MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 27 June 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
I was held in a gripping conversation the other day with some young people. They had read my last piece on Dr Rodney and Federation.
Every single one of them, the oldest 24, said they were unaware that these West Indian islands were once united between 1958–62. The oldest was born in 1973 and was unaware that there was once a Federation of the West Indies. The West Indian flag once flattered in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, St Lucia, Grenada, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Dominica, Antigua & Barbuda, St Kitts-Nevis & Anguilla, Montserrat.
I did not bother to ask what they were taught in school. Not every student does history. And not every student who does history studies the more modern period. Besides a Chinese wall has been erected around Federation and everybody avoids discussion of it. Everybody. It is, to be sure, the biggest failure in our history. Federation is the Black Sheep of West Indies history and so everybody ignores it. The young it seems, who are familiar with terms like globalisation still think that the unity of the Caribbean, even of the English-speaking Caribbean, known as the West Indies, is a pipe dream. They cannot see West Indian politicians, as they know them, “ever, ever, giving up their insular thrones”. Never, never happen, said another. History, I reminded does not depend on leaders, but more so on the social forces set in motion.
Naturally, most of what I said to them was said from my head. One of the young persons present said to me a surprising thing, that African history was oral, and passed on orally from generation, and maybe it is that break with our oral traditions that brought about “our current indifference to everything, causing us to cherish other peoples politics and history above our own.” The speaker was female and 18 and I marvelled at the depth of perception.
I responded by saying that oral history often gets over-laid with myth, and while historical myths can inspire, in our time, modernity demands that we document and substantiate our story.
But, I took her point. Until we have a view of ourselves and our sojourn here beneath the stars, which is a part of our everyday thinking and being, and rooted in our own experience, we will always be captive to foreign schemes and we will squander everything, lands, off-shore islands, beaches environment, because we have no organic connection with our natural and historical environs.
In speaking to the young group I said that perhaps the best way to explore a subject was to begin with the current view, and from there, work backwards to the beginning, in order to go forward.
I said that on Federation the man who had the best view, since he tried, with energy and acumen, to save it, was Sir Arthur Lewis, the world famous West Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, born in St Lucia, whose parents were Antiguan.
Sir Arthur Lewis had written something with which I had at first disagreed, I had argued with it every which way, but the force of events has made me come to see it as distilled wisdom.
Sir Arthur Lewis had written this in 1968:
“The current political leaders are so scarred by the mutual hatred and contempt which they acquired for each other on the last round [the aborted Federation of 1958-62] that they are not likely to make the effort. However, they will pass on in the next dozen years, and yield to a new generation. Then West Indians will once more face their destiny which is to come together as a nation.”
That Sir Arthur Lewis was chronologically wrong is not in question. It is patent. Sir Grantley Adams, Sir Norman Manley, Dr Eric Williams, Robert Bradshaw have all passed from the political realm, and have been succeeded by others. And nothing has happened. We still remain fragmented mini-states, wallowing in various degrees of structural adjustment. And still we persist in the folly of insular mini-states, even when over the world small states with less than 20 million people have become a political and economic anomaly.
For instance, I pointed out, China with 1.2 billion people a backward country of mediaeval serfs in 1949, 115 years after we were emancipated from slavery, now produces half the world’s toys, two-thirds of its shoes, most of the world’s bicycles, lamps, power tools and sweaters. China’s exports of high-end product, that is, of machinery and electronics, jumped 60 per cent in 1995!
In that scenario of global production where are we, we in the West Indies, who really created what is today the world market? It is our creation as sugar colonies, that caused this movement of ships from Africa to the New World, and the movement of sugar and cotton back to the Old World of Europe. The World Market came into being. Sugar fuelled the industrial revolution, at the base of it were African slaves in the Caribbean and the Americas. Now we who were once central are marginal to the world market.
Over time, the slaves have been freed, but a society, that is, a community of interests, promoting human development has not been formed. The West Indies was created to serve the interests of Others and we have not overcome that ignominious beginning and come to serve our interests, our own community of interests, and so relate to the world. Therein lies the rub.
But after emancipation in 1834–1838, the next big moment was 1865, the Morant Bay Rebellion, when in Jamaica, peasants and workers said, the land was not for alien planters, but for the people. This was the first clarion call to West Indian nationhood. And the British treated it as such, by repressing democratic development not just in Jamaica but in the English-speaking Caribbean, and imposing instead, direct rule from the Colonial Office in London, abolishing even the limited elected assemblies in the area.
The point however was made, Bogle and Gordon in Jamaica had served notice that the British colonial arrangements of West Indian society were not just a hindrance, but the obstacle of obstacles to West Indian becoming.
I should add that the idea of Federation of these islands, first came from the British, not as nationhood, that is, the organisation of resources for the development of people and things, in the area. The British idea of West Indian Federation was for the administrative convenience of Britain as Colonial power.
First of all the Eastern Caribbean was administered from Barbados. This comprised Barbados and the Leeward Islands. In 1671 the Leewards were separated from Barbados. Barbados then became the seat of the Governor of the Windward Islands. The British Colonial Office tried various permutations and combinations of the islands, always for the administrative convenience of the British Colonial Office, and never ever for the economic and political convenience of the West Indian islands. The economies of the islands were never linked one to another. The linkage, the economic and political linkage, was always each island to Britain.
Thus people with a common history, a common language in a common geographical area were kept as separate as East from West. Iron filings were disoriented from the magnet of unity.
I could argue, and argue persuasively, that cricket was the one activity that gave to the people of these English-speaking islands a sense of shared identity. They all produced sugar, they all endured the plantation, but plantation society was linked to England, not to each other. The very mode then of colonial plantation production re-inforced insularity, not unity. Similarity of production relations did not breed solidarity across the sea. Each endured its own colonial oppression, in a common history, but without the linkages that could make acting together feasible. Even after trade unions emerged, bringing labour together, they were insular organisations. Trade Unions in different islands never acted together. How the British reinforced that insularity at every turn is a long story, which though necessary, would distract us here.
But it is well to remember that the U.S. became an independent slave-holding democracy in 1776. It too feared a united West Indies of emancipated slaves. The very existence of such a state would have, as you moderns say, impacted on the slaveholding foundations of the United States. That, as historians say, was objective reality. How the objective becomes subjective and vice versa, is the interplay of history.
After 1865, you will recall Britain had shut down the limited elected Assemblies or legislatures of the West Indies.
By the end of the First World War, a movement for self-government, as opposed to government from the Colonial Office, started in the Caribbean. This was initiated by two men, one white, one black.
The first, the white Corsican, born in Trinidad was Captain Andrew Cipriani. It is well to remember that it was the life-and-death struggle of the first global war in which Andrew A. Cipriani, came to recognise and defend the equality of the barefoot black man. On the battlefield, in perhaps the sternest test of humanity, Cipriani saw the black West Indian man, hitherto barefoot before enlisted, as equal to any in terms of courage, daring, solidarity with his fellows, selfless devotion to a cause larger than the individual, indeed, all the classic virtues of humanity. It was what I call an authenticating experience. After that, Cipriani could not live in the old way. Cipriani with that experience, as white upper middle-class Trinidadian, had to break ranks with his social station, and instead, took up the cause of the barefoot man.
In 1919 after the war and upon his return to Trinidad he revived the Trinidad Workingman’s Association. This formerly defunct body, grew as few organisations have ever grown. It had struck a receptive chord amongst the population. By the 1930’s it numbered 120,000 members out of a population of 450,000! It was not a Trade Union. Trade Unions were still outlawed by Britain, home of the Trade Union.
Even to this day, as I write now it still continues to amaze me, that ordinary people joined an organisation in tens of thousands, which did not bring wages and increased consumption but which was primarily and essentially concerned with popular representation by election to the legislature. Cipriani’s prime concern was adult suffrage, to everyone over 21 the vote. It was a major challenge to the un-representative system. The British Colonial Office was incensed. A white had become the leader of its biggest opposition in the region, in the interest and on behalf of blacks. Cipriani was, the Colonial Office forgot, not just another white, but a white West Indian, his conceptions of himself and of blacks forged in the red hot heat of the globe’s most cruel war. Human courage was never more severely tested. Blacks including Norman Manley of Jamaica had met and passed that test. After that, they could not abide the old colonial arrangements of West Indian society, either racially or economically, and therefore not politically.
Cipriani’s Working Man’s Association also concerned itself with factory legislation, land settlement, slum clearance, education reforms and I repeat, popular representation in the then exclusive legislature. Cipriani, I remind too, had served with the British West Indian Regiment, men of the region, they were one and indivisible in battle. A sense of West Indianness was emerging. Cipriani expressed it and called for a Federation of the islands. A new conception of Federation, not as administrative convenience, but as a collective group seeking to transform conditions through co-operation.
T. Albert Marryshow was not to the manor born, as was Cipriani. He was of humbler origins, as they say, but a highly disciplined radical of great charm. He formed the Representative Government Association of Grenada in 1914. However it was after the War, that Marryshow and his organisation took flight. He thought and acted in terms of all the islands working together for political reform. Not a Colonial Federation, for British administrative convenience, but a Federation which would change the system and bring West Indians into administrative control. Marryshow wrote, spoke and journeyed throughout the Eastern Caribbean.
Marryshow’s organisation spread to St Vincent, St Lucia, Dominica and, be it noted, St Kitts. There was an important difference. Marryshow and Cipriani were for complete adult suffrage. The leaders of organisations in other territories were for limited suffrage. Only those with so much property would be allowed to vote. They were, it will be noted too, victims of colonial mis-education. Even those organised around and for change were victims of the conceptions of the old order. They could not break. Eventually such behaviour would break the Federation.
I move now to 1932 – the Roseau Conference. At the invitation of the Dominica Tax-payers Reform Association a conference of West Indian leaders was summoned to meet in October 1932.
That conference did a remarkable thing. It drafted, as its first act, a Federal Constitution to include Trinidad, Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent, St Lucia, Antigua & Barbuda, St. Kitts-Nevis, Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands. The chairman of this Conference, Mr C.E.A. Rawle, a noted lawyer in Dominica, declared “the door was left open for British Guiana and Jamaica.”
There was to be in this West Indies Federation a single chamber legislature of 33 members with 27 elected. Those elected would not be by direct ballot, but by the legislative councils of each territory. The government, the Federal government, would be financed by each territory making contributions in proportion to its revenues. It sought too, to remove tariff barriers between the islands on all goods, “wherever practicable.” There would be a united West Indian civil service. The Federal Government was to have power on 24 matters, inclusive of police, education, public health, commerce, public loans, postal services, shipping etc. Where the law of any unit of the Federation conflicted with Federal law, federal law was to prevail. There was to be a West Indian Supreme Court, with puisne judges in the Windward and Leeward Islands.
Cipriani, thought to be the most radical leader present, found that the leaders of the smaller islands had stepped ahead of him. He himself said:
“During the short time I have been here, I have found myself in the unusual position, instead of putting my foot on the accelerator, I find myself putting my hand on the brake. And this will tell you how enthusiastic and eager all you leaders have been.”
The point is the 1932 Conference saw internal self-government as inseparable from Federation. But it did not attempt to change the oppressive economic foundation of society.
The Roseau Conference, however, though it had made a departure was still shackled by colonial obeisance or the colonial mentality. It could not and did not break with the old order. It was hamstrung.
This is reflected in its declaration which said “the time had come when it would be inequitable for any of the West Indian islands, no matter how greatly it suffered from economic hardship, or the cataclysms of nature, to expect that any further burden should be on its account laid upon the Mother Country, sorely vexed and troubled as she is by her own tremendous responsibilities and the hunger and destitution of millions of her people. The West Indian islands must in the future carry their own deficits.”
Except for the last sentence, it is riddled through and through with a sense of the benevolence of the colonial power, and not a sense of their own exploitation and oppression by what they termed the “Mother Country.” If Federation was not aimed at overcoming exploitation and oppression of the old plantation system, then it was Federation in name but not in substance.
The Roseau Conference which began on a radical note of departure ended in rank conservatism. Cipriani had forced this issue. Said Cipriani:
“Our policy is this: No Federation without self-government and no self government without adult franchise. On that we stand or fall.”
The Roseau Conference did not stand. Maybe it did not fall to be charitable. But it adopted the idea that all over 21 would “gradually” get the vote, and qualifications to vote, would be left to individual legislatures. They agreed in principle only to sabotage in fact. It was a formula that would recur and recur.
This formula is this. The professional elite would seek through Federation new administrative and constitutional arrangements which would open new posts and pay to them, through West Indian Courts and a West Indian Civil Service, as well as becoming legislators by election or appointment. After that, they would accept and insist upon the old colonial, economic arrangements of society. Deliverance for the professional elite meant Federation and self-government with the mass of people still stuck in the mire of the old oppressive order, with better wages as a palliative for their part in the struggle.
That conception or misconception was both to make and mar the West Indies Federation. It is to go beyond it that constitutes a new future.
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