"We had only heard of democracy. We really believed the magical beautiful word... But a lot of things turned out not exactly the way we expected." So said a Russian citizen (in the NY Times of August 19) of democracy in the former Soviet Union. The sentiment is familiar; "democracy" could be replaced with "independence," "the PP," or "Barack Obama." The Jamaica Gleaner on June 28, reported on a poll which found that 60 per cent of Jamaicans felt the island would be better off if the British were still in charge. When Carl Stone asked the question in 2002, 53 per cent felt the same way. So there is a sense that the independence thing doesn't seem to be working out. To some people even before independence in Trinidad, its failure was obvious. In his Race and Nationalism (pp 69, 105), Selwyn Ryan reported that a significant portion of the population did not think the society was ready for decolonisation-many of the whites, Indians and a few middle class Africans.
And from well before 1962, various colonial officials and other observers, like the hated but accurate Froude and Trollope, had observed that leaving West Indian society in the hands of the more-ambitious-than-talented black and coloured middle classes, and white Creole plantocracy, would be disastrous. (The Indians then, as now, didn't merit notice.) The Trinidad situation was summed up by journalist Joseph Lewis, testifying before the Royal Commission on the Franchise in 1888: "I believe our people are less fit to exercise the franchise than almost any other British colony... the mixture of them, the different prejudices, the difficulty in getting them to combine and think alike for any common purpose and interest" (New Era, May 4, 1888). Little had changed by 1956. The society was highly unstable. The American occupation, and mass emigration, had destroyed social networks, values and embryonic institutions. Half the Indians were illiterate, and the majority still on the plantation. Education had not reached the vast majority of the black urban proletariat. People were moving in multiple directions, guided by wildly different ideas-Garveyism, Indian nationalism, Anglophilia.
Despite all this, the "push" for decolonisation was fomented by "nationalist" intellectuals. Why? What drove these intellectuals was not, as they claimed, a desire for autonomy, dignity, and all that tosh. They didn't want to end oppression, they wanted to be the oppressors. The phenomenon was outlined by Fanon in his Black Skin White Masks, Albert Memmi in The Coloniser and the Colo-nised, and Paolo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. By 1956, the dynamics of this psychosis were being demonstrated by Eric Williams, who had made the urban proletariat his blunt instruments. Gordon Rohlehr, in his "History as Absurdity" some years later, unflatteringly sketched the Father of the Nation's psyche. Trini pre- and post-colonial psychology are detailed in Edgar Mittelholzer's A Morning at the Office, LE Brathwaite's Social Stratification in Trinidad, and Naipaul's Mimic Men. And the details ain't pretty. Given these obvious problems, were there options to independence? Yes. Some intellectuals were smarter than others, like Aime Cesaire, who saw "decolonisation" for what it was: desertion by the coloniser without meeting obligations to societies they'd exploited for centuries.
Guadeloupe and Martinique remain departments of France and, today, thanks to Cesaire, closer to being real countries than the rest of us. This doesn't mean they have no problems. But their problems don't involve thousands of murders, decaying health, education, and justice systems, and mistaking coprophilia for fine dining. So what does this have to do with right now? In 2011 the failure of the independence project is not the issue: the issue is that, as another brilliant Indian (Homi Bhabha) realised, colonial societies, and the colonised personality, were designed to fail once detached from the coloniser-call it a "suicide meme," similar to the "suicide gene" put into GM crops. The nationalists' psyches were designed so that, once untethered from colonial control, they metastasised, unleashing violent revenge and power fantasies, more repressive and unjust than the colonials'. In the early days of the PNM (the 1960s), the country was rife with strikes and industrial unrest. Williams introduced the Industrial Stabilisation Act (ISA) to make much industrial action illegal. State violence and political repression were pervasive. People like CLR James and later Kwame Ture (and many more) were jailed and banned.
Education could have built better leaders, but in the 1970s, the warrior-politician-scholar turned his attention to the university. Kari Levitt, in her book Reclaiming Development, recalls that her work permit was withdrawn when her work with Lloyd Best threatened to create locally relevant economic theory. There are many other examples, and the university, and society, have never recovered. The university's educative role was left to the state cultural/political apparatus: Carnival, Best Village, and later, Black Power, which became, post-1970, an arm of the PNM. This was Williams's idea of "educating the masses": implanting narratives of ethnic ownership, entitlement, and, most insidiously, a logic that justified it. This complex was mobilised with the aim of erasing Indians (qua political threat) from national consciousness.
What we see and hear in calypso, talk radio, and the university today descend directly from that programme. It is why 250,000 people left between 1962 and 1990 (and continue to leave). You probably won't hear much of this in independence mythology/history. The facts have either been forgotten or plastered over with slogans ("Ah love mih corn-tree", "Trini to de bone-head") and so on. But the most odious and enduring legacy of Williams and the PNM has been the linking of ethnicity, nationalism, and culture, which dominates the national discourse to the present. To better understand it, the complex will be examined in some detail in the next few columns. Again.