Looking and listening to emancipation these days, it seems the whole business is African men and women in Kente cloth, ethnic costumes, bristling with anger and rhetoric about slavery. Well, it's their show, but if I'm to participate, I get bored with the slavery thing after a very short time. And after the anger, then what?
At a UWI seminar a few years ago, I asked one of the presenters why presentations we'd seen repeated the same story-sufferation, slavery, and cruelty-over and over. He said he hadn't got over it yet. Honest, if sad. I'd guess most who commemorate emancipation feel this way. And it's no mystery how someone born 200-plus years after the abolition of slavery could still not have gotten over it. Keep repeating a story over and over again, sing songs about it, write books, bake it into social rituals, education, culture, and politics, and people tend to remem- ber, and forget everything else. Fine and dandy, but it's not helping anyone-African or otherwise-and is stunting possibili- ties, or even the idea that there are alternative responses to emancipation. If you read the Trinidad newspapers from 1870-1900, you'd find a Trinidad much more interesting than slavery and indenture-and this was when people who were alive during slavery and actual indentured labourers were around. A figure you would encounter regularly in the papers is John Jacob Thomas.
Thomas is best known for Froudacity (1889), his response to British historian JA Froude's book, The Bow of Ulysses, which said the West Indies were uncivilised, governed by corrupt men with more ambition than talent, and destined to fail. (Of course, Froude was totally wrong, wasn't he?) Various contemporary thinkers have tried tie Thomas to Froudacity-make him into a proto Afro-nationalist, like Dennis Benn in his valuable work, The Caribbean: An Intellectual History, and Faith Smith in her (less valuable) Creole Recitations. But Thomas was much more, and his story provides an alternative idea of emancipation-a freedom to become, rather than a freedom from "oppression," or nostalgia for the pre-slavery past. Froudacity was not Thomas's opus; it was The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar (1869), which was the basis for his lecture to the Royal Philological Society-and that is as big a deal as it sounds. The book also signals what resides in the remainder of his story. homas was an advocate of black nationhood, but not insular nationalism. He was ahead of his time in being proud of his African antecedents, and critical of his brethren who fell prey to the colour-obsessed decadence of colonialism. In the New Era newspaper of September 23, 1872, Thomas published "Negroes and Their Nationality."
He wrote of a "moral flunkeyism" which encouraged the educated of the colony to internalise foreign prejudices and suppress "native instincts." This caused a "guilty reticence with which...we sneak through the significant 24 hours of the first of August, which should have been the great commemoration day." His idea of emancipation was larger than mere commemoration. In the same article, he acknowledges the continuity of civilisation: the Greeks borrowed from the Phoenicians and Egypt, Rome from Greece, and so up to Europe. For a nation to separate its young from this collective education, he wrote, would be "fatal." Where did this big idea come from? Thomas had been initiated into the Masonic Lodge Eastern Star in 1871. Masonry was central to his worldview, and this idea is quintessentially Masonic. He believed in classical education, and he formed the Trinidad Athe-naeum (1872), a literary society. He was elevated to the magistracy and then Secretary of the Board of Education in colonial Trinidad-and was widely respected by all sectors of society. Thomas's early life was humble: his parents were poor, and education largely out of reach. He took what little public education he could get, and made great things of it-teaching himself several languages, and attracting the attention of the governor, Sir Arthur Gordon and Gordon's friend, Charles Kingsley, which doubtless also helped his prospects.
But luck was against him. His health failed, debilitating him for years. His career stalled: his head-mastership of the Borough School in San Fernando was cut short by a "misunderstanding" with politicians and a shrewish Scottish schoolmarm. His funeral had to be paid for by friends. This is the barest outline, but what emerges is a remarkable self-made man. He was born in slavery, from humble origins, and exceeded and expanded the possibilities of his time. He was proud of his African origin, but not trapped in a nostalgic conception of it. He criticised Trinidadians for their "complexional prejudice," corruption, and cravenness to the colonial hierarchy. He took strong and unpopular positions, and butted heads with the established order. The established ordered eventually ended, but Thomas's creed survived. He saw himself as part of a continuum of civilisation, and entitled to all humanity had produced. This attitude could not grow within a narrow ethnic creed. Thomas might not have been the first "organic" Trinidad intellectual, but he was the first modern Trinidadian: a prototype of an ideal national character. His intellectual descendants include Eric Williams, CLR James, Lloyd Best, Seepersad Naipaul, and his son, Vidia, and many others. But I see nothing of JJ Thomas's legacy in the representations and meanings of emancipation in 21st century Trinidad. The idea of emancipation is now, like all "Creole" culture, resentful, backward looking, poisoned by the PNM's post-independence cultural policy, and debilitated by all the limitations and vices attached thereto. If he were here today, the First Trinidadian would probably not be proud of what he would see on August 1, or at any other time in the year.