MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 20 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.
Last Friday, June 13 was one of those days. One of those days when you must go down memory lane. It was the 17th Anniversary of Walter Rodney’s death to the day and date. It was a Black Friday in more ways than one. On June 9, 1989 I had buried Arah Hector my first wife. Perhaps in a way, no two of my contemporaries had had more influence on me.
I remembered well that fatal night, in 1980 not long after I had gone to bed, when the phone rang. It was my dear friend and brother Conrad Luke. He was choked with emotion. He asked if I had heard. Heard what? It had just come over the BBC. What had just come over the BBC? The worst news. What was the worst news? Walter Rodney was killed by a bomb in Guyana, Lukie said he was coming by. In the interim as I waited for Lukie, shell-shocked, numbed, for once overwhelmed by this mounting tide of Barbarism – a bomb had exploded in Grenada killing children – for some unknown reason Martin Carter’s poem sprung to mind:
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This I have learnt |
I felt consumed by Walter Rodney’s murder. I had ruled out murder as an instrument of political policy in the English-speaking Caribbean. I knew that murder was used as a political weapon. Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, in Duvalier’s Haiti, or in Batista’s Cuba, but somehow I felt that the English-speaking Caribbean was insulated from such. In 1983 Maurice Bishop was murdered by his very own political colleagues. The roof of my world had a gaping hole!
In 1989 March, in a heartfelt conversation with Arah, I had told her that I was through with electoral politics. Endearingly she had appealed to me to put that decision on hold. By May 28, the same year, 1989, Arah was dead by murder most foul. I was away in Africa returning via London to Antigua. It was in London I got the dreadful news. Lukie again had to deliver news of the disaster. This time it was my wife! This time I dropped the phone. George Odlum travelling with me, had to take the rest of the message. The foundation of my world had collapsed with precipitous speed. George Odlum supported. He warned that the sinister would turn my personal tragedy against me. The sinister, George counselled, had been let loose in Antigua. I listened, numbed, but absorbent.
I promised George then and there, that whatever the sinister might say, however they might try to twist the truth of Arah’s murder, like knaves making a trap for fools, be they friend or foe, I would not be drawn into it for Arah’s sake. For none who knew, or barely knew, could dispute the high quality of the relationship between Arah and I. Nor could any, however mean, deny either that it was a relationship at once profoundly and emotionally gratifying and no less political in its coupling. Those who would wish to twist the truth of that had their own malign or maverick purposes. And I, for one, would not drag Arah down to their gutter level. I had our children to raise and that I would do as widowed father of the family, as well as any father ever did, and do so to Arah’s memory. For Arah and I were both fatherless. Our mothers and aunts had fathered. That then was a sacred bond. She had asked, in a moving moment, that I not quit politics. I would see this as part of her last will and testament, and so would continue – always keeping her political interest foremost. It was all I could do and had to do. She, Arah Hector, was not interested in political office, but in settling in motion that self-movement which would allow women to emancipate themselves as part of the movement of ordinary people to represent themselves and not be represented by the Other.
But the tragedies were coming thick and fast. It were as though I had supped deep of horrors. The very day of my return to Antigua after Arah’s all too cruel murder, driving with Lukie from the airport, he pulled the car aside, to report that C.L.R. James was dead. At least, this time by natural causes. I had just been in England, overnighting, and under the impact of the terrible news I had not even remembered to call C.L.R.’s home. I thought I was composed. This failure to call confirmed how disoriented I was. The world was out of joint – at any rate, my world. I buried Arah on a Friday, June 9, 1989, and left Antigua the Sunday for C.L.R.’s funeral. It was a funereal time. It was the dark time, my love, Martin Carter wrote. So it was indeed.
Later to restore my own faith, I turned of course, to my mentor – C.L.R. James. Walter Rodney and I were born in the same year. James had said something about that in his pamphlet of 1983, entitled Walter Rodney and the Question of Power. I looked it up. James had written:
“To be born in 1942 was to have behind you a whole body of work dealing in the best way with the emerging situation in the Caribbean and the colonial world. That was Walter Rodney. He grew up in the world of the wars and also in a world where Nkrumah succeeded in securing independence in the Gold Coast and establishing Ghana; then a little later Julius Nyerere did so for Tanganyika, which united with Zanzibar to become Tanzania. Walter had an upbringing and development that many of you cannot appreciate, because to you it is natural. To him, it was not; it was something new. That is why when he completed his studies, he was able to build on these foundations. The work that had been necessary to motivate him to study Africa and the Caribbean had been done already. That is an aspect of the importance of the personality and particular politics of Walter Rodney.”
C.L.R. James was, as usual, on the ball. Walter and those of us of Walter’s generation had been given a foundation to build on. That foundation was laid by C.L.R. James himself, by the great W.E.B. Du Bois, by the most significant Marcus Garvey, by George Padmore, the Father of African Emancipation, and by Frantz Fanon, the philosopher of post-colonialism or the theorists of the pitfalls of national independence. We had to build on that foundation, in theory and practice, or “betray the mission” as Fanon had put it. One could not build without knowing. And one could not know without acting. The important thing is that, unlike previous generations we had a foundation on which to take off to know and to act. With that everything, without that nothing much.
Walter Rodney in his preface to How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was to define anew the purpose of our generation in thought and action:
“The purpose ... is to try to reach those who wish to explore further the nature of their exploitation, rather than to satisfy the standards set by our oppressors and their spokesmen in the academic world.”
In other words, ours was the task to stimulate thought and consequential action, in organised activity. To bring the masses in. Into organised activity, and by grappling with problems together, strip away the conservative and Eurocentric indoctrination which had held us in fee, simple or complex. And to go beyond, that is to challenge colonial dispossession not as the isolated intellectual in any ivory tower, but in concert with the great mass of ordinary people. They and they who alone could emancipate society. In the process, the intellectual had to abolish himself as a special category. We had too, to go beyond categories like Nationalisation as be-all and end-all and find new ways to establish social property.
I have recently moved house. As a result most of my books are in boxes, unpacked. I do not have at hand any of Rodney’s historical works. But an assessment of him as historian is in order at this time. Paul Sutton wrote a quite remarkable essay on The historian as politician: Eric Williams and Walter Rodney. This is what, among other things, Sutton had to say:
“Whereas Williams delighted in critique, Rodney devoted comparatively little time to this exercise, preferring instead to plunder the archives for new knowledge. Rodney’s A History of the Guyanese Working People stands as a monument to his method and his industry. On reaching the final pages one is aware of having read an extraordinary book which may in retrospect prove as decisive for the historiography of the Caribbean as earlier was Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery. There is certainly no recent equal in West Indian history, the parallels having to be sought outside the region in such works as E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Classes or Manual Moreso Fraginals’s The Sugarmill – the Socio-economic complex of sugar in Cuba. Indeed in sensitivity and approach, Rodney’s last work is very much the synthesis of the two.”
I readily concur. Concur in so far as Rodney brought to historical writing the passion of the participant who set about to change the world, not in dream, but in action, and was seeing and searching in history for new foundations for new action. Without that passion historical writing becomes either chronology or dry as dust dissection of events, without a sense of movement. History moves. Rodney understood that. Williams didn’t.
It is not that Williams was more inclined to critique, for critique is the essence of historical writing, not compilation of facts and latterly figures, in a dry as dust science called economics.
It is the critique of facts, events, new data and previous historical writing that makes for the writing of history, and worthwhile history, as the premise for present and future action. It is that historical method that distinguishes Walter Rodney. He had learnt it from C.L.R. James in particular, and from W.E.B. Du Bois no less. He stood on formidable shoulders, and was himself formidable.
Walter Rodney and I had agreed in 1979 to do a joint work – indeed a critique. We were going to take on the most formidable Sir Arthur Lewis. To do this we would have to marshal a vast array of facts, analyse and critique documents, not least the Economics of West Indian Nationhood and the whole history of the West Indies Federation from Montego Bay in 1948 at least, to the short lived Federation of 1958–62.
But the over-riding fact was to contend with that most formidable of West Indian academics, a world-historical figure in his own right – Sir Arthur Lewis.
Sir Arthur Lewis had written, in a little known essay, this most cogent of questions, which everybody has ducked since he posed it. The question of questions posed by Sir Arthur Lewis was this:
“How did these highly intelligent men, all devoted to federation, come to make so many errors in so short a period? Clearly the leadership of the Federation was awful.”
And continued Sir Arthur Lewis, even more cogently, pulling no punches, and there is no better intellectual puncher than Sir Arthur, both jabbing from afar or punching toe to toe, or working inside.
“This in itself, is odd,” continued Sir Arthur “since the three heads of government whose head-on collisions, despite their unquestioned allegiance to the cause, ultimately wrecked the federation – Adams, Manley and Williams – were all men of the highest quality on any definition of the word. Their talents were outstanding and their education the envy of mankind. They were men of immaculate integrity and selfless devotion to the public service. Each was at the top of his profession before entering public life, and gained neither prestige nor money from entering politics. Each would be recognised in any country in the world as a public servant of the highest calibre.”
Sir Arthur had posed a fundamental question, deep, and profoundly deep in its simple formulation. The whole intellectual history of the world from Socrates to Walter Rodney himself was in question here.
We would have to examine the new political class which emerged since 1789 in the French Revolution with Robespierre. The political class of the lawyer, doctor, the professor, the literary, the technical From Robespierre through Lincoln down to Stalin and McNamara, the first leader of the modern military industrial complex. All this we would have to do in order to understand Adams, Manley and Williams. This new class which nowhere speaks in its own name but hides itself under the banner of labour and until recently, socialism. This new class which saw itself as holding the balance between Capital and Labour, but which was forever subordinating Labour to Capital.
We would have to deal too, with Sir Alexander Bustamante’s case which rested on two economic fears, the fear that Jamaican industries would be undercut by Trinidad manufactures, and the fear that Jamaica might have to subsidise the smaller islands.
Related to all this was the conception of industrialisation which was current at the time, and the objective movement of the world economy. We would have to pose the necessity for import substitution, and the limitations of it. And the way beyond it.
Rodney had set me the task of doing what he called the ‘philosophical work’, to check out the underpinnings of the West Indian intellectual. He had set me too, the task of “destroying,” his word not mine, the essential argument of the Economics of Nationhood that the richer islands had to subsidise the poorer. The point which had frightened Sir Alexander.
He himself had set himself the task of examining the role of the individual in history, and the individual and the social forces at work at the historical moment of Federation and since. Together we would work on how these historical tendencies represented themselves in Adams, Manley & Williams. Burnham represented the ultimate deterioration of the political type. Lester Bird etc. are the dregs.
Then together we would have combined on the so-called “integration” movement since Federation from 1967 to the present. It would be the story of Caribbean disintegration.
On Friday last I searched desperately for a note wherein Walter had dashed off to me when he was last banned from coming here and while at the Barbados airport en route to coming here. I couldn’t find it! It had said emphatically that if I did not set aside time to do this work, if I did not make it a fundamental part of my discussion with my ACLM colleagues, Caribbean unity itself “would be set back in time and place.”
I confess that I thought then that Walter was guilty of a pre-judgement. Namely, that he was putting too much store, by the work of intellectuals in history, in this case his and my work. Only recently did I recognise what Walter long ago knew. That certain fixed categories of thought like nationalisation and privatisation if not challenged on the basis of one’s own history, arrested all forward movement, and we enter the stage of historical retrogression in which we are now.
I confess now too, that he was right and I was dead wrong. As wrong as wrong can be. It was not that we were special. He was, I was not for sure. It was that we were both active in changing the course of Caribbean history in our separate provinces, and as such best able, by praxis, to do the work at hand. I knew last Friday that I now have to fulfil the mission or betray it. Though late and soon, as a great poet wrote, the world is too much with us.
I knew too, that Walter Rodney lives. For he could still summon me, to do alone, what we had agreed to do together after a lapse of some 17 years. Such force of personality, even from the grave, is most rare. Walter Rodney was most rare. He is an exemplar. He belongs in that rare category of Marcus Garvey, C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Frantz Fanon.
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