This country has produced a few exceptional people in the twentieth century, but of the few, hardly any have been able to fulfil themselves at home.
Achievement was virtually impossible in 19th century Antigua and Barbuda. The first third of the century saw our people bound hand and foot to the plantation, in chattel slavery, the dehumanising project.
The other two thirds of the century saw us trapped in the dehumanising project, making decimal degrees of progress. Dr Susan Lowes, writing of this period in Antigua summed it up this way: ‘As the economic situation deteriorated after the 1840’s the white population made a concerted effort to preserve its hegemony, and barriers that had seemed to be falling began to be re-erected."
By 1860, according to Sewell, even the non-white middle class was being excluded from the polls. The Legislative Council was once again composed entirely of planters. Coloureds had made one step forward, only to make two steps backward. Blacks remained bound hand and foot to the plantation. We survived. Achievement was nil.
Indeed, it was not until 1939 that Reginald St Clair Stevens achieved the first wage increase in over 50 years. The process of stultification knew no limit. The dehumanisation of slavery continued, as free labour proved cheaper than slave labour. Some there were, called the Thirty-niners who saw liberation as better wages. It was a most limited conception, dignified, on hindsight, with the term "Mission of Mercy".
By the 1950’s though, one or two blacks began to look pass the administrative posts which the system allowed, look beyond the one or two opportunities to be doctors and lawyers. All of whom, administrative or professional, faithfully served the old system. Not a few Afro-Saxons were more English than the English. None save Nellie Robinson before 1939 and Kenny Joe dared in any way to challenge the system. Other than the labourer, fighting back, by reducing his level of productivity. This negation was to remain a negation. This lowering of productivity is sometimes described by the adherents of colonialism as "laziness". But it was all our forefathers and foremothers could do to resist. Reduce their level of productivity. If the system of production is not replaced by another, then the lowering of productivity ceases to be resistance and only transformation, with new conceptions can raise the level of productivity.
Be that as it is, by the 1950’s the sons and daughters of primary school teachers, masons and carpenters began to dream new dreams or to go in some new direction.
One such was Dr Lauchland Henry. Valedictorian of his graduating class at the Antigua Grammar School, he had gained acceptance at Cambridge University in England. But, as he put it "money was not available" for him to attend. Blighted, in spite of success at school. He went off instead, to his father in Harlem in the winter of 1951. The Korean war was on and he promptly found himself in the American marines. Drafted. Off to the foxholes of Korea. From the somnolence of a backward plantation economy to the theatre of modern warfare.
Returning from the Korean war, to "the land of the free", Lauchland Henry found only a succession of menial jobs - pushing hand trucks through the garment district. You think it easy up North, eh? But the immersion in an industrial economy which is at the same time, the epicentre of racism teaches profound lessons.
Luckily Lauchland Henry could call in on his G.I. Bill and go to college. And, as he said, "I figured that if that didn’t work out, I could always go back to pushing carts," or to an assembly line, the change in production, at that point in American time.
At University, Colombia University, he puts it a little whimsically, as he says he "stayed long enough to earn a doctorate in mechanics," really, mechanical engineering. Had he stayed here he would still have been writing up Local Purchase Orders (LPOs) in the civil service. That would have been the outer limit of achievement here. The same man abroad was not only a mechanical engineer but had a doctorate, if you please. He had not done either chemistry or physics. But here he was mastering the science of engineering. His country men could dream new dreams based on his example.
Dr Lauchland Henry was to spend 21 years in various management positions with IBM. "In addition" wrote his publisher "he taught and spoke to thousands of IBMers, his audiences have included IBM customers from the Fortune 500, medium and small organisations, school systems, hospitals and government agencies."
Added to all that there is more. Dr Lauchland Henry "has been a trustee of Packer Collegiate Institute, an adjunct faculty member at Rutgers University and the Malcolm-King College." The last named after Malcolm X and Dr Martin Luther King tells you a lot about his liberation perspective. He is, among other things, president and co-founder of Greenwood and Henry Associates "specialists in management and professional development."
Among the other things I would personally want to note is that Dr Lauchland Henry has a very fine wife, Gloria, who in my personal gallery, is one of the finest people I have ever met. So strong was her personality, that she has battled illness for many years now, and despite the ravages to her body, she remains the epitome of courage, capability and charm.
Dr Lauchland Henry was to write three books. One, believe it or not, on management, entitled The Professional’s Guide to Working Smarter. It is rated as a classic of the type. An Antiguan rising to the top of an industrial society, in one of the world’s leading companies, on the cutting edge of technology, and writing a treatise on modern management! The achievement is not only exceptional and inspiring, it is awesome.
This engineer, Dr Lauchland Henry, a computer whiz, long before computers were popular, is also, guess what? A poet! Incredible.
Even more incredibly this expert in management has never been asked by his native land to do a single thing here.
We, routinely, spurn our best products. This man who has had and led management seminars all across the U.S. for Fortune 500 companies, has never been asked by his native land, to conduct even one seminar in management, for a country which for centuries controlled nada, and whose main lack is management. Stultifying.
The man I know would have gladly done it for a penny. I am sure about one thing, reading his book on management, though he does not say so explicitly, it is written for inner-city blacks, and post colonial blacks. He left a guide and a ladder for those who would come after.
Out of his two books of poetry Talk To Me and Touch Me Inside, one poem from the latter has always, baffled, puzzled and even bewildered me. It goes like this, and it is called Life:
Few lines in poetry, from say Chaucer to any of the moderns, have stunned me more than the last of this poem.
What in the dickens does Lauchland Henry, the poet mean?
Up from slavery, we have gone nowhere, just getting and spending, playing blind man’s bluff in our assimilation. So we blew the game. Is that it?
Space does not allow me to reproduce here Lauchland Henry’s poem dedicated to his friend and first cousin, John Laviscount. John Laviscount though, is that rare man of this our twentieth century. A black man, who, became an industrialist in a 108 square mile island, a steel fabricator, in a pastoral country, where there has not even been more than a glimmer of the 18th and 19th century industrial revolution. Needless to say, in our alienation, we prefer steel frames from Miami or even Odessa, rather than Laviscount’s. Our self-contempt persists. Laviscount says this self-contempt is rooted in the worship of alien gods. I contend it goes beyond that. It is rooted in our failure to own and control, and so we remain dependent worshippers at foreign shrines. But that is not my subject here.
There is this poem from Dr Lauchland Henry, on which I will not comment, but leave you to absorb. It says to you, this:
Dr Lauchland Henry has not lived here for 48 years. Back on holiday occasionally. How then does he know us so well? Maybe our pussy-footing so long on history’s door step, imitating our oppressors and voicing their perceptions of the world have become known far and wide. So that the sensitive among us can only "despise the things we sanction" in our acceptance of "empty promises." Our spinelessness in refusing to take a stand defines us. We are afraid of what may come if we take history, ownership and control, in our own hands.
Is it our fate to go on with vain-glorious boasting about being 38th on the UNDP’s human index when we have never invented a single thing put to use in our society for our own upliftment? Maybe it is our Fate
I leave you there, or is it here? With one of Antigua and Barbuda’s 20th century giants, Dr Lauchland Henry, mechanical engineer, IBM expert, lecturer, management specialist, poet. Antiguan and Barbudan extraordinaire. The creative voice is not Longfellow’s, not Hart Crane’s. Not T.S. Eliot’s, not Robert Frost’s. The intimations of mortality though, are undoubtedly our own. The voice distinctly and definitively his.
I come now to a contemporary of mine. Classmate. As another exceptional mind Lawrence Jardine, where prose is spare and clean, was to write of him: "He attended the Antigua Grammar School where he met the now legendary Dr Alfred Blackett, black classicist, who left an unerasable mark. At the Antigua Grammar School he was an "A" student, Latin, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Pure and Applied Maths; it is said that in his classes in his last years the contest amongst the other students was for second place. In 1958 he was the only Grade-I recipient in the Cambridge exams. In athletics, in that same year he was "Victor Ludorum", an award for best athlete, making him the only student to achieve both awards simultaneously, in the [115 year] history of the Antigua Grammar School. He is also an excellent swimmer and diver." He was to play football for the AGS and Antigua in that same year. Who is he?
Lawrence Jardine continues to tell us of him: "At age 16, he left Antigua for college: Hampton Institute in Virginia. In 1963 he graduated with a triple major in Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics, and received a graduate scholarship to the University of Maryland.
"However, due to mounting racism, he left for California and Stanford University. Here, after two years, he received his Masters in Applied Physics and began work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC). There his work involved probing the structure of the atom, and took him into the rare world of subatomic particles. Between 1965 and 1967, as part of a design team, he participated in the design and testing of a prototype of "Streamer Spark Chamber’. This apparatus is presently being used in the search for the elusive Quark." Another Antiguan and Barbudan, this time standing on the Everest of science.
An Antiguan & Barbudan inventor! In the rare world of atomic physics. Who is this man? Do you know him? Of course you do! He has played with you, for football is his undying passion. Great physicist, mentioned in the scientific Who is Who of the world! Who played football here, whom you spurned too. No Hosannas for him. Only the crucifixion. And when thirsty, was given gall to drink, and perhaps too, mocking laughter in our alienation.
But who is this man? "In 1968" our chronicler Lawrence Jardine, who can make complex scientific matters seem accessible, continues "he moved to Berkeley and the University of California and changed his specialisation to Solid State Physics. There at Berkeley he designed a stable node locked 50 MW Laser, intra-cavity modulation and extra-cavity demodulation of He-Ne laser. He also lectured at undergraduate and graduate level in Physics and worked with the great scientist Charles Townes, as research assistant, who received the Nobel Prize for Science. In the meantime our Antiguan scientist achieved his Ph.D."
He went back to work. This time, as Jardine writes so easily, "at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center between 1973 and 1986. Here, among other things, besides major scientific papers, a fast data logging optical spectroscopy system was designed by this same Antiguan and Barbudan scientist, and made operational at the IBM Research Facility in Yorktown Heights, New York." Who is this amazing Antiguan and Barbudan of the 20th century?
The shortened record of his achievements are not done yet. "In 1980 as part of the 1979 U.N. International Year of Telecommunications he devised and designed an approved project, which saw him create, build and install a satellite tracking system to monitor the path of hurricanes as they made their way through the Caribbean." A scientist and man of many parts. Not a narrow specialist, but a man for all seasons.
Who is this astonishing inventor, this amazing scientist of the 20th century?
He is, to cut a long story short, Dr Percival ‘Pep’ Perry, Antigua and Barbuda’s 20th century, outstanding contribution to the world of science.
I am going to make what seems like a diversion. But you will find at the end that I am very much on the ball. Recently, to understand my classmate and friend Dr Pep Perry better I have had to be delving in the history of mathematics and science.
Now, as everyone knows the great era of the electronic computer came only after the Second World War. But, it seems the computer had a long and interesting pre-history, so to speak. In 1808, for example, a weaver, Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a method to programme a draw-loom by means of punch cards. The idea was taken over by Charles Babbage, for his "analytical engine". This "engine" never finished. It contained, it is said, many of the ideas basic to any modern automatic computer. It could "store," perform calculations ("mill") and control. However, since the workings had to be entirely mechanical, only the electronics of the present age would have made it practical.
Later, Konrad Zuse, a German, improved on previous efforts, including those of the American statistician Herman Hollerith, by taking up Leibniz’s ideas on the binary system.
Then in 1939, Vannevar Bush, at MIT, in collaboration with Norbert Weiner constructed in that year, an analog computer for the evaluation of certain integrals and for solving some types of differential equations. Following, rather overlapping this, in 1936, at Princeton, Alan M. Turing, a young Englishman, defined the ‘Turing Machine", an abstract model of a possible logical machine. Then in 1945, at Manchester in England Turing applied his ideas to the construction of practical computers. Following on this Claude E. Shannon, then at MIT, took further steps in logical design for his information theory.
The new or modern era in working computers began with the Mark I at Harvard by Howard H. Aiten with help from IBM. Thus, with modern finance in the loop, the Mark I still largely mechanical, was followed by the Mark II 1945-47, this had all the arithmetical and transfer operations done by electromagnetic relays. The first electronic computer the ENIAC, was completed at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. All this, as you would have noted, was still University work, but in the 1950’s computers became available for commercial purposes.
Why did I write all this. When Pep and I were at school here, I thought he had accepted Henry Ford’s idea that: History is bunk. In a conversation with him in 1994, I found that he had undertaken a profound study of the mathematical and electronic history of the computer. It was a relatively brief conversation, and as his wont and style he spoke matter-of-factly, but I was overwhelmed by his profound grasp of the historical development of the computer.
My guess is that he is planning to make a decisive intervention in the whole process of computer development, and he seemed to be working on some new approach, which truth to tell, I was not mentally equipped even to approach, let alone comprehend.
But if you watch carefully, the historical development of the computer has largely been international.
I feel pretty sure, that Dr Percival Perry, Antigua’s premier man of science in my view, will make a decisive contribution to this international development, in computer technology for and on behalf of the Afro-Caribbean, and may well be a Nobel Prize contender in due time. I rest my case.
Time will prove me right or wrong, but I departed from custom, and ventured to predict not about a historical process, but an individual. I believe I am on the ball, as Pep would say. Either way, though, it is beyond doubt that Dr Percival "Pep" Perry has placed Antigua and Barbuda, in the strastosphere of modern science. And in doing so he has remained very human, holding dear not his scientific work, but his coaching of the Antiguan football team to the first OECS championship in 1991. There is nothing of the weird, not-of-this-world, lacking grasp of reality, usually associated with the scientist about Dr Perry. He is Antigua & Barbuda at its embodied best. In fact, he is a walking encyclopaedia of jokes. But truth, he faces soberly.
For, Dr Percival ‘Pep’ Perry came unto his own, to apply his scientific mind and humane being to social transformation here. But his own received him not. That, in and of itself, tells a tale about where we are on the real Human Achievement and Value Index.
But Dr Perry, in and of himself, says that despite the weight of history on our backs, still upholding the backward, one day we might take a quantum leap, and launch ourselves into a new orbit. To be sure, Dr Percival Perry’s achievements reminded that we too, small as we are, can make an incalculable contribution to the rendezvous of human victory, despite long entrenched structures of economic and mental domination. He, after all, broke the shackles on the mind and gravitated into realms hitherto unknown the rarefied realms of ‘quarks’. Hail Dr Percival Pep Perry, footballer, athlete, coach, man of humour and brilliant 20th century scientist, with inventions past and inventions to come, son of a people once doomed to inventing nothing. Hail.