary for community rehabilitation’, since the ‘forced separation of Africans from their homeland has resulted in cultural and social alienation from identity and existential belonging. Denied the right in law to life, and divorced by space from the source of historic self, Africans have craved the right to return and knowledge of the route to roots.’ ²⁹ Education, similarly to the driving force of the Emigrant Ambassadors, is the driving force for Black liberation movements, ³⁰ as demonstrated by the Honourable Jean Augustine’s migration as an educator, and through Prime Minister Mottley’s leadership as Barbados’ Black woman head of political government.

Conclusion

Militant Millennials make up a generation of Canadians who understand the paradox of colonised settlers; victims of a history that has physically and ideologically landed their identities in a conflicted state as actors in the continued colonisation of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. We ourselves did not experience the life-changing effects of international migration and settlement in a new and unknown world. We are not naturalised Canadians like our parents or grandparents, but by jus soli – citizens by birth on Canadian soil. However, in a Canadian society historically stained by racial discrimination, one’s phenotype has become the precursor to one’s right as a ‘true’ Canadian.

Emigrant Ambassadors fought for the right to come to Canada as ambassadors of their homeland and soon adopted a hyphenated Canadian sense of self, without discarding their respective archipelago nationalities. Nevertheless, their descendants are the true measure of integration and acceptance in Canadian society as they reveal the state’s willingness to incorporate difference as an innate Canadian value. However, institutionalised barriers, including the perpetuation of racial discrimination at every level of Canadian society, continue to inhibit the acceptance of an influential Black class.

Yes, similar to countless newcomer stories, Emigrant Ambassadors came to this country to give their children the opportunities and privileges that they themselves were denied as children and fought valiantly to procure them. Racism and xenophobia are real barriers to success in Canada, barriers first-generation Barbadian-Canadians struggled to overcome for their children to succeed in a multicultural – but unequal – Canadian society.

Times have changed and White supremacist Canadian society is stuck in thinking that it is still dealing with the Emigrant Ambassadors of the mid-twentieth century who were ‘just happy to be here’, and who would suffer all forms of racial abuse for the ‘privilege’ to be Canadian. Militant Millennials have learned from our Ambassadors and are applying a new framework to our Black Liberation.

We, as Militant Millennials, know the system. Why? We were born in to it and are learning from the histories of those that came before us. Now we need to improve upon how our Emigrant Ambassadors navigated and survived during a period of seemingly insurmountable odds. We need their resiliency. We need their spirit. We need their courage and bravery to try something new. To discover new inhospitable lands and avenues and force our way in. We are ‘playing in the sandbox’ of White businesses, schools and offices. We wear our uniforms of Whiteness, we can speak the language of Whiteness. These are all elements that our Emigrant Ambassadors fought against and, arguably, for – capital that we were given because of their struggle. The system is what it is – an oppressive and racist structure designed for us to fail. A system in which Indigenous peoples of this land continue to agitate for decolonisation (and we must be cognisant of how our presence, particularly the influx of Emigrant Ambassadors in the 1960s, impacted Indigenous sovereignty movements). We need to learn from our history, recognise and celebrate our Emigrant Ambassadors, and use the tools they fought for to our advantage.

As Militant Millennials we are standing on their shoulders. Militant Millennials will do whatever is needed to secure our rightful place in this world − by any means necessary.