MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 13 October 1996, online here.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
A White American friend of mine, who lives and teaches in New York keeps at me every time he gets a chance, with the same question; why is it that Antiguans have such high tolerance for corruption and bad governance?
I have evaded him many a time. But he keeps on, at every polite opportunity returning with the question. Once I fobbed him off with the answer that life is lived forward, and then understood backward as history. History teaches By that I meant, and he understood me clearly to mean, in the philosophic sense, that it is only after we have gone through what the great German Philosopher Hegel called “the patient labour of the negative,” that is, the struggle to overcome corruption and bad governance (which in many ways are one and the same thing) that we will understand why people here tolerated corruption and bad governance for so long.
I reminded him that Mayor Daley and his corrupt group lasted longer in Chicago than corruption and bad governance have lasted here. I was, of course, trying to be neat in suggesting that corruption and bad governance was nothing new historically, and it occurred in the U.S., in England with its “rotten boroughs” in the Catholic theocracy of the Middle Ages, in the “Babylon” that was the Roman Empire of antiquity, as it does in Africa and the Caribbean today. That, to be sure, did not satisfy my friend.
He was only satisfied when I said I had no answers, but I had some views which I will explore in print.
The other day, a very close friend of mine, gave me a most interesting book entitled The Colonial Legacy in Caribbean Literature by Amon Saba Saakana, with an introduction by my very good friend and great writer from Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Writing on the question of colonial education, in the Caribbean Amon Saakana says
“Secondary education had its own purpose: to foster a sense of belonging to Britain [ and if not Britain the British Empire] and to perpetuate Britain’s cultural tradition thereby creating an indigenous elite, into Caribbean societies.”
The writer continues
“English History and English took a prominent role in the syllabus. With history the young Caribbean intellectual would be familiar with all the details of Britain’s imperial glory; and in literature the model of the English poem or short story, with its quaint language and images, would foster in the youths an inner longing to migrate away from the lands of their birth.”
Amon Saakana continues his persuasive argument this way:
“By providing a false consciousness, hence a divided self, Britain was creating an artificial crisis of personality. If the child is not instructed in its own history, its own geography, its own literature, then what was offered would provide the basis of a surrogate self. But that self being false and contradictory would create psychic trauma and disturbance in the child, even as it grew to adulthood.”
And I add, beyond adulthood.
I certainly experienced that after being educated here at school. I left secondary school, with my head full of all the details of Britain’s imperial glory, and to a lesser extent Europe. I knew nothing at all of Africa. Save that it was the Dark Continent, past, present and future. Nothing I learnt in geography was even vaguely related back to Antigua. Such Caribbean geography as I learnt was superficial. The English literature I learnt left me ambivalent. From Blake, Wordsworth and Byron, I got a sense, rather a passion for freedom, while Tennyson and Kipling and the rest of the sacred gang celebrated, naturally then England.
But here I question Saakana, when I left school say in 1960 there was no substantial body of Caribbean literature to be taught. Mittleholzer, Selvon, Lamming, Naipaul, were then beginning to be published. Mr. Reg Samuel and Dr. Gregson Davis, two outstanding teachers I had, encouraged me to read though these were not on my syllabus.
I remember Mr. Reg Samuel stunning me as a youngster, when he said that “we are the only people on earth, when asked to draw a man, drew a white man, while Arabs would draw a man looking like an Arab, a Chinese would draw a Chinese, and a European a European.” Every time I drew, I drew a man or woman with white features. I gave up art at which I was not any good anyway.
Later, I was to understand the thorough distortion of consciousness which brought about this state of being. It was, to be sure, rooted in a deep-seated self-contempt, which, had been long inculcated by formal and informal education. Again you will notice my divergence from Amon Saakana. Everything around me in Home and Church and Society reinforced the view that alien people were the best. Power, status and achievement were all white and alien in the social milieu in which I grew up. I knew, without being taught, that if I was good, I would eventually be like the British Governor, the Senior Civil Servants, doctors or Senior Police officers. Save for Reg Samuel, Dr. Blackett and Gregson Davis, there was no teacher who taught me, who had even a trace of anti-colonialism in them, and Dr Blackett’s did not emerge in the classroom or in his pedagogy, but when I knew him later as a fellow staff member on the A.G.S. staff. Father Brown, an Englishman, was far more anti-colonial, than any who taught me when young.
By the way, Auchenleck, headmaster of the AGS before my time was vastly different. His Botany educated in the local flora and fauna. When before his death I spoke to him, he was deeply skeptical of the purposes of education, and said it made “little colonial boys and girls.” He too was English, but taught in Africa.
When later, I taught at several other schools, I found few teachers who had even a trace of anti-colonialism in them. They accepted colonialism and the consciousness that went with it, as a way of life, in spite of Naipaul, James, Lamming, and in spite of having learnt Caribbean history and not English. Something deeper was responsible for this false consciousness.
Recently, and as a result of an on-going debate over two years with my father-in-law George Derrick I have had to look back on elementary education as experienced here. Incidentally, George Sprugoo Derrick debates by the method of incisive questioning, rather than statement, in the manner of Socrates.
George Sprugoo Derrick and others of his time, including my late mother, were of the view that their teachers were good because they inculcated “discipline.” When they utter the word ‘discipline’ it sounds like a Holy Sacrament. This discipline they associate with “punishment”. A regular chastisement, meted out with rod and strap, with monotonous regularity, for anything and everything. And theirs not to reason why.
I beg to disagree. It is not discipline at all. It is what it was, punishment. Discipline is not punishment. Discipline is the organisation of an individual or individuals for the achievement of an accepted goal and the Code of Conduct that goes with it as well as the taboos.
Such punishment as was inflicted in elementary schools from 1835 to 1955, was not towards any end. It was at best an end itself. I am sure I have provoked the ire of a number of oldsters. Let me explain. For I am deadly serious.
Now the first Report on Education in the Caribbean was written by the Rev. John Sterling in 1835. He said that the predominant tendency “to European eyes” among the ex-slaves “may be called the servile and barbarous characterised by indolence, vagrancy, debauchery, deceitfulness and contented ignorance.” Remember Sterling and his Royal Commission were not writing for writing’s sake. They were in fact prescribing for education in the Caribbean.
It was Sterling thought, the purpose of education, elementary education, to get this tendency out of the ex-slaves. He saw the parents of the children as engines of disorder, and children were best kept away from the parents of ex-slaves. It was a gross misconduct. It went into Sterling’s prescription nevertheless.
Permit me to tarry on this a bit. The Rev. Sterling was emphatic that “the performance of the functions of the labouring class [elementary school graduates] will depend entirely on the power over their minds of the same prudential and moral motives which govern, more or less, the mass of the people here [England]. If they are not so disposed to fulfil these functions, property will perish in the colonies for lack of human impulsion. The whites will no longer reside there and the liberated Negroes will probably cease to be progressive.”
This classic piece of nonsense the Rev. Sterling wrote 31 years after Haiti was independent, when all Europe and North America combined against Haiti, to press the first Black Independent Republic on earth, into the ground.
To Sterling education had to drive out of the Negro, to use the term of the time, this innate tendency “to indolence, vagrancy, debauchery, deceitfulness and contented ignorance.”
I contend that the strap and the rod was used so profligately in elementary education here because the wielders felt and believed that their black charges were innately indolent, vagrant, given to “debauchery, deceitfulness and contented ignorance.” And they, the teachers and head teachers had to whip “the offending Adam or Ham” out of them, regularly, systematically and monotonously. They made the servile, more servile. These educators, black educators, did not challenge the servility, they reinforced with whip and strap, and in the very content of education too. They were fulfilling to the nth the colonial purpose of producing “a labouring class” willing to provide to the max the needs of greater wealth on the grounds that, without this methodology, “property will perish in the colonies for lack of human impulsion. The whites would not longer reside here, and the Caribbean, without the whites as owners of all major means of production, would fall back into barbarism. For, without the whites in power and property, even “the liberated Negroes themselves will probably cease to be progressive.”
If you look carefully and dispassionately at V.C. Bird and his successor Lester Bird, you will see these same assumptions underlying their governance. I urge you to look carefully and dispassionately.
The oldsters will say but we learnt a lot despite the beatings. I challenge that too.
I am going to call the same Rev. John Sterling in 1835. In his Report he said that the Bishop of Jamaica had given the Sterling Commission “some of the selections and catechisms used by his teachers and some of the children are said on examination to have answered very satisfactorily.”
Then the Rev Sterling in his Report continued this way. This means that “they have learnt by rote with great accuracy.” Sterling again says, what we all know to be true, “a child may learn the whole Bible and yet no whit more religious, and in spite of the catechetical form of composition, might be able to repeat all Plato’s dialogues and still never be the wiser.” So indeed. So much so that elementary, secondary and tertiary education at UWI produced a Minister of Education here, who publicly on Radio and TV, “yearned for the good old colonial days.”
The ceaseless floggings were in pursuit of this catechetical form of education, learn by rote. Plato’s dialogues, however profound, are only valid when in reading them we apply the knowledge in the Dialogues to our own particular circumstances. Otherwise Plato is a useless abstraction, a decoration at best for certification.
What I am contending can now be made clear. If as the oldsters contend, their sacred gang of teachers inculcated discipline, how is it (to use the form of Plato’s Dialogues) that they, the students, now men, tolerate the indiscipline, the lawlessness, on which corruption feeds? It is now pellucid that they did not learn discipline.
What we learnt, in elementary and secondary schools with the constant floggings, was to accept the white structure of ownership and control, and that our task was to go on working for them just as before and in spite of the degradations and despoliations of the rulers. Ours not to reason why?
What we learnt, in elementary and secondary schools, with the constant floggings was to believe that if we reasoned why and found the establishment wanting, refused to fulfil our functions until things were put right is that “property will perish in the colonies for lack of human impulsion. The whites will no longer reside here,” and the whole society will fall into barbarism.
Only this year, at the height of the General Strikes in February and March, the Employers, urged their employees, not to resist unjust taxation, and a persistently unaccountable government, because tourism would be affected, and, in consequence we will all decline into barbarism.
It surprised the hell out of me, that this ruling class 1835 nonsense, crudely and baldly stated, but repeated ad nauseam over Radio and Television still held sway in 1995 with the mass of the people. But nevertheless, it did. It is the last leg of Old Corruption. It will be overcome. It must be overcome.
What then I am suggesting is that our seemingly endless tolerance of corruption has to do with the political economy in which we have lived our lives, the structure of ownership and control, that is foreign ownership and government control of jobs, plus the history of education which has re-enforced it since 1835. Have I made myself clear?
Last updated on 9 February 2022