The Legacy of Eric Williams: Into the Postcolonial Moment

INTRODUCTION

TOMEIKO ASHFORD CARTER, TANYA L. SHIELDS, AND WILLIAM DARITY JR.

The Caribbean is the site of numerous gestures toward the creation of postcolonial spaces of belonging. Caribbean nation-states, still newly liberated from dominant patriarchies,¹ are redefining their national and global identities apart from and in relation to the empires to which they belonged. To a large extent, the leaders of these nations build on inherited sociopolitical structures with no erasure of the colonial rule that previously existed, in effect negating a tabula rasa for the complete reconstruction of their countries. Caribbean-born scholars and artists have been helping their respective nations to formulate new identities that more closely reflect their countries’ national characters.

The Cameroonian Achille Mbembe has long examined the mechanisms of power propelling postindependence legacies. According to Mbembe in his book On the Postcolony, state regulations of human behavior following direct rule, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, require continued relations of subjection. The prior colonizing state’s various manifestations of power continue to enhance its value, distribute the product of labor, and either ensure abundance or manage poverty and scarcity.² Mbembe also asserts that current African national regimes suffer from governments that are ill-formed mixtures of native traditions and extant colonial practices.³ Mbembe’s characterization of the postcolonial state is one deeply informed by colonial legacies, ideologies, and violences and one whose earlier sensibility of social change has given way to a complicated mix of change and repression.

Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins highlight Caribbean-born citizens’ moves beyond colonial histories as crucial to establishing new postcolonial identities. In Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, Gilbert and Tompkins note that serious practitioners of postcolonialism respond to more than . . . just the . . . experience of imperialism.⁴ These practitioners seek a deeper understanding of their unique heritage. From José Martí’s articulation of Our America to Wilson Harris’s take on indigeneity, Caribbean intellectuals have extended themselves and their talents to create viable postcolonial moments to shrug off the violence of Europe’s colonial enterprises with radicalism and mimicry, offering, at times, quirky fusions of the two.⁵ Like Gilbert and Tompkins and serious Caribbean intellectuals, we examine the effects of nations’ recent eschewing of imperialism (the post-colonial), along with their postmodern and contemporary global participation (the postcolonial).⁶

At these intellectual, nationalistic, and social crossroads, we find Dr. Eric Williams, a scholar, leader, and driving force—a central architect of the postcolonial Caribbean self. In this volume, Williams is examined from several angles: as a political trailblazer, a charismatic personality, the embodiment of a nation’s aspirations, a social enthusiast, and a complicated man of genius. These depictions illustrate the varied dimensions of both the man and his homeland, the place where Williams, in the evocative words of Booker T. Washington, let down [his] bucket in the British West Indies.⁷

As a hyphenated descriptor, the term post-colonial refers to a country that has recently gained independence from an imperial nation-state, and it implies all the tribulations faced by a newly founded country emerging from under an oppressive power. As each of the Caribbean nations sought out and achieved independence, their unique stories unfolded. Trinidad and Tobago’s story is one of an ethnically diverse society perhaps best known for its contributions to the world’s musical heritage, namely, calypso, the invention of the steelpan, and one of the most extravagant celebrations of the pre-Lenten festival of Carnival. But the country’s history is as complex as its contemporary multicultural reality. Caribs and Arawaks from South America first populated Trinidad as early as 2100 BC and, over the centuries, were joined by slaves, indentured servants, and émigrés from all parts of the world. In 1498, Christopher Columbus claimed Trinidad as part of Spain’s empire, and the ensuing years saw Spanish encomenderos enslave the indigenous people in exchange for their Christian conversion and protection, resulting in mission outposts throughout the island and a booming slave-driven economy. However, Trinidad and Tobago remained a Spanish outback—underdeveloped and underpopulated—until the crown issued its Cedula of Population in 1783. The Cedula granted acreage to Roman Catholic planters willing to emigrate to the islands, with grants based on the number of family members and slaves they brought with them. Remarkably, the law also provided smaller parcels to gens de couleur libre, or free men of color, most of whom came from French colonies. Thus Trinidad held within its shores a unique French-speaking, free-black, slave-owning class.⁸ Meanwhile Tobago followed a very different trajectory: in a territory alternately claimed by the Spanish, British, French, and Dutch, slave revolts flourished, the most of notorious of which, in 1801, involved two hundred revolting slaves from sixteen plantations and saw six of their leaders burned alive. In the following year, Tobago was enfolded into the British crown, four years after it wrested Trinidad from Spanish rule.

The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was not fully realized through emancipation until 1838, and this spurred a dramatic demographic change among the islands’ labor population. The wage demands of newly freed black slaves led Britain to import more than 100,000 indentured laborers from Southeast Asia from 1845 to 1917 to maintain control over the international appetite for tobacco, cacao, cotton, and King Sugar. This kali pani, or crossing the dark waters, from India led to the much-vaunted characterization of Trinidad and Tobago as a place of two tribes—one Indian and one African—with minority populations of Chinese, Syrians, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese, all under the rule of the British crown. Then the discovery of oil on Trinidadian lands greatly transformed the country by 1910. Now no longer solely an agricultural economy, the island nation underwent industrial and economic changes that impressed themselves on the existing racial stratification, adding to Trinidad’s historical trend of rebellion, riots, and strikes.⁹

Eric Williams was born into this atmosphere of diversity and social unrest in 1911. His young life was steered politically and socially by British authority and ideals. As the son of a postal official and the eldest of twelve children, he knew well the life of working-class West Indians, knowledge that would later allow him to identify with the plight of economically disenfranchised Trinbagonians at the height of his political career. His schooling was modeled on the British didactic system and saw little—if any—inclusion of Trinidad’s own historical and cultural heritage. Politically, he bore witness to the British crown’s 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement with the United States, which installed a military base on Trinidad’s northwest shores, thus triangulating Trinidadian interests with America’s maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), and Britain’s wartime needs to subvert German U-boats and maintain access to much-needed energy reserves. As Bridget Brereton explains, the agreement turned the Caribbean into America’s backyard: Trinidad played an important role in the war: it was the convoy assembly point for the dispatch of tankers from the Caribbean ports across the Atlantic to North Africa and Europe. [Furthermore,] the Gulf of Paria was used by US carriers and airplanes for their final exercises before going to the Pacific battleground via the Panama Canal.¹⁰

The Legislative Council of Trinidad comprised just thirteen members, six of whom were appointed by the governor, the remaining seven elected according to minimum age, property, and income standards. Not surprisingly, no native Trinbagonian held elected office within the Legislative Council until full adult suffrage was achieved in 1946 through the revolutionary actions of men such as labor leader Uriah Butler and what Rex Nettleford explains as the important vehicle for serious dialogue between the citizenry and the wider society: calypso (see chap. 1).

It was from this resonant context that Williams embarked on his journey of leading the citizenry of Trinidad and Tobago out of colonialism and into, arguably, its present-day post-colonial independent identity. He was a remarkable student in his youth and, in 1932, won the prestigious Island Scholarship to Oxford University. Abroad he thrived academically, earning an honors degree in history in three years’ time and a PhD three years after that. Yet he brought with him his justifiable disenchantment as a black colonial and was persistently engaged in studying Trinidad’s racial, economic, and sociopolitical situations, perhaps then seen more clearly from the sterile distance of the empire’s homeland. His doctoral thesis, The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery, effectively attacked the benevolent notion that the abolition of the British slave trade was a humanitarian decision and asserted that it was instead a purely economic one.¹¹

Despite his academic esteem, Williams could not find a teaching position in Britain, so he accepted a social sciences professorship at the historically black college Howard University in the United States. It was here that he published Capitalism and Slavery (1944), a treatise that built on his Oxford thesis. In a 2008 article in the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, William Darity Jr. notes that Capitalism and Slavery argued that, through the enslavement of Africans, the imperial agendas of the English and French had a far-reaching demographic, economic, and political impact on the West Indies. According to Darity, Williams not only located the origins of racism against blacks of African descent at the start of the Atlantic slave trade but also argued that colonial slavocracies in the West Indies, through the wealth and labor they produced, ushered Europe into the industrial age. Moreover, Williams contended that the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was primarily due to the colonies’ diminished economic value to the imperial center. In Williams’s view, the British ended slavery when it was no longer financially valuable for them, not because they had any high moral imperative to do so.¹²

Perhaps the catharsis of finally publishing Capitalism and Slavery, or perhaps due to his discomfort with speaking to the inherently different sociopolitical problems of African Americans, Williams returned to Trinidad eight years after arriving in the United States and just two years after gaining tenure at Howard University. This homecoming was not surprising and would later prove prodigal.

Lisa Clayton Robinson contends that Williams’s 1948 return to Trinidad as the deputy chairman of the Caribbean Research Council of the Caribbean Commission was short-lived. The council was a conservative organization, aimed at soliciting US and British neutral involvement in the Caribbean, and Williams wished for a more aggressive political activism. In 1955 he helped form the People’s National Movement (PNM), a political party espousing national unity through multiclass and multiracial representation, although its makeup consisted mainly of blacks. Despite discrepancies in party platform and composition, PNM leaders recognized greater disparities in Trinidad’s national leadership and its lay populace: the minority of wealth-owning whites governed a majority population of diverse ethnic peoples, among them Africans, East Indians, and Chinese. With Williams at the helm, the PNM called for radical government change: the party wanted a self-governing state.

The PNM’s growing popularity paralleled Williams’s own ascent to political power. Winning the national election in 1956, the PNM gained majority legislative representation, and Williams was named chief minister, serving in that office from 1956 to 1959; in 1959 he became the premier. Six years later, on August 31, 1962, Trinidad and Tobago gained its independence from Mother England, effectively making Williams prime minister, a title replacing premier to reflect the change in governance, and the father of the new nation. Williams delivered several famous lectures at the University of Woodford Square, an open-air public plaza where he would share political wisdom with his constituents, a place where Williams felt he could reach the public.¹³ A vast population, historically subservient in the roles that Spain, Great Britain, and the United States had bestowed on it, was now at once enlightened, knowledgeable, and armed with the right to vote.

Williams’s intention to make the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago a wholly functioning entity after its rule by Great Britain reflected the primary aim of post-colonialism: to highlight the historical relations and political struggles of decolonized nations. Such was certainly the case with Trinidad and Tobago as Williams faced the problems of how to establish a viable system of government that would address the needs of all its people, how to make Trinidad and Tobago economically stable, and how to unify the lower and upper classes, as well as the diverse populations in the nation, thus giving the island nation its own identity.

Still, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins argue that the understanding of post-colonialism in its most basic sense as a temporal concept[,] meaning the time after colonisation has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state, is oversimplified and neglects to address the far-reaching cultural, sociopolitical, and international struggles for recognition confronted by new states.¹⁴

As we discuss hereafter, postcolonialism in its unhyphenated form implies more substantial formations of national identities and has more deterministic political and sociocultural ramifications for nation-states attempting to carve out their own niches within global contexts. Charles Bressler puts it most succinctly, describing post-colonialism as the period after the colonized societies or countries have become independent, in contrast to postcolonialism, which refers to all the characteristics of a society or culture from the time of colonization to the present moment.¹⁵ Ania Loomba adds that the prefix ‘post’ complicates matters because it implies an ‘aftermath’ in two senses—temporal, as in coming after, and ideological, as in supplanting. . . . The second implication [is contested because] if the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism. A country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependent) at the same time.¹⁶ It was in the milieu of both the post-colonial and the postcolonial that Eric Williams became an iconic Caribbean figure. When he died in March 1981, Eric Williams had become one of the most respected—and most highly criticized—figures in Caribbean political history, especially in the independent nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago.

Williams’s initial advocacy of governance by the citizenry in lieu of nearabsentee rule by British officials, his sympathy with the living conditions of the underclasses, and his embrace of vernacular culture won him instant approval of masses of voters. Members of all races and classes revered him, especially for his promotion of a raceless society in favor of national pride and affinity. However, by 1970, young proponents of the Black Power Movement rejected Williams’s seemingly optimistic political stance, alleging that his policies actually retarded the mobility of blacks and East Indians. The young militants criticized what they saw as a lack of radicalism in his politics.

Indeed, in 1970, Williams published his scathing history of the Caribbean, From Columbus to Castro, despite his seemingly lackluster political actions. This work extended the scope of Capitalism and Slavery to include the entire Caribbean. Amid charges that larger national powers easily influenced his political decisions, Williams seized more authority in response to the influence of the Black Power Movement.

The Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago was controversial in part because most people did not understand the need for black power when governance has a black face. Jerome Teelucksingh characterizes black power in the Caribbean as a response to racism and the deleterious socioeconomic impacts of colonialism and imperialism.¹⁷ In fact, a 1970 study showed that in companies of 100 or more people: whites represented 53% of the business elite; ‘off-whites’ represented 15 %, mixed-race 15%, Chinese 9%, Indians 9%, and Africans 4%.¹⁸ These statistics, coupled with lack of access to the nation’s prosperity in terms of jobs, housing, and health care, led to protests that lasted months and ended with a state of emergency, the incarceration of over 70 movement leaders and the death of several others including Basil Davis.¹⁹ Beverly Jones, a member of National Union of Freedom Fighters (NUFF), an organization that believed in armed resistance, was another victim of the Black Power rebellion. Though unarmed at the time, Jones was gunned down in 1973. The Black Power Movement revealed critical fissures in the postcolonial state. Fragile alliances between women, Indians, working-class people, and intellectuals politicized these constituencies and galvanized action across the country.²⁰ Trinidad and Tobago’s Black Power Movement was part of regional and global movements for redressing colonial and postcolonial violence and inequality and ranged from the Cuban Revolution (1959), to the Black Power Movement in the United States, to independence struggles throughout Asia and Africa.²¹ Caribbean intellectuals, among them C. L. R. James and Walter Rodney, were part of this movement in England to Jamaica. In 1968, Rodney was banned from returning to Jamaica because he argued that Caribbean poverty was a direct result of continued White control of banking, industry, commerce, and transportation and that without Black ownership, imperialism would persist even after independence.²²

The confluence of these global and local currents erupted in Trinidad and Tobago in 1970 and challenged Eric Williams’s grip on power. Brian Meeks characterizes it thus: In February 1970 in the wake of carnival . . . tens of thousands of overwhelmingly young people marched daily in the streets of Port of Spain, San Fernando and other towns under the slogans of black solidarity, African-Indian unity, and an end to white and foreign domination of the country’s economy.²³ The situation intensified in April 1970 when Prime Minister Eric Williams

declared a state of emergency and ordered the arrest of leaders of the movement, and called on the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment to leave its barracks in Chaguaramas on the western outskirts of the capital and enforce the law. But the revolutionary mood had run much deeper than Williams and his government had anticipated. Led by young lieutenants, a large contingent of the regiment mutinied. In an action interpreted in various ways, but that was ultimately defensive, the junior officers who led the mutiny refused to carry out the instructions of the government to enforce the decree. After a prolonged negotiation, doubtless spurred on, in part, by the imminent and visible threat of Venezuelan and U.S. warships on the horizon, the rebels surrendered, the government re-established its authority and the active, offensive phase of the February Revolution appeared to have been broken.²⁴

The ideology of Black Power in Trinidad was similar to its expressions elsewhere, particularly in terms of gender and political power. There was an emphasis on the black man’s oppression and an ideology that equated lack of power with lack of manhood. The concept of manhood was directly linked to imperial notions of masculinity. In Making Men (1999), Belinda Edmondson argues that Caribbean intellectuals were writing themselves into and as the English vision of intellectual authority worthy of self government.²⁵ In this realm of hegemonic gender expressions is the issue of power over another. For instance, the British or imperial model of masculinity was power over others (expressed in physical and emotional violence), neatly dressed, well-spoken, notion of manners, decorum, civility, and control of emotions.²⁶ And though women were part of the movement, their participation was characterized in nurturing terms as the Earth Mother who supported the Black Man in his struggle as head of household.²⁷ These expressions of masculinity did not challenge the inherited colonial norms, and the strong leader ideal persisted in postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago.²⁸

By the early 1980s, public opinion was divided over the effectiveness of Williams’s leadership.²⁹ That divided reaction was due in part to Williams’s own enigmatic political persona, according to Gordon Rohlehr, an ambiguous blend of conqueror, deliverer, benevolent patriarch, godfather, patron, sinister autocrat, and reincarnated colonial governor.³⁰ In his essay in this volume, Rex Nettleford asserts that Williams constructed a densely authoritarian image for himself. Nettleford goes so far as to say that Williams donned sunglasses to perpetuate this image, to hide his eyes and appear more distant and ominous. It is important to note, however, that while many critics may have felt Williams was rigid in his leadership style, he by no means terrorized Trinidad and Tobago or posed as a solitary national dictator.

Still, Williams courageously headed one of the Caribbean’s first independent colonies—one with inherited colonial models of leadership—and catapulted Trinidad and Tobago onto the international stage.³¹ His efforts clearly anticipated the political aims and distresses of post-colonialism and globalization. Growing problems under his leadership of the fledgling nation indicated the complexities of creating a new identity for a former colony of the British empire, especially since Trinidad and Tobago still formally aligned itself with the mother country as a member of its commonwealth. This alignment illuminated the underlying practical and theoretical issues that often accompany post-colonial status. In fact, Williams grappled with maintaining Trinidad and Tobago’s position in a global context. At first eschewing help from world superpowers, then later collaborating with them, Williams sought to establish a sound and sustainable way of life for his citizens. His commitment to the stability of his country in an ever-changing, modern world recalls the aims of the second postcolonialism school of thought, what Gilbert and Tompkins define as an engagement with and contestation of colonialism’s discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies in sharp contrast to the seemingly trite chronological construction[s] of post-independence.³²

David Scott takes the argument further, asserting that postcolonial nations, given their recent though clearly viable histories, need to abandon their concern with the affairs of colonial powers and concentrate instead on the multiple yet distinctive political positions of new nation-states. To do this, Scott suggests that postcoloniality, as a theoretical set of assumptions, encourages healthy though critical respect for pluralizations of subaltern difference.³³ Clearly Williams’s political strategies reflected a mind-set that recognized Trinidad and Tobago and nations like it as major national players on the international scene whose significance could no longer be ignored by traditional superpowers.

As previously mentioned, in the context of this anthology, postcolonialism in its unhyphenated and sometimes collapsed status is also meaningful as a metaphor for a mind-set of inclusion and diversity, one that maintains that newly liberated countries throughout the world must regularly adopt socially responsive attitudes and practices given an increasingly interdependent world. In this sense, postcolonialism reflects a constant condition of being affected by a new world order. For Williams, such a postmodern concept of nation building meant continuously trying to address issues surrounding the diversity of his country’s populations while trying to carve out a unique niche for the nation itself, that is, to make a recognizable place for it on the world map.

For most of his time in office, Williams achieved these goals and had the backing of his citizens in doing so. But the nation’s growing political unrest toward the end of his nearly twenty-five-year premiership and its ongoing strife between the races parallel situations of other post-colonial nations; consider Jamaica and India, two nations that have struggled to maintain a consistent postcolonial presence on modern global fronts.³⁴

Williams’s problems with nation building and identity formation perhaps stemmed from his and his constituents’ varied concepts of citizenship, a defining marker, as many theorists argue, of the post-colonial subject. Homi Bhabha’s notion of unhomeliness certainly highlights the angst of generations of dispossessed Africans, East Indians, and Chinese who make up Trinidad and Tobago’s population and invariably seek to make the island nation home. The term unhomeliness describes the state of displaced cultural existence, connoting a particular dislocating aspect of that identity. As Bhabha defines the term more specifically, it is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations.³⁵ The psychological disruption inherent in multiple identifications, like those incurred by the post-colonial Caribbean citizen, makes reconciling such extracultural positionings challenging, to say the least.

Contemporary Caribbean citizenship extends beyond T. H. Marshall’s civic-political definition of (1) rights to property, personal liberty, and justice; (2) right[s] to participate in the exercise of political power; and (3) rights of economic and social security.³⁶ It includes more broadly what David Held describes as the involvement of people in the community in which they live.³⁷ But postcolonial Caribbean citizenship considers the places in which individuals live, that is, their communities, to be local, national, regional, and international sites. Indeed, this multifaceted sense of place and being makes for a complicated postmodern ontology.

Thus Williams’s difficulties in unifying his citizenry foreshadowed the ongoing struggles that characterize this period in world history. The long postcolonial moment (so considered because the temporal space of the moment could conceivably last indefinitely) is rife with questions of citizenship, possession, belonging, and identity: post-colonial histories ground, structure, and legitimize national spaces. In this instance—the actual moment of the early twenty-first century—this