BLACK BRITAIN INTERVIEWS HOREN TUDU ON BLACKS IN THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS

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BLACK BRITAIN ONLINE FEBRUARY 26, 2007

Racism threatens to wipe out the Jarawa –India’s
indigenous black people from Africa

Category: race Dated: 26/02/2007

They are beautiful, dark-skinned black people, with
natural Afro kinky hair and are shorter than the
average height. They came from Africa around 60,000
years ago but today are threatened with extinction
because of their blackness...

Deborah Gabriel

Another legacy of British colonialism destroying
African descendants

When you come across groups of people that were there
before the Aryans, it conflicts with their world view.

They are beautiful, dark-skinned black people, with
natural Afro kinky hair and are shorter than the
average height. They came from Africa around 60,000
years ago but today are threatened with extinction
because of their blackness.

There are no precise figures as to how many Jarawa
people there were before the British invaded and
colonised the Andaman Islands in the 1850s. Along with
other indigenous peoples: the Sentinelese, the Onge
and the Great Andamanese, they were once the sole
inhabitants of the Andaman Islands and have lived
there for around 60,000 years.

After the end of British colonial rule, the Andaman
Islands became part of India and several thousand
people left the Indian mainland to settle there,
outnumbering the indigenous groups. The Jarawa, Onge
and Great Andamanese peoples all came from Africa and
were the earliest people to inhabit India.

The Great Andamanese were decimated by the British and
their numbers fell from 5000 at the time of the
British invasion, to only 53 today. The remaining
Great Andamanese are plagued by alcoholism and
dependent on government handouts. There are only 100
Onge people left out of 600 and the Jarawa are thought
to number around 300 today. Their population level has
remained stable in recent years.

In 1957 the Indian government established a reserve
for the Jarawa on the Andaman Islands and it is
illegal for outsiders to enter this area; but in the
1970s it built a highway right through the reserve,
which brings the Jarawa into daily contact with
outsiders – something they had vigorously resisted.

The road is used by other local settlers as a
convenient way of entering the Jarawa reserve, leaving
them exposed to exploitation, poachers and racial and
violent abuse. In 2002, the Supreme Court of India
ruled that the road had to be closed, but the ruling
has yet to be implemented. Survival, an international
NGO that supports indigenous nation groups worldwide,
has been campaigning for the road to be closed.

Spokesperson Miriam Ross told Black Britain:
“Outsiders are going into the Jarawa reserve, stealing
their animals and giving them alcohol…often with the
complicity of local police.” Local opposition to the
road closure has intensified as local settlers with
business interests in the vicinity have protested it
should stay open. The Andaman Administration has since
petitioned the Supreme Court to revoke its order to
close the road.

Survival feels that the Indian Government has
developed good policies to protect the Jarawa but
“lack the will to implement them,” a view shared by
Horen Tudu, a US-based researcher and writer who was
born into the Santhal tribal group in Bangladesh. He
said: “The Indian government has no interest
preserving these people at all.”

According to Tudu, the Indian Government sees itself
as more cultured to Aryan supremacist beliefs that
dictate that Aryans are indigenous to India: “When you
come across groups of people that were there before
the Aryans, it conflicts with their world view.”

Tudu told Black Britain that some Indian scholars
would like nothing better than for people to believe
that the Caucasian race originated in the Indian
subcontinent: “They would like people to believe that
other groups of people who are basically the parent
people of all the Austro-Asiatic and tribal people
that you see in south Asia and south-east Asia never
existed.”

Tudu believes that the present threat posed by
outsiders to the Jarawa people is history repeating
itself.

Complicit police who collude in Jarawa exploitation
are mainly high caste Brahmins

There does need to be guards to some extent patrolling
their territory and keeping out these illegal
poachers, because the Jarawa are so outnumbered by
Indian settlers.

When Aryans invaded the Indian subcontinent the
indigenous peoples resisted and fought back, but they
were subdued and some of them were enslaved and
eventually relegated to the margins of society as
untouchables. Those who fled to the hills are today’s
tribal people who have chosen to retain their
traditional culture and way of life.

Today’s battle is much the same with some Hindus
intent on dispossessing the black indigenous peoples
of their land and resources. Tudu told Black Britain
that this is a conscious effort on the part of Indians
to disconnect themselves with the indigenous black
people of the Indian subcontinent and their African
heritage: “They want to remove the whole image of
themselves from anything that is non Caucasian,” he
said.

The Jarawa people have been struck by two recent
measles epidemics which have resulted in at least one
death. But there is still a possibility that they
could be adversely affected by other diseases. In
recent decades, other indigenous communities, like
those in Brazil, have seen 50 per cent of their
population wiped out through diseases brought in by
outsiders.

The decimation of the Great Andamanese people,
according to Tudu: “Has to do with the spread of
diseases like Bronchitis, the measles and syphilis, a
sexually transmitted disease, which only came about
through rape.” There are also reports that Jarawa
women are being sexually exploited by local settlers.

Ross believes that the Indian government has failed to
realise the real risks to the Jarawa people. “An
epidemic could still wipe out the whole Jarawa
population,” she explained. Ross told Black Britain
that the only way for the Jarawa to be saved is by
ensuring that they are afforded proper protection-
even if it means installing a permanent convoy of
troops: “There does need to be guards to some extent
patrolling their territory and keeping out these
illegal poachers, because the Jarawa are so
outnumbered by Indian settlers.”

Aside from military protection, an education programme
is essential if people’s attitudes are to change:
“…local officials who have dealings with the Jarawa,
police stationed around the reserve, the
administration’ s tribal welfare officers…they have to
understand about the Jarawa’s rights, needs and way of
life,” Ross said. The local administration recently
held a training event for local police officers to
sensitise them to the needs of the Jarawa.

Tudu pointed out that the reason for the complicity on
the part of Indian police is due to the fact that
around 80-90 per cent of police officers are upper
caste Brahmins and the rest are other upper castes,
for whom anti black racism is deeply embedded in their
psyche: “Government officials and local government
jobs are done by Brahmins. They hold on to all the
employment opportunities that could be availed to
anyone, even though they are only 5 per cent of the
population.”

Survival believes that the sensitisation should be
extended to local Indian settlers. As well as hunting
animals in the Jarawa’s reserve, which is prohibited,
they have also taken to luring the Jarawa to hunt for
them whilst bribing them with alcohol, tobacco and
rice, creating dangerous addictions, as well as an
unhealthy dependency on outsiders. In essence, they
are being used as “manual labour.”

As black people in India, the Jarawa are exposed to
racism, not least because of caste discrimination,
which places them at the bottom of a skin tone, racial
hierarchy.

Genocidal campaign against the Jarawa is a continuum
of the African Holocaust

Anti black racism is …the most dangerous thing in the
world today that needs to be addressed.

Racist attitudes can also be traced back to
colonisation, which brought with it the ideology that
the Jarawa people and other indigenous groups were
‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ and need to be ‘civilised.’

“Local people and the local authorities have tried to
get the Jarawa to wear clothes and adapt to the
mainstream, Indian-settler lifestyle…but obviously
that displays a deep-seated racism and belief that the
Jarawa’s hunter-gatherer way of life is inferior,”
Ross told Black Britain.

Tudu explained how dangerous these beliefs are to the
Jarawa and the threat they pose to their ultimate
survival: “You once had proud communities, but now the
infrastructure has been decimated and they interfered
with the indigenous methods of procuring food.”

Tudu told Black Britain that the Jarawa and other
nation groups on the Andaman Islands have been
deliberately encouraged to abandon their traditional
lifestyle and assimilate into the mainstream, which
ties them into the economy: “When they exist outside
the mainstream economy they are more self-sufficient,
once they are encouraged to do other things they get
dependent on currency.”

Survival points out in a report submitted last week to
the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination , that the Indian vocabulary reflects
the government’s racist attitudes towards indigenous
peoples living within the Indian subcontinent. The 75
nation groups are referred to as ‘Primitive Tribal
Groups’ which has been challenged.

New draft policy drawn up in 2004 acknowledges that
the name ‘primitive’ has derogatory overtones and
should be abandoned. However, the proposed alternative
‘Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups’ is equally
questionable. The draft policy acknowledged the rights
of the Jarawa people and promised minimal intervention
in their lives and complete autonomy.

But the rhetoric has not been transformed in practice.
Jarawa people who have to attend hospital are given
clothes and food, but clothes can present problems
when they are not used to wearing them as they usually
remain unwashed and cause skin diseases. Jarawa are
also being kept in hospital for minor ailments such as
coughs and colds, putting them at risk of infectious
diseases.

Survival points out that this practice only serves to
“undermine confidence in their own medical practices
and way of life.” Ross told Black Britain: “Out of
everyone who lives on the Andaman Islands, they are
the ones who have an intimate knowledge of its ecology
and natural history.”

Survival is campaigning to try to change attitudes and
blames the media for sometimes referring to indigenous
people as ‘primitive’ societies. This gives the
impression that indigenous people are not progressive,
but Ross stressed that they do adapt, albeit in
different ways to mainstream societies. But it is not
only the media who are at fault.

The education system also has a lot to answer for. It
does not present a world view of history and
development, but perpetuates the view that the era of
the British Empire was a positive episode in history,
presenting colonisation as a necessary act of
civilising ‘backward’ people, rather than a genocidal,
immoral, and undesired invasion borne out of a desire
for economic exploitation and political domination of
the African, Asian and Caribbean continents.

Tudu told Black Britain: “Anti black racism is …the
most dangerous thing in the world today that needs to
be addressed.”

In essence, the genocidal campaign against the Jarawa
and other indigenous black peoples throughout the
world is a continuum of the Maangamizi, (African
Holocaust), which needs to be urgently addressed, not
only by the United Nations but by the African Union as
part of an international dialogue on reparations.