Caribbean Freedom & Independent Thought

Caribbean Freedom and

Independent Thought

Edited By

Kenneth Hall and Myrtle Chuck-A-Sang

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First published as Lloyd Best Enduring Relevance of Independent Thought, Caribbean Freedom in 2008 by Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston, Jamaica

© Copyright 2013 The Integrationist.

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Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

1        EXTRACTS FROM A LETTER TO CLR JAMES1

2        CLR JAMES: THE LARGEST SINGLE INFLUENCE ON MY LIFE1

3        THE LEGACY OF ERIC WILLIAMS

4        A POLITICAL OBITUARY:

5        BEAUTY IN THESE PLACES:A TRIBUTE TO M.G. SMITH

6        PLACING OURSELVES IN HISTORY: A TRIBUTE TO

C. L. R JAMES1

7        ALLAN HARRIS, BRAHMIN1

8        HE WAS THORNE AND NO ONE ELSE1

9        SIR ALISTER MCINTYRE: POLYCRAT AND NATION BUILDER1

10        KARI LEVITT-WEST INDIAN FROM EAST EUROPE1

11        C.V. GOCKING HONOURED: CITATION: FELICITOUS CROSSING OF LIFE’S PATHS1

12        HENRI TELFER CHRISTIAN, CATHOLIC

13        SYL LOWHAR: THE WAY OF HIS WORD1

14        GENTLE GREVILLE JONES1

15        MOTHER, MAMA, MATRIARCH: EMBODIMENT OF TUNAPUNA1

16        REMEMBERING DR. GOCKING1

17        SCIENTIST AS WELL AS ARTIST-V.S. NAIPAUL1

18        REFLECTIONS ON THE REFLECTIONS

19 |       DIFFERENCES WITH A BOSOM FRIEND1

20        THE ISSUE IS WHAT WE KNOW1

21        ECONOMIC THEORY AND ECONOMIC POLICY IN THE

20TH CENTURY WEST INDIES: THE LEWIS TRADITION OF TOWN AND GOWN

22        IN TANDEM AND TOGETHER: LYNETTE ATWELL JULY 1938-FEBRUARY 20051

23        SIZING UP THE NEW VICE CHANCELLOR1

24        GEORGE BECKFORD AND THE CARIBBEAN

PREFACE

The fifteen territories that currently comprise the CARICOM Single Market (CSM) and that hope to transmute into the CSME (Caribbean Single Market and Economy):

Antigua and Barbuda; The Bahamas; Barbados;

Belize; Dominica; Grenada; Guyana; Haiti; Jamaica;

Montserrat; St. Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia;

St. Vincent and the Grenadines; Suriname; and

Trinidad and Tobago;

are characterized by various paradoxes. There is a triad of these paradoxes that merit special attention because of their fundamental nature and connection to development.

First in that triad is what may be described as the Identity paradox. The fundamental nature of that paradox derives from the truth of the Swahili Proverb: ‘The beginning of Wisdom is knowing who you are.’ Farrukh Dhondy in his book on C.L.R. James (published 2001) recounts the story of James’ exposition of this paradox at meetings to which Learie Constantine had invited him to speak about the West Indies. The paradox required explaining how descendants of Africans were now known as West Indians; how, though a very large proportion of the population of Trinidad was descended from labourers from India itself, they were distinguished from the African descendants by being known as East Indians, with no relationship to the East Indies (the islands of Java and Sumatra between Asia and Australia), and how East Indians were nevertheless West Indians.

This linguistic conundrum has had its complexities compounded by the consequences of miscegenation. C.L.R. James, in The Black Jacobins, gives a clear account of the problem in relation to Haiti. He points out that ‘they divided the offspring of white and black and intermediate shades into 128 divisions. The true Mulatto was the child of the pure black and the pure white. The child of the white and the Mulatto woman was a quarteron with 96 parts white and 32 parts black. But the quarteron could be produced by the white and the marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the white and the sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56 and so on all through the 128 varieties. But the sang-mêlée with 127 white parts and 1 black part was still a man of colour.’

Richard Allsopp, in his Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, captures the linguistic usage in terms such as ‘san-tan-tone’ (a person of mixed African and Portuguese parentage-usage in Guyana) and ‘douglah’ (a Caribbean person of mixed African and Indian, or sometimes Chinese, parentage-usage in Grenada, Guyana, St. Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica).

This problem of how to treat the results of miscegenation has not been unique to the Caribbean. For instance, in David Bradbury’s biography of Louis Armstrong he needed to refer to the complex racial and social web of New Orleans. He noted that people were classified into mulattos, quadroons, or octoroons, depending on the proportion of African parentage; and pointed out that in 1894, Louisiana Legislative Code No. 111, declared that a person with any African ancestry was black.

In the final analysis, the question of ‘who we are’ could have any of more than the 128 answers, depending on where in the Caribbean we focus, or on what aspect of our characteristics is the focus of the query; but we, including the Africans and the East Indians and all admixtures, have tacitly agreed, with differing and unstable degrees of understanding, that we are all ‘West Indians’.

Another paradox relates, in the sense of an analogue, to the distinctions between ontogenesis (the history of the individual development of an organised being), phylogenesis (the evolutionary development and diversification of groups of organisms), and epigenesis (the biological theory that the embryo develops from an undifferentiated egg cell). The rules and explanations referable to the actual development of each of the fifteen individual Caribbean territories, to the actual development of the group of fifteen called CARICOM, and to the supposed commonalities of development that point in the direction of the CSME are not all the same, even though intuitively it seems they must be related. The net result is that we live in a world in which, far too often, the equivalent of Rudyard Kipling’s Just so Stories comprise the fare offered us by our soi-disant intellectual elite, and our political leaders, about the Caribbean’s past, present, and future.

The third paradox relates to the general idea, perhaps cryptically stated, as the rule that ‘men become what they think.’ The influential thinkers of the Caribbean have not always been at one on fundamental issues of integration or of development; and consequently the citizens of the Caribbean have often found themselves in the paradoxical situation of facing discord arising from being forced to be in harmony with others.

Dealing with these three paradoxes and their relatives requires some insight into the minds of the influential thinkers of the Caribbean. Though we appear not to be fortunate enough to have at our disposal an agreed on compendium of the History of Caribbean Economic Thought, we have the next best thing. This next best thing is a set of essays that represent close-up snapshots of the thoughts of the minds of some major thinkers on matters Caribbean; and these snapshots have been composed by no less a photographer of the mind than himself an influential thinker-Lloyd Best.

This publication presents a selection of those essays, cheek by jowl. It is our Caribbean forest of memes to savour and make of them whatever we will. In true Caribbean style it is a forest of mixed species, and therefore capable of being the basis of exquisite laminates for the furniture of development.

Hopefully, we will not in these days of avid pursuit of material well-being and (consequently?) of migration from the Caribbean, say of the Caribbean, as Baron de Wimpffen is alleged to have said when leaving Haiti more than two centuries ago that his final word was that the more I get to know the men who inhabit it, the more I congratulate myself on leaving it. Instead, especially for those who prefer not to migrate, this peek into some of the minds of the Caribbean via the window of one of those minds ought to further nurture thought and strengthen resolve to stay, understand, and contribute.

INTRODUCTION

The collection of commentaries, essays, and articles that comprise the main part of this publication are pen pictures that result from Lloyd Best’s focus through his unique lens on the thinking and actions of some Caribbean persons he considered ‘influential’ The lens he chose to use is a composite one that he constructed more than three decades ago, and had perfected in terms of use ever since. Its main elements are described in his seminal work Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom which he published in the journal New World Quarterly in 1971.

In that work, he emphasized the need to have a distrust and abhorrence of automatic imitation of ‘western scientism and western propaganda’ in efforts to understand and prescribe for the affairs of the Caribbean-the eschewing of automatic mimicry in things technological or otherwise. He considered it a necessary condition for desirable social change in the Caribbean that the minds of Caribbean men should be applied to erode ‘the intellectual, philosophical and psychological foundations of current politics’ What is required is the replacement of that regime of thinking with a new appropriate localized framework to enable pursuit of an exciting vision: ‘reorganize the economy, integrate the region, open the way to popular participation, call a new world into existence, and so on.’

These parameters defined the components of the lens that Best would use to take close-up pictures of Caribbean minds. The full meaning of those pictures becomes apparent only if viewers understand the elements that comprise the lens applied to compose them. It is on the basis of these observations that this Introduction suggests that a pre-introduction to this publication should involve potential readers in first reading the work referred to in the first paragraph. The content of each of the articles is an assessment of the person or circumstance being assessed on the basis of the parameters for Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom in pursuit of the vision identified above.

If we persist with the photographic metaphor, these offerings are analogous to photography where the photographer gets in close to the subject with a macro lens, the better to highlight minute detail. It is this aspect that leads to many of the subjects being Trinidadian, even though the wider context is Caribbean. It is also significant that the vehicles used for the showing of the pen pictures are mainly, but not exclusively, the Trinidad and Tobago Review, the Tapia Newsletter, the Trinidad Express, and the Trinidad Guardian. The significance is that Best was communicating his views and judgments, in his own inimitable style, to the ‘ordinary’ but not unintelligent folk who tended to read these publications. Thus there are eulogies / obituaries-for example Ewart Thorne (He was Thorne and no one else), Dr Charles Vernon Gocking (Remembering Dr Gocking), Greville Jones (Gentle Greville Jones), Violet Thorpe (Mother, mama, matriarch embodiment of Tunapuna), Syl Lowhar (Syl Lowhar: the way of his word)-each treating in a close-up, detailed way with the characteristics and contributions of the deceased to the Caribbean condition.

But eulogies/obituaries are not the only fare offered in this collection. True to the observation in the eulogy for Violet Thorpe that ‘Fortunately, like funerals, history is not for the dead but the live and the quick’ the collection contains pithy and possibly polemical contributions such as The legacy of Eric Williams, derived from looking through the same lens at relatively recent history. These contributions do analyze and bemoan the errors of the past; but since the contributions are not simply about doom and gloom (for instance they forthrightly proclaim and critically applaud the efforts of the likes of George Beckford, Kari Levitt, William Demas, and Alister Mc Intyre) they serve as a useful backdrop for approaching current and emerging problems.

The articles in this book are presented in the chronological order of their initial publication, thereby giving readers some sense of Best’s ongoing concerns, analyses, and conclusions as they occurred over time. This has been done deliberately, even though one must be well aware that analyses and conclusions by any serious thinker are rarely published immediately after conceptualisation; and even after considered conceptualisation and subsequent publication, there can be reflections on reflections! Best, however, has passed; so that he is no longer in a position to expose to us any further reviews of his reflections. Furthermore, throughout the Caribbean there has been a persistent passing of the acknowledged intellectual stalwarts, and the need for a new generation of young replacements is great. Best himself (cf. Sizing up the New Vice Chancellor) bemoaned what he perceived to be that ‘The great gap in WI awareness is the scandalous innocence of the educated elites about when and whence we came…’

This last comment brings us back to the first paradox mentioned in the Preface, and rapidly proceeds to generate concerns about the other two paradoxes identified therein. Given that men, and therefore societies, become what they think, it is obviously a sincere expression of hope to venture the view that this selection of articles by Lloyd Best (though incapable of claiming his approval as to the adequacy of the selection from his works) will contribute in no small measure to ensuring the relevance and the potency of the thinking of the emerging generation of Caribbean persons.

1

EXTRACTS FROM A LETTER TO

CLR JAMES1

May 1964

Dear Nello,

I am prompted at long last to write by Lamming’s Radio Review of Black Jacobins, (new Edition). I chanced to hear it at home today during lunchtime just when I had returned from reading the old edition at the Library. (For some reason, the new has not yet arrived in the bookshops here-which, incidentally, tells you some-thing about colonial society).

Under crisis conditions it is the structural weaknesses that come to the fore. They may express them-selves initially in terms of demands for more jobs and higher wages but in point of fact, it will soon become a call for a total reorganization of the structure of all economic and social relations. At that point, the existing administration must either dispose of decisive military force; or it must make a switch of policy; or it must be replaced by a new administration.

I was interested to hear George say how often he has got back to B.J. for fresh insight for this has been precisely my experience. As you know, in the last few months I have been looking into some of the develop-ments during the most recent phase of the colonial transaction in T & T. Out of this, many puzzling problems have arisen. Perhaps the most important among these is the basic ambivalence of the West Indian people and particularly of the West Indian leadership. To me, this is the most important single structural fact in the situation. This peculiar Afro-Saxon ‘way of seeing’ is so much part of us that we are unable to formulate any strategy to deal

with Prospero. Indeed, among our leaders there is a covert acceptance of the Caliban role.

This goes a long way back. I think it is inherent in our historical circumstances and is reinforced by our physical circumstances as well-smallness of scale. Thus in Generalissimo Williams, Maximum Leader, we are merely seeing a modern manifestation of an old phenomenon which was evident in Toussaint. I think that in B.J. the duality of T’s character was somewhat understressed. He could have gone, either way, left to himself. In point of fact, he very nearly went the other way when he conducted the negotiations for the emancipation of a few hundred. Culturally, by virtue of his education and exposure he had a foot in both camps. This is a West Indian dilemma. Among the Africans, there is no conflict. The outcome is determinate be-cause the African heritage which the African carries inside him can lead him one way only. In Toussaint as in all of us, it was touch and go. What was decisive in the Haitian case was the intransigence of the local elite and the unity of the ‘the property’ (negro slave). There are important lessons in that. Given the basic ambivalence of the West Indian leaders. the local elite will always stand a chance of keeping their privilege if they are prepared to accommodate a few hundred. Unless two other conditions are satisfied. First, the ‘property’ must be united and ready to press for their rights;-and, in the West Indian context of small scale developments must take place abroad.

That the property must be united and ready to service their interests is obvious enough. Williams has gone the other way, in my view largely because the PNM never transformed the ‘riot potential’ inherited from Cipriani and Butler into disciplined constructive power. Williams is no different from Toussaint but the latter (a) created a hard core and (b) at the second stage, harnessed the whole of the popular movement, Williams not only failed to make the PNM a party but also, related to that, never integrated the rural half of the popular forces into his movement.

It must not be overlooked that developments abroad are also necessary for West Indian emancipation. Cuba has shown the limitations set by scale though these can be overstressed. Regional action can offset a lot of the limitations of scale not because of the additional territory and population-as the ‘Federationists’ often claim-but because of the political situation that will be created in the Caribbean by any act of regional integration. It will completely befuddle the imperalists whose way of seeing rule out any conception of a united Caribbean. But even with regional action there will be severe limits. This leads me to an important conclusion: Padmore made an astute judgement in abandoning the backstage of West Indian politics for the world stage-according to Williams’ misinterpretation in BRITISH HISTORIANS… He (Padmore) must have perceived the essential connection between African development and West Indian decolonisation and from that derived the correct strategy.

The emergence of the African presence and ‘way of seeing’ (and by extension the Afro-Asian) is an essential condition for West Indian emancipation. Our basic ambivalence springs from the fact that we have this dual consciousness. But the African (or Afro-Asian) half is a Freudian consciousness, inarticulate and involuntary. This has two effects. One is that the more articulate half always triumphs in time of conflict since it has the supporting elements of a known language and history and all the points of reference that come with those. The second is that we are incapable of bringing about any integration of the two halves and distilling what