MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 14 February 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.
In 1946, Jamaica had the vote, long before any other African country. Even before India became independent in 1947, there was universal suffrage in Jamaica. By 1951 Antigua and Barbuda, a mere speck of dust on the world map, had universal suffrage – to every man and woman over 21 the right to vote. No African country on the continent had reached there yet.
It took Jamaica 26 years before it could move to independence, after getting the vote. It took Antigua 30 years to move from universal suffrage to independence. In other words, granted self-determination, it took these English-speaking Caribbean islands a quarter of a century at least before they could self-determine to be free and independent. By 1981, all African countries had gained their independence often by struggle.
Where we were once, at the head, of the most important political movement in the 20th century – and for that matter all of human history for there is nothing in history to equal or rival the national liberation of more than a 100 countries in less than 40 years – we ended up at the tail-end.
So much so, the Caribbean is among the last outposts of colonialism. We are at the bottom of the heap. What is even worse, the British Government has publicly signalled that it wants to get rid of its remaining Caribbean colonies as soon as possible. The British are now doing publicly what it did to Antigua and Barbuda privately. In plain terms, the myth, assiduously cultivated these last 15 years in particular, that Antigua and Barbuda “struggled for independence” is precisely what it is – myth.
The truth of the matter is, that the British told the Bird Government – which had strenuously opposed independence under the George Walter Government – that it did not wish to continue the colonial relation with Antigua and Barbuda. And so Antigua and Barbuda limped to independence in 1981. It is to George Walter’s eternal credit, that even when battling political imprisonment, from 1976, he did not, never once, turn against the independence he himself had proposed for Antigua and Barbuda in 1976. That puts George Walter in a very elevated category of political personages. Oddly enough he has never been credited with this before, in spite of those who to promote themselves claim to be the sole defenders of the PLM, which party, incidentally, they did more to discredit when in power – that is from within!
The point is, George Walter, as a vehicle for his own political salvation could easily have adopted the position that for Antigua and Barbuda to gain independence, it had to have a referendum, as prescribed by the Constitution and there would have to be a clear two-thirds majority voting for independence. I can safely speculate that no party in Antigua & Barbuda could have won a two-thirds majority on any issue in a referendum. I repeat it is to George Walter’s eternal credit that he did not take this obvious course, which the Birds had collectively taken against him. Namely, no independence under George Walter. George Walter did not reply in kind. Antigua and Barbuda owes him an enormous debt of political gratitude for that alone.
But the point I wish to make is even larger. Independence has failed and failed lamentably in the Caribbean, though not ingloriously.
For, from 1804, Haiti battled on alone. Alone, alone in a wide wide world, a world not only wide and white, but uncompromisingly hostile in length and breadth. Europe and America combined to bring independent Haiti to its knees. Haiti, after all, had had the effrontery to abolish slavery by an historic revolution. Slave-holding America, slave-holding U.S.A, slave-holding France, even slave-holding Spain could not abide Haiti’s independence, as the first black independent Republic in the world. Each and all of them made war against Haiti. Haiti repelled them all. All of them, the mightiest countries in the West, Haiti defeated. It is a glorious chapter in Caribbean history. And, indeed, in world history.
For sixty and more years, the U.S. refused to recognise Haiti. It had to prove to itself and to its black slave population that freedom and independence were not worth having, freedom was not an essential requirement for human development. Slavery was better. Before the Cold War, the land of the free and the home of the brave, sponsored every Haitian dictator it could find, and when none were to its liking, it invaded and occupied Haiti establishing a dictatorship in its own name, and bringing the misrule of Haiti to its lowest depths, itself.
It is my view, that whether at Harvard or Temple University, Black Studies, has failed utterly, though not totally, in bringing home that historical reality – U.S. hostility deeply ingrained, to Caribbean freedom.
I do not say this lightly, and least of all in what is termed “anti-Americanism”. For the U.S. was to carry on the same hostility against another Caribbean country, Cuba, since the Cuban Revolution of 1959. For 35 years now it has kept up a blockade, an economic embargo against Cuba, the longest in human history. Not even against the Soviet Union, which the U.S. was to term an “Evil Empire” did the U.S. maintain an economic embargo for half as long as it has against Cuba. The hostility to black and Caribbean freedom, as symbolised by the Cuban embargo, continues apace. The embargo against Cuba was strengthened only last year. And not just embargo. In the 38 years of the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. has carried out more than 2,000 covert operations against Cuba, as recorded by the U.S. Congress. In that climate of implacable and unceasing hostility against Cuba, the U.S. still demands democracy in Cuba. Not even the U.S. itself could develop or maintain democracy, if victim of such unrelenting hostility from its former colonial master – Britain. By the way, without any continuation of hostilities from Britain, it took the U.S. thirteen years after 1776, the year of the American Revolution, before it held elections.
Cuba then, maintains, the only form of government possible and practicable, in such intense conditions of political and economic strangulation, allied to over 2,000 acts of war.
Yet Fidel Castro has not imprisoned in concentration camps, any serious fraction of the number of Japanese-Americans, that the U.S.A put in concentration camps after the single Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour!
Besides that, Fidel Castro and the Cuban people did make an undeniable, an invaluable and incalculable contribution to human freedom, by defeating the forces of apartheid allied to the mighty U.S. in Southern Africa. Just as independent Haiti helped and fitted out the great liberator Simon Bolivar in the liberation of South America, so too did independent Cuba directly assist Africa, Southern Africa, in particular, in quest for not just African freedom, but human freedom. These then are glorious moments in the history of the independent Caribbean.
Not to make these central to any programme of Black Studies, is to pursue the arcane, even the frivolous, if not the vexatious. Be aware that my criticisms are not just levelled at the top-flight programmes of Black Studies, undertaken at Harvard and Temple, but at U.W.I. and the University of Guyana, even more so. Indeed, not the U.S.A, but the Caribbean ought to be the leading centres of Black studies. That it is not so, speaks volumes about the failure of what my friend in Trinidad & Tobago, Lloyd Best, calls “the independence project in the Caribbean”. After all, blacks are a minority in the U.S., and for the most part powerless. Blacks are a majority in the Caribbean, and at least nominally, if not substantially, endowed with political power. How comes it then, that Black Studies flows in the U.S. while it barely meanders, if at all, in the Caribbean? The weakness reflects our lack of consciousness, and our consciousness reflects the weakness.
That fact belies the other fact. That is, that the most prominent personages in the field, the Cuban, Fernando Ortiz; the Martiniquan, Frantz Fanon; the Jamaican, Marcus Garvey; and the Trinidadians, George Padmore and C.L.R. James; the Guyanese Walter Rodney and Ivan Van Sertima; all stand tall, where not tallest, among figures and scholars of the 20th century. Something is profoundly amiss. What is that?
The Caribbean gained its independence and then set about to conform to the very arrangements and structures of thought, feeling and economic being, which had brought about our enslavement and colonial thralldom in the very first place. We did not like the chains off our minds and therefore could not and did not take the chains off the economy.
The economic, social and political institutions in which decolonised Caribbean people live out their lives are the same as under colonialism.
The failure to diversify economies of the region; the failure to deepen democracy beyond the superficialities inherited from colonialism; the failure to bring the people in, into economic and political management; has left the Caribbean echoing and re-echoing the laissez-faire market economies which has become Holy Writ in the world the Euro-Americans made, maintain and are determined to retain, regardless of whether blacks are marginalised, or rather, better if blacks are marginalised.
Black studies to be Black Studies has to challenge that Euro-American world-view which enslaved and dehumanised us, root and branch. Descartes’ rationalist injunction “Doubt everything” is still a valid beginning, and an essential starting point for all Black studies.
I readily admit that at the time, the national liberation movements deposited Africans and people of African descent, as well as the indentured East Indians, on the world stage, the Euro-American world had already collapsed in thought, though not in part, and by no means in hegemony. That, I suppose, must be a startling statement. But it is nonetheless true. That is, that philosophically the Euro-American hegemony was at a dead-end. Now the proof.
It was in 1882 that Nietzsche in The Gay Science, stated that “God was dead”, not in 1982 when Time Magazine belatedly discovered it, was the declaration made.
Nietzsche, said that “God was dead” not so because he was an atheist, but because as a result of Rationalism and its economic system, capitalism, educated people could no longer maintain the beliefs of Hebrew nomads, in the face of scientific thought and industrial growth over the preceding 250 years. Nietzsche went on to predict (in Ecce Homo) that the 20th century would be a century of “wars such as have never happened on earth”. The First and Second World Wars, as well as the Korean and Vietnam wars, were to confirm, even exceed, that prediction. Nietzsche went on to declare “that brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of non-brothers ... will appear in the arena of the future.”
However that is glossed over or however concealed, by whatever devices, that reality is upon us. It cannot be wished away. Whether they be called the G-7 countries or the World Trade Organisation, the existence “of brotherhoods with the aim of robbery and exploitation of non-brothers” ... has appeared in the arena of the present. Nietzsche’s future is the present.
For Caribbean purposes, how else can the wholesale assault on Caribbean banana production be explained. In no other way, but that the multi-national brotherhoods, with no other aim but “the robbery and exploitation, (even the extinction) of non-brothers” is at work, ruthlessly and heedlessly, God dead or not dead.
I am not done with Nietzsche yet, one of the major western thinkers. He said that humankind would limp through the 20th century “on the mere pittance” of the old, decaying, God-based moral codes. But then in the 21st century, would come a period more dread and more dreadful than the great wars, a time said Nietzsche, “of the total eclipse of all values.”
Such a time is already upon us. There are those trying, with arms in hand and by murder, individual or mass murder, to return the world to the outmoded fundamentalisms. While neuroscience seems intent on proving that we are all prisoners of genes, or “brain imaging”, and so “hard-wired”. Thus people are “hard-wired” not only to loathe one another, but also themselves.
This is the world that the independent Caribbean and independent Africa entered in their own right, in their own name, for the first time in centuries.
I might add two other defining moments in western history, and therefore western thought and practice, which signalled its collapse. Freud came upon the great discovery, which I will call the Oedipal drama. To Freud the unconscious sexual plot that was played out in the family during every child’s existence is the key determining factor. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, is to me still a major point in humankind’s sojourn on earth. But the method he devised for treating mental deformations, proceeding from the unconscious on the Oedipal drama – psychoanalysis – dramatically collapsed, and accidentally at that!
In 1949 an Australian psychiatrist, John Cade, gave five days of lithium therapy – for entirely the wrong reasons – to a 51 year old mental patient who had been “so manic depressive, so hyperactive, so unintelligible and uncontrollable that he had been kept locked away in asylums for 20 years. By the sixth day, thanks to the lithium build up in his blood, the manic-depressive was a normal human being. Three months later he was released and lived happily every after in his home.” Freud’s psychoanalysis, the new Shaman of the West, had failed. Tranquillising drugs had worked. Freudianism was assailed from all quarters. Another western God had fallen. Freud’s latter day critics, all but threw out the baby – the theory of the unconscious – with the bath-water-psychoanalysis.
The other collapse of the west, was the collapse of Sovietism. The Russian workers, through the Soviets or Workers Councils had come to power in Soviet Russia in 1917. The exploitation of class by class was ended, it was said. Civil War in Russia wiped out the Soviets – or workers councils – the new creative social organ. Counter-revolution led by Joseph Stalin, wiped out the Bolshevik party and the Bolshevik Revolution by 1928. Yet Western intellectuals continued for a long time, all of them, from Bernard Shaw to Sartre, to hold up Soviet society as the last great hope of humankind, up until 1956 and finally up until 1973.
In 1956 at the 20th party congress Khruschev denounced Stalin and the criminality that had underpinned his rule. Nearly all the world famous intellectuals hurried away in haste. Few noticed, even to this day that the great George Padmore, a Caribbean man, had abandoned it since 1938, as the God that failed; and that C.L.R. James, another Black West Indian had kept up a profound, a thorough-going critique of Soviet State capitalism, rejecting it as any kind of socialism long before Khruschev. All this has so far escaped Black Studies, and Caribbean scholarship.
And then in 1973, Sovietism or Soviet State Capitalism, was struck its final blow by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who, in a 2,000 page densely detailed, non-fiction work, The Gulag Archipelago, had shown, in historic detail, what he had outlined fictionally in a great novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Namely, that the Soviet system, was based on a slave labour camp system, where labour was even more degraded. Degraded labour in the labour camps paid for the elaborate welfare system – which people mistook for socialism – and slave labour camps, as well as exploited industrial labour, paid for the elaborate arms race in which the Soviet Union was engaged in, against other parts of the West.
It is this world the Caribbean had entered where all the Western Gods had fallen. Its own George Padmore, its own C.L.R. James, had remained irrelevant to it; if not hounded and rejected. They came unto their own and their own received them not. Their own clung steadfastly to the failed Gods of the West. Black Studies, born in the revolutionary throes of the momentous U.S. Civil Rights revolution, seems to have abandoned its essential mission. That is, to critique and replace Western modes of being in the world, and the thought that re-enforced it, the idea and practice of “brotherhoods with the [sole] aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.”
As with Freudianism, so with Sovietism, the Western pundits are now anxious, indeed, over-anxious to throw-out the baby – revolutionary socialism – with the bath-water, – Sovietism or Soviet State Capitalism. Black-studies had its work cut out for it. How to restore and advance the theory of human emancipation from class, sex, and race domination. Black studies is about that, or it is about nothing really valid.
I want to end this long treatise – too long – as I began, with the Caribbean. The Caribbean was to witness one of the great tragedies of our time in a little island. It was, among other things, as all tragedies do, to expose the bankruptcy of the Caribbean nationalist movement which began so heroically in the 30’s with mass upheavals in every single territory, English, French, Spanish and Dutch. In that pan-Caribbean mass activity a united Caribbean was pregnant. It was aborted. The resultant nationalist movement degenerated.
For example in Grenada, the Spice isle was awash in corruption and mis-government by independence in 1974. A nationalist leader, Eric Gairy, had miscarried in the earliest months of pregnancy. Gairy imitated the worst aspects of the failed nationalist movement in Haiti. He turned to a goon squad, the Ton Ton Macoutes, to become the repressive arm of the State augmenting or replacing the army and the police. Abuses were rife. After much personal suffering, the immortal Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel movement led a successful revolution against Gairy’s mis-government on the Ides of March, 1979.
Maurice Bishop had before the revolution, following ACLM in Antigua and others in the Caribbean, outlined a new democracy based on Assemblies of the People, which would be directly involved in Government. This democratic revolution would produce – One Caribbean as its logical outcome.
With the Grenada Revolution came reactionaries, disguised as revolutionaries, who sought to instruct the revolutionary party in the most absurd text on earth, namely, the Fundamentals of Leninism by Joseph Stalin. What had been condemned even by the Soviet Union itself as far back as 1956 became Holy Writ in revolutionary Grenada. What the Gulag Archipelago had exposed as a Soviet Labour Camp system was now being upheld, as the new heaven and the new earth.
The Elitism of the party as the Guide and Director of all things, replaced the idea of the Assemblies of the People. The Paramount Party would become the State by way of the shibboleth of “democratic centralism” a clear contradiction in terms. Simultaneously, the new democracy of the Assemblies of the People was abandoned. Joint leadership was proclaimed as a subterfuge to let in the Stalinist maximum leader, Bernard Coard. To be fair, with the prevailing predominance of the Cold War, and its so-called ideological divisions of the world, Maurice Bishop went along. Newspapers were closed. ACLM objected. People were detained, willy-nilly. ACLM objected. As the Fundamentals of Leninism became the new bible to be taught from Grenada, ACLM again, politely withdrew. In the while, the Party leadership became indistinguishable from the Army Party and Army leadership became the State. ACLM was dismissed from the Caribbean’s new liberation family. A Caribbean revolution was trapped in the worship of dead Gods. All in compassion ends, so differently from what head and heart had arranged.
In the end, Maurice Bishop, prompted by the very fine Jackie Creft, a very fine woman in Caribbean history, demurred. He could no longer go along. He was imprisoned by the Stalinists. Freed by the masses, who were without revolutionary institutions, Maurice Bishop and those who stood with him, were shot down worse than in Truman Capote’s Cold Blood. A step in a new English-speaking Caribbean direction, had perished in a sea of shibboleths and blood. And too, in a Caribbean Sea, unspeakably hostile as it was orchestrated under the watchful baton of the U.S. The Caribbean pre-occupied itself with the American invasion of the dead corpse, and not the internal abortion of the revolution. It learnt nothing. It turned even more worshipfully to other dead Gods. It was structurally adjusted, from the Bahamas in the North to the Guyanas in the South. In such a condition are we now.
Black studies has to develop a new historical perspective, or perish as historical prettification.
It is not impossible that Antigua & Barbuda could from part of a new thrust in the revival of Black Studies as a tool of liberation. But that awaits the passing of another failed god, otherwise known as the Bird dynasty.
Last updated on 14 February 2022