The Race Monster, Part 2 - In late 1869 in Trinidad, Jules Espinet, a mixed-race doctor, was insulted by Robert Bakewell, a white British doctor, via a letter published in a newspaper. Bake-well was later tarred and feathered by three black men on the steps of Government House in Port-of-Spain. It happened in daylight in an official thoroughfare, but no one saw anything, no one was prosecuted. This was a materialisation of mixed-race upper class Trinidadians' hatred of being reminded of their black antecedents, and their control of the black underclass. This pattern of control and violence recurs. The first articulation of this constituency's eidos was Jean Baptiste Philipe's Free Mulatto, in 1824. It represented one of two streams of Afro race sentiment from the 19th century. The Espinet Creoles, via Freemason lodges, formed alliances with French and British men, and were politically active. Their agenda was articulated in 1871 in a letter in the Echo of Trinidad and signed "the Creole Party". It claimed moral ownership of the island, and agitated for Creole representation in the colonial administration.
The Colonial Office demurred, citing corruption. An elective office, the Port-of-Spain Borough Council, was banished by the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1898 for this reason. The Creole Party, then known as the "No Surrender" faction of the borough council, using calypsonians, and the press incited the urban underclass to the Water Riots of 1903. The pattern was interrupted by the First World War, but its aftermath brought Garveyism and heightened race consciousness. In Port-of-Spain in 1919, middle class black and coloured men incited black working class men to riot. A ship (the Oriana) transporting black prisoners of war docked in Trinidad, and anti-white sentiment ran high. But the war also brought the cinema, which would become the premium shaper of consciousness, and British labour socialism, with its doctrine of educa- tion, self-reliance, and self-determination. Socialism provided a platform for egalitarian nationalist ambitions and interethnic alliances. This was not the Espinet Creoles' preference, and their fortunes declined between the wars.
Socialism enabled another group's ascension: the Organic Creoles. In 1871, as the Creole Party "came out," a black schoolmaster, John Jacob Thomas, was initiated into the Masonic Lodge Eastern Star. His great achievement was (the book) The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar, which led to his induction into the Royal Philological Society-a stunning achievement even to-day. Unlike the Espinet Creoles, the Organic Creoles were sentient, products of a grounded community-the black lower-middle class. This class was lovingly described by CLR James in Beyond A Boundary. They availed themselves of all available knowledge-Freemasonry, religion, Arnoldian high culture-but unlike the Espinet Creoles were proud, not ashamed, of their African origins. Thomas was the apotheosis of this class. His ideas of racial equality, nationalism, and self-determination were ahead of his time, and he was not an anomaly. His descendants include (inter alia) James, Lloyd Best and Eric Roach. The Creole groups were/are not strictly divided or mutually exclusive, but distinct. Thomas (New Era, Oct 11, 1875) described a kind of person he called a "bambilou": an ape whose traits are mimicry, cravenness and who is obsessed with status and whiteness. Nai-paul would call them "mimic men" a century later.
Significant also, in the 1870s, is another group's emergence. The Chronicle (Oct 19, 1878) felt it politic to point out that 20 per cent of the burgesses of San Fernando were "Asiatics". The implications were clear, the reactions predictable. The Public Opinion newspaper (July 23, 1886), a vehicle of the Espinet Creoles (aka, by then, the Reform Movement), editorialised that Indian immigration had to be stopped.
The Indians were a drain on public funds, their heathen beliefs and practices were uncivilised, and they displaced West Indian labour. These arguments formed the "rational" basis of anti-Indian sentiment which persists to to-day. (A version was last seen in the Express, on June 14, 2006, in a letter written by Dr Hollis Liverpool.) Though education and Freemasonry helped racial entente, it was not until labour socialism that the conditions for mass unity, embodied in alliances like Rienzi-Butler, came into being. Unfortu- nately, the Second World War and the Americans transformed Trinidad into a large nightclub/ whorehouse, and destroyed the embryonic "whole" society in formation. Socialism was broken, and the Espinet Creoles ascended using "nationalism" as their ladder.
They formed the core of the PNM. In 1953, sociologist LE Brathwaite published his classic Social Stratification in Trinidad, a class-profile of Afro-social classes. The upper class men were sadistic, power hungry, and resented threats to their entitlements (by then, the Indians). The black underclass was violent and susceptible to Messianism, which was exploited by Eric Williams, who embodied the Espinet Creoles' ideal. (Ivar Oxaal picked this up in Black Intellectuals, Selwyn Ryan makes little of it in Race and Nationalism.) The underclass is sometimes confused with the black working socialist working class. That socialist working class contributed significant amounts of the post-war migrants to the UK, then the US and Canada up to 1990 (a quarter-million left between 1961 and 1990). They were replaced by waves of Grenadian, Vincentian, and other island emigrants post-WWII, who were easily manipulated into hatred of the Indians. Thus the promising amity between the black working class and Indians died. A new underclass, conditioned by Black Power, Afrocentrism and Nation of Islam lunacy, became the black underclass we know today. Only now it leads, instead of follows, the PNM. To be continued