Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher, famous for the Critique of Pure Reason, gave as his opinion, like Hegel, that "So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, Europeans and Africans, that it appears to be as great in regards to mental capacity as in colour." The difference in mental capacity between whites and blacks is as stark as night and day.

This Kant wrote in a philosophical treatise entitled "Observation on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime." It is not enough to say that this observation by Kant is neither beautiful nor sublime, but reflects crassly the prejudice and ignorance of Kant’s time. It reminds too, that even the best of European thinkers fell prey to the all prevailing and pervading racism - the result of colonial conquest, African enslavement, and the 19^th century scramble for Africa.

But my point here is not the racism. Instead it is how, in our humanising process, we have sought to combat it in the production of thought and thinkers. I shall therefore be focusing on Antiguan intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. But I cannot exclude the first half. My argument is that up from slavery is our humanising project. It is not whether politicians understood it or not. It is that the full emancipation of labour is the purpose and flag-staff of Caribbean history, if not all history.

In the first half of the 20^th century though the Caribbean was moved by the ideas of E.W. Blyden, J.J. Thomas, the author of a wonderfully titled book, Froudacity, the famous Caribbean response to Froude’s attack on blacks in the Caribbean as less then human. Booker T. Washington, and of course Marcus Garvey, moved the English-speaking Caribbean as well, and definitely more so in this humanising project.

The local intellectual representatives of Garveyism were three in number. First and foremost, George Weston, who sought to repudiate the strictures against and the cultivation of inferiority and shame about our African origin which colonialism bred into us for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as snack in between. So that we came to uphold as the good, the beautiful and the sublime, all things European, rejecting all things African. So thorough was our rejection that we bleached our skins with vanishing cream, pulled our flat noses to make them straight, and conked our hair, all to eliminate our eternal African identity. So grievous was this condition that some advocated "miscegenation", the marriage of Africans to Europeans to escape our Africanity.

George A. Weston, almost single-handedly sought to counter this dread state of affairs, this internalised and externalised inferiority, by fostering a knowledge of Africa, its great past. And too, an understanding of Africa’s colonial subjugation by the Great Powers of the Western World. His was a lonely struggle. But for more than 50 years, to his dying day, he kept up this herculean struggle without pause. He was of course, one of Garvey’s lieutenants, at once international and national.

Weston wore a beard, neatly trimmed, which he swore never to cut until all Africa was free. It is one of the bench marks of the insensitivity of this society, that in his final illness, hospital authorities insisted on removing his beard. He never spoke a word thereafter. His marvellously sonorous voice was stilled by his own.

The next significant Antiguan intellectual, of the first half of the 20^th century would undoubtedly be Thomas N. Kirnon. The Antigua Grammar School, a weak model of an English public school, produced not a few brilliant men. But they were all in the first half of the 20^th century, assimilated. Assimilated to accept European thought and European dominance, and serve and subserve it, objecting here in that by verbose petition to its minor irritations.

However it was the Boys School, under Kirnon, which produced the first champions of change. Among such were two brothers, Vere and Oscar Bird, the first is well known. The younger brother, Oscar Bird, has been practically invisible, though his effect upon the social history of Antigua and Barbuda is no less profound. Oscar Bird, in the first Social Welfare Department of Antigua & Barbuda, on his own, and through his office, created more clubs, more organisations, than any other individual in history. If Spartro no longer exists, it gave rise to Trojans and to Spartans, two clubs which brought working people in the limelight of social activities, sports, from which they were otherwise debarred.

It was Oscar Bird’s work, which produced Ephraim John, the finest Broadcaster ever in Antigua and Barbuda, bar none. Radio has not attained the exalted heights of he 50’s and 60’s when Ephraim John presided. It was he who made popular the work of Paul Robeson, Marion Anderson, Errol Garner, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, asserting that not only Europeans but those of African descent had made inestimable contributions to life and living. It was Ephraim John, who gave time on Radio to Gregson Davis in the 60’s to host programmes on Caribbean literature. Nothing of the kind is known now. It was the same Ephraim John who gave Venetta Ross and Tim Hector time on radio to continue the work that Gregson Davis had started in popularising Caribbean literature, challenging the dominance of English Literature. It was the same Ephraim John who gave Sydney Christian time on radio to bring the great Jazz greats, the classical music of the 20^th century, to the population. But Ephraim John, was an Oscar Bird product.

It is enough to remind too, that the work of Oscar Bird gave rise to Hutson Knight and Norris Hunte, both of whom founded Rialto which became what we today know as Empire. Hubert George, with his Empire Grocery was, in truth, the first sponsor of a Club, which played cricket and football, and a derivative from Oscar Bird’s work, Dodgers, became the finest Volley Ball club Antigua has ever seen. It beat all comers and then went into oblivion for want of competition. Oscar Bird’s influence though was not only far and wide, but enduring.

But I return to T.N. Kirnon after an all too brief cameo of Oscar Bird as seen through others. T.N. Kirnon was born in Montserrat, and was brought to Antigua by the Methodists to teach at Sawcolts and Freetown Schools before taking charge of the Boy School.

T.N. Kirnon was moved by Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, two of the great names in the emancipation and liberation of Africans through education. It is not an accident that T.N. Kirnon named the Houses at the Boy’s School, off Washington, Aggrey and Stevens, three well known black figures. That, in itself, was a giant leap forward in consciousness, in the context of the harsh and nearly impenetrable authoritarian control of European colonialism.

But in the limited space allowed me I want to give you what T.N. Kirnon thought of Education here. I want you to remember that T.N.Kirnon went to the Tuskegee Institute of Booker T. Washington. I want to remind you too, that he read everything he could lay hands on by George Washington Carver, often called "the peanut man," a great inventor, and one of the best advocates in the entire history of education, of technical or vocational education. With that in mind, here then is T.N. Kirnon speaking in 1939 at the Harlem YMCA. (I need only interject from the start that T.N. Kirnon could not speak this way at home. Even though in his speech it is obvious, that as a public servant, he is still speaking guardedly in fear of colonial authority, while speaking in Harlem.)

Said T.N. Kirnon "Education conflicts with many things. If you want cheap labour you will be glad to get children to work, and consequently you would not be particularly interested to see that they go to school or to provide the means for them to get further education." [I interject here to remind that between 1906 and 1941 child labour constituted a stupendous 27 per cent of the plantation labour force here.] "There are people" continued T.N. Kirnon "who regard ignorant labour as an asset and for that reason they withhold any support for providing conditions that will educate the masses in general."

For indirection, or tongue-in-cheek expression, this is a masterpiece. Yet when the tongue is taken out of the cheek, this is the strongest indictment of colonial education. Colonialism and the plantation economy regarded "ignorant labour as an asset", and colonialism always sought to increase its assets, therefore "the withholding of any support for providing conditions that will educate the masses in general." It is clear that Kirnon understood the bare essentials of Capital’s role in the dehumanising project.

Kirnon was even more advanced. He said in the same 1939 address "For instance, in the islands there is an effort to settle people on the lands to get a strong peasant proprietorship. With the owning of the lands, if the children are given some knowledge of scientific agricultural work … they will be useful to their parents and will be able to do something for themselves when they go away from school."

It is blindingly obvious, that T.N. Kirnon understood, that agrarian reform to create "a strong peasant proprietorship" had to be based on the teaching of "scientific agriculture in schools", and, without that scientific instruction peasant proprietorship would collapse. So said, so done. Peasant proprietorship collapsed and the reverberations of that collapse can still be heard loudly in the current history of Antigua, where the national economy based on local forms of proprietorship has not yet emerged, independence or no independence. In consequence we hear so often the sad and shrill voice of underdevelopment both harsh and grating, with little power to chasten and fulfil.

I do not want to leave the impression that these our icons of the 20^th century were all paragons of unblemished ebony. I had and still have, and will always have difficulty if not outright rejection of T.N. Kirnon’s sense of discipline. Discipline was for him punishment. They are two vastly different things. To me, for sure, discipline is the humane organisation for the most efficient accomplishment of an objective. T.N. Kirnon, on the contrary, seemed to have thought that his task was to whip the offending child out of his charges, literally. The truth is, as a pastoral society, without industry, we are still in the vice grip of the Old Testament. So, long after Abraham was stopped from sacrificing Isaac, we still sacrifice our sons and daughters on the altar of blows. Besides, the plantation lived by the whip and the strap. By a kind of osmosis, we moderns unthinkingly and by ancient injunction, spare not the rod only to spoil the child into the ways of violence, which, in time, becomes domestic violence. Were it not far better that we sought to find and cultivate our children’s curiosities, interests and enthusiasms, and when they knowingly break accepted commandments, we deprive them of the pursuit of their own curiosities, interests and enthusiasms, as punishment?

Maybe, T.N. Kirnon could not have that perspective, limited and circumscribed by time and custom. At any rate, though, he was so formidable a model, that he allows us to critique his method of discipline in order to go beyond him in the humanising project.

In closing out the first half of the 20^th century the other intellectual of historical note is P.A.W. Gordon, who continued the voluntary adult education night classes, started by T.N. Kirnon and extended its range from Seatons all across the land. Antigua has not seen the like since, but for the Antigua Caribbean Training Institute started by ACLM in the 70’s and 80’s which sought to combine the ideas of Kirnon and Gordon and going beyond to Appropriate Technology. The anti-communist campaign waged by the Birds saw to the demise of the Antigua Caribbean Training Institute which was acclaimed by UNESCO. And that anti-communist campaign had the same purpose as described by T.N. Kirnon, namely, "withholding of any support for providing conditions that would educate the masses in general." The point is there were and still are forces working against the humanising project or more appropriately, the full emancipation of labour.

I want now to come to the second half of the 20^th century.

To grow, to escape the miasma which choked, confined, cabinned and cribbed the intellectual in this twin-island state the scholar had to go abroad; and given the one-crop or one industry economy, had to stay abroad to maintain growth.

To put it in the well known aphorism of C.L.R. James: "To establish his own identity Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew."

In the light of that, while Ashley Bryant, was the foremost intellectual produced in Antigua, himself becoming one of the leading figures in DNA research at its inception, he proves the point that he had to go and stay abroad to maintain growth. However, I have already written, at length on the late Ashley Bryant whose death in the 90’s rocked me, even my foundation. Rocked me because, not even a memorial service was held in his native land for this fine scientist! For now I will say no more. For anger might get the better of me, at the bovine indifference of official society to our significant achievers. Maybe, just maybe, like Hamlet, I have to say, O, cursed spite that I was born to set things right. And maybe too, officialdom is the natural enemy of the humanising process.

Surely though, the most significant intellectuals produced by Antigua & Barbuda who had to, in order to establish Calibans’ identity, after three centuries of subjugation, would include Professor Gregson Davis, Dr Lauchland Henry, Professor Paget Henry, Professor Farquhar, Dr Percival Perry and Dr Vanere Goodwin. (At another time, I shall come to the women). Remember that I am writing of a tiny 170 square mile twin island state with under 70,000 people. Such a distinguished group of intellectuals coming from so small a place, should distinguish the place. But, the place pays no attention to its own distinction. Because there is no national economy, no real national proprietorship, hence there can be no real national pride, official pronouncements notwithstanding. What say you?

Gregson Graham Davis is a modest, almost self-effacing man, born in Antigua in 1940 and educated at the Antigua Grammar School. He is today the Andrew Mellon Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Duke University one of the most outstanding U.S. universities. Before that, from 1991 to 1994 he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Impressive.

But Professor Gregson Davis though modest, almost to a fault, would have no idea of the tremendous impact he had on us all who followed him.

Professor Gregson Davis could not have known how those of us who followed him used our meagre pocket change to buy a Time magazine of June 1960.

There we read in this prestigious international magazine of an Antiguan, an Antiguan achiever. We grew instantly to ten feet tall.

Time magazine of June 1960 had this to say: "The good looking negro strode briskly to the platform at Harvard’s commencement, welcomed his audience with sweeping gestures and rolling Latin phrases. Turning to the ladies he intoned: "O Puellai Radcliffienses." And the Radcliffe girls present, one smiled more happily than the rest at the words of Noel Gregson Davis 19. She was his sister Cecile 21. Together they had made a remarkable record. Gregson has not only been chosen one of Harvard’s two student commencement orators, the first Negro so honoured, but was also graduating magna cum laude, while Cecile (cum laude) was elected class president and senior-class marshal."

Two Antiguans at the top of one of the top-most universities in the world, male and female, brother and sister. What a day! What a moment!. Not a few of us aimed to scale similar heights. Harvard was the college of the great W.E.B. DuBois and here was Gregson Davis achieving what DuBois had not. Glory be.

But that was not by any means all. Time Magazine could not and did not say that Gregson Davis, from tiny Antigua, had achieved an all-time Harvard record. Entering Harvard in 1956, at 16 he was one of the youngest students ever. More than that, he was the first Freshman, in the three hundred year history of Harvard, to win Bowdoin Prize in Latin in his first year. It had never been attempted before. Not only did Gregson attempt, he won. Not only did he win, he won the Bowdoin Prize every year for the next four years. That, too, was a record.

I hope you get the point. In his first year at Harvard Gregson was competing with Seniors and won the Bowdoin Prize for Latin translation among all comers. It means then that, at 16, he was most wonderfully prepared from Antigua to compete with the best. A justly eminent black classics scholar, Dr Alford Blackett, had laid the foundation. The talent and application was Gregson’s. But the foundation was well and truly laid here. Backwoods we are in industry, large-scale commerce and modern agriculture, but in all things purely human we are the equal of any, including the best.

I will remember, Father Ralph Browne, and Englishman then teaching at the AGS being so pleased and so proud of Gregson’s achievement that he called me to his room and had me read Kant’s statement that "so fundamental is the difference between these two races, African and European, that it appears to be as great in regards to mental capacity as to colour." Browne then went on to say that it is in that context that Gregson Davis’ achievement had to be seen! It was in Father Browne’s view "a great big blow against the inferiority which has induced a serious complex here. With Davis N. G. going before, you all can now go forward to bury other slanders and calumnies as Davis N.G. has buried this one, for us all." That "us" used by Father Browne, became an unbreakable bond between us in my view. His identification with "us", the downtrodden, the colonised, the wretched of the earth, and his rejection of the aristocracy of the skin, was absolute and complete.

But Gregson was to do more. With such a spectacular beginning we should have been prepared for the middle.

In 1991 Gregson wrote a book entitled Polyphymia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse, California Press. Now this publication was to make, follow me carefully, world history.

For, in the latest edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the authoritative international reference work on the classics, Dr Gregson Davis’ book appears at the end of the short bibliography on Horace. Only a dozen or so books are cited on each ancient classical author as definitive works. To accomplish this, a definitive work, in long history of classical scholarship, on Horace in particular, is nothing short of the very acme of scholarship.

A quiet, self-effacing young man, from two tiny dots of a twin island state, in the Caribbean Sea, called Antigua-Barbuda had scaled the highest heights of classical scholarship. The humanising project had taken a great leap forward.

A word or two about who Horace was. Horace is the anglicised name of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. He was born on 8 December in 65 BC and died November 27, 8 BC. He was regarded as imperial Rome’s greatest lyric poet. His 88 Odes are still today considered classics of literature, ancient or modern.

That an Antiguan-Barbudan, Noel Gregson Davis, would scale the highest heights of classical scholarship and write a definitive work on Horace shows not only a mastery of the classics but one of the truly brilliant minds of our time, as classicist and literary critic.

Gregson was also to turn this mind to the study of Caribbean literature. He has written the definitive work on Aimé Césairé, the great poet from Martinique. As well as another work on Aimé Césairé Non-Vicious Circle. He has recently, or rather, more recently turned his attention to the nobel-prize winning Derek Walcott and two essays of his (which I have not read yet) "Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros," 1997, and "Pastoral sites: aspects of bucolic transformation in Derek Walcott’s Omeros" are considered compulsory reading, not only by critics, but by Derek Walcott himself. These are no mean achievements. They are in fact on the grand scale, and perhaps, the grandest. But Gregson Davis himself would look askance if I were to be more full-blown.

What is striking to me though about Gregson Davis, is that as literary critic, he is in the top drawer. He scrupulously avoids the theorising by which modern critics impose some theory on the text under discussion, fitting the work into the theory until work and author vanish in the manner of Roland Barthes and the theory of the critics alone stands glowing in its own theoretical pyro-technics. Gregson Davis is not one of those and therefore not in the fashionable circle. Incidentally he is familiar with all the new fangled literary critics, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes etc, whom he reads in the regional French.

In time though he will be acclaimed among the leading literary critics and his work on Césairé and Walcott, might be acclaimed in his work on Horace. Though, the Horace work cannot easily be matched.

Suffice it only to say, that Gregson Davis did on Horace, what neither Hegel or Kant could do. He showed too an acuity of mind which obliterated all distinctions between one race and another. In one lifetime that is more than enough. How all this is related to the emancipation of labour, and therefore the abolition of class and gender domination we shall see as I go along.

Sadly though, Gregson Davis returns home to his own and he is never allowed to speak to his own. Radio and TV, all in official hands, all ignoring, if not ignorant. Yet it bothers Gregson, familiarly Gregee, not at all. As scholar exceptional, even more so as person. It is such as Gregson Davis who when known about, encourages us all to be more human, reminding that the humanising prospect is our real mission to rise from the worst form of slavery known to man and in rising, rising, by struggle, to create a truly human history. When that history is written Noel Gregson Graham Davis would have made an inestimable contribution.

(Next week Professor Paget Henry, Dr Lauchland Henry et al.)