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I remember a post sometime ago about the psyche and business practices of some people in the Caribbean. I found this article equally interesting. I guess this is an example of the kind of psyche that Frantz Fannon has continually addressed.

Excerpt:
The question is why is Jamaica apparently so unresponsive to small and medium sized black businessmen and women who want to invest there? I believe that part of the answer is deep in the Jamaican institutional psyche.

I think that, while Jamaican financial institutions are very happy to take the money of the Jamaican Diaspora, when it comes to dealing with British business too many Jamaican officials seem to believe that the only businesses worth dealing with is white-led ones.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum..._INVESTORS.asp

Massa mentality eenh

what she says may be true. Jamaica loves "foreign", so its easy for a foreign business to do well - and business is about profits.
Jamaica barely farms (eg) on the scale they once did. They import chicken and many other goods and products that could easily produced in Jamaica. So since imports seem to take precedence over what is locally produce, finaincial institutions are gonna follow suit.

True and sad.

It might be sad, recess, but it eh hopeless. The fact that it has been identified as a problem is cause for optimism.

This colonial mentality is not only found in Jamaica, it sweeps across the entire Caribbean in varying degrees. Right here in Trinidad, the prevailing attitude is still 'foreign is better' and the worst culprits are probably those in government. Almost every day I hear they looking to bring in somebody else from the US to help the oil, to provide cell phone service, to fight crime, to reform the Police, and so on and so on. When I was in the service, it was the same damn thing; people from England and especially the US coming here to tell us what we already knew and recommended only to be ignored by senior officers

We have to understand what the colonial mentality, the self-contempt, is built on. It's built on a belief that says nothing of substance was and can be produced from within the minds of those who were enslaved and colonised. The whole reason behind their enslavement and colonisation was b/c they did not have the mental capacity to advance any civilisation on their own. All technology, 'salvation' and intellect could only come from outside. Now once we understand that, once we make a decision to reverse that and start defining and creating our existence based on an indigenous understanding of ourselves, based on our own understanding of our history and ancestry, that's 3/4 of the problem solve right there.

We get licks in the pst b/c the pst leaders (and plenty of the present) were products of that Eurocentric system. They were products of a system that forced one to attend school as a stepping stone to receive the best of British/French civilisation. But that civilisation was designed by whites for whites and when the Eric Williams, the Bustamentes, the Manleys, the Adamses, entered into this system of schooling and churching, though they would use them to undermine and overturn the colonial regimes, they were so scarred by that indoctrination that they could not help but see through the eyes of the coloniser. many who opposed them were no better; on the one hand you had -- and have -- those who come back here boasting of being to Harvard, Oxford, Princeton and Yale and had bested the Euro in his own institutions (which is great), but still spouting the theories of Durkheim, Adam Smith, Hobbes, Keynes as if they were godsend. On the other hand you had those who did the same thing and came back defining reality according to the ideologies of Marx, Engels and Mao and they are all irrelevant, all unworkable in a Caribbean context.

Somenone recently said that Lloyd Best's essay Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom should be required reading for all schools. I agree wholeheartedly. But we need to read it to the teachers first. But like ah say, once we identify the problem, we could deal with it.

True. We have to identify the root-cause of the problem and not just treat the symptoms. We have to understand what this institution (slavery, colonialism) has done to us mentally…how potent its effects…as it continually is perpetuated through generations because the institution still exists however subtle or covert. But yes, there is hope. Thanks Ananci! Appreciate it.