The tradition of Caribbean intelligentsia insists on a grounding with the massive against the elites.
Part I
Aaron Kamugisha is Professor of Caribbean and Africana Thought at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus
“What does it mean to live in countries in which landscape and history are shadowed by genocide, chattel slavery and indentureship?”
Almost every summer, as the academic year ends, I am drawn towards re-reading a short, compelling article published over seventy-five years ago. The article is little remembered or referenced even among the Caribbean intelligentsia, though its author, Eric Williams, will be known as long as there is a scuffling of islands and territories we call the Caribbean. Published in The Journal of Negro Education, that formidable scholarly tome that did so much to stimulate black intellectual production in the 20th century, the article was published in 1944, under the title “Establishment of a University of the West Indies” – the same year that saw the first edition of Williams’ book, Capitalism and Slavery.
The first prime minister of Trinidad & Tobago, Eric Williams presents one of the most intriguing puzzles for students of the region. The first person from the Anglophone Caribbean to receive a doctorate in History from Oxford University in 1938, Williams’ thesis would, on publication in America as Capitalism and Slavery, become the most debated and influential book of 20th century Caribbean history. It is hard not to feel a sense of awe at the charismatic appeal of Williams, which in 1956 allowed him to found the People’s National Movement and win elections within a year, one of the most striking stories of nationalist mobilization around a new political party in the Caribbean’s history. Yet simultaneously, the other side of the Williams legacy is all too well known – his authoritarian impulses that became clear within a couple years of independence; his later polemical writings on Caribbean history which Guyanese historian Elsa Goveia famously described as new shibboleths for old. Yet in “Establishment of a University of the West Indies,” an argument published with a world war still in progress and the future of the colonial world uncertain, we can glimpse the contours of Williams at his best, the critic of the social and political deprivations caused by colonialism in the Caribbean, with the resolute conviction of the changes needed to arrest exploitation and transform the region.
Williams commences his article by noting that the West Indies has waited a long time for a university, doubtlessly aware of the presence of universities in Canada, Australia and other colonies under British dominion since the 19th century, and the establishment of the University of Havana in 1728. He attributes this to the status of the British West Indies as colonies of exploitation, “sugar plantations, not colonies,” which when coupled with the absentee landlord status of the plantation elites resulted in an almost complete disavowal of interest in the establishment of institutions of higher learning within the region. Yet in this delay Williams perceives an advantage, as the West Indian university will not be burdened by the mistakes of the past, and thus able to respond to the compelling demands of the post-World War conjuncture.
“In ‘Establishment of a University of the West Indies’ we can glimpse the contours of Williams at his best.”
Williams believes four main features are essential in the then future West Indian university. He commences with the declaration that “the West Indian university must serve the needs of the West Indian community,” announcing federation as the singular and most important of these goals. Nor is the dream of federation limited to the Anglophone territories, as “the West Indian University will have to act…as the rallying center for the entire Caribbean, from Cuba to French Guiana.” This is incomprehensible absent a decolonizing mission, and as a result “the West Indian University must be a center for the culture of the Caribbean area,” it “should aim at developing and extending our own unique culture” rather than simply facilitating the local transformation of knowledge that could be acquired overseas. Amidst the accelerating pace of production and nationalist competition, Williams positions the West Indian university as a citadel of Caribbean consciousness, an expression of the “ideals and aspirations of the West Indian people” in an uncertain world. Finally, Williams states that the West Indian university must be a “popular university, a university of the people” – an aspiration for an institution rooted in service to its community. The goal here would be to provide Caribbean solutions to Caribbean problems, and decisively contribute to the evolution of an authentic, decolonized Caribbean citizenry.
There is a candor and brilliance in each one of these suggestions by Williams, but they are not his most compelling comment on higher education, which came in his later autobiography. Published a quarter of a century after the earlier article, by which time Williams had spent a baker’s dozen years as chief minister and later prime minister of Trinidad & Tobago, Williams’ 1969 autobiography, Inward Hunger, is boastful, iconoclastic, and filled simultaneously with glaring omissions and stunning prose. This is best seen in his reflections on his decision to return to the Caribbean while in the United States as recounted in the following passage:
“But I had decided on my future. I would stick to the West Indies. West Indians had traditionally deserted the region, (George) Padmore for Africa, (C.L.R.) James for the absurdities of world revolution, the traditional West Indians for the law and medicine. I would cultivate the Caribbean garden from Cuba to French Guiana. And when time came for the West Indian university, as come it must, I would be prepared to play my part and to leave Washington.”
This comment is quite surreal. The withering scorn towards Padmore and James is remarkable. That it is the first mention of James in the autobiography – James the school teacher, mentor and advisor of Williams, James without which there would be no Capitalism and Slavery. Williams is in a hurry to deny any influence by James or Padmore and the anti-colonial movement in England, even though intellectual histories of the period place him as a fellow traveler of the International Friends of Abyssinia Movement. It is this thoroughgoing disavowal of these movements which complicate hagiographic readings of Williams’ legacy.
“Williams is in a hurry to deny any influence by James or Padmore and the anti-colonial movement in England.”
But despite all this, there is so much in the power of Williams’ comment on the then unborn institution that would become the University of the West Indies in his autobiography. Rarely have the feelings of a Caribbean citizen in self-enforced exile overseas in the metropolis, yearning for a return to where their truest realization of life’s meaning and happiness might be found, ever been written. I used it as the signature at the bottom of my e-mail in the heady summer of 2006 as I prepared to leave Toronto on the completion of my doctorate, as I could think of nothing better that encapsulated my urge to leave Canada after four years, and my excitement and worry about returning home. In our travels outward and back, we Caribbean citizens are forever journeying towards an expectation – an expectation that reveals much about the internal exile that is life.
University life is a labor of almost ineffable patience. The process of doing research, of making a significant and new contribution to the lore of human knowledge is not one that comes easily. It involves at least a decade of training through three degrees, a further period of semi-apprenticeship in which your first work is proffered to the world through publication. The arc of every university academic’s career is different. For some that first work is a memorable outburst, their most important contribution, before other responsibilities of life and administration shift their energies in a manner not easily replicated in their career. For many the second work is the great contribution, created when the angst over writing and career worries have abated somewhat, giving a verve and confidence to what becomes their magnum opus. Some rare talents find meaningful words every day, and assemble them with a discipline and verve that makes us pale with envy and grief about our own shortcomings, others dazzle sparingly but brilliantly over the years. Few though ever feel satisfied, because to fall in love with knowledge is to persistently want more, and to feel a responsibility to something grander than yourself is a rarely comprehended burden.
It is often only lightly addressed, and much unknown, that there is a quiet sorrow in many persons who live a life dedicated to pondering the social and political dilemmas of existence in the contemporary Caribbean. The existential plight of the region raises unanswerable questions and engenders perpetual irreconcilable tensions. What does it mean to live in countries in which landscape and history are shadowed by genocide, chattel slavery and indentureship? How does one reconcile the beauty of this region, the immense seductiveness of its popular culture which transfixes persons throughout the world, with the contemporary realities of poverty and exceptional violence that afflict it? And to know that no matter the steadfastness of will to rededicate oneself over and over against the lies and injustice of colonialism, its sibling, neocolonialism continues to grow with weight and power with each generation. “I did not mind my defeat, I only minded that it had to last so long; I did not see the future, and that is perhaps as it should be,” Jamaica Kincaid once had one of her characters utter. And that is the nature of the Caribbean reality that transfixes us – to not only have to fight a resurgent and stronger neocolonialism and witness the betrayals and lethargy of our time, but to worry at Caribbean futures with no grounded expectation of that future heaven – Caribbean self-determination, freedom, happiness. One may rightly demur that it is an incredible privilege to be able to even ponder such things, though knowledge of that privilege does not diminish the complexity of the situation. By accident, talent or luck, those given the strange chance and lot to be considered Caribbean intellectuals are faced with a series of bewildering thoughts which often revolve around a central question – what are the responsibilities of Caribbean intellectuals?
The Responsibilities of Caribbean Intellectuals, Part II
Aaron Kamugisha
For George Lamming, on the occasion of his 94th birthday (June 8th).
What then are the responsibilities of Caribbean intellectuals? I draw my definition/sense of the intellectual here from figures as diverse as Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, Claudia Jones and Audre Lorde. For the purposes of this essay I am twinning the thought of George Lamming and Walter Rodney – specifically Lamming’s succinct description of an intellectual as someone whose fundamental orientation is a life of the mind, whose oxygen is ideas, with Rodney’s emphasis on the responsibility of the intellectual to the struggle over ideas, against bourgeois knowledge and towards human freedom. In the Caribbean, this draws us immediately towards our towering social commentary calypsonians, artists, writers and social activists. The style and depth of engagement with this strange enterprise that is life is what marks one as an intellectual, and is vastly more important than the work through which one spends most of one’s waking hours. I am choosing to group the responsibilities of Caribbean intellectuals into seven overlapping categories – unsatisfactory perhaps given the stakes of what I am trying to convey, but with intimations towards a future imperfectly articulated in this reflection.
First, she should throw in her lot with the most radical and discerning social movement of her time, and contribute her intellectual labor towards their goal of human freedom. There is no purpose or honor in remaining removed or detached from the social justice movements of one’s time, however ambivalent or contradictory their manifestations may be. Nor is the tradition of Caribbean intelligentsia one removed from its people, the tradition insists on a grounding with the massive against the elites. Wherever one goes – and Caribbean people are perpetually mobile – you must be socially and politically conscious, and active everywhere. The contemporary movements here are reflected in the self-activity of Caribbean people rising against the oppression of patriarchal rule and men’s violence, the class domination intrinsic to capitalism, the denials of citizenship and violence towards LGBTQ persons, antiblack racism locally, hemispherically and globally.
“There is no purpose or honor in remaining removed or detached from the social justice movements of one’s time.”
Second, the Caribbean intellectual takes her greatest sustenance from the marvelous tradition of Caribbean thought – beyond the boundaries of Western thought. The allure of Caribbean thought is mesmerizing and renowned worldwide, with a style that shelters the hope of living in a world beyond domination. Jose Marti would call this living in a world in which humans live not as wolves among wolves but men among men, Sylvia Wynter would speak of the confrontation between plantation and plot, “between those who justify and defend the system; and those who challenge it.” There is no tradition worth having which is not to be argued with, but there is no culture worth sheltering that does not acknowledge and honor the thought of its ancestors, and Caribbean thought gives us more conscious control over the ideas by Caribbean people over space and time in the pursuit of human freedom.
Thirdly, the Caribbean intellectual should unashamedly proclaim a love and appreciation of the Caribbean popular, as the site of embodied expression of human freedom beyond colonialism, and evidence of a revolution in consciousness impossible to discern in our public institutions. The Caribbean popular does not need intellectuals for its validation, as C.L.R. James knew over fifty years ago in Havana when he said that “intellectuals should prepare the way for the abolition of the intellectuals as embodiment of culture.” The terrain of the popular will always be in advance of its interpreters, its meaning always elusive. Yet the Caribbean intellectual can assist the process of clearing the ideological ground on which the popular’s greatest practitioners tread, from conservative attacks, so that its artists can concentrate less on attacks on their legitimacy, but instead, creation.
Fourthly, the Caribbean intellectual yearns for the unity of the region, a form of solidarity and commonality that holds the never refuted best chance of Caribbean people living in nations that are not the prey of Western powers. Lloyd Best would sigh here that he longs to be “part of a grand Caribbean sou-sou”, David Rudder begs his people to please remember the colonial sources of the inter-island suspicion and quarrels so debilitating even when not violent, or perhaps put differently violent because they are so debilitating. The unity of Caribbean people does not require the tomes of the economist or the technocracy of the public official, it is the lived reality of many Caribbean people. The puzzle remains to give institutional form to felt conviction in the interest of Caribbean self-determination.
“The unity of Caribbean people does not require the tomes of the economist or the technocracy of the public official.”
Vision beyond tragedy is the next responsibility – that the disasters that roar so often through the Caribbean do not become an alibi for anomie, despair, a lethargy of will, or an absence of vision. The disasters the Caribbean has endured this century – from the Haitian earthquake of 2010, the greatest calamity to befall the region since slavery, to the current climate crisis and its unleashing of deadly hurricanes that have caused so much anguish throughout the region – are without doubt terrifying. But what must be resisted is the license it gives state managers to abandon the limited social democracy so hesitatingly proffered at independence, and surrender to a neoliberal logic that places profits over people, commodifies the Caribbean land and sea space, and suggests there is no future for these countries except as service appendages of global capital.
The reality is that vulnerability, calamity and neocolonialism will endure in the foreseeable future. Yet the next obligation of Caribbean intellectuals is to facilitate, through historical analysis and a presentation of socio-economic options, the resilience and survival of the community. How can one consume ethically in a neocolonial economy, George Lamming once mused. But that we must. The grounding expectation here is what it always has been – to produce for human needs rather than desires manufactured from the salesman’s lies, to energize a process of production that expands human creativity and produces goods and services which do not accelerate the destruction of the planet, and fulfil human happiness. Impossible in a capitalist system, many would argue, and I agree with them. Which is why the transformation needed will inevitably travel a path towards a renewed socialism – made for the first time to the measure of a Caribbean consciousness.
And finally, seventhly, the grandest ambition of Caribbean intellectuals – to complete the process of emancipation. This is a quest to honor ancestors, to become one in turn, and to be qualified to live forever among those who have done so much to enchant human life in this region.
My reading of the contemporary Caribbean leads me to the urgent belief that it must recreate itself anew. This transformation will mean a different political economy, political arrangements beyond elite domination, and an entirely different structure of feeling in the realm of our public and private citizens lives. It is a quest that falters in me as in all others who dream of different Caribbean world. But it is a vision we cannot live without.
Aaron Kamugisha is Professor of Caribbean and Africana Thought at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus
These articles previously appeared in Stabroek News.
COMMENTS?
Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport
Or, you can comment by emailing us at comments@blackagendareport.com
Gaza has exposed the West’s ‘human rights’ as a colonial farce. Now, the world is experiencing a descent into imperial barbarism, and only collective resistance can build a future beyond fascism.
“Jesus was a revolutionary black leader, a Zealot, seeking to lead a Black Nation to freedom.”
Somalia’s recognition of SSC-Khaatumo as its sixth Federal Member State (FMS) has radically shifted the Horn of Africa’s geopolitical dynamics, with implications for Israel, Palestine, and Ansar…
This week’s featured author is Erik S. McDuffie. McDuffie is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His book is The Second Battle…
"Poem For The Great Dr. Freeman (My ’19 Lemlich Nominee)" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
