MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 11 July 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 suppose it is not known generally here that few people living here pay more attention to broadcast Church sermons, or those at funerals and weddings which I attend, than I do.
On Sunday I heard what was easily one of the most remarkable sermons ever preached in this country on the broadcast media. It was by Father Kevin, an Irish priest of 43 years in the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church.
This Irish priest in his remarkable sermon did a most astonishing thing. He actually interrupted his own sermon to have the choir sing Bob Marley’s Redemption Song. “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery” sang the choir in obvious reggae rhythm. This before Father Kevin resumed his sermon, urging that if you were made in the image and likeness of God, then mental slavery is a concession to the Dragon, to the demon of indifference, to the demon of powerlessness, to the demon of failing to insist that we are responsible for the shape and character, not only of ourselves, but of our society. I do not know if Father Kevin stunned his church audience both in the reggae form he used and the content of his sermon, he certainly stunned me. So much so, that I insisted on waking up my ill wife, Jennifer, and asked her to listen. We discussed it at length.
Now you will wonder what all this had to do with Federation. Everything. Nothing destroyed the West Indies Federation of 1958–62, like mental slavery. And it was not the mental slavery of the masses, educated into conservatism by religion and the colonialism which spawned us all. It was the mental slavery of the educated elite which ruined the Federation from beginning to end. And the mental slavery did not collapse with the collapse of the Federation. It worsened after the collapse, as perhaps was inevitable. In such a condition are we now.
I know, dear reader, that you will say again that Tim Hector is imposing his view, with the benefit of hindsight on historical events. That every historian does and must do, or else he is not writing history. History is distilling past events through the prism of the writer in order to inform the present and influence a new future.
But I hasten to add that this view that mental slavery destroyed the Federation, is not mine, is not Father Kevin’s. It is far older than that. It is the view of that West Indian immortal, T.A. Marryshow, who mercifully, died while the Federation existed. Had he lived to see its collapse he would have died of grief on the instant.
On June 22, 1950 Marryshow let it be known in the Grenadian Legislature that “while other peoples had been fighting to get out of the British Empire the West Indies had been fighting to stay in.” Even today we are fighting either to get further in but certainly to stay in the American Empire.
What I am going to say is not apology or apologia. It is by way of explanation. Alone of all peoples in this great Globe, Empire created us. We are entirely the product of Empire. And so we find it very hard to cut the umbilical cord to empire.
Other people be they Indian, African, Arab or Chinese had their own independent history before Empire, ever expanding, incorporated them by conquest. They therefore had an identity, a way of being, to resist the colonial way of subordination and inertia imposed on them. The West Indies, or if you prefer, the Caribbean had no such settled way of life to combat colonialism. Yes, at critical times, we relied on what remained of Africa in us. But, in our coming hence Africa was fractured, and so was our identity. Oppression created a vacuum. That nature abhors a vacuum, is well established. Colonialism filled our human natures.
Overcoming that hurdle would take a re-organisation of society, especially so, the re-organisation of production and the productive forces. Federation and federation alone offered that prospect. The opportunity was squandered, in the most volatile and reckless manner, and by the best and ablest among us.
Federation exposed West Indian weakness, in spite of, and to some extent because of the brilliant individuals involved. Few societies have valued “brightness” more than has the West Indies. Few developing countries can compare with the West Indies, per capita, in terms of brilliant scholars produced. In few places in the world would one hear more boasting of how many “degrees” so and so has. Some, backward as ever, even boast of how many more degrees they have when compared to others. Brilliance turned into complete opacity with the Federation. It proves the point, if proof is still needed, that the scholar who walks without the people walks into the night.
However, brilliant Grantley Adams, Norman Manley, and Dr Eric Williams were, and by any standard, ancient or modern, they were, they failed utterly to define what Federation was about. It is a profound failure. But their successors, even with the failure of their predecessors Adams, Manley and Eric Williams, failed as badly, if not worse, to define what this Caribbean integration they have been tinkering with these past 24 years is all about. No man or woman in any street from the Bahamas to the Guyanas can define Caribbean integration, CARICOM or Single Market and economy, except in text-book terms. What specifically is it aiming to do in the short, medium or long term for the farmer or the worker, the woman or the youth, not one, no, not one of the architects can say in 5 or 5,000 lines. So with Federation, so with Caribbean integration.
Let us return o the empirical facts of Federation. But before that, this. Generalisations are often, and by definition, sweeping. History must have such generalisations or else one is overwhelmed by the particulars. However, to say that none of the leaders had a conception of Federation, beyond the platitudinous phrases about common history, common culture etc. would be for me to ignore, and therefore do violence to a man to whom I am ideologically opposed, he being a Stalinist, normally called “communist” as a general label of abuse in these parts, innocent of the philosophical development of humankind.
In September 1945, at the momentous meeting of the Caribbean Labour Congress, Richard Hart of Jamaica a formidable figure, who was later to contribute to the horrible debacle in Grenada in 1983, made the following important intervention.
“This conference cannot too strongly urge” said Richard Hart “that the development of the Caribbean as one economic entity is the only way of creating a stable and self supporting economy. This is possible only if such a programme of development and expansion, is conceived and directed under the unified control obtainable under a Federal Constitution, with responsible government.”
There is a skeleton of a definition of Federation which badly needed the bare bones fleshed out. So that the worker and farmer understood what was his and her role, what was expected of him and her, and what him and her could expect of Federation. That elaboration never took place. Stalinism always sticks to the general, the bare bones, the better to betray in the execution, with the concentration of power in a party hierarchy, corresponding to the hierarchy in production which stifles all initiative at the base and ruins the general process. Hart was archetypal. Nevertheless, his intervention was a telling departure from the recipe of clichés, which West Indian leaders in the pre-federation period, sprouted and spouted.
So as not to leave you in any doubt, the Federation had first and foremost to pursue a strategy of import substitution – providing for ourselves what the one-crop plantation had decreed had to be provided from abroad. The plantation had to give way to anew organisation of production, at once co-operative and individual farm units. The aim would have been food security as well as export growth through diversified agriculture. Allied to import substitution industries, the industrialisation of the region had to be undertaken with a plan, at once Federal and territorial. It were well if the unit territory could have served as the executive arm of the Federal government implementing both industrialisation and housing programmes, to overcome the appalling housing conditions. This definition would have been concrete, not the airy-fairy abstractions, beloved by populists and charismatic leaders.
Once the Federal Government was seen to be altering conditions in favour of the worker and farmer, women and youth in each territory, and doing so without partiality, the man in the street, would have become an adherent of the Federal principle. Once Federation took on the abstraction of administrative convenience, even humbug, Federation was doomed.
Though I anticipate myself, as the very fine but late Gordon Lewis was to write “the retention in the Federal Constitution of the paraphernalia of individual island sovereignty produced an indigestible plethora of politicians so that in the end the Federal Government was weighed down by a costly structure of a Governor-General, five Governors, at least five Commissioners and not less than fifty-five (55) Ministers and Ministers without portfolios.”
The peasant, worker, clerk and teacher, paid for this elaborate superstructure. The merchants and fledgling industrialists, in the main, escaped either by tax evasion or by tax-free concessions. Inequity inexorably becomes iniquitous.
With that as view and overview we return to the facts of the matter leading to Federation in 1958.
Between the Montego Bay Conference in 1947 there were, to be generous, eleven tortuous years of foot-dragging. The forging of a Federal Constitution, thought in Montego Bay to be a cinch, became a protracted process. Meaning was smothered in the surmise of endless committee wranglings and obfuscation. Literally, tons of words poured out. There was the Standing Closer Association Committee Report of 1949 (the Rance Report) the Holmes Commission Report on Civil Service unification, the report of 1955 from the Conference on freedom of movement. Then there were reports from the three (pre) Federal Commissioners, the Judicial, the Fiscal and the Civil Service appointed by the 1953 Conference. Then there was the 1957 Mudie Commission Report on the vexing and perplexing matter of, guess what? The Federal Capital site.
Perhaps nothing illustrates how British colonially inspired and directed was this Federation than the question of the Federal Capital Site.
A Commission made up of “three wholly impartial persons who have never resided in the West Indies” was constituted, and they in the course of a two month visit to the West Indies were to determine which island was to be the Federal Capital! A mad hatter could not have devised a worse formula.
These three English Commissioners were the very opposite of those who went in search of the Magi astrologically following a star. They said the Capital of the Federation should be metropolitan and not provincial. Yet they chose Barbados. They found, they said, the East Indians of Trinidad & Tobago, a “disturbing element”. They themselves as Englishmen were, no doubt, still disturbed by the Independence of India in 1947. It was an absurdity, absurdly conceived and had Ionesco learnt of this he would have greatly enriched the Theatre of the Absurd.
It underlined the fact that the whole Federal Experiment was left to British “experts” to draft a Constitution, when they themselves had no experience of Federal problems. With typical English prejudice they ignored the American Federal experience, preferring instead the Australian as their sole guide and precedent!
Hence the 1945 and 1947 Caribbean Labour Congress conceptions of Federation, on which all were agreed, full internal self-government for each unit and secondly dominion status or independence for the federation, and thirdly the membership of British Guiana were all scuttled.
All this was brought about because Adams, but more so Manley, the most admired figure in the Caribbean had decided to split with the left-wing and the Caribbean Labour Congress. The Cold War just then heating up had captured West Indian milk-and-water nationalism, and held it captive with the permission of the captives.
Gordon Lewis, himself an Welshman by birth, but a West Indian by choice, summed it up generously this way:
“There was a fatal ambiguity in the West Indian psychology. It believed passionately in West Indian nationalism. At the same time it accepted uncritically the British belief in the civilising mission of British imperialism.”
It could not have been better put. It is no doubt a faithful description of the Afro-Anglo-Saxon mentality. But it is impossible in my view, to maintain any genuinely nationalist view, let alone a passionately held one, while simultaneously believing in the civilising mission of British imperialism. In short mental slavery gripped the West Indian leadership and held it in fee simple. They were in appearance nationalist but in substance colonials, through and through.
So it was then that since Montego Bay in 1947, all the Federal Conferences were held in faraway London and not in the West Indies. They were completely isolated from West Indian life, and so the Federation as constructed bore no relation and carried nothing in its Australian kangaroo pouch for the West Indian worker and farmer, women and youth.
Federation argued the West Indian architects of this kangaroo federation, which was patterned on the Australian experience, meant that the West Indies would have a more dignified international personality and image. It was image without substance.
The substance was the old colonial, plantation order. The Leaders had no wish to break up the plantation by agrarian reform, and establish Federation, with new ownership and control.
And so a new Constitutional hobble dress was fashioned, by imperial designers, for the old plantation lady, well past her best days, cosmetics notwithstanding. By the way, the hobble dress had no split in front or behind, and so hobbled, the Federation would split as new self-governing unit, granting concessions to American capital investment, ceaselessly attacked a toothless Federal government. Self-governing unit, thus subordinated a Federal Government.
I am going to rely on Gordon Lewis again. He said “the British discreetly but firmly shaped the main outlines of the Federal Constitutional framework finally producing an enlarged Crown Colony which omitted nearly all of the items previously insisted upon by the West Indian leaders [themselves!]” Pathetic in the extreme.
Such items previously insisted on by the West Indian Federal creators included the demand for a unicameral legislature, that is, without an upper chamber, which even Grantley Adams had repudiated “as an anachronism”. Worse yet they all accepted, what had been unanimously rejected by the Caribbean Labour Congress, reserve powers for the Governor-General and the Governors of the several units.
Common-sense dictated that all British governors in all territories should have been dispensed with, and the reserve powers vested in the Federal government. The great George Padmore at the 1945 Pan African Congress in 1945 had made this proposal, (later adopted by the Caribbean Congress) central to Federation.
On the contrary, the West Indian Federation of 1958 conferred on the Governor-General, the foppish Lord Hailes of the British Conservative Party, some 34 clauses empowering the Governor-General to act “in his discretion” or “in his individual judgement”. More than that the Governor-General personally appointed all senators, federal Supreme Court Justices, and members of the Public Service Commission. In certain circumstances he could remove any or all of them in his own deliberate judgement. The ‘nominated’ elite had secured themselves and their status. Worse the Governor-General could refuse assent to any bill or reserve it for review by London. Worst of all the Governor-General could determine any urgent matter, however important, by himself, if time did not permit consultation with the Cabinet. The Governor-General in constitutional terms really headed a Crown-colony, otherwise called Federation.
This West Indian Federation was thus headed by an English colonial Governor-General, more powerful than any other Governor-General anywhere, and as one conservative critic in the Barbados House of Assembly noted “the Governor-General’s salary and emoluments equalled those of the Governor of a state of the United States as wealthy as New York.”!!! A less conservative critic would have observed, that it was downtrodden agricultural labourers and peasants who had to pay for this highly decorated anachronism.
I do not wish to leave the impression that it was just the British who “discreetly but firmly” conned West Indian leaders into this misconception of Federation and the miscarriage of our most important undertaking.
The West Indian leaders were collaborators in conning themselves and the West Indian people into this colonial Federation, since they too did not want the sun to set on the British Empire. Take this speech addressed to the British by Sir Grantley Adams first and only Prime Minister of the Federation, during the movement to Federation. Said Adams “if we put our case before you in a reasonable way, you will see that you can trust the West Indies as much as you trusted the Boers of South Africa.” Any further extrapolation on that could only deepen humiliation in horror. Adams conceived of himself like the Boers who had already established the reprehensible apartheid regime!
Sir Norman Manley, (admittedly one of my favourite West Indian figures) was only less bad. He said that Federation “was a long hard road with little to gain for the present generation save the knowledge of doing work comparable to the champions of Magna carta, and all those who by vision, enterprise and sacrifice have wrested freedom and consummated nationhood.”
Like most charismatic leaders he had taken refuge in the rhetorical stratosphere, when required to inspire West Indians with concrete proposals, which would give a sense of national mission for the first time.
The Federation then was but another of those one step forward two steps backward which would dig Caribbean history in its “ambiguity” as a people wholly created by colonialism and therefore glued tar-baby style to its own oppression, and the British imperial “civilising mission” – which was really unspeakable oppression and degradation such as few people anywhere, have known.
A wise-acre once said that Eve told Adam on leaving the Garden of Eden that they “were entering a period of transition.” Federation was such a period of transition, seemingly eternal.
Transition to greater insularity in so-called independence. The West Indian leaders could not break with the preferential agreements on which their one-crop plantation economies rested. In their insularity they now have to face these preferential colonial agreements ruthlessly and cruelly withdrawn despite their tar-baby loyalty. History takes some cruel turns.
Next time we shall see how the single effort at West Indian nationalism, Chaguramas, and more importantly, how an oil refinery shattered the Federation of 1958–62, opening the way to Independence by concession to American capital. After which Britain through the British Queen reigned, but America through American capital, ruled.
Last updated on 30 May 2022