24 January 1998 | by Jacob Gelt Dekker
On a hill crest close to Hato, Curacao's International airport, stands a house built with whatever was at hand. It is an artist's house, a bricoleur's house.

Every piece of material of bricolage contains in it, past meanings, a goddess and a bird's head rearranged from chromium car bumpers, a conquistador and a love-making couple from cogwheels and engine parts. Bricoleurs dismantle and re-arrange with whatever is at hand. They create new meaning without destroying the past .

Levi-Strauss, a modem French Structuralist who re-defined anthropology, contrasted work of a bricoleur to that of an engineer as opposite characters, to illustrated mythical thought versus science, science of the concrete versus the science of the abstract. These are not... "two stages or phases of knowledge. Both approaches are equally valid"( Levi-Strauss 1966:22). And.. " Compare magic and science as two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge, though it is true that science is more successful than magic" (Levi-Strauss 1966:1).

Levi-Strauss differentiated between 'hot' societies, societies where science and competition rule, and 'cold' ones, societies of mysticism and confluence. Bricolage is the 'knowledge' of cold societies, it takes what is available, re-assembles and creates new entities, whereas in hot societies, science creates from the abstract with considerable disregard of what was. In the process, competition, innate to science, segregates winners from losers. Curacao is colonially 'hot' and culturally 'cold'. Its Black population suffers from an inferiority complex imposed by its former colonial masters and its mosaic-of-cultures rather than a melting pot, as Jay Haviser put it, desperately tries to find a common and joint identity.

Most inhabitants of Curacao have roots in West Africa. They suffered centuries of Caucasian ethnocentric arrogance and brutality that ignored and denied all values of African culture and history, and treated blacks as if they were a new animal species. Reverend Blyden ( 1803), a black man from St. Thomas who returned to West Africa and is regarded as the father of 'Negritude' - the philosophy that led to Africa's independence - stated that "in our past there was nothing of value. Black man should look forward to a great future in which he treasures and builds on Christian blessings from slavery."

In the same tenure an American priest wrote about a hundred years ago, "... his (Negro's) intelligence is greatly inferior to that of Caucasians, and consequently he is incapable to govern himself. He has been placed under our protection. The vindication of slavery is contained in the Scripture... we can effectively defend our institutions from the Word of God."

About sixty years ago, Belgium Jesuit, Tempels, in his book on Bantu philosophy, obviously trying some benevolent Black rehabilitation, made desperate attempts to discover 'original' Black values working from a cognitive perspective of Westem philosophy. Black Christianity and America's Reverend Faracan's Black Muslims have done the same. For the occasion, Aristotle was discovered in Bantu mythological philosophy, baby-Jesus and his mother became blacks, and Kwanza. a year-end celebration, was re-launched as a centuries-old tradition.

Levi-Strauss' hypothesis of equally valid forms of knowledge has had little impact outside the academic world. Recent archeological finds and rediscovery of Africa's great and glorious history have hardly been noticed by the public. Black Africa, Black Americas and Black Carribean continue to suffer from inferiority complexes caused by colonial mental and scientific arrogance.

In Curacao's Willemstad, a unique pontoon bridge connects two city parts on either side of the harbor entrance. A string of flat-deck floats connected by a road deck and powered on one end by a large diesel ship-engine, hinges from the opposite end in a quarter circle to allow entry and exit to incoming and outgoing ships. It is a wonderful and unique piece of bricolage of a centuries old port.

Over Willemstad's skyline also hovers a giant steel arch larger than St. Louis' gateway to the Wild West. It spans from one mountain bridgehead of town to the one across the harbor. This piece of colonial ingenuity dwarfs the entire historic town. It may have connected one highway with the next, but more than anything, it has segregated arrogant hot Western post-colonial intellectualism from that of the local bricoleur, the fabric of Curacao's cold society