Allan Chastanet still thinks that Colonialism had a Conscience?

Allan Chastanet’s purported attempt to apologize for saying that colonialism had a conscience was anything but an apology. It was equivocal and seemed to reinforce his view that it did in fact have a conscience.

It could be easy to write off the former prime minister’s loose words to ignorance, safe in the knowledge that he does not make a hobby of reading and therefore probably does not know what colonialism actually is.

 Still though, from even the little he knows about colonialism, Allan Chastanet should know that it was a long standing and sustained evil that imposed slavery upon the African peoples including some of his ancestors, annihilated the native civilizations of what is now known as the Americas, and brought out the worse in the European probably including some of his ancestors as well.

Yes, speaking to Andre Paul and Stanley Lucien on Radio 100 FM recently he explained that as bad as colonialism was, it had a conscience. In his incomprehensible and some would say incoherent mumbling on the subject, Chastanet said something to the effect that colonialism was not as bad as economics or had more of a conscience than economics. The senseless chatter was a base and illogical insult within an apology.

Effectively, on national radio, and TV, recorded and posted for posterity on the World Wide Web, the opposition leader demonstrated to the world that throughout his days as Minister of finance for the Saint Lucia economy he never discovered that economics is in fact a science. It is no wonder that Chastanet ran the Saint Lucia economy like an art eccentrically crafted according to his fancy.

Chastanet does not know that slavery in the Caribbean was a system established by law and enforced by its strong arm. Or that slave labour provided the outputs for economic prosperity in Europe and the Americas.

But let’s leave that there.

What’s interesting is that although Chastanet apologized in his own way for making the “colonialism had a conscience,” statement, we still have a problem.

The words were insulting and insensitive but what of the thoughts? Yes! A predisposition to favour colonialism and everything that came with it must have influenced Chastanet to make the statement in the first place.                                       The problem therefore resides in his mind.

Listening to our former Prime Minister speaking to the talk show hosts recently, we got the sense that he was apologizing because of the public backlash that followed from him making the statement rather than because he realized that he was dead wrong.

Chastanet has not convinced us that in the disquiet of his overly counterproductive mind he believes that colonialism was an unfeeling system of sustained evil that indicts the European for some of the worse human rights atrocities in history.

The big question for us then is: if Allan Chastanet was a privileged three quarter or so breed on the slave plantation in the 1800s, would he carry news from the house to the field or would he carry news from the field to the house. Or worse yet, would he carry news in both directions? 

This is no frivolity. 

Believe it or not, in 2021, this is the deciding question on which many aspects of our view of Allan Chastanet depends.

We suspect that we know the answer.