Ineffectual Grace

Review of Kwame Dawes's Invisible Flying

2007-11-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

Impossible Flying. Kwame Dawes. Leeds, Peepal Tree Press, 2006.
ISBN-13: 9781845230395
120 pages

Kwame Dawes’s latest collection begins by taking the reader to a Kingston of the mind, the Kingston of his youth long left behind but never forgotten. It begins with poems that are so deeply personal and familial – about his father, about his brother – that the appearance of politics, of the Kingston of 1980 and of a quotation from the Jamaica Labour Party’s campaign song of that year, comes as a visceral shock.

The themes established in the first few pages of this collection are repeated throughout the book, though the poet contemplates places other than Kingston and experiences other than those of growing up in the Jamaica of the 1970s and 1980s. Experiences that include his younger brother growing into manhood, his mother’s care, his father’s childhood in Sturge Town, St Ann, and his own efforts to create an identity for himself:

making
my first decision there – to change my name, not
Neville any more, not the Anglo name, the protection
of my father’s birthright, his Oxbridge imprimatur.

I read these poems, and I feel like an intruder in Dawes’s life, an observer over his shoulder in the various vignettes he sets out, which are always personal, always intimate, and yet at the same time detached so that the observer, seeing things through the poet’s eyes, still feels an observer. He explores his life and invites the reader to join with him in this exploration of his own private space.

Even in the title poem, “Impossible Flying”, which is pretty openly political, with its simultaneously engaged and detached view of Jamaica in the 1970s, we find ourselves suddenly moved from the approaching Jamaica Labour Party victory in the elections of 1980 which takes place in a public space to a private encounter between the poet and his brother as the latter tries to do the impossible and fly. It is not the first of the many surprising juxtapositions in this book. And even the political becomes personal; the socialism of 1970s Jamaica becomes an inverted snobbery, an effort to claim the mantle of poverty:

how we fought
to be poor, to be sufferers.

It is his brother and his father who populate most of these poems, though one is dedicated simply ‘for Mama’ and others deal with adult relationships outside the birth family, and the central theme is the poet’s striving for manhood in relation to both. But there is something more: “This is,” he writes, “the tale of our redemption.”

We follow Dawes through Kingston, through London, through Canada, through South Carolina, as he explores his present, his past, his family, his own body as it grows fat with age, and we feel privileged to be his traveling companions through the ordinarinesses, discomforts, joys, and epiphanies of life. Dawes was born a traveler, and he can do nothing but take his readers with him on his explorations of place, people, and self.

Mortality sits lightly on these poems, his father’s death and the inevitability of his own:

I do not want to die. So absurd
this admission, this effort to confront
the unpredictable odds of our living.

These poems are filled with regret, for lost chances, for more innocent times, for the relationships that are no more. It is that regret, the melancholy that fills these poems, “the messy/contracts we make with blood legacies” as Dawes puts it.

The blurb on the back cover declares that Dawes is “widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation”. That’s a bold claim, most especially because, apart from place, there is at first glance little that is Caribbean about these poems; most of them could have been written anywhere. They are about what it is to be male, how a masculine identity develops in the shadow of a father, in the presence of a brother. The history in them is personal, even at its most political. Yet it is a claim that should be weighed carefully, for Dawes is a true poet, and his work speaks to one of the most significant qualities of being human which is “the dreary cadence of regret”. And that regret is a pain that can be as political as it is personal.

F.S.J. Ledgister
Clark Atlanta University

Machiavellian Moments: Norman Manley, Eric Williams, Democracy and Decolonisation in the British West Indies

2007-06-08T09:35:00.001-07:00

Machiavellian Moments: Norman Manley, Eric Williams, Democracy and Decolonisation in the British West Indies

F S J Ledgister

Clark Atlanta University,

Atlanta, Georgia

Introduction

Attraction and inspiration are the sugar coating enabling the political leader to engage in political education, as J.S. Mill put it promoting “the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves.”[i] Mill tells us, also, that a people who have been slaves have to be taught self-government, and require “not a government of force, but one of guidance,” a point of considerable relevance when considering the politics of the British West Indies after the mid-19^th century.[ii] But who is to provide this guidance, the metropolis or metropolitan-trained leaders of the people?

On the side of the metropolis, we should consider the assertion of Sir Alan Burns, a colonial administrator in Africa and the West Indies in the first half of the twentieth century, that the British

Undertook the gigantic task of helping the peoples of various under-developed territories to overcome the handicaps imposed on them by nature and environment; to learn the principles of democracy and honest administration; and to qualify themselves for independence.[iii]

While this is dishonest, self-congratulatory, and self-deceptive, it contains the underlying positive claim of the colonial ruler: that they acted as trustee for peoples who could not have sustained their own self-governing polities in the world of competitive capitalism. It also encapsulates a truth, British rule provided (or provided the conditions) for the emergence of an educated subject class that learned “the principles of democracy and honest administration” along with the rules of cricket.

On the other side, consider the equally bombastic pronouncement of Eric Williams, the historian-statesman who governed Trinidad and Tobago from 1956 to 1981:

The independence of Trinidad and Tobago cannot be developed on the basis of intellectual concepts and attitudes worked out by metropolitan scholars in the age of colonialism. The old intellectual world is dead, strangled by the noose that it put around its own neck. The new world of the intellect open to the emerging countries has nothing to lose but the chains that tie it to a world that has departed never to return.[iv]

The bombast should not blind us to the facts that British colonialism, by transmitting liberal-democratic values, did sow the seeds of its own destruction, and that a once-colonised people must find its own path in the world.

Though British colonialism was not the high-minded, altruistic enterprise that Burns makes it out to be, it had an influence persisting into the age of independence. Current political institutions in all the former West Indian colonies, except Guyana, are modelled on those of Great Britain; the language of business, education, and government is still English; and there are still economic and personal ties with the former overlord. More importantly, colonial rule creates conditions of thought and practice that persist long after it has ended.

A colony’s history is not entirely its own. The history of the colonial power is also, if only in part, the history of the colony. The evolution of political ideas and practices in the “mother country” affects events in the colony. The values associated with the imperial overlord are normative and may remain so in the post-colonial period. In colonies like those in the West Indies, these values are not only those of a ruling class, they are also, because of the visible physical differences between ruler and subject, those of a ruling race.

Most British West Indian colonies, by the late nineteenth century, were Crown Colonies, ruled by imperial fiat from London. The Crown Colony had replaced the Old Representative system in which a colonial assembly responsible to a limited electorate possessed legislative authority. The Crown Colony system permitted Britain to institute modern state structures in the West Indies. This created a contradiction between the norms of the modern liberal state and the facts of colonial rule. The colonial subject eager for a place in the sun could exploit that contradiction.

I explore one aspect of how autocratically governed colonies became independent liberal democracies. How were the values of colonial rule challenged, and by whom? The short answer is nationalism buttressed by social democracy. Deeper analysis must involve considering who planted the seeds of nationalism and social-democracy.

I focus on two nationalist leaders of the late colonial period, Norman Manley of Jamaica, and Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago.[v] I will show that these political activists mounted a successful challenge to the ideology of colonial rule with its own weapons: British education, liberal and social democratic political values, and patriotism. To do this they fashioned political theories that had the dual effect of justifying their policies as political activists and of justifying the achievement of national independence.

I examine their writings and speeches in the pre-independence period, to determine how they constructed their theories, what these were, and how they functioned both as a means of gaining office and as a challenge to the colonial political order. Manley and Williams saw themselves as the political educators of their peoples; each sought, successfully, to acclimate liberal and social democracy to late colonial polities. After discussing the political thought of these statesmen, I will consider the nature and basis of their approach to politics.

Norman Washington Manley: The Dutiful Intellectual

The labour revolt of May and June 1938 in Jamaica produced two leaders who were to play a major role in shaping the island’s politics through independence and beyond. One was Alexander Bustamante, who put himself at the head of the labour movement, and whose populist style connected with the masses; the other was his cousin, Norman Manley, the colony’s leading lawyer, who was invited to lead the People’s National Party (PNP), the first successful organization of middle-class activists in Jamaican politics.[vi]

Manley, a Rhodes Scholar, returned to Jamaica, from education in England and wartime service in France, in the early 1920s. He quickly carved out a niche for himself as an effective barrister, and, by 1930, had become “a household name throughout Jamaica.”[vii] In the early 1930s, dissatisfied with his way of life and profession and alarmed at the rise of fascism and the effects of the Great Depression he began to consider social activism.[viii] Using his connections to the Jamaica Banana Producers Association, Manley was able to persuade United Fruit mogul Samuel Zemurray to contribute one cent per stem of bananas loaded to the social development agency that Manley founded, Jamaica Welfare Ltd.[ix]

The labour revolt thus found him ready to enter public life. The political needs of the time provided Manley with a purpose and an objective: constructing a nationalist and social democratic political culture.[x]

His first major statement came at the founding conference of the PNP in September 1938. His speech was a first statement of his political philosophy and his conception of the purpose of political organization:

No amount of economic good will make our people a real unity. All efforts will be wasted unless the masses of the people are steadily taken along the path in which they will feel more and more that this place is their home, that it is their destiny. They will then do more for it, more work, more effort, more thinking, more sacrifice, more discipline, and more honesty than by any other measure you can bring in this country.[xi]

Political education, then, is the cornerstone of political development. Obviously, it is the task of the party to educated the people and create within it a national spirit and a sense of common purpose. That purpose involves not only the transformation of the political system through the achievement of self-government, it means also the transformation of the economy, and an end to middle-class complacency. Manley acknowledged that he had to shake off that complacency himself:

And it [the PNP] will be opposed by all those who look back upon what they regard as the beautiful past, the past of peace and contentment and freedom from agitation. But great things are not done without effort; and discontent is the divine prerogative of man. There are those who love our thatched huts and the picturesqueness of Back-O-Wall, and those who look at smiles on people’s faces and believe that all is well because people will smile, nature is bountiful, and one season follows another. I have lived in that feeling myself, I have felt those sentiments. If you live in a place long enough you become complacent. What you see every day you regard after a time as belonging to the order of things.[xii]

To exercise that divine prerogative to challenge the existing order and ameliorate it is obviously the task of the political party and the political activist. Manley provides not only a set of goals, but also a political language that, though not revolutionary, is fundamentally transformative. He insists that “the order and nature of things” has to be changed, and that this is the purpose of politics. The political party is the agent of that purpose.

Manley connected nationalism with liberty, democracy, and creativity. Freedom can be maintained only through constant striving against authority, both external and internal. Democracy is necessary in order to realize human creative potential and “the evolutionary potential in every society however chaotic and vague its elements may seem.” Consequently, to demand self-government for Jamaica is to demand the “ restoration of the conditions essential to the liberation of reality in the life of a country.” Against this demand for the creation of a national identity, however, “the dead hand of imperialism” stultifies the development of a creative culture: “there would be life and trouble, blossom and fruit, but the dead hand, quietly with blind efficiency, closes on it all.”[xiii] Self-government will liberate creativity and humanity. Manley’s nationalism, as the above indicates, has clear roots both in Enlightenment humanism and in Marxism.

Logically, then, we would suppose the PNP to be committed to some form of socialism; and we would be correct. In 1940 the party committed itself to democratic socialism, which Manley defined as involving a “vital transformation of society” though not limited by “rigid doctrine” and neither anti-religious nor revolutionary.[xiv] In other words, Manley saw the PNP as playing the role of the Labour Party in Britain.

Manley entered the legislature as leader of the opposition and an advocate for self-government in 1949. In 1955 he finally achieved office. In government, the PNP did not immediately increase the pace of constitutional advance, having chosen to join the West Indies Federation proposed by the British, no longer either capable or willing to maintain an empire, as a means of ridding themselves once and for all of their colonies in the Caribbean.[xv] Nonetheless, Manley continued to move for greater Jamaican control of internal affairs.

In 1957 Manley made a remarkable broadcast to the Jamaican people, stressing the role of “the little people, the poor, the humble, and the seeming weak” in Jamaica’s acquisition of self-government.[xvi] He also emphasized Jamaica’s role as an exemplary multi-racial society, and the need for fraternity now that Jamaica had received internal autonomy.[xvii] Having achieved internal self-government, Manley now emphasized national solidarity in order to maintain rapid economic growth.

Manley had not forsaken independence, but transferred his focus from Jamaica to the West Indies. As the British sought to pull out of their colonies, they attempted to rationalize the empire into packages large enough to be viable in independence – from the perspective of the Colonial Office. This meant, in several cases, bringing together colonies that had operated under separate administration into federations that would enter independence as units. The West Indies was one region the Colonial Office attempted to federate; it had, since 1946, focused on creating a federation that would become an independent dominion. Ten of Britain’s thirteen West Indian colonies agreed, and the Federation of the West Indies came into existence in 1958 as a Crown Colony.

Although the federation was a creature of the British, many West Indian nationalists, including Manley, were committed to it. Manley’s rival, Bustamante, lacked that deep commitment, and in 1960 announced that the JLP was opposed to federation as a matter of policy. Manley’s response was to call a referendum on the question for September 1961.

In announcing the referendum, Manley asserted that there was a West Indian nation destined to take its place in the comity of nations. This nation contained a West Indian people, with common aspirations and a common history, which was on the verge of achieving unity.[xviii] As an exemplary nation where people of different races “are learning, have nearly learnt, how to dwell together in unity,” the West Indian nation was obliged to become an independent state as a light to the world.[xix]

Manley could not transmit his vision of a united West Indian nation to a majority of the Jamaican electorate, which, on 19 September 1961, rejected continued membership in the federation. Jamaica had no other option than to become independent, which it proceeded to do at the beginning of August 1962. The PNP lost elections held four months earlier, and Manley spent the rest of his political career in opposition.

Yet independence had been his goal, and he welcomed it unreservedly, transferring back to Jamaica his hopes for an independent West Indies as an exemplary state.[xx] Independence was the culmination of a long struggle by “men who in the past and through all our history strove to keep alight the torch of freedom in this country.”[xxi]

Independence could be marred by a lack of vision among the country’s leaders. Jamaica continued to be influenced by the colonial legacy of passive obedience to authority both in pusillanimity and in the difficulty of arousing public opinion. The task still remained to “create the new things which will make [the] nation live and endure in the world to come.”[xxii]

A few years later, retired from politics and looking back over his career, he declared that the mission of his generation had been to create a national spirit, and achieve political independence, the succeeding generation had the task of conceiving and creating a society “based on principles of equality” in which no group of Jamaicans would be alienated from or reject the Jamaican nation.[xxiii] At the end of his life, however, his vision had become more somber. Independence, he said

was a real chance to rebuild the national spirit, and to think out afresh the sort of Jamaica we wanted to build which could make a real and vital contribution to the modern world. That chance we missed.[xxiv]

Jamaica could still set the world the example of an integrated, multi-racial community. It should avoid entrenching race or colour conflicts in its politics.[xxv] To the very end, Manley carried a vision of a national society based on equality and social justice that could be a light to the world.

His vision was liberal, social-democratic, and humanitarian. He brought to Jamaican politics both conscientiousness and conscience, not to mention a strong moral awareness. His biographer, V. S. Reid, did not exaggerate when he stated that Manley’s life had been lived to the end of achieving independence and that “he had caused a multitude to praise.”[xxvi] It was entirely fitting that just before his death he should be officially proclaimed – by his political rivals – a national hero.

Eric Williams: The Hero as Politician

Before there was an organized labour movement, much less a labour revolt, in Jamaica, there had been both in Trinidad. That country had produced its own equivalent to Bustamante, oilfield union leader T.U. Butler, and a host of politicians, some venal, some decent, who sought to take advantage of the political self-awakening of the people. Trinidad, nonetheless, did not produce an equivalent to Norman Manley for almost two decades. From the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, political leadership was largely in the hands of mediocrities and eccentrics, none of whom articulated a clear, cohesive vision of the nation.

Then a leader with vision did appear; Eric Eustace Williams, an academic intellectual with a blazing image of the history and destiny of his homeland at the forefront of his thought, was borne into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm in 1956, and remained in power until his death in 1981.

To assess Williams as theorist and activist, we need to note the distinction between Williams the statesman and Williams the scholar. His scholarly career lasted from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s. Thereafter, although he published books as late as 1969, he was very much the political leader. Yet, though these careers occupied different stages of Williams’s life, each informed the other; there are clear political concerns in his academic writing, and his political career was definitely informed by his academic interests.

Williams first came to public attention with The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), a study of the region in the war years derived from his travels on behalf of the Caribbean Commission. In this book, he advocates political and economic federation of the Caribbean and asserts “the Negro’s right to decide his own affairs and his own life is not a question for argument.”[xxvii] The book that made his name was Capitalism and Slavery (1944), a masterly study of the links between West Indian slavery and the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain. This book alone would have made Williams a significant figure in the development of Anglophone Caribbean political thought. In it, Williams applies the principles of economic determinism to West Indian slavery, arguing that politics and morals “are to be examined in the very closest relation to the economic development.”[xxviii]

The third book written by Williams before he became an active politician, Education in the West Indies [1950] was produced in response to the decision by the British government to establish a University of the West Indies.

From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, Williams was Secretary of the Caribbean Research Council of the Caribbean Commission, based in Port of Spain. As an international civil servant in his own country he was barred from public political activism; but he was not forbidden from lecturing on subjects that were not party political, nor was he prevented from meeting like-minded people in private, and he did both. In addition to public lectures for the Teachers’ Economic and Cultural Association (TECA), he led a study group called Bachacs (fire ants) composed of educated members of the middle class who sought solutions to the colony’s problems.[xxix]

Williams’s relationship with the Caribbean Commission was stormy; he perceived them as biased against him on grounds of race and national origin. In 1955 the Commission refused to renew his contract. On the day he left their service, under the auspices of TECA Williams gave a speech at Woodford Square in Port of Spain that marked his transition from academic to man of action. In the speech, “My Relations with the Caribbean Commission, 1943-1955,” Williams rehearsed his quarrels with his former employers, arguing that he incarnated the principle of intellectual freedom and the cause of the West Indian people, and that his dismissal was “the defeat of the policy of appointing local men to high office.”[xxx] Having identified these causes with himself, he stated his commitment to remaining “with the people of Trinidad and Tobago… who have made me whatever I am, and who have been or might be at any time the victims of the very pressures which I have been fighting against for twelve years.” He declared that “I am going to let down my bucket where I am, now, right here with you in the British West Indies.”[xxxi]

The decision to commit his expertise to the service of his people catapulted Williams into a position of leadership that may have been unexpected but was hardly unwelcome. He entered public life at a crucial moment in Trinidad’s political history. Universal suffrage had been introduced in 1946, and ministerial status had been granted to elected members in the executive in 1950. A true party system had not yet developed, and the party with the largest bloc of support from both Black and East Indian Trinidadians, the Butler Party, had been excluded from the executive. The Creole middle class had been alienated from politics after 1950, and did not expect to see an educated, responsible leadership of the sort that had arisen in Jamaica and Barbados emerge in Trinidad.

Williams became the leader of a new political party, the People’s National Movement (PNM), seeing it as a vehicle for political education as well as a body of activists seeking office. Williams emphasized his leadership and his commitment to political education by speaking regularly in what he called “the University of Woodford Square.”[xxxii]

The PNM had to overcome considerable distrust of politics as usual. Williams set out to do this in a pamphlet entitled The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago [1955]. Trinidad, he contended, was “the sick man of the Caribbean” and the problem lay with the “doctors”.[xxxiii] What Trinidad needed was an enlightened, alert, relentless opposition that would keep the government on its toes.

Trinidad’s political climate in 1950 had been hostile to “the very idea of party politics.” Instead, candidates stressed their non-partisanship, and, on the basis of being individually-elected representatives, offered their constituents promises of a better life, a more developed country, and greater opportunity. On these, Williams was merciless.

One of the most common of the claims made to fame by the candidates was their experience in city or county councils and in ward-work. The manifestos are full of boasts of standpipes erected, drains paved, roads surfaced, telephone booths installed or secured, traces improved, and cemeteries enlarged, undertaken, or under construction. If the candidate is not able to guarantee you living space, dying space is the next best thing; if you guarantee the candidate a happy hunting ground in this life, he will guarantee you a happy resting place in the next.[xxxiv]

Williams goes on to point out that without the backing of a party, the promises of individual candidates were meaningless. What is more, it would not have mattered had the electors in 1950 backed a completely different set of independents.[xxxv]

Having lambasted the existing political elite, Williams turns to arguments to back the “overwhelming” case for “a democratically organized party”. Such a party would have a coherent programme, and internal discipline would enable its members to carry out that programme.[xxxvi]

The main task of the party is political education, with emphasis on the Burkean notion of the representative serving the nation as a whole rather than the local constituency. Political education is not limited to such tasks, but should focus on getting “the people to do things for themselves and think for themselves.”[xxxvii]

The party must be national, appealing to all classes, races, and religions.[xxxviii] Williams underlined this by stressing the cooperation of capital and labour, and his opposition to racial discrimination. As for the problem that any new party faces, the question of the experience of its leaders, Williams declared: “My colleagues and I are and always will be inexperienced in corruption, in changing our minds, in promising one thing and doing the opposite.” Instead, the party would hold up to Trinidadians the ideals of Athenian democracy, “animated by the noble sentiments of Pericles.”[xxxix]

The PNM’s victory in 1956 brought Williams to government. Two years later, in elections to the West Indian federal parliament, the PNM was dealt a sharp 6-4 defeat by the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) a rally of the “outs” formed to fight the federal elections by Sir Alexander Bustamante. The DLP constituted a significant challenge to the PNM. It took up the oppositional role that Williams had initially envisaged for his party, and it provided ethnic contrast: the PNM had become identified with one ethnic group, the Creoles; the DLP, consequently, became the Indian party.

Williams, for his part, sought to stress the open, multiracial nature of the PNM, its commitment to political education, the development of a national identity, democracy, and economic change. In his speech, “Perspectives for Our Party” given at the PNM’s third annual convention in 1958, he noted that the PNM had established party government, given the country a political leader “who speaks with authority,” established the “University of Woodford Square”[xl] as a public forum, set up its own newspaper, won control of the legislature and local councils, posed “a conception of the new society,” and spearheaded the nationalist movement.[xli]

His government had operated according to the Lincolnian ideal, promoting development and political education. The party had to be organized as “the indispensable complement and support” of the political system. It had to penetrate “into the deepest masses of the people”.[xlii]

In this party organization, the “Political Leader” (i.e., Williams) plays an important role. As theoretical guide he inspires the party, and plays the central role in political education. The political leader sets the tone for the party. In the conditions of the West Indies, the roles of ideologue and party leader had to be combined.[xliii]

The DLP provided Williams with the opportunity to make a statement about nationalism and democracy that remains to this day the benchmark of West Indian nationalist thought. In January 1961, a liberal white businessman, Sir Gerald Wight, wrote an open letter to Williams, expressing concern about anti-democratic tendencies in the PNM government. In his reply, Williams contended that the PNM was “in the historical stream which runs from Aristotle to Franklin D. Roosevelt,” and told Sir Gerald “Massa day done.” This last phrase, says Williams, was seized on by “the scribes and Pharisee,” and the DLP urged Williams to repudiate it.[xliv] Instead, he went on the attack.

Addressing a crowd at Woodford Square in March 1961, Williams said that it was the Trinidad Guardian newspaper that he had been attacking for its “slave mentality.” However, if Wight thought that the term applied to him, Williams was not going to lose any sleep over the issue. He categorically refused to withdraw, amend, or apologize for his statement.

Williams’s opponents, he declared, were concerned only with power, not with the history of the colony or its progress. All they could see in Williams’s slogan was “racial antagonism;” but “massa” was not a racial term, it was the symbol of a past age.

Massa had been, in the main, an absentee European planter who ruled his slaves by the whip, and grew sugar since he knew nothing else. He could treat slaves and indentured labourers with “pathological unconcern with the most elementary conditions of production” because he had a monopoly of political power. He rationalized his rule by insisting that Blacks and East Indians were inferior and incapable of self-government, and his laws ensured that the subject peoples had no opportunities, thus making the “inferiority” visible. Massa was loyal only to his self-interest; the West Indian massa “constituted the most backward ruling class history has ever known.” However, not every white man was a massa, and “not all Massas were white.”[xlv]

Massa’s values, said Williams, were absorbed by the house slaves. These values “penetrated the consciences” of the enslaved to such an extent that the Haitian revolution which began as a fight for freedom ended up with “a ridiculous imperial court of a Haitian despotism with its Count of Lemonade, exploiting the Negro peasants.” The Maroons of Jamaica, who had fought a long guerrilla war for their freedom ended up required “to help Massa to put down any other slave rebellion.” Emancipation itself led to a transfer of ownership such that, in some colonies, “whilst Massa remained, his complexion became darker.” Massa was consistently against education, against the moral and material improvement of the masses, against anything that interfered with his profits. World War II heralded the end of “Massa Day” as colonized peoples around the world, and the working class in the industrialized countries, were on the march: “Massa Day Done, Sahib Day Done, Yes Suh Boss Day Done.”[xlvi]

While his opponents in the DLP sought to hold back the tide of liberation, Williams and the PNM by developing the country, by recognizing the small farmer and the worker, by standing for the dignity of labour, had ended “Massa Day” in Trinidad and Tobago. The PNM had brought those who were defined as unfit to rule themselves to the brink of political independence. Against massa’s belief in racial inequality, it held out to the people the possibility of interracial solidarity, democracy, and education.[xlvii]

By calling on Williams to repudiate the phrase, the DLP had demonstrated that they were no more than modern house slaves. The PNM, by contrast was committed to building a free, democratic nation.[xlviii]

At this point, Williams seems to slide into farce by noting that his government had been able to welcome Sir Winston Churchill to the colony, and “it is only left now for Her Majesty the Queen to visit us.” Clearly, the values of massa had not been completely expunged from Williams’s mind, though it is possible that he was using Churchill’s fame, and a long tradition of high regard for the monarchy for his own ends.[xlix]

It is noteworthy that Williams, in this and other speeches and writings, connected liberal democracy in Trinidad to American as well as British values. His vision of liberal parliamentary democracy drew from Alexander Hamilton and Booker T. Washington, as well as from Burke and J.S. Mill. He rooted his vision of democracy, furthermore, not in nineteenth century Westminster but in classical Athens. His approach to political education involved teaching the people of Trinidad their history, and that of colonialism in general, in order to demonstrate that colonial rule had produced a nation.

Both themes are present in Williams’s speeches and writings as his country moved to independence. On Trinidad’s independence day, Williams gave his country the birthday present of a History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. This book, hastily written and based on research done in the 1940s and early 1950s, contained much material from Williams’s earlier work. It was intended to provide the country with a national history, along with its flag, coat of arms, anthem and other national emblems.[l] Although by no means his best work, it seems fitting that the historian-statesman should provide both nationhood and an understanding of what led to that outcome.

The History was intended to show that in Trinidad members of all racial groups shared the same historical experiences, and had received the same treatment from the colonial rulers. While as historiography this is not exactly the best purpose, as a tool of political education the book provided a neat summation of Williams’s educational efforts since his return to Trinidad.

While Williams the historian sought to provide his people with a sense of their common history, Williams the prime minister sought to give his people a sense both of the solemnity of the occasion and the significance of the achievement: “You are nobody’s boss, and nobody is your boss.”[li]

The important issue was what would be done with independence. Trinidadians had the responsibility of protecting and promoting their democracy, defined in clearly liberal and social democratic terms. For democracy to survive and thrive “an informed and cultivated and alert public opinion” was necessary.[lii]

There is, however, a note of pride in his final words:

Let us then as Nation so conduct ourselves as to be able always to say in those noblest and most inspiring words of St. Paul, “By the Grace of God we as people are what we are, and His Grace in us hath not been void.”[liii]

There is something fundamentally West Indian about being able to find a biblical text to endorse the nation-state. Williams had brought his country to independence; unlike Manley he crossed the stream into the new land, and for nearly two decades after independence was at the head of Trinidad and Tobago’s affairs. For all his failings – arrogance, an autocratic temperament, and a sense of his own indispensability – he created a liberal democracy.

Discussion: The Politician as Foundational Theorist

Modern political theory in the West begins with a concern for the creation of nation-states. This is the problematic of Machiavelli’s Prince and Discourses on Livy, and it is unavoidable in considering the establishment of post-colonial states. Colonial rule created polities that were large workshops, producing goods for the markets of the imperial power, rather than being nations or states in embryo. As late as World War II most colonies were not considered capable of governing themselves.

At the same time, colonial rulers justified their rule by arguing that it provided benefits for both colonizer and colonized. It was not exploitative, but, rather, a means of civilizing the world and appropriating its unused resources for the benefit of humanity. As a British scholar noted in the 1940s:

Although colonial relations arise out of the search for material advantage, men like to justify their activities on moral grounds and colour them with the warm glow of humanitarianism.[liv]

The imperial powers provided their colonial subjects with the education necessary to supply a lower middle class of clerks, police constables, and schoolteachers, whose status and social mobility were linked to the state. These people came from the subject races, and their experience administering the lower levels of the state, and, over generations, rising in the bureaucracy, gradually gave them a sense that they could run as well as serve the state. Local intelligentsia, fostered by the colonial authorities, were, as Benedict Anderson puts it “central to the rise of nationalism in the colonial territories.”[lv]

The British tried to inculcate their values and beliefs in their colonials to keep the subject populations docile and encourage loyalty to the metropole. To do this, they needed a class of educated people to act as the transmission belt for imperial values. Some of these colonial subjects could aspire to some degree of status as a result of education in the metropole. It is no accident that such figures as Trinidad and Tobago Island Scholar Eric Williams and Rhodes Scholar Norman Manley were scholarship boys who won the glittering prize of an Oxford education.

In exposing young colonials to the values of British high culture, and then expecting them to return to middle class status in their homelands, the British miscalculated. Men like Williams and Manley – talented, sensitive, and intelligent – could not long accept subordinate status. They had received the same, or better, preparation as the leadership of Britain, and could not long be satisfied with the role of colonial middleman.

Jamaica and Trinidad at the beginning of World War II were polities in which only a few could vote. A bureaucratic elite independent from the local ruling class held real power, because it represented the imperial government, but allied to it. Middle class political aspirants could hope to hold elected or appointed office under the supervision of metropolitan officials who were unlikely to be their intellectual equals but who possessed ultimate power.

In the late 1930s, under the impact of the Great Depression, the working people of the British West Indies emerged as a political force in their own right, one that could be used by middle class activists to gain their own ends, and that would accept these activists as leaders in order to gain improved wages, working conditions, and social mobility. The worker revolts of the late 1930s provided emergent political leaderships with a demos on whose backs they could ride to power, but which they also had to serve. Before the labour rebellion, the mass of West Indians had been subjects; their actions earned them the right to become citizens.

Educated activists who possessed a vision of a transformed society wanted more than mere office. They wanted to create nations. Beyond their immediate, or long-term, advantage, they sought sovereignty and national independence for a sophisticated political community whose citizens could control their lives individually and collectively. They took the political awakening of the West Indian masses in the way that Machiavelli had urged Cesare Borgia and Lorenzo de’ Medici to liberate their homeland:

This opportunity, then, must not be allowed to pass by, in order that Italy, after so long a time, may behold its redeemer… This barbarian domination stinks to everyone.[lvi]

Their approach could not be that of simply overthrowing the barbaro dominio of the British. British colonial rule was authoritarian. It was also the rule of law, a constitutional government in which subjects of the Crown possessed defined rights and liberties. In spite of this, the fact that the majority of colonial subjects were excluded from political life made it possible for Williams and Manley to act as “redeemers” in Machiavelli’s sense of the word.

But not only, or merely, as that. Other leaders – Bustamante in Jamaica, Bradshaw in St Kitts, Bird in Antigua, to name a few – also promised redemption. Manley and Williams took on the task of founding these states in the sense used by Machiavelli in the Discourses on Livy.[lvii] For both men this meant constructing liberal democratic states on the British model.

It is difficult to untangle to what extent this was a product of their educations and humanist world-view, and to what extent they were taking Machiavelli’s advice that those who seek to change the form of government must “retain the shadow of its ancient customs.”[lviii] In the West Indian case, this meant not the prevailing customs of colonial administration, but those which were normative even though not applied: the British rules of parliamentary democracy.

The Machiavellian caution employed by Manley and Williams stands in stark contrast to the radicalism of Cheddi Jagan, leader of the People’s Progressive Party in British Guiana, who directly challenged the colonial authorities. Jagan was twice deposed by the British, and sidelined for three decades until the first free and fair elections in independent Guyana brought him to office.

The role of Manley and Williams was to bring together the needs of the West Indian middle and lower classes with the norms of Western parliamentary democracy and the ideals of the post-Enlightenment West. This meant constructing theories of politics that did not challenge the assumptions of the West, but did stress the importance of middle and lower class West Indians, and gave them a sense of history, significance, and value. Williams’s concern with West Indian history, and the impact of colonialism on the West Indian peoples, and Manley’s vision of an exemplary people, a light unto the nations, are the means whereby this was achieved.

They did this, furthermore, not as patriarchal dictators dispensing wisdom from above, but as activists in the democratic arena. The competed with men such as Bustamante in Jamaica, or Albert Gomes and Tubal Uriah Butler in Trinidad, who, while they lacked the particular humanist vision of Manley or Williams, could speak to the people in terms they understood and offer themselves to the masses as the people who would best handle their public business.

What Manley and Williams achieved was the routinization of liberal democracy – and its values – in the space of a generation. They succeeded in imparting meaning to abstractions of political thought and convincing their peoples that they were citizens who could govern themselves. We tend to forget, absent the context of colonial rule, how radical an ideal this was at the beginning, and how significant it has been.

Conclusion

In any discourse there must be speakers and hearers, and discourse only works if those who are in the position of hearers are willing to listen. People respond to a message when it has engaged their thought. The message of Williams and Manley that West Indians could act creatively, manage themselves wisely, and stand up on their own feet is one that resonated with large sections of their peoples. Their vision of a self-governing homeland had meaning for their listeners because they could recognize themselves, in what their leaders said, as actors in rather than victims of history. Manley and Williams engaged the masses of their countries, and in that engagement the masses were transformed, and transformed themselves, into nations. Thus Williams and Manley could lay the foundation for nation-states, and regard that construction as the mission for their generation of leaders.

In recognizing their limitations as political chieftains, we should not forget what they have achieved: in Jamaica and Trinidad over the four decades that have elapsed since independence, governments have changed only at the ballot box. When we look at the records of former colonies in Africa, or at the West Indies’ Latin American neighbours we realize how unusual, and how inspiring, that achievement is.

[i] John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government [1861], in J.S. Mill: Three Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, 167.

[ii] Ibid., 175.

[iii] Sir Alan Burns, In Defence of Colonies: British Colonial Territories in International Affairs. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1957, 303. To read that peoples had their independence taken away from them in order to qualify for independence is to realize that it is impossible to underestimate the British sense of humour.

[iv] Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies. New York: Scribner’s, 1966, 13.

[v] Paul Sutton argues that comparison of Manley and Williams is only apt ‘if the aim is political or intellectual biography’. (‘The Historian as Politician: Eric Williams and Walter Rodney’; in Alistair Hennessy, ed., Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century Caribbean. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1992, 98.) Yet to understand the task they undertook, their functions within the process of political change, and the role of the intellectual in nation-building, it makes sense to compare their work as men who actively sought to construct new states on the basis of the old.

[vi] Rex Nettleford, Manley and the Politics of Jamaica: Towards an Analysis of Political Change in Jamaica, 1938-1968, Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1971, 1.

[vii] Philip Sherlock, Norman Manley. London: Macmillan, 1980, 71.

[viii] See the biographies of Manley by Philip Sherlock (note 7 above), and V.S. Reid (note 26 below).

[ix] Ibid., 73-80.

[x] Nettleford, op. cit., 14.

[xi] Norman Manley, “Launching of the People’s National Party,” in Rex Nettleford, ed., Norman Washington Manley and the New Jamaica: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1938-1968. London: Longman Caribbean, 1971, 15.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Norman Manley, “Of Freedom,” in ibid., 384-385.

[xiv] Norman Manley, “The PNP Declares Itself a Socialist Organization,” in ibid., 59-64.

[xv] Rex Nettleford, note in ibid., 134.

[xvi] Norman Manley, “A Moment of Joy, a Moment of Promise,” in ibid., 158.

[xvii] Ibid., 159-160.

[xviii] Norman Manley, “Referendum: The Verdict is Yours,” in ibid., 174-177.

[xix] Ibid., 177. “To dwell together in unity” was the motto on the West Indian coat of arms.

[xx] Norman Manley, “To Plough the Land and Gather the Fruit: Address at the Opening of the Independence Parliament,” ibid., 312.

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] Norman Manley, “Independence: The Assets we Have,” ibid., 315-317.

[xxiii] Norman Manley, “A Mission to Perform,” ibid., 365.

[xxiv] Norman Manley, “Mission Accomplished: The Wheel has Come Full Circle,” ibid., 373.

[xxv] Ibid., 381.

[xxvi] Victor Stafford Reid, The Horses of the Morning – About the Rt. Excellent N.W. Manley, Q.C., M.M., National Hero of Jamaica: An Understanding. Kingston: Caribbean Authors Publishing Co., 1985.

[xxvii] Eric Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean. Washington, DC: The Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1942, 102-104.

[xxviii] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. London & Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944], 211.

[xxix] Winston Mahabir, In and Out of Politics: Tales of the Government of Dr. Eric Williams from the Notebooks of a Former Minister. Port of Spain: Inprint Caribbean, 1978j, 15 & 17.

[xxx] Eric Williams, “My Relations with the Caribbean Commission, 1943-1955” in Eric E. Williams Speaks: Essays on Colonialism and Independence, ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Publications, 1993, 112.

[xxxi] Ibid., 164-165.

[xxxii] Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race and Class in Trinidad. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1982, 108. Eric Williams, Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister. London: André Deutsch, 1969, 133.

[xxxiii] Eric Williams, “The Case for Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago” in Cudjoe, op. cit., 168.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 179.

[xxxv] Ibid., 183.

[xxxvi] Ibid., 183-184.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 186-187

[xxxviii] Ibid., 196.

[xxxix] Ibid., 204-205.

[xl] Williams was inordinately proud of this. He cites in this speech, as an example of “the international recognition of the University of Woodford Square” a picture in a German magazine captioned “Universitãt von Woodford-Square.”

[xli] Eric Williams, “Perspectives for Our Party,” in Cudjoe, op. cit., 208-209.

[xlii] Ibid., 226-227.

[xliii] Ibid., 228-229.

[xliv] Williams, Inward Hunger, 263-264.

[xlv] Cudjoe, op. cit., 238-246.

[xlvi] Ibid., 247-252.

[xlvii] Ibid., 252-254.

[xlviii] Ibid., 255-262.

[xlix] Ibid., 262-263.

[l] Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. Port of Spain: PNM Publishing, 1962, vii.

[li] Eric Williams, “Independence Day Address” in Cudjoe, op. cit., 266.

[lii] Ibid., 267-268.

[liii] Ibid., 269.

[liv] J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1948, 6.

[lv] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London: Verso, 1991, 116.

[lvi] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince: A Bilingual Edition. Tr. & ed., Mark Musa. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964, 223.

[lvii] Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. Tr. Leslie J. Walker, S.J., ed. Bernard Crick. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, 266.

[lviii] Ibid., 175.

cage of ribs

2007-06-03T09:16:00.000-07:00

a simple thing to write a word
we do it without any thought
for even though the act's absurd
a simple thing to write a word

the heart's a kind of entrapped bird
it will not give itself for nought
a simple thing to write a word
we do it without any thought

Review: Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004).

2007-04-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004).

Obika Gray has made the political role of the urban lower-class in Jamaica his central subject. His earlier monograph, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972, dealt with urban working class politics in the early years of independence. This book, by contrast deals with a vaguer category, “the urban poor”, in Marxist terms, the poorer urban working class and the lumpenproletariat.

Gray’s central thesis involves a dialectical relationship between what he calls the “predatory state” and a lower class that resists the norms that state seeks to impose by erecting its own values of “badness-honour”, a rival standard to the middle-class nationalist values promoted by the state.

Gray begins with an analysis of the “paternal and authoritarian qualities” of the Jamaican state, citing Carl Stone’s studies of clientelism, and emphasizing that he seeks to reassess and revise Stone’s work. Gray defines the Jamaican state as simultaneously “predatory and populist; violent and paternal, as well as democratic and viciously abusive of human rights.” The state is seen as parasitic, rather than destructive, in its relationship with the urban poor.

The state’s relationship to the poor is described as mediated by the needs of the political parties – the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) – which at different times have exercised control over the state apparatus. This relationship is predatory and parasitic. Yet, dialectically, the state’s predation on the poor has become the source of the challenges from the poor.

Gray’s narrative moves us from the development of partisan rivalries in the slum areas of Kingston, starting with the conflicts between the PNP and JLP in the 1940s, through the establishment of garrison communities in the 1960s and the links forged between politicians and slum-dwellers. This was never a one-way relationship. While political patrons certainly had an influence on the urban poor, Gray notes that the poor also had “sentiments of self-ownership and cultural pride” which provided “relative protection” from the reach of the state.

The poor live in conditions of marginality and presumed dishonour but construct their own Afrocentric conception of an exilic social space from within which Western and Creole conceptions of identity have been challenged through assertion of a fundamental African identity, key elements of which are provided by Rastafarianism.

In the 1970s, the conditions of urban life changed as lower-class “badness-honour”, which Gray describes as “the oral-kinetic practice in Jamaica that enables claimants, usually from disadvantaged groups, to secure a modicum of power and respect by intimidation” became a significant cultural force as the parties intensified their conflict on the streets of Kingston and found the militancy of the poor useful. The social power of the urban poor increased as it penetrated the PNP.

While the PNP in the 1970s sought to change the society, its conception of social transformation became grist for communal conflicts, and this transformation of ideological and political challenge into partisan warfare has become the defining characteristic of Jamaican politics. At the same time popular music and popular culture more widely popularized an attitude of defiance towards the authorities. The state’s combination of populism and predation was exemplified by party support for loyal poor supporters and hostility to those supporting the rival party.

Yet, even as the dependency on political party patronage seemed to indicate that the poor were captives of the predatory state, they developed tactics which could not be easily suppressed by the authorities which led them to achieve greater control over the funds disbursed to them and resulted in predation from below as well as from above. As Gray put it “In the consciousness of the Jamaican poor, politics is about predation and how to minimize its impact on their lives.” The predatory actions of the poor are seen by Gray as an “understandable self-defensive manoeuvre” against the predation of the state. Social bandits such as Dennis “Copper” Barth and Wayne “Sandokhan” Smith appear to slumdwellers as heroes who challenge the predations of the state, even as they see them as personalized by specific state officials

In the 1980s, the effects of the system of patronage that was firmly established in the previous decade continued, and the culture of the urban poor came to be centred on “martial values of a street culture that drew on competitive individualism and on the agonism of heroic outlawry”. This was the result of the growing influence of what Gray speaks of, following Carl Stone, as the lumpenproletariat. Increasingly, over the course of the 1980s, following the immense outburst of violence during the 1980 election campaign, criminal gangs acted with greater impunity and developed into independent, self-organized bodies.

This involved both what Gray calls the militarization of left-wing politics, among supporters of the communist Workers’ Party of Jamaica (WPJ), and the deepening criminalization of the state in part through the growth in importance of criminal gangs which earned their revenue from the trade in illicit drugs. Criminal leaders evolved into the “Drug Dons” who controlled the export of cannabis and the transshipment of cocaine, and built networks that connected Jamaica to criminals in the United States. Gang culture in Jamaica, Gray contends “was less a peculiarity of Jamaican experience than it was a disruptive, radiating force in global culture”. The gun became a source both of social mobility and social power, not to mention independence from the political élite.

Gray sees the Jamaican state as having developed a predatory relationship to the urban poor, and inflicted considerable terror on them, creating the paradox that “A key objective of Jamaica’s democratic order… was an everyday form of rule that terrorized the ghettos.” Simultaneously, the state “evinced protean, solicitous attributes” which incorporated the poor into the political system through the rivalry of the major parties.

In more recent times, Gray notes, there is more talk among politicians and other public officials about reform, and both the middle class and poor have been driven to become more activist in response to the continuing crisis which Jamaican society faces as crime and violence escalate and state repression fails to rein them in.

What Gray has given us is a complex, thoughtful work that sets Jamaica’s social and political agony in the context of a changing capitalist world-system and of conflicts between demands for a more inclusive democracy and a state that simultaneously exalts democratic values and punishes the poor and marginalized for being poor and marginalized. There are flaws – political parties aren’t arms of the state and their use of the urban poor as footsoldiers in their rivalries is less about state predation on the poor and more about jockeying for power and access to resources within the state. That is to say, analysis of the relationship between political parties and the urban poor might point us equally to the conclusion that the former mobilized the latter in order to promote elite predation on the state, and the rewards doled out for support were partial results of that predation. Even the use of public force against the poor supporters of rival parties is less about predation on the poor and more about keeping a particular party elite in a position to cream off public resources.

A key paradox that Gray brings out is that while seeking to use the urban poor for their ends, JLP and PNP leaders ended up promoting the values of that segment of society and making them appear to be normative lower-class values. Other scholars, Deborah Thomas for example in Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica, have pointed out that the middle-class values which dominated in decolonizing and early independent Jamaica have ceased to be normative for poorer Jamaicans (and not only the urban poor), as their need for middle-class patronage has declined. The rise of the dons is not simply a case of the tail wagging the dog; it is the tail becoming the dog.

Gray is, I think, correct to see the process he describes and analyzes as a response to modernity and a critique of it. He is equally correct when he contends that theoretical as well as social renewal is needed. It is less clear that the “alternative ways of living” that he sees as coming from the “lived experience of Afro-Jamaicans” are either likely to be more democratic or that they can constitute a successful response to the ways in which the world is being reshaped in the aftermath of the Cold War and the absence of a credible alternative to unfettered and unbounded capitalism.

-- F S J Ledgister, Clark Atlanta University

Reconsidering The Case for West-Indian Self-Government

2007-04-15T16:57:00.000-07:00

C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist:

F.S.J. Ledgister

Department of Political Science

Clark Atlanta University

Introduction

The usual description of C.L.R. James’s political theory locates him at the intersection of Marxism and pan-Africanism, generally more towards the former than the latter. The bulk of James’s work bears this out. For example, in The Black Jacobins he defines the rebels of Saint Domingue as proletarian without forgetting their blackness. James unambiguously defined himself as in the tradition of Marx and Lenin.[1]

Nonetheless, James’s earliest political monograph aligns him more with Creole nationalists such as J.J. Thomas, Eric Williams, or Norman Manley, than with Walter Rodney or the New World Group. In this paper I analyze that work and delineate the ways that the ideas he expressed at that time connect to a West Indian Creole nationalism that stressed the need for an end to colonial trusteeship and that saw West Indians as peoples (or a people) shaped by the colonial experience and ready and able to govern themselves.

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government, originally part of the Life of Captain Cipriani, published in 1933 not long after James moved to England, provides at first glance no indication of James’s later radicalism. It critiques British rule very much in the tradition of Thomas’s Froudacity, with a Millian, not a Marxist, assertion that the West Indian people (projecting from James’s own experience and knowledge of Trinidad but with references to other colonies) had been sufficiently prepared by British rule to take control of their own destinies.[2]

James argues for West Indian autonomy, as we shall see, in terms little different from those of the Creole nationalists who were to dominate the politics of the region from the 1940s until the 1970s; but he is not normally considered among their number. His thoughts on the subject of political autonomy nevertheless make him a forerunner of the Creole nationalism that became normative at the end of the colonial period; they contain both seeds of a more radical political future, and signs of James’s own limitations in seeing the colonial Caribbean as a Creole region.

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government is, not altogether surprisingly, a work often mentioned but rarely cited; largely, one suspects, because it does not fit well into the categories in which James is normally placed.

The Setting

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government emerged from James’s support for Trinidad’s first serious political movement, the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA), initially established in 1897, and revived after World War I under the leadership of a white planter, Alfred Cipriani, who as a captain in the West India Regiment during the war had protested the racism that caused the regiment to mutiny shortly after the war.[3]

Cipriani became a member of the Legislative Council, the colonial legislature, when seven elective seats were added in 1925.[4] Hitherto, the Council had been a purely appointive body. The 1925 reform effectively enfranchised only six percent of the population, and only five of the seven constituencies were contested. Although, Cipriani was nominally the leader of a bloc of four members, the other TWA members of the Legislative Council only sporadically supported Cipriani, leaving him to carry out the task of opposition to the colonial regime alone.[5] Although not very effective, Cipriani was the first voice to speak for the Trinidadian worker, both black and East Indian, in the legislature. That was his political role when James departed Trinidad for England in 1932.

James had not been deeply involved in the labour movement or in the conventional politics of the island after 1925. Rather, he entered public life as a writer. He contributed fiction and criticism to the literary journal, The Beacon, established by Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes.[6] Before leaving for London in 1932, he completed the novel Minty Alley, which contains a fresh and lively description of working class life in the barrack-yards of Port of Spain of James’s youth, which he was decades later to describe as about ‘the fundamental antagonism… between the educated black and the mass of plebeians’.[7]

James, as a Trinidadian intellectual of the 1920s, was in a line dating to the mid-nineteenth century of black Trinidadians who, with the tools of Western culture, asserted an identity that colonial rule would have denied them. James was aware of this, as Selwyn Cudjoe notes, given his praise of Maxwell Philip (1829-1888), the first black Solicitor-General, and the first black writer of creative prose, in Trinidad’s history.[8]

James was also influenced by J.J. Thomas, the schoolteacher whose rebuttal to J.A. Froude’s The English in the West Indies was the first assertion that West Indian people had a legitimate claim to govern themselves, and by A.R.F Webber, a novelist and pioneer socialist, who Cudjoe sees as ‘anticipating’ James in some respects.[9]

Like Phillips, Thomas, and Webber before him, James was largely self-educated and determined to promote the development of his own people. His early intellectual development was very much oriented towards Western civilisation and its cultural products, for all that he instinctively rebelled against them.[10] Cudjoe makes the point that James’s real political awakening only began when, in discussions with the cricketer Learie Constantine in England shortly after arriving there in 1932, he developed the idea of working for self-government of the West Indies.[11] Even so, James had considered the issue and begun to take a position on it earlier.[12]

Nonetheless, his primary intellectual activity in the Trinidad of the 1920s was self-education. Asked by Paul Buhle what he did between the ages of twenty and thirty, James replied:

Reading books, that’s what I was doing. Literature and history. And I not only read as the ordinary West Indian read, but I went to the library and found all sorts of books on history and classical studies.[13]

In his regular job, as a teacher at Queen’s Royal College, James pioneered the teaching of West Indian history, a political act of great importance, and mentored the young Eric Williams.[14] He also, as he told Buhle, had a relationship with Cipriani, though limited by the fact that as a teacher at a government school he was a public employee. He wrote on sports for Cipriani’s paper, The Labour Leader, and spoke occasionally on behalf of the TWA; nevertheless, speaking of himself in the third person, he said to Buhle:

James was part of the movement, he didn’t put himself forward, but he was part. Cipriani would come to me and ask me what about this and so on. I would speak on behalf of the movement.[15]

Nor was James’s youthful political activity limited to support of the TWA and Cipriani. He also engaged in debate over the question of black intelligence in the Beacon, rebutting the arguments of Dr Sidney Harland a lecturer at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, adjacent to James’s home town of Tunapuna, about the inherent abilities of black people.[16]

The thirty-one year-old who arrived in England in 1932 with the manuscripts of The Life of Captain Cipriani and Minty Alley in his trunk was about to start a new life, a life that would carry him from Britain to the United States, and back to Britain and the West Indies.[17] It is interesting, and perhaps instructive, that he began his long sojourn outside the West Indies by looking back to his homeland and speaking of its needs. As Grimshaw notes, the essay is rooted in his early life.[18]

‘A People like ours should be free’

In The Case for West-Indian Self-Government – a 32-page pamphlet, of which 27 are devoted to the main text – James lays out his first sustained political argument. Before doing that, however, he dedicates the work to Arthur Cipriani, T. A. Marryshow, J. Elmore Edwards, and C.D. Rawle, all activists in Trinidad, Grenada and Dominica, whom he salutes as ‘leaders of the democratic movement of the West Indies.’[19] The pamphlet was one of a series on political issues published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press that included pieces by C.E.M. Joad, J.M. Keynes, and Harold Laski; James began his career as a political theorist in some very distinguished company.[20]

His first move is to provide a context for the pamphlet: a Colonial Office Commission’s investigating the possibility of federating some or all of Britain’s Eastern Caribbean colonies. James asserts that, while the Commission was taking evidence ‘on the constitutional question’ such a question required an understanding of the social context of government.[21]

That context, James contends, is obvious. Over eighty percent of the population of the islands being investigated ‘consists of Negroes or persons of Negroid origin’ who, albeit of African origin, had become a distinct people:

Cut off from all contact with Africa for a century and a quarter, they present to-day the extraordinary spectacle of a people who, in language and social customs, religion, education and outlook, are essentially Western and, indeed, far more advanced in Western culture than many a European community.[22]

The nature of the argument that James is to make in the remainder of the pamphlet is thus clearly laid out: West Indians, as a westernised people, are in a position to govern themselves and should be allowed the opportunity.

James immediately contrasts this picture of the westernised West Indian with the view of ‘the advocates of Colonial Office trusteeship’ who dismiss the black West Indian as a ‘savage’ who ‘beneath the veneer of civilisation’ is still a vicious creature who will long need white tutelage before being allowed to begin moving toward self-government.[23] James marshals quotations from Sydney, Lord Olivier, a former colonial administrator and Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Sir Charles Bruce, a former colonial governor, that speak highly of the qualities of black West Indians, and black people in general, to rebut the argument for black inferiority.[24] ‘Men of colour’ are ready and able to take high office in the West Indies.

The ‘West Indian Negro is ungracious enough to be far from perfect’, sharing the vices of all those who live in the tropics ‘not excluding people of European blood’, but has a ‘magnificent vitality’ that ‘overcomes the enervating influences of the climate’.[25] They lack ‘the thrift, the care, and the almost equine docility’ of Europeans whose harsher climate and industrial economy have imposed a discipline on them. But they also, as a young people, lack the cramping traditions which inhibit the European.[26]

James then looks at the divisions of caste within the ‘Negroid’ population, noting that it is composed of a majority ‘of actually black people’ and a minority of fifteen to twenty percent of people of mixed black and white ancestry.[27] This minority had from the days of slavery on asserted a claim of superiority to the ‘ordinary black’. Between the brown and black people a distrust exists which has been ‘skillfully played on’ by the whites and which ‘poisons the life’ of a community made up of a variety of racial mixtures and in which relations within families can be made tense by differences in shade between close kindred.[28]

Possession of wealth, however, matters:

It is not too much to say that in a West Indian colony the surest sign of a man’s having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.[29]

Status concerns on the part of the middle class make it hard for them to unite, and this is ‘the gravest drawback of the coloured population’ as it should, naturally, take leadership but is, instead, divided by distinctions of colour.[30]

The most important of other groups, writes James, ‘are the white creoles’. However, he footnotes this assertion with a statement that bears quoting in full:

Many of the West Indian Islands are cosmopolitan, and East Indians form about twelve per cent of the total population, though concentrated in Trinidad. But there is no need to give them special treatment, for economically and educationally they are superior to the corresponding class in India; and get on admirably with the Negroes.[31]

We will return to this point later, as it is crucial for any analysis of James’s understanding of his own society in the early 1930s.

Whites, James asserts, face two disadvantages: they cannot stand the climate for more than three generations, and being white automatically makes them people of consequence. Yet this is power without more than personal responsibility, since the white people who govern are not West Indian but English.[32]

James then proceeds to give us a portrait of the English colonial administrator who arrives in the West Indies with experience ‘in dealing with primitive peoples’ in Africa and who in the West Indies is confronted by ‘a thoroughly civilized community’ whose members are his intellectual equals. In response, the Englishman has to fall back on claims of inherent Anglo-Saxon ability, and on a claim that the crown colony system needs to be maintained.[33]

In reaction to the claims of West Indians, the colonial bureaucrat takes up a hyperpatriotic celebration of Englishness and reinforces his inherent snobbishness with an unearned aristocracy which is ever vigilant for insults.[34] English liberalism – the celebration of a history that includes the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights – disappears in the colonies, as the colonial administrator defines anyone who exhibits a local patriotism as

a dangerous person, a wild revolutionary, a man with no respect for law and order, a self-seeker actuated by the lowest motives, a reptile to be crushed at the first opportunity. What at home is the greatest virtue becomes in the colonies the greatest crime.[35]

Turning from the psychology of the coloniser to the administration of the colonies, James gives us a description of the ‘Governor-in-Executive-Council’.[36] While the governor was advised by an executive council, which included senior government officials and prominent locals, the latter ‘selected by himself’, he did not need to follow that advice.[37] James lays out, as an example of the arbitrary behaviour of colonial administrations the relationship among the colonial government, the Trinidad Electric Company (which both supplied electricity to the island and operated Port of Spain’s municipal trams), and the Port of Spain city council in which the government acted to promote the profits of the company and its officials and to ‘defeat the legitimate aspirations of the citizens of Port-of-Spain’.[38]

While the Executive Council met in secret, the Legislative Council attracted public interest. The Council was divided into three parts: the first consisted of twelve government officials chosen by the governor, the second consisted of thirteen unofficial members, six appointed by the governor and seven elected ‘by the people’, and the third was the governor himself as presiding officer.[39]

James notes that some official members serve in the Council for years without saying a word, and that

There is a further unreality, because whenever the Governor wishes he can instruct the officials all to vote in the same way. And the Council becomes farcical when two members of a committee appointed by the Governor receive instructions to vote against their own recommendations.[40]

The officials, who are ‘a solid block of Englishmen with a few white creoles, generally from some other colony’ work in solidarity with wealthy white creoles ‘against the political advancement of the coloured people’. The government and the Chamber of Commerce constitute a single political bloc.[41] It had become government policy, however, to appoint ‘a few Negroes’ to unofficial positions on the Legislative Council. These persons were ‘Negroes of fair and not of dark skin’ notes James, who goes on to say that such people are frequently more hostile to ‘the masses of the people than the Europeans themselves.’[42] This hostility James attributes to a lack of self-respect. When ‘light-skinned Negroes’ recognize that they will receive respect only when they respect themselves, then the racial power of whites will be ended.[43]

The Europeans who exercise power are intellectually shallow and provincial, but they have power and can thus maintain a degree of exclusivity. This, ‘for the fair-skinned Negro who does not seek much’ is a paradise.[44] At the same time, any white talent will be clustered around the governor. Non-whites with ‘powers above the average’ will seek to penetrate such groups even though they are dominated by Englishmen who are ‘constitutionally incapable of admitting into their society on equal terms persons of colour.’[45]

The ‘man of colour’ could only hope for a position at the fringe of polite society. Those who were unwilling to accept ‘place-at-any-price’ remained in splendid isolation distrusting each other and united only in jealousy at each other’s ability to stand well with the government.[46] That government, while pointing to the number of coloured men appointed to the Council as a sign of its non-racialism, ‘rarely appoints black men’.[47]

The result is that while the Colonial Office is congratulating itself on ensuring that ‘the coloured people’ are represented in government, the colonial administration and the local white population know that these ‘representatives’ are in fact ‘more royalist than the King’ and far from being in solidarity with the black majority ‘are at one with [the English] in their common antipathy to the black’.[48]

The third part of the Legislative Council is the governor himself. James wittily states that:

The Governor of a Crown Colony is three things. He is the representative of His Majesty the King, and as such must have all the homage and respect customary to that position… In Trinidad the Governor is Governor General and Prime Minister in one. But that makes only two. When the Governor sits in the Legislative Council he is Chairman of that body. The unfortunate result is that when a member of the Council rises to speak he is addressing at one and the same time an incomprehensible personage, three in one and one in three.[49]

James’s allusion to the Athanasian Creed serves to introduce the point that in this way the governors avoid taking responsibility for their actions while members of the Legislative Council are always eager to jump to the defense of the Crown’s representative and the president of the Council while being ‘quite neglectful of the responsibility of the head of the administration’.[50] The governor’s power gives him disproportionate influence on the legislative process and his presence in the Council inhibits freedom of speech.[51]

The result is that the government faces no ‘effective criticism or check’ and since it is administered by bureaucrats rather than politicians with vision becomes ‘slack and regardless’. The members of the Legislative Council, far from being vigilant on behalf of the public, are no more than sycophants, and the function of government appears to be no more than a favour granted to the people rather than a responsibility for the common good and general welfare.[52] James illustrates this by considering a debate on racial discrimination at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in which biracial members of the council had insisted that there was no discrimination against Trinidadians of colour attending the College even though one of them knew that there was. Attempts by Cipriani, a white Creole, to deal with the matter were stymied by the Colonial Office being able to point to these statements in response to Cipriani’s complaints.[53]

For all that English officials would want to underplay or deny racial discrimination, James reserves his greatest contempt for the ‘so-called representatives of the people’ who are caught between fear that speaking up about racial discrimination would deny them the opportunity for advancement and fear that they would have to confront publicly ‘the perfectly obvious but nevertheless dreadful fact that they are not white men’.[54]

James notes that in smaller, more racially homogeneous, colonies such as Grenada and Dominica the colonial government had managed to unite nominated and elected members in opposition to itself.[55] In this way, the British were preparing unwittingly for the destruction of their empire.

For James, the only way forward is a democratic constitution, perhaps modelled on Malta or on Ceylon.[56] High income qualifications to hold office or to vote would have to be abolished and the legislature should be made up exclusively of elected representatives.[57]

James does not see democratisation as a panacea. He sees it as necessary in order that the concerns and needs of the people are regularly and consistently taken into account by the government:

No one expects that these Islands will, on assuming responsibility for themselves, immediately shed racial prejudice and economic depression. No one expects that by a change of constitutions the constitution of politicians will be changed. But though they will, when the occasions arise, disappoint the people, and deceive the people and even, in so-called crises, betray the people, yet there is one thing they will never be able to do – and that is, neglect the people. As long as society is constituted as it is at present that is the best that modern wage-slaves can ever hope to achieve.[58]

Crown colony government has run its course. It is based on the fraudulent assumption of superior ability by the English, and is wicked because it permits a small number of privileged Englishmen to control ‘hundreds of thousands of defenceless people’. In using ‘England’s overflow’ to prevent the people from achieving their natural aspirations to personal advancement and self-government it is, in fact, actually criminal.[59] The colonial administrators are ‘itinerant demi-gods’ ever eager to hear of opportunities for advancement elsewhere in the empire ‘while men often better than they stand outside rejected and despised.’[60]

Britain can control the West Indies as long as it desires. It has the naval and air power to do so. Nevertheless, James asserts ‘a people like ours should be free to make its own failures and successes’. Without that freedom, West Indians

remain without credit abroad and without self-respect at home, a bastard, feckless conglomeration of individuals, inspired by no common purpose, moving to no common end.[61]

Britain has promised its colonial subjects ‘self-government when fit for it’. It would lose little by keeping its word.[62]

Evaluating the argument

In a very small compass, James has presented a liberal nationalist argument for self-government. By that, James does not necessarily mean independence. At the time he wrote, no colony run by non-white subjects had achieved independence. Only in 1931 had the full autonomy of Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa been recognized by the Statute of Westminster, and all of these, save South Africa, were territories with white settler majorities. South Africa’s white settler minority was large enough to dominate the non-white majority and deny it political power.

The British West Indies was not a collection of colonies of exploitation, as were most colonies in Africa and Asia, nor were they colonies of settlement in the sense of having a large segment of the population deriving from the ‘mother country’. It was a region of colonies somewhere in between containing a population that was Westernised rather than Western, and imported for the purposes of exploitation rather than exploited in their aboriginal homeland. The Caribbean Sea is a lot further distant from Europe than the west coast of Africa, but it was under European rule (as opposed to a marginal presence) for much longer.

It is for this reason that James begins his essay by asserting that the population of the British West Indies is both black and Western, and why he makes a point of the historic distance between the people of the West Indies and their African roots. West Indians are blacks, but they are not Africans as James states both explicitly and implicitly.[63] Rather, as Bogues notes, they are a distinct people.[64] James is asserting that the people of the Caribbean, certainly of the British West Indies, constitute a nation formed by a shared history. That history, it must be noted, is one that involves British colonial rule, and the imposition of British political ideas as normative. The lens through which James sees the British West Indies has been shaped by the thought of people like J.S. Mill, for whom black West Indians, as the descendants of slaves, had to be taught freedom; freedom, that is to say in a British mode. James, thus, declares that West Indians no longer need British tutelage and are ready to govern themselves.

This declaration requires that he confront the question of the East Indian segment of the population, which was clearly not Afro-Western. He thus has to state that many islands are ‘cosmopolitan’ because they have East Indian residents. But he then dismisses them in two curt phrases: they are better off than in India, and they ‘get on admirably with the Negroes’. These apodeictic claims sweep a significant issue – that of ethnic difference – under the carpet. The politics of Trinidad and Tobago and of Guyana since World War II has been dominated by the ethnic division between Creoles and East Indians in a way that indicates that neither group gets on admirably with the other. Or, in other words, that the latter does not find the culture of the former normative.

Since James’s argument rests on asserting that West Indians have developed enough to be able to govern themselves according to Western norms, he has to assume that the East Indian section of the populace is aligned with those norms, but can present no evidence for this. Even worse, he ignores the middleman minorities – the Chinese, Portuguese, and Levantine Arabs – who were and are highly visible even though their numbers are small. The story of the West Indies, from James’s perspective, is entirely black and white.

Race relations, relations among white, black, and biracial West Indians, are central to James’s account of the condition of the West Indian colonies and to his argument for self-government. The ‘brown-skinned middle class’ which ought to provide leadership to the black mass of the population is so divided by squabbles over fine distinctions of colour that it cannot take up that role. The whites, meantime, are enervated by the climate and by the automatic deference accorded to their race. Clearly, it is the job of black West Indians to govern themselves. Glen Richards sees this, correctly, as the means by which James believed that they would be able to overcome the burden of racism.[65]

It is racism that makes the English assume that West Indians cannot govern themselves without the supervision of their betters. Racism makes the English blind to the difference between Westernised Caribbean people and ‘primitive Africans’.[66] The latter, in James’s eyes, require the trusteeship which the former no longer need. Where a black nationalist like Marcus Garvey would have emphasised racial solidarity and rejected divisions between blacks in Africa and in the Diaspora, James embraces that distinction.

That same racism is what leads to the bickering over differences in colour and the arbitrary inclusion or exclusion of talented people. Yet, racial prejudice in the West Indies is not accompanied by racial antagonism, and, free of crown colony rule, West Indians will be able to live in peace under the rule of their elected representatives. James has come to a conclusion which would have surprised Edward Wilmot Blyden or Marcus Garvey. Indeed, while Garvey would probably have nodded at James’s description between brown and black West Indians as support for his contention that the former were inimical to the latter, James has no such intention. Rather, he wants us to see that continued British domination through the crown colony system divorces status from ability, makes lightness of colour the sign of the former and ignores possession of the latter by those who lack the fortune to have begun life with some European ancestry.

Democracy would make wealth and ability, rather than race, the markers of status and would remove the barriers confronted by talented West Indians of wholly or partly African descent. It would not remove racial prejudice, but in the absence of racial antagonism that does not for him seem an insuperable difficulty. The problem is, of course, that ‘race antagonism’ was hardly absent in the colonial Caribbean. The reactive racial philosophies of Blyden and Garvey could not have come into existence had they not believed in a racial hostility directed at persons like them from the white authorities and believed that it was necessary to reciprocate. James’s own depiction of the racial prejudice of brown to black indicates more than mere prejudice; James recognizes that mixed-race West Indians were possessed of a racial fear.

Equally, James the Marxist a few years later would not have assumed that bourgeois democracy was the best alternative available, even if it was corruptible. Yet that is what James the liberal does. Little wonder that Trinidadian political scientist John LaGuerre could dismiss the early James as ‘a nationalist without a political theory.’[67] While Bogues rejects this as too superficial an approach, he also disagrees with LaGuerre’s saying that James when he arrived in England was ‘at best a liberal’.[68]

But this is what James was at the time. Although Bogues turns to James’s fiction for evidence of a deeper understanding of the situation of black working-class Trinidadians of the 1920s, and contends that James did not yet understand the implications of his thinking for that class, the reality is that James, in The Case for West-Indian Self-Government is arguing entirely within the framework of the liberal imperialist idea of trusteeship. His argument is that this trusteeship has achieved its end and is no longer necessary. A few years later, in The Black Jacobins, he was to articulate a very different kind of argument, but in 1932 and 1933 he was not yet either a Marxist or a pan-Africanist. For James in 1933, West Indians constituted a nation whose aspirations were being frustrated by the continuation of crown colony government. He does not see them as part of an international proletariat created by and antagonistic to capitalism. Nor does he see them as part of a larger African community.

James’s argument with respect to the crown colony system echoes the Canadian political scientist Hume Wrong writing a decade earlier:

Crown Colony government is a political blind alley. It is, and must be, paternal, and it gives no chance for education in political responsibility. To regard it as a permanent institution is to give up all hope for the political development of the inhabitants of the colonies in which it prevails. All these colonies are far from being ready to control their own affairs, but some of them may be sufficiently advanced to make a start on the long road which may ultimately lead to responsible government.[69]

While James would obviously have disagreed that the West Indies was not yet ready to govern itself, he would have considered Wrong’s assertion that the crown colony system was a blind alley to be correct. James would have agreed with Wrong’s statement that ‘the negro in the West Indies is a very different person from his racial kin in Africa’.[70] Indeed, this is the very claim that James makes in asserting that the West Indian is ready for self-government. Wrong, like James places the link with Africa securely in the past and sees the West Indian black as Westernised.[71] And, like James, Wrong sees the absence of ‘open racial hostility’ as a hopeful sign for the political development of the West Indies.[72]

While there are many points of disagreement between James and Wrong, not the least of which is Wrong’s assessment that the West Indies was still far from ready for self-government, what should concern us here is the similarity of their approach. Both see the West Indies as a backward part of the West, and crown colony government as contributing to that backwardness. They occupy different points on the spectrum of liberalism, James being far more radical than Wrong, but they share the basic assumptions of Western liberalism.

Creole Nationalism

While James was writing The Case for West-Indian Self-Government time was not standing still in the West Indies. The Great Depression was biting the poorest West Indians and they were not accepting it stoically. Starting in the early 1930s, workers in the colonial Caribbean began to protest their continuing immiseration, and their demands for justice, work, and bread were gradually joined by middle-class West Indians who awakened to their racial and/or cultural solidarity with the poor.[73]

Labour uprisings in 1937 in Trinidad and in 1938 in Jamaica were especially important in this regard because they reinforced and expanded existing political movements (as was the case in Trinidad) or generated new movements with middle-class leadership (as was the case in Jamaica).

That leadership took the language of British imperial liberalism and the imperialist attitude to the colonial Caribbean and gave it a new twist:

There are those who love our thatched huts and the picturesqueness of Back-O-Wall, and those who look at smiles on people’s faces and believe that all is well because people will smile, nature is bountiful and one season follows another. I have lived in that feeling myself, I have felt those sentiments. If you live in a place long enough you become complacent. What you see every day you regard after a time as belonging to the order of things.[74]

Thus spoke Norman Manley in September 1938, announcing that self-government had become a central political demand for middle-class West Indians such as himself. In another text that year, Manley was to echo James even more directly:

The dead hand of imperialism is made manifest in the dearth of our culture, in the paucity and poverty of our arts, in the drying up of the sources of charity, in the decay of faith and the licentiousness of morals, in the dishonesty of our escapism, in the malice of our leaders, in the cowardice of government, in the narrow mean circumscription of all our horizons. One touch of creative intensity and a veritable desert would quicken into life with rank weeds jostling the flower shoots striving for living room. There would be life and trouble, blossom and fruit, but the dead hand, quietly with blind efficiency, closes on it all.[75]

This is a vision of political freedom from which racial and class differences are absent. It rests on the assumption that expanded political liberty will unleash the creative potential that the crown colony system has suppressed. Manley, speaking as the leader of a political party dedicated to the achievement of self-government and eventual independence for the West Indies, shares with James the desire to see his people have the freedom to achieve their own successes and experience their own failures.

That people is not cast in terms of black and white, but as a West Indian people who have emerged from the particular historical experience of the Caribbean, that is to say as a creolised people. Creolisation involves the ‘inescapable mixing of peoples and cultures as an undeniable facet of the modern world.’[76]

Hence James’s odd treatment of the East Indians: He defines them as creolised, and therefore part of a political community which also contains brown people, black people and white people. West Indians are a creolised people, and the nation that James and Manley envision is a Creole nation. White, black, brown, East Indian, all are brought together in a single Creole pepperpot in which the flavours of Africa, Asia, and Europe achieve a new, fierce harmony. This is, a generation later, to be echoed by James’s pupil Eric Williams.[77] Williams, however, was to go a step further by proclaiming the end of imperial rule, not simply calling for it: ‘You are nobody’s boss, and nobody is your boss.’[78] It was the end of what Williams called ‘Massa day’, the rule of a backward, obscurantist class, but not every white was a massa, and ‘not all Massas were white.’[79]

Creole nationalism, so defined, is a Caribbean form of European liberal nationalism. Trusteeship is seen as having played its role as midwife of the new nation, which henceforth must achieve its successes and failures on its own. Thus far, Burke and Mill. Equally, continued crown colony rule, with its sidelining of ability and creativity, was a noisome nuisance to be condemned by all. Thus far, Machiavelli.

Conclusion

If we can see James as in a tradition that has its roots in 16^th century European republicanism and 19^th century European liberalism, then The Case for West-Indian Self-Government represents a direction that he was not to take in his own intellectual and political development. It is not a precursor to a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist analysis of the impact of imperialism, nor is it part of a pan-African resistance to that imperialism.

Yet, at the same time, it is focused on James’s own people, their history, and their political plight. It is therefore very much in tune with his later concerns – socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism.

How, then, should we see this pamphlet? I would venture to suggest that we see it in two ways. One is as a precursor of the Creole nationalism that was shortly to emerge full-blown in the colonial Caribbean. It is no large step from James in 1933 to Manley in 1938, nor to Williams in 1961. This is James as he might have become had he never left the West Indies and had not become involved in the international Marxist movement. And this is the approach that has motivated this study.

The other is as a first, untutored effort at developing a coherent political vision of the Anglophone Caribbean in the modern world, a true work of theory informed by the normative values which James accepted at the time. It contains themes, such as imperialism and racism, which he was to explore in great depth throughout his career, and regarding which he was to acquire and to develop new analytic tools.

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government then can be seen as a liminal work. It sits at the boundary between James’s youth and his adult life, between his experience of Trinidad and his experience of the wider world, between his early liberalism and his later Marxism, between Creole nationalism and pan-Africanism. That James was to go beyond those boundaries does not mean that it is not a work of significance both for an understanding of who James was and the nature of the world in which he came to his first maturity.

It is, finally, a work of tremendous importance for Caribbean political thought. Like J.J. Thomas before him, James was not content to accept subordination or the disvaluing of his abilities and the abilities of those around him. He felt himself part of a nation, and spoke on its behalf. As a people, West Indians were entitled to take their chances in the world, and in doing so to develop their own self-respect, their own common identity, and their own common purpose. That is a message that still needs to be heard.

[1] Anthony Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James; London: Pluto Press, 1997, 1.

[2] Glen Richards, “C.L.R. James on Black Self-Determination in the United States and the Caribbean” in Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain (eds.) C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, 318.

[3] F.S.J. Ledgister, Class Alliances and the Liberal-Authoritarian State: The Roots of Post-Colonial Democracy in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Surinam; Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998, 98. Cedric J. Robinson, “C.L.R. James and the World-System”, Cudjoe & Cain, 245.

[4] Ledgister, 98. Prior to that date, Trinidad and Tobago had been an example of what Hume Wrong called a ‘pure’ crown colony. The addition of an elective element, albeit elected on a limited suffrage turned Trinidad into a ‘semi-representative’ crown colony. Hume Wrong, Government of the West Indies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 113 & 136.

[5] Ledgister, 99.

[6] Bogues, 19.

[7] Bogues, 24-25.

[8] Selwyn Cudjoe, “The Audacity of It All: C.L.R. James’s Trinidadian Background”, Paget Henry and Paul Buhle (eds.), C.L.R. James’s Caribbean; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, 43-46.

[9] Cudjoe (1991), 46-50.

[10] Anna Grimshaw, “C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision” in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 3.

[11] Cudjoe (1991), 52. James attributed his late political development in part to the decision to join the Maple Cricket Club, with a predominantly biracial and middle-class membership, rather than the working-class predominantly black Shannon Cricket Club. ‘Faced with the fundamental divisions in the island, I had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed my political development for years.’ C.LR. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993 [1963]), 53.

[12] Aldon Lynn Nielsen, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997, xiv.

[13] Paul Buhle, “The Making of a Literary Life: C.L.R. James interviewed by Paul Buhle”, Henry & Buhle, 58.

[14] Buhle, 58. The references to Williams’s relationship with James are legion, including Williams’s own in Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969).

[15] Buhle, 60.

[16] Nielsen, 8-12.

[17] James went to Britain with the encouragement of Learie Constantine who promised to see him through if he had financial difficulties. James (1993), 110.

[18] Grimshaw, 5.

[19] C.L.R. James, The Case for West-Indian Self-Government; London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1933, 4. The pamphlet was excerpted from The Life of Captain Cipriani while James was living in Lancashire in 1932. Nicole King, C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001) 75.

[20] James (1933), 2.

[21] The ‘constitutional question’ was the question of whether some form of representative government should be introduced in a reformed constitution.

[22] James (1933), 5-6.

[23] James (1933), 6.

[24] James (1933), 6-7.

[25] James (1933), 7.

[26] James (1933), 7.

[27] James (1933), 8.

[28] James (1933), 8.

[29] James (1933), 9.

[30] James (1933), 9.

[31] James (1933), 9 fn. Emphasis mine.

[32] James (1933), 9-10. One presumes that James subsumed Welsh, Scottish, and Irish officials under that category.

[33] James (1933), 10-11.

[34] James (1933), 11.

[35] James (1933), 12.

[36] James (1933), 13. The phrase alludes to the constitutional term ‘the King-in-Parliament’ which refers to the Crown in its legislative role operating in conjunction with the House of Commons and House of Lords.

[37] James (1933), 13.

[38] James (1933), 17.

[39] James (1933), 18-19.

[40] James (1933), 18-19.

[41] James (1933), 18-19.

[42] James (1933), 19. In a later work, James describes the disgraceful official treatment of the great cricketer Learie Constantine who was unable to get any regular employment other than acting positions in government because of his race. James (1993), 106-107. It is one of the ironies of history that the British, who discriminated against Constantine because of his race in the 1920s, would in 1969 admit him to the House of Lords.

[43] James (1933), 23.

[44] James (1933), 20.

[45] James (1933), 21.

[46] James (1933), 21-22.

[47] James (1933), 22.

[48] James (1933), 22.

[49] James (1933), 23-24.

[50] James (1933), 24.

[51] James (1933), 25-26.

[52] James (1933), 26.

[53] James (1933), 27-29.

[54] James (1933), 29.

[55] James (1933), 30.

[56] James (1933), 30.

[57] James (1933), 31. Malta at the time had a bicameral legislature. Universal suffrage was introduced in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1931.

[58] James (1933), 31.

[59] James (1933), 31.

[60] James (1933), 32.

[61] James (1933), 32.

[62] James (1933), 32.

[63] James makes the point that the oil companies operating in Trinidad would as soon appoint a Zulu chief as ‘a local man of colour’ to a position of responsibility. The implication being that there is a real difference between the Zulu and the Trinidadian Creole that the oil company is not recognizing.

[64] Bogues, 23.

[65] Glen Richards, “C.L.R. James on Black Self-Determination in the United States and the Caribbean,” in Cudjoe and Cain (1995), 318.

[66] James (1933), 10.

[67] Quoted in Bogues, 25.

[68] Bogues, 25.

[69] Wrong, 144.

[70] Wrong, 171.

[71] Wrong, 171.

[72] Wrong, 179.

[73] The ‘and/or’ is necessary because some of the middle class activists who emerged in the 1930s, such as Albert Gomes in Trinidad or Richard Hart in Jamaica, were unambiguously white.

[74] Norman W. Manley, “Launching of the People’s National Party”, in Rex Nettleford, ed. Norman Washington Manley and the New Jamaica: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1938-1968 (London: Longman Caribbean, 1971), 15.

[75] Norman W. Manley “Of freedom”; Nettleford, 385. Emphasis in the original.

[76] King, 143.

[77] Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (Port of Spain: PNM Publishing, 1962), vii.

[78] Eric Williams, “Independence Day Address” in Selwyn R. Cudjoe, ed., Eric E. Williams Speaks: Essays on Colonialism and Independence (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1982) 266.

[79] Eric Williams, “Massa Day Done” in Cudjoe (1982), 238-246.

“Intellectual Murder”: Walter Rodney’s Groundings in the context of the Jamaica of the 1960s.

2007-04-11T18:24:00.000-07:00

“Intellectual Murder”: Walter Rodney’s Groundings in the context of the Jamaica of the 1960s.

F.S.J. Ledgister

Department of Political Science

Clark Atlanta University

How many on our flesh have fattened!
But if the noisome birds of prey
Shall vanish from the sky some morning
The blessed sunlight then will stay.

(Eugene Pottier, L’Internationale)

Introduction

Walter Rodney became a public figure – as distinguished from someone well known in academic or radical circles – as a result of his being made persona non grata by the government of Jamaica in 1968. To understand that exclusion, we have to look at Rodney in the context of the Jamaica of the 1960s. This means we have to reexamine The Groundings with my Brothers, which contains Rodney’s lectures to slum-dwellers that so alarmed the government of prim minister Hugh Shearer. We also have to consider what kind of country Jamaica was at the time, and what the attitude of Jamaica’s government was to academic freedom.

Jamaica became independent on 6 August, 1962. That did not mean that it instantly shed its colonial past. “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living,” wrote Marx.[1] This is even more the case when those generations are not in fact dead.

No impassable barrier separates colonial Jamaica from post-colonial Jamaica. Indeed, Jamaica became independent with a state structure that combined authoritarian and democratic elements;[2] the former the result of long colonial rule, the latter the result of processes of decolonization that began in the 1940s.

Early independent Jamaica was a continuation of what it had been under late colonial rule with one substantial difference – apart from the fact that the governor no longer exercised a power of veto over the elected government – that until independence the local authorities were subject to the British and after independence paid close attention to the wishes of the United States.[3] A two-party system, the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) facing the social-democratic People’s National Party (PNP), had been established over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, and local politicians had, in stages, taken over responsibility for local affairs from the Colonial Office between 1944, when universal adult suffrage was introduced, and independence in 1962.

The JLP government, which came to office shortly before independence and was to remain in power for the first decade of independent Jamaica, was sensitive both to the concerns of the United States government and to social pressures which manifested themselves in the emergence of the Rastafari movement and in such events as the anti-Chinese riots of 1965.[4] Foreign investment (particularly in bauxite and sugar), tourism, and the continued existence of ethno-racial minorities (particularly since some of them controlled much of the wealth of the island), were central concerns to the JLP prime ministers, Sir Alexander Bustamante, Sir Donald Sangster, and Hugh Shearer, as they presided over the government. They had been central concerns of the pre-independence PNP administration of Norman Manley.[5]

The island’s social structure, in the years following the achievement of independence, showed little change from the years preceding. The upper class continued to be dominated by whites, with a few Chinese and brown (mixed race) Jamaicans on its fringes, the middle class was made up mostly, but by no means entirely, of brown Jamaicans, and the lower classes, urban and rural, were overwhelmingly black. Habits of deference, and habits of dominance, developed over the three centuries of British rule, and the long period of plantation slavery during that rule, were still ingrained in parts of the population.[6]

Others, however, had developed and refined forms of resistance to racial and class oppression, of which the most significant was Rastafarianism[7]. And that drew, in its turn, from the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey, perhaps the most important political figure to emerge in late colonial Jamaica, given the impact of Garveyism on Africans and peoples of African origin outside that continent. That resistance constituted a counternarrative to the official account of Jamaica’s movement from colonial rule to independence.

The Setting: Jamaica in the 1960s

An observer of Jamaica in the 1960s would have noticed few substantial differences from the preceding period. Already, in the 1950s, Jamaican personnel had taken over the bureaucracy, and all of the government except for the office of governor. Business continued to be dominated by white Creole Jamaicans and members of the Levantine Arab and Chinese minorities.[8] Social mobility had begun to accelerate following the introduction of the eleven-plus examination for entry into secondary schools in 1958. The founding of the University in 1948 marked the beginning both of real research into the life of the island (and the wider West Indies) and real opportunity for higher education to an expanded segment of the population.

The growth of the middle class, as tourism, the bauxite mining industry, and import substitution industrialization expanded the island’s economy, and access to middle-class employment through education, were outcomes of a political transformation that had begun with the labour rebellion of 1938 which had produced, over a decade and a half, two political parties that competed for popular support and two large trade unions that connected those parties to the rural and urban working classes.[9]

Jamaica’s political life settled into a pattern of encouragement of development by a state that sought to promote the welfare of the community at large, coupled with the use of patronage to sustain support from large segments of the island’s population.[10] The two parties, the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party, the roots of which lay in the worker uprising of 1938, divided the lower classes, in particular the urban lower classes, into rival ‘tribes’, the term current in Jamaica, that sought advantage through their support of the individual parties. These, though formally different ideologically had converged by the mid-1950s becoming ‘cross-class, catch-all vote-getting machines’.[11]

The emergent middle class, for all that its members were mostly the children of peasants, yeomen and workers, looked upon the lower classes with a mixture of pride, scorn, and fear. Middle class Jamaicans, especially brown (mixed race) people, were quick to apply racial explanations for poverty, or to blame habits of African origin or remnants of African culture for the ‘backwardness’ of much of the population.[12] Yet, while the middle class had gained, and grown, in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘much larger sections of the people’ had been marginalized and faced increased suffering.[13]

We might say that to middle class status anxiety was allied a racial fear, a fear of being mistaken for the uneducated, backward African rather than seen as educated citizens of a modern nation and participants in Western civilization.[14]

At the same time, the government of the newly-independent nation had its own anxieties. One had to do with the burgeoning urban slums and how they ought to be controlled. Another had to do with Jamaica’s security in the world; this was seen as dependent on a close alliance with the United States and commitment to Western goals. ‘I am with the West’, declared Prime Minister Sir Alexander Bustamante at independence, offering the United States the chance to establish military bases in Jamaica.[15] While the United States failed to take Bustamante’s offer up, the Hurwitzes note that

The loan agreements and the economic and technical aid given by the United States, Great Britain and Canada seemed sufficient proof that amicable relations with these powers would take care of Jamaica’s needs. During these years, Jamaica’s foreign policy jelled in this traditional mold.[16]

This policy of continuity faced challenges. The PNP did not constitute a major challenge, of course, during most of the 1960s, but significant challenges to the continuation of the late colonial order were made on racial grounds.

Before independence, a black preacher, Claudius Henry, played a role as ‘a leading militant’ demanding that black Jamaicans be repatriated to Africa. Calling himself the ‘Repairer of the Breach’, Henry created the African Reformed Church at the end of 1958. This church, which drew its members from the lower classes of Kingston, advocated an ‘unapologetic, militant anti-colonialism’ in the ideological language of Rastafari.[17] Henry advocated rejecting the calls for self-government of the two parties, instead demanding repatriation to Africa.[18] Unsurprisingly, his church was a regular target of police raids, one of which, in April 1960, uncovered a cache of weapons. Henry and others were charged with treason felony (Henry served a sentence for this). His sons attempted a revolt that June and this was suppressed by the police and the British garrison.[19]

In the 1962 elections, shortly before independence, the People’s Political Party, led by Millard Johnson, a brown barrister whose racial consciousness was developed during his education in Britain – and reviving the name and outlook of a party founded by Marcus Garvey in 1930 – was, as Gannon notes, ‘the only Jamaican political party ever to run a slate of candidates on a racial platform’.[20] To Gannon, the PPP’s defeat in the elections (it picked up only 2.24 percent of the vote in the 16 constituencies, out of 45, that it contested) was an ‘apparent rejection of black nationalist ideology’ by an electorate that, in spite of being overwhelmingly black and lower class, gave greater importance to economic than racial or cultural issues, and for whom class differences were of more direct relevance than racial differences.[21] Even so, ‘PPP support was concentrated in the urban lower classes where black skin and material dispossession were perfectly correlated’.[22]

Nevertheless, the poorest, blackest constituency in Kingston, West Kingston, was won in 1962 (and was represented until 2005) by a white man, Edward Seaga, from the Levantine Arab minority[23]. This was in spite of the fact that his three opponents, Byron Moore of the PPP, Ras Sam Brown, a Rastafari movement activist and artist who was an independent candidate, and Dudley Thompson of the PNP, all used racial or Africanist appeals in their campaigns.[24] As Gannon summarises it, the results ‘in this constituency, revealed that a racial ideology without an explicit economic framework had limited political potential in Jamaica.’[25] Seaga was able, among other things, to communicate effectively with his constituents because of his knowledge of and connection to Revival cults, popular among the urban poor, and his ownership of a recording company that produced popular Jamaican music.[26]

Ras Sam Brown was seen by some in the early 1960s as a significant representative of the Rastafarian movement. George Mikes, who interviewed him in 1966, giving him the transparent pseudonym of ‘Jack Smith’, quotes him as saying ‘There is no solution other than bloodshed. I don’t welcome it. I regret it. But there is no way out. It is inevitable. The white man will have to pay with his life for the crimes he has committed.’[27] While Mikes considered Brown ‘a sham and a ham’ and ‘a snob and an upstart’ – in part because he demanded money for being interviewed, in part because he had become a kind of tame revolutionary pet providing a delightful frisson of horror for the Jamaican rich – it cannot be doubted that he articulated a real feeling among the urban poor of Kingston and that the Rastafari movement symbolized that feeling.[28]

The two-party system, however, was the main means of mobilizing the lower classes. In the mid-1960s, an increase in political violence (led, to a large extent, by Edward Seaga’s efforts to consolidate control of his constituency) obliged the government to impose a state of emergency in West Kingston in 1966.[29] The JLP’s victory in 1967 might have seemed to indicate that the government was on the right course, in spite of some rumblings among the poor in different parts of the island.

After the Henry incident of 1960, there had been a conflict between six Rastas and the police at Coral Gardens near Montego Bay in 1963 after the Rastas attacked a filling station there. In 1965, when a black employee at a Chinese-owned store in downtown Kingston claimed to have been beaten by her employers, anti-Chinese rioting broke out along the Spanish Town Road in west Kingston.[30]

Even though the rumblings among lower class Jamaicans involved issues of race, both parties used appeals to class in their 1967 campaigns: the JLP presented itself as the party of the small man while the PNP emphasized the JLP’s increasing orientation to the wealthy.[31] References to race were rare in that election campaign, and multiracialism and racial harmony were depicted as the norm.[32]

Beneath the surface, however things were different. It was perhaps in recognition of the need to acknowledge Jamaica’s racial reality that Edward Seaga, as the minister with responsibility for culture,[33] ensured the repatriation of the remains of Marcus Garvey and their entombment in a monument to the father of black nationalism in 1965; in that same year, the centenary of the Morant Bay Rebellion was commemorated by the proclamation that Paul Bogle and George William Gordon were henceforth to be National Heroes.[34]

The state visit of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie in 1966 can be seen as part of the same process. However, even though it was an official occasion, and Haile Selassie was present as a guest of the government, the visit was, because of its significance to the Rastafari community, a ‘catalysing’ event for lower-class black Jamaicans.[35]

The government gave with one hand and withheld with the other. While Garvey was celebrated, contemporary black nationalists were not. The works of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and H. Rap Brown were all banned.[36] So were publications of the Cuban, Soviet and Chinese governments, seen as promoting communism, and the novel The Children of Sisyphus by the Jamaican sociologist H. Orlando Patterson which contains a depiction of Bustamante (‘Montesaviour’ in the novel) as a two-faced liar as well as detailed descriptions of life for the urban poor, particularly residents of the ‘Dungle’.[37]

In addition, the government kept a wary eye on lecturers at the University of the West Indies. Foreigners working at that institution whose views the government found distasteful had their work permits revoked. These included West Indian scholars, such as the Guyanese Harold and Kathleen Drayton and Clive Y. Thomas,[38] and Marxist academics from outside the region such as Bertell Ollman,[39] Jay Mandle,[40] and Ken Post. Jamaican scholars and activists distrusted by government had their passports taken away.[41] This, nevertheless, did not stop the circulation of ideas disliked by the government; it merely drove them underground.

Walter Rodney’s arrival at the UWI in 1968 to teach African history was in itself an indication that interest in Africa was growing.[42] Rodney’s activities, in addition to his regular teaching became a source of alarm to the government. Rodney gave public lectures on African history and related subjects, such as imperialism at the university, at the university’s extra mural centre, and at other locations in Kingston

I would go further down into West Kingston and I would speak wherever there was a possibility of our getting together. It might be in a sports club, it might be in a schoolroom, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully. (Those of you who come from Jamaica know those gully corners.) They are dark, dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them. I have spoken in what people call ‘dungle’, rubbish dumps, for that is where people live in Jamaica. People live in rubbish dumps.[43].

It was these lectures that caused the government to refuse him reentry into the island when he returned from the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal in October 1968. Prime Minister Hugh Shearer told Parliament that Rodney had ‘openly declared his belief that as Jamaica was predominantly a black country, all brown-skinned, mulatto people and their assets should be destroyed.’[44] While Gannon sees this as Shearer’s ’exaggerating the significance of political rhetoric’, there is no evidence that Rodney said anything like this.[45] Rupert Lewis cites a Special Branch officer who said that Rodney was banned because he ‘was charismatic at the grassroots level and had a following among intellectuals.’[46]

Rodney’s self-presentation, Lewis states, was that of ‘a 1960s black radical though unexaggeratedly so’ while his wife, Pat, ‘wore a low haircut and dressed in African print wraps’.[47] He was determined to avoid the isolation of the university and what he saw as the philistinism of many of his colleagues by living off campus and connecting himself directly to ordinary Jamaicans.[48]

The Groundings

Rodney’s public lectures in Jamaica, and statements made at the Black Writers Congress, are contained in The Groundings with my Brothers, a slim book that represents Rodney’s primary contribution to Caribbean activist thought prior to his return to Guyana in 1974. The heart of the work is focused on two subjects: black power and African history.

Rodney defines blackness as central to the experience of black people: ‘I’m putting it to my black brothers and sisters that the colour of our skins is the most fundamental thing about us’. This is not an idea, merely an acceptance of reality, a reality imposed by the white world which ‘defines who is white and who is black’.[49] Whites define those who are not white as black; thus black people are those ‘hundreds of millions whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with another few millions in the Americas’ with persons of African descent in a position ‘clearly more acute than that of most non-white groups.’[50]

White racial domination is a product of white imperialism, thus ‘the Russians are white and have power but they are not a colonial power oppressing black peoples’.[51]

Imperialism continues even after the achievement of independence, ‘but a black man ruling a dependent State within the imperialist system has no power. He is simply an agent of the whites in the metropolis, with an army and a police force designed to maintain the imperialist way of things in that particular colonial area’.[52]

At the same time, whiteness is associated with wealth and blackness with poverty as a result of the ‘imperialist relationship’ which ‘makes the whites richer and the blacks poorer’. This is an exercise of ‘white power’ which has held blacks down and kept them impoverished both relatively and absolutely.[53]

Indeed

Conscious blacks cannot possibly fail to realise that in our own homelands we have no power, abroad we are discriminated against, and everywhere the black masses suffer from poverty. You can put together in your own mind a picture of the whole world, with the white imperialist beast crouched over miserable blacks. And don’t forget to label us poor. There is nothing with which poverty coincides so absolutely as with the colour black – small or large population, hot or cold climates, rich or poor in natural resources – poverty cuts across all of these factors in order to find black people.[54]

Black power, as it has emerged in the United States, Rodney goes on to argue, ‘is a rejection of hopelessness and the policy of doing nothing to halt the oppression of blacks by whites.’[55] He traces its origins to Garvey, and points out that Garvey saw the struggle as an international one, and all black power advocates since have done so. The only new thing about black power, apart from the name, is the advocacy of violence. But violence, says Rodney, echoing Fanon and citing Carmichael and Hamilton’s Black Power, is inescapably and unceasingly directed by whites against blacks.[56] Black American’s ‘limited violence’ has meant that their demands are being noticed.[57]

For blacks in the West Indies, the existence of black power as an ideology of resistance to white domination requires a choice:

Now we need to be specific in defining the West Indian scene and our own particular roles in the society. You and I have to decide whether we want to think black or to remain as a dirty version of white.[58]

Capitalists established slavery in the West Indies, and continued the exploitation of labour in the region after emancipation through the use of imported Indian indentured workers. The British prevented free blacks from gaining political power by imposing the crown colony system in Jamaica and other territories after 1865.[59]

The labour revolts of the 1930s surprised the British, and the Royal Commission that investigated them produced a ‘report of the conditions [that] was so shocking that the British government did not release it until after the war, because they wanted black colonials to fight the white man’s battles.’[60]

After the war, concessions had to be made to ‘certain groups in colonial society’ in order to prevent social upheaval and maintain the basic structure of imperial control as well as the concerns of the United States in the West Indies.[61]

In response to continued imperial control exercised through ‘a white, brown and black petty-bourgeoisie who were culturally the creations of white capitalist society’ black power had to break with imperialism, secure the control of power by the black masses, and reconstruct West Indian society ‘in the image of the blacks’.[62] By black, Rodney goes on to say, he means the mass of the population, ‘either African or Indian’.[63]

The Chinese, mulattoes, and ‘so-called West Indian whites’ have to either relinquish the role of exploiters or be deprived of it ‘before they can be re-integrated into a West Indian society where the black man walks with dignity.’[64] This is a choice for these groups to make themselves as black power ‘is not racially intolerant’ and ‘is not incompatible with a multi-racial society where each individual counts equally’.[65]

That, however, would require the equitable distribution of power. The image of a multiracial society projected by the government of the day, however, was nothing more than ‘a myth designed to justify the exploitation suffered by the blackest of our population, at the hands of the lighter-skinned groups.’[66]

Rodney concurs with Stokely Carmichael’s calling Fidel Castro ‘one of the blackest men in the Americas’, because white power is white imperialism, and the Cuban Revolution in rejecting the latter had also rejected the former:

Black Cubans fought alongside white Cuban workers and peasants because they were all oppressed. Major Juan Almeida, one of the outstanding leaders of Cuba today, was one of the original guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra, and he is black. Black Cubans today enjoy political, economic and social rights and opportunities of exactly the same kind as white Cubans. They too bear arms in the Cuban Militia as an expression of their basic rights. In other words, White Power in Cuba is ended. The majority of the white population naturally predominates numerically in most spheres of activity but they do not hold dominion over blacks without regard to the latter’s interests.[67]

That being so, black Cubans ‘can in fact afford to forget the category “black”. In Jamaica, where there are no oppressed whites, it would be blacks alone who would bear the brunt of revolutionary fighting.[68]

Educated black West Indians, including students and teachers at the university had to make a choice. Did they want to continue as agents of the white power system, or did they want to overcome the cultural inferiority that had resulted in black West Indians ‘thinking white’.[69] Blacks had to overcome the assumption that white standards of beauty and white symbols of value were normative. The acceptance of white values has distorted how the masses – African and Indian – see themselves and each other, and black power had to begin ‘with a revaluation of ourselves as blacks and with a redefinition of the world from our own standpoint.’[70]

To this end, Rodney delivered a series of nine public lectures on African history.[71] He states the purpose of these as to counter the deliberate hiding and distortion of African history in and by the West which has produced the result that ‘our knowledge of Africa is got from reading Tarzan comic books.’[72] Knowledge of African achievements, Rodney believed could build the self-confidence of black people.[73]

Rodney’s examination of African history involved an explicit rejection of racism, defining it as a tool of white exploitation.[74] His assertion on the subject, as well as his view on how Western technology ought to be appropriated, as presented in the summary of the fourth lecture, is worth quoting at length:

As Africans, we will use the question of race to unify ourselves, and to escape from the oppression at the hands of white men and their black lackeys. So long as there are people who deny our humanity as blacks, then for so long must we proclaim and assert our humanity as blacks. That is why our historical and cultural heritage is so important, and that is why we must proceed to live our culture because culture is a way of life. We must recover what was taken away from us and we must adapt in order to survive and keep on growing as a section of humanity.

Here it is very important to notice the question of technology. Europeans accuse black people of not inventing the wheel. They claim that our culture never included the construction of machines which work on the principle of the wheel – e.g., mills and wheeled transport. This is partly true, but all that can be said is that we never borrowed the principle of the wheel, for it was invented in China and borrowed by the Europeans[75]. Where our history and culture lack certain things there is nothing wrong in borrowing. His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Haile Selassie, was the first African to realise the importance of the European invention of aircraft, and sought aeroplanes, not to be like Europeans but to protect Ethiopian culture by strengthening it with something new. Africans (especially youths) must learn new skills[76].

Rodney was to make it clear, in addressing the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal in October 1968, that African history had to be placed at the service of black revolution.[77] The humanity of blacks, he asserted could only be proved ‘by revolutionary means’; the Cuban revolution being an example of what was possible.[78] African history needed to be taught, not merely with a focus on the major historic states and their elites but with attention to ‘the elements of African everyday life’ and with appreciation of all African culture. The purpose was to show that Africa’s past had meaning and that ‘the black man in the Americas’ could identify proudly with it.[79]

Anticipating his major work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney asserts that ‘stagnation in the “Third World” was causally related to advance in Western Europe, and that blacks needed to reject European ‘cultural egocentricity’ that defined the world in terms of one European achievement, the ability to organize large states and mobilize their populations.[80]

Against this, African values such as hospitality should be praised. Africa and Europe, Rodney contends, were moving in different directions in the early modern period and Africa had avoided the class antagonisms that characterized the development of capitalism in Europe.[81] Knowledge of the African past, for its part, would, by expunging Western myths about Africa’s lack of history perform a ‘revolutionary function’ for blacks in the Americas.[82]

Rodney’s assessment of the Jamaican situation at that conference was that ‘a new phase is beginning in the epochal march forward of the Black Humanity of Jamaica’.[83] Jamaica’s government had been forced to accept the collapse of the ‘myth of a harmonious, multi-racial society’ and had engaged in ‘a crude manipulation of the symbols of national black pride’ by acknowledging Marcus Garvey and Paul Bogle as national heroes.[84]

Condemning the prohibition of the ‘liberation literature of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X and Elijah Mohammed’ he noted that the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ was increasing and the repressive power of the state was being used to control the latter.[85] Interestingly, his first example of that increasing repression was that ‘the number of charges imposed on black people for the possession of ganja (marijuana) are astronomical’. He went on, though, to point out that a charge of ‘suspicion’ had been made law and that this was used ‘in much the same way’ as the vagrancy laws to control poor black people.[86]

Jamaica’s police had demonstrated that they were even more ferocious in their hostility to poor black people than the New York Police Department, and the government had urged it to greater efforts.[87] Yet that same government had faced a strike of the police force for higher wages which was, Rodney believed, ‘a part of the breakdown of the system of oppression’. That system could not even guarantee the middle class basic services and security.[88]

The issue of race was openly discussed, despite government efforts to sweep it under the rug, and even though they had been employed by the two parties to wage violence on each other, black youths were ‘becoming aware of the possibilities of unleashing armed struggle in their own interests.’[89]

A few days later, Rodney was to comment on one aspect of that struggle, his exclusion from Jamaica and the protests which followed. That ban was the act of a ‘white-hearted’ government which used a false multiracialism to cover up the fact that racial oppression of black Jamaicans continued.[90]

Educated black West Indians were sucked into the establishment; intellectuals were given economic security in exchange for their souls. To break from this ‘Babylonian Captivity’, the black West Indian academic had to attack the distortions of black history promoted by imperialism, to challenge the ‘social myth’ of multiracial harmony, and to ‘attach himself to the activity of the black masses’.[91]

He had spoken about black power on the university campus and off it: ‘I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of Black people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen’. That was the very definition of black power – black people coming together to discuss and think through their situation.[92] He had spoken at the UWI Extra Mural Centre, at sports clubs, schoolrooms, church halls, and in gully corners, wherever people would gather to discuss their lives and history, with people whom prime minister Shearer had dismissed as ‘criminals and hooligans’.[93]

The student protest, at one of ‘the most bourgeois of universities’, was an act unprecedented in the history of that institution.[94] It would not have occurred in his days as an undergraduate. Beyond that, the ‘Black Brothers’ in Kingston had moved against the government in what Rodney saw as the beginning of ‘their indictment against the Government of Jamaica.’[95] That government, he stressed, did not have the moral authority to condemn him.[96]

Aftermath

On 15 October, 1968, returning from Montreal, Rodney was not allowed to disembark in Kingston and was forced to return to Montreal.[97] Rodney’s banning from Jamaica resulted in student protest in the form of a march of about 900 students to the prime minister’s residence on 16 October, 1968.[98] The students were tear-gassed there, but made their way downtown to the parliament building, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Prime Minister’s Office, where they were again attacked by police. In the interim, poor Kingstonians joined in the protest and engaged in a riot which, while alarming, was confined only to part of Kingston and which lasted three days.[99] In spite of this, the university was besieged by the police for a week.[100]

The Jamaican parliament debated the protests on 17 October. Before they could do that, an opposition Member of Parliament, Maxwell Carey, from southeastern Westmoreland seized the mace and cried out ‘This is intellectual murder!’ before being escorted from the parliamentary chamber.[101] In the debate that followed, Prime Minister Shearer stated that Rodney ‘openly declared his belief that as Jamaica was predominantly a black country, all brown-skinned, mulatto people and their assets should be destroyed’.[102] Gray notes that ‘unable to find evidence of treason, the government eventually suggested that it barred Rodney for meeting “with Claudius Henry who was convicted in 1960 of Treason Felony” and having discussions involving the “condemnation of the democratic system of government of Jamaica.”’[103] Shearer’s speech, attacking Rodney and the university, particularly non-Jamaican university students and teachers, as the causes of the riot, played on anti-communist and anti-intellectual themes.[104] To this ‘emotional appeal’ the opposition PNP had no real answer; the leader of the opposition, Norman Manley, while calling the banning of Rodney ‘arbitrary’ did not seriously challenge it.[105]

A different position was taken by the spokespeople for Jamaican popular culture. Bob Marley and the Wailers, in ‘Fire, Fire’ noting that ‘Babylon’ was burning, sang

Fire, fire – They have no water…

Who you gonna run to? – Who you gonna run to?

Who you gonna run to? – They have no mercy.

Stand up and fight it – Stand up and fight it

Stand up and fight your fight

Till you give me freedom.[106]

One significant consequence of the protests was the establishment of new political organizations as the barriers between ‘the militant poor’ and the intelligentsia collapsed after the repressive power of the state had been directed against both simultaneously.[107] The immediate result was the establishment of the Abeng[108] collective, an organization which sought to continue Rodney’s work.[109] The group issued the first copy of its weekly paper Abeng in February, 1969. Abeng, which was distributed throughout the island and had a circulation of 20,000, sought to link popular culture to class struggle and black nationalism.[110] The paper lasted from February to October 1969, when the print shop where it was produced burned in a suspicious fire.[111]

After the fire, the collective dissolved and its members moved in a number of different directions: some went on to form Marxist-Leninist organizations such as the Workers’ Liberation League,[112] the Independent Trade Unions Advisory Council, and the Communist Party of Jamaica (all pro-Soviet), and also the Youth Forces for National Liberation (Maoist). Others went into the People’s National Party Youth Organisation or into the PNP itself under the leadership of Michael Manley, who had taken over from his father, Norman Manley, in February, 1969.[113]

The elections of 1972 were a watershed. As Waters puts it

Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, in contrast to the ‘racial harmony’ of the previous campaign [in 1967], was now saluting with clenched fists and threatening to ‘beat down Babylon’.[114]

Manley’s government was to unban previously forbidden writings,[115] and, in 1975, to remove the bans on Clive Thomas and Walter Rodney.[116] Jamaica underwent a significant cultural and political change in the period 1972-1980, and Rodney’s thought, openly available, played a significant role in the process.

Michael Manley’s commitment to democratic socialism involved an appropriation of Rastafari symbolism and expressions of solidarity with the suffering poor.[117] In the 1980s, the party sought to weld black nationalist and socialist appeals using a language of Third World Solidarity that echoes Rodney’s.[118]

Assessment

What was the impact of Rodney’s intellectual activism? On the one hand, it is clear that he moved both academics and middle class youths to see themselves as organically connected to the black masses.[119] On the other hand, he presented African history and African identity to Jamaicans of all classes in a manner that connected that history to the conditions of life of black Jamaicans in the late 20^th century. Obika Gray saw Rodney as having overcome the isolation of the intellectual ‘by fusing theory and practice’ and as having ‘served notice that the knowledge of the intellectual could and would be put at the service of the masses.’[120]

That Rodney’s historiography contained elements that were dubious (the invention of the wheel in China, the Soviets as non-oppressive whites,[121] Jesus as an Egyptian[122]) is not as much to the point as the fact that he presented African history as part of an overall project of promoting both pride in that history and revolutionary consciousness. Rodney’s vision of the role and concerns of black people in a world dominated by whites, however, is not without its problems. His description of World War II as a ‘white man’s war’, for example, is problematic as the war against Nazism was surely as much the battle of the black as of the white. Notwithstanding this, Rodney’s achievement was to tie two approaches to political resistance – cultural protest and anti-imperialism – into a single golden thread of political affirmation.

Rodney has been seen, by Caribbean scholars, in two ways, as a spokesman for black consciousness or as a Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist) revolutionary. Taking the former approach, Denis Benn, in his magisterial history of political thought in the Anglophone Caribbean, places him in the tradition of Marcus Garvey, who began, like Garvey, by seeing racial identity as the basis for political consciousness.[123]

Benn notes that Rodney had

succeeded in forging a link between a radical black consciousness ideology and the dispossessed elements within the society, drawn largely from among the Rastafari, and thus set the stage for the emergence of a short-lived, but effective, social movement which threatened to create a ‘revolutionary’ juncture within the society.[124]

Even though Rodney was ‘in the tradition of Garvey’ as a spokesman for a black identity, and like Garvey emphasized ‘race as the basis of political theory’, Benn notes, correctly, that Rodney was influenced by Fanon’s theory of revolution and an ‘orthodox Marxist class analysis and critique of imperialism’.[125] For Benn, Rodney’s work recasts Garveyism by adding the element of class. This made Rodney’s activism

the most important effort since Garvey to articulate a systematic doctrine of black consciousness specifically relevant to the needs of the Caribbean.[126]

The inclusion of class analysis ‘marked a break in the trajectory of the development of black consciousness.’[127]

Anthony Bogues, however, begins his examination of Rodney by taking note that Rodney considered himself a ‘black Marxist.’[128] For Bogues, Rodney was ‘a postcolonial revolutionary theorist following in the tradition of Frantz Fanon.’[129] This links him to a tradition of Caribbean political writing beginning with J.J. Thomas,[130] which used the tools of Western intellectual production to critique the ways in which Caribbean people were rendered invisible and dehumanized.[131] Rodney sought to ‘Caribbeanize Marxism’ and to develop ‘an alternative approach’ to leadership in a post-colonial context.[132]

Responding to criticisms that Marxism was one more European ideology, and thus unsuitable to the needs of black people, Rodney took the position that Marxism was an analytical tool that could be used with an understanding of the ‘internal realities of a given African society’.[133] Rodney’s analysis of post-colonial politics was not, however, orthodox Marxist. He sought, rather, to show how postcolonial elites in the Caribbean used ‘pseudo-socialism’ to promote a positive image abroad.[134]

Bogues notes that, ironically, one of the most serious critiques of Rodney’s approach came from the dean of Caribbean Marxism, C.L.R. James, who felt that Rodney did not wait (in the context of Guyana) for the ‘revolutionary people and the revolutionary class’ to be engaged in conflict with the government before raising the question of revolt. James also saw Rodney’s conception of political leadership as flawed because he had not seriously studied the question.[135]

Bogues sees Rodney, along with Fanon, as trying to find ‘forms of authentic liberation’, and sharing with Fanon an ethic of political engagement. Rodney, for Bogues, sought to ‘integrate the local dialect with the dialectic’ and in doing so forged a connection with the prophetic stream of black political radicalism.[136]

Another take on Caribbean Marxism, that of Silvio Torres-Saillant, places Rodney within a tradition of Caribbean political scholar-activists who

added to the region’s visibility through the vigorous embrace of a near orthodox Marxism of internationalist aspirations while they unabashedly upheld their identity as black Caribbeans.[137]

Rodney, on this view, belongs to a tradition that included Anton de Kom of Surinam; George Padmore and C.LR. James of Trinidad; Jacques Roumain, the Haitian writer; and the Martinican Fanon.[138] Noticeably absent from this list is Marcus Garvey.

Of these approaches, it is that of Bogues, which by foregrounding Rodney’s own self-identification with Marxism makes the most sense in understanding Rodney. Rodney’s achievement, seen in this light, is an assimilation of the ethnic and class struggles of black people in the Caribbean into a single struggle to affirm their worth as persons by taking power from the white and non-white agents of imperialism.

Even given his importance to black and Caribbean intellectual history, though, we have to note that Rodney’s political role has been largely elided in the social memory of Jamaica. As Ledgister and Waters have pointed out, the Rodney Riots are ‘silenced’ in the official record, and unofficial social memory is more focused on the riots than on Rodney as an individual.[139] He is remembered, we emphasise, by the age cohort that was in its intellectually formative years at the time of the riots, and by Caribbean public intellectuals who learned from him how to combine theory and practice and how to yoke pan-Africanism and Marxism together.[140]

That scholars examining Caribbean intellectual history or the history of black intellectual resistance to white racial domination continue to see Rodney as playing a role of great importance, however, indicates that what he had to say, and how he said it continues to be important.

Conclusion

Rodney’s Groundings is a work that, curiously, continues to matter in spite of a superficial datedness. It matters, I would say, not only to the audience for which it was intended, but for a wider audience seeking to understand the aspirations of colonized and racially oppressed peoples. Rodney’s exclusion from Jamaica, by a government fearful that he was bringing to the poor and dispossessed the news that they were poor and dispossessed, was indeed ‘intellectual murder’, but the victims of such murders have a habit of rising again.

Rodney brought to the Jamaica of the 1960s a black radical vision blended with a Marxist understanding of the world economic system. ‘Black power’ was, after all, a slogan that emerged from the struggles of black Americans,[141] but for Rodney it meant much more than demands for political recognition. The enemy is not ‘the white man’ but imperialism, and the answer is not black separatism but revolution.

Rodney’s thought and activism in 1968 remains relevant despite moments of naïveté – the uncritical approach Rodney takes in the Groundings to the Soviet Union comes to mind – and despite the fact that, with the end of the Cold War, it is shorn of part of its context; that is to say, the assumption that Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism could provide a viable alternative to the bourgeois state in the form of the state socialism that existed at that time.

Nonetheless, decades later, it continues to ring true. To be black is to be a locus of poverty and deprivation. It still means social and political exclusion in the Jamaica of the early 21^st century to those born into urban or rural poverty. Kingston today, as much as it did in 1968, and, indeed, as much as it did in 1938, contains two separate societies: a middle class uncertain of its status but oriented towards Western values and practices, and a lower class united in poverty and resisting that poverty through an assertion of pride in blackness.

Yet Kingston is but one corner of a world in which blackness carries with it a stigma of poverty and ‘backwardness’. For some the poverty may not be as great, or may be non-existent, and black culture is more valued by the wider world and by the black bourgeoisie than it was four decades ago, yet poverty still cuts across all boundaries ‘to find black people’.[142]

While the collapse of the Soviet Union has, it seems, made the orthodox Marxist approach to solving the problems of poor, colonised, or neocolonised peoples unavailable, alternatives continue to exist. The Cuban Revolution may be facing difficulties, but southeast of Jamaica the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chávez represents, yet again, the desire of the deprived, powerless, and dark-skinned, to achieve recognition of their humanity. Time, as the Jamaican proverb has it, langa dan rope.

[1] In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. URL: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

[2] Obika Gray, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960-1972; Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991, 1.

[3] Gray also notes that colonial laws continued to be used after independence against ‘groups and individuals thought to be subversive’ (Gray, 47).

[4] American concerns were driven by the exigencies of the US role in the Cold War. In the case of Jamaica, this meant fear of possible Cuban or other Communist influences.

[5] Gray, 38.

[6] John Charles Gannon “The Origins and Development of Jamaica’s Two-Party System, 1930-1975”; Ph.D. Dissertation, Washington University, St Louis, 1975, 257 fn 2.

[7] Rastafarianism is a much-studied religious and cultural phenomenon. Some of the most significant works on the subject are The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, by M.G. Smith, F.R. Augier, and R.M. Nettleford (Mona, Jamaica: Institute for Social and Economic Studies, 1960), Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica, by Joseph Owens (Kingston: Sangster’s Bookstores, 1976), The Rastafarians: The Dreadlocks of Jamaica, by Leonard Barrett (Kingston: Sangster’s Bookstores, 1977), Race, Class and Political Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics, by Anita M. Waters (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), and Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, by Horace Campbell (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1987)

[8] Waters, 29. Anthony J. Payne, Politics in Jamaica Revised Edition; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994, 17.

[9] Jamaica’s Gross Domestic Product per capita rose from J$97.80 in 1950 to J$514.50 in 1972 (Gannon, 180-181).

[10] I follow here the argument of Carl Stone in Class, State and Democracy in Jamaica (Kingston: Blackett Publishers, 1985), which focuses on the role of patronage in Jamaican party politics.

[11] F.S.J. Ledgister, Class Alliances and the Liberal-Authoritarian State: The Roots of Post-Colonial Democracy in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Surinam; Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998, 74.

[12] This derives from a long history of self-contempt within the culture of Jamaicans of African descent. This involved such things as valuing ‘good’ (straight or loosely-curled) hair over ‘bad’ (nappy) hair, using terms like ‘niggeritis’ to refer to indolence, and ‘Yu too black an ugly’ as an insult (particularly striking when delivered by one person of noticeably African features to another).

[13] Payne, 17.

[14] That race was seen in this way, and not only by middle class Jamaicans, can be noted from the impressions of an outside observer of the Jamaica of the mid 1960s, the Anglo-Hungarian writer George Mikes. For example, Mikes observed two black workers contemplating the statue of Paul Bogle (a hero of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion – Mikes confuses him with George William Gordon a liberal member of the Jamaica Assembly who was judicially murdered in the aftermath of the revolt) in Morant Bay and noted ‘One of the black workers suddenly burst out angrily: “You know, if he wasn’t a black man, they wouldn’t have made him so black.”’ (George Mikes, Not By Sun Alone; London: André Deutsch, 1967, 57). See also Holger Henke, Between Self-Determination and Dependency: Jamaica’s Foreign Relations, 1972-1989; Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000, 3. That Jamaicans, with the notable exception of Rastafarians, saw Africa and Africans in this way into the 1970s is attested by Kwame Dawes, the Ghanaian-born son of a Jamaican father, in a recent article (“Passport Control”, Granta 92, Winter 2005,66-69)

[15] Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith F. Hurwitz, Jamaica: A Historical Portrait; New York: Praeger, 1971, 228.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Gray, 49.

[18] Gray, 50.

[19] Gray, 51. Gray also notes that Henry had written a letter to Fidel Castro announcing his willingness to rise in revolt against the colonial regime.

[20] Gannon, 256.

[21] Gannon, 257-274.

[22] Gannon, 274.

[23] Seaga was to go on to become Minister of Development and Welfare (1962-1967), Minister of Finance (1967-1972), Leader of the JLP and of the parliamentary opposition (1974-1980), Prime Minister (1980-1989), and Leader of the Opposition again (1989-2005). He relinquished leadership of the JLP only last year, at the age of 75.

[24] Gannon, 283-287. Waters, 63-64. Thompson, a brown Jamaican lawyer who had served with distinction in the Royal Air Force during World War II, was the candidate with the most genuine African connection having practiced law in Tanganyika and Kenya and having been one of the lawyers who defended Jomo Kenyatta when he was charged with treason by the British.

[25] Gannon, 287.

[26] Waters, 63-64.

[27] Mikes, 102.

[28] Mikes, 103-104.

[29] Waters, 69. Payne, 20.

[30] Payne, 20.

[31] Waters, 76-77.

[32] Waters, 79.

[33] Seaga was responsible for the annual Jamaica Festival, held in commemoration of independence, from 1962 to 1971. The Festival Commission following him from the Ministry of Development and Welfare to the Ministry of Finance in 1967. In 1968, a poem of his ‘River Mumma’ won a silver medal in the Festival Literary Competition.

[34] Waters, 80.

[35] Rupert C. Lewis, Walter Rodney: 1968 Revisited; Kingston: Canoe Press, 1998, 10-12. One of Waters informants called the Rastafari crowd at the airport ‘the most terrifying demonstration of mass good nature I’d ever seen’ (Waters, 71). Waters and Lewis have differing perceptions of the impact of the visit on the middle class. Lewis states that ‘the middle-class was ambivalent confused and somewhat hostile to the visit’ (Lewis, 11) while Waters states that the absence of conflict and the visible cooperation of Rastas with the authorities ‘helped create an atmosphere of tolerance, if not goodwill, extended to the Rastas by the middle class’ (Waters, 71).

[36] Gannon, 311 fn. Walter Rodney, The Groundings with my Brothers; Chicago: Research Associates School Times Publications, 1990 [1969], 62. All publications on the banned list, with the exception of publications of the DeLawrence Company of Chicago which were seen as promoting sorcery, were unbanned by the PNP government in 1972. Lewis, 40. Lewis notes that copies of Muhammad Speaks were passed from hand to hand in the slums of Kingston (Lewis, 20).

[37] Copies of the original Writers & Readers edition were circulated clandestinely in the late 1960s and early 1970s; one was passed to me in 1971. The Dungle (Dunghill) was the municipal rubbish dump in west Kingston on which many of the poorest urban residents lived, ‘dis land o’ shit’ as one character in the novel calls it. It was bulldozed in 1966 and the Tivoli Gardens housing estate built where it had stood. Unsurprisingly, Tivoli Gardens was populated entirely by staunch supporters of the JLP and of their member of parliament, Edward Seaga. The government of Michael Manley, which included Patterson’s brother Percival as a minister, employed the sociologist as a consultant for a time in the 1970s.

[38] Lewis 40.

[39] Gray, 151.

[40] Lewis, 41.

[41] Lewis, 40-41.

[42] Rodney spent eight and a half months as a lecturer at the Mona campus of the University. (Lewis, 2.)

[43] Rodney, 64.

[44] Gannon, 311 fn.

[45] Gannon, 311 fn.

[46] Lewis, 41. The Special Branch is the political unit of the police force.

[47] Lewis, 3.

[48] Lewis, 4, 16, 37-38.

[49] Rodney, 16.

[50] Rodney, 16-17. Lewis notes that some students feared the implications of Rodney’s argument as this meant socialist revolution (Lewis, 34).

[51] Rodney, 18.

[52] Rodney, 18.

[53] Rodney, 19.

[54] Rodney, 19.

[55] Rodney, 20.

[56] Rodney, 21-22.

[57] Rodney, 23.

[58] Rodney 24. Emphasis in the original.

[59] Rodney, 26-27. In fact, Rodney’s statement contains a significant false assertion – that the British abolished the existing Old Representative constitution of Jamaica in 1865. In actuality, the Jamaica Assembly voted itself out of existence after the Morant Bay Rebellion out of fear of encroaching black and mulatto political gains. It was the fears of the white Jamaican ruling class, rather than British imperial decision-makers that led to the retrocession of legislative power to the crown. (See Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792-1865; Bridgeport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.)

[60] Rodney, 27. Ken Post notes that ‘passages in the report… presented a very unfavourable picture of the results of centuries of British rule’ and that this would have given the German propaganda machine ‘splendid material for attacks on British colonialism’ (Ken Post, Strike the Iron, A Colony at War: Jamaica 1939-1945; The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1981, I. 86).

[61] Rodney, 27.

[62] Rodney, 28.

[63] Rodney, 28.

[64] Rodney 29.

[65] Rodney, 29.

[66] Rodney, 29.

[67] Rodney, 31. Almeida, a mulatto, was at the time the only non-white member of the Cuban government.

[68] Rodney, 31. There are white peasants in the parishes of Westmoreland and St Elizabeth whose conditions of life do not differ from those of their black neighbours.

[69] Rodney, 32.

[70] Rodney, 33-34.

[71] The texts in chapters 4 and 5 of Groundings are summaries of the lectures, rather than the lectures themselves. They nonetheless constitute a brief and lucid overview of the subject.

[72] Rodney, 35.

[73] Rodney, 37.

[74] Rodney, 39.

[75] This is a particularly odd claim, especially in light of the fact that in the next lecture Rodney was to unambiguously claim ancient Egypt as an African civilization, and the Egyptians used the principle of the wheel, not to mention wheels themselves, probably at a time when it was unknown in China.

[76] Rodney, 39-40.

[77] Rodney, 51.

[78] Rodney, 51.

[79] Rodney, 53.

[80] Rodney, 56.

[81] Rodney, 56-57.

[82] Rodney, 58.

[83] Rodney, 12.

[84] Rodney, 12.

[85] Rodney, 13. The terms ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ were given currency in Jamaican political life in the maiden speech of Edward Seaga to the Legislative Council (the forerunner of the present-day Senate) in 1959.

[86] Rodney, 13.

[87] Rodney, 13-14.

[88] Rodney, 14.

[89] Rodney, 14-15.

[90] Rodney, 60-61.

[91] Rodney, 62-63. The term ‘Babylonian Captivity’ is a deliberate echo of Rastafarian belief. Rastas compare the condition of blacks in the diaspora to that of the Jews captive in Babylon.

[92] Rodney, 63-64.

[93] Rodney, 64. Lewis lists a number of the places where Rodney spoke (Lewis, 20)

[94] While the scale of the protest was unprecedented, UWI students had taken direct action in protest at the expulsion of Bertell Ollman in 1966 (Gray, 151).

[95] Rodney, 65-66.

[96] Rodney, 65.

[97] Payne, 23.

[98] Payne, 23-24.

[99] Gray, 160. Payne, 25-26.

[100] Payne, 26.

[101] Carey, a PNP back-bencher, had not previously been known for any particular activism. He died the next year and was succeeded in his constituency by a young lawyer, P.J. Patterson who campaigned using the slogan ‘Young, gifted, and black.’ Patterson has been since 1993 the Prime Minister of Jamaica; the first person of purely or overwhelmingly African ancestry to hold that office.

[102] Gannon, 311 fn.

[103] Gray, 161.

[104] Payne, 26-27. The president of the Guild of Undergraduates, and principal organizer of the student protest, was Ralph Gonzales, a white student from St Vincent. Gonsalves would go on to become a lecturer in political science at the university, a lawyer, and, eventually, prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

[105] Payne, 27.

[106] Waters, 100.

[107] Gray, 160.

[108] The abeng was the cowhorn used as a means of communication by the Maroon rebels of the 18^th century. The word is of Twi (Fanti and Ashanti) origin (F. G. Cassidy & R. B. Le Page, Dictionary of Jamaican English 2nd Edition; Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002, 2).

[109] Abeng was also inspired by the fortnightly journal Moko published in Trinidad by Lloyd Best (Gray, 168-169).

[110] Waters, 96. Gray, 169-182.

[111] Waters, 97.

[112] Later to become the Workers’ Party of Jamaica.

[113] Waters, 98.

[114] Waters, 90.

[115] Waters, 164.

[116] Al Creighton, ‘The Walter Rodney factor in West Indian literature’ URL: http://www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com/wpa/rodney_literature.html (Originally published in the Stabroek News, 18 June 2000.)

[117] Waters, 139.

[118] Waters, 164-176.

[119] F.S.J. Ledgister and Anita M. Waters "Commemorating Caribbean public scholarship: the memory of Walter Rodney in Jamaica," paper presented at the Atlanta University Center Conference on Walter Rodney, Atlanta, Georgia, March 23, 2004.

[120] Gray, 153.

[121] One is not sure that this point of view would have been acceptable to, say, a Crimean Tatar.

[122] Rodney, 40.

[123] Denis Benn, The Caribbean: An Intellectual History, 1774-2003; Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2004, 249.

[124] Benn, 249.

[125] Benn, 250.

[126] Benn, 250.

[127] Benn, 250.

[128] Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals; New York: Routledge, 2003, 125.

[129] Bogues, 126.

[130] Thomas, a Trinidadian, was the first black West Indian to directly challenge white assertions of inherent black inferiority requiring colonial rule into an infinite future.

[131] Bogues, 127.

[132] Bogues, 128.

[133] Bogues, 137. Bogues is here citing a speech Rodney gave in New York in 1975.

[134] Bogues, 142.

[135] Bogues, 143-144.

[136] Bogues, 150.

[137] Silvio Torres-Saillant, An Intellectual History of the Caribbean; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 152.

[138] Torres-Saillant, 152.

[139] Ledgister & Waters, 4.

[140] Ledgister & Waters, 4. Gray, 157. Lewis, 36-37.

[141] It is worth noting, though, that Stokely Carmichael, who first used the phrase, was a Trinidadian.

[142] Rodney, 19.