Part 2

Years ago, I think it was late 1974, shortly before Walter Rodney’s return from Tanzania he was deeply concerned about me. I remember it well. Bird had banned him from coming to Antigua. And subsequently the PLM administration which had howled against the banning of Walter Rodney, also banned him. A straight case of pot and kettle calling each other black, but Tweedledee doing as Tweedledum did.

Now Walter Rodney was concerned about me in that in 1973 the PLM administration had interdicted me, and I had proceeded for nearly a year, on half pay. At that time I held the record for the longest interdicted Civil Servant. The African Liberation Day March of 1973, which the Mighty Swallow later immortalised in song, "We go march in peace", had led to my interdiction. The United States was frightened by African Liberation Day, which was initiated here for the first time in the world, in 1972, and it coincided with several similar marches in U.S. cities. We had aimed to bring Brazil into the Liberation Day Movement. By this we aimed at uniting the whole Black Diaspora, around the idea of African Liberation. This, with Southern African, the main theatre of revolutionary struggle, central. Rodney in Tanzania was enthused by these developments but he felt I was indifferent to the role of the individual in history, and often without due regard, put my own personal life on the line. I think he thought unnecessarily, to be succinct, if a little unfair.

The Nixon administration was terrified, at the prospect of an International Black Movement, built around the progressive socialist ideas, emanating from Southern Africa. From a small twin-island state, Antigua & Barbuda, we had dared to light a very big torch in the world. To keep it lit, Rodney felt I had to be free of personal hassle, and want of basic needs. The individual had to be free to extend the limits of the possible, in order to create the new.

The U.S. records show that the U.S. and British governments prevailed upon a black government in Antigua and Barbuda to end the internationalisation of the black movement, around progressive ideas, and the largest black movement since Garvey – the African Liberation Day movement. This was globalisation by other means - freedom.

Thus, then and therefore did the State here, at U.S. command, attempt to stop the 1973 African Liberation Day Demonstration. But ACLM rallied the population by every available means. In the result, there was perhaps the largest ever demonstration in Antigua and Barbuda. The Nixon administration stood in its boots and wondered. Rodney was at once delighted and worried.

Worried because myself and several others including Eustace Newton of All Saints, then a strong supporter of the ruling PLM government, but firmly committed to African Liberation, were charged in the courts for marching after the police had given permission, and then were forced to rescind it. Before the trial I was interdicted and my wife Arah, was laid off from Jabberwock Hotel where she worked. I did not will this unwanted situation. It was imposed by ‘friends’ with state power, acting on external instructions. My wife and two children were expected to survive on half my salary, a sum less than $300 per month! Is the personal, political? Or is the political, personal? Both however, coincided, in my case. "The individual in history", I remembered Rodney’s admonitions and read Plekanov, still the best on the subject.

Our day in court came. By coincidence the lawyers went on strike, that very day, against mal-administration of the Courts. Though we had been courageous to declare: The March Is On! We were now in double jeopardy, so to speak. Lay-men, up against the Establishment, but without a lawyer. I think it was some 13 of us who were charged. Rodney urged that we get an adjournment and get a lawyer from Guyana which he was prepared to fund.

Fortune though attended us in what he termed from afar, "my adventurism". I led the defence in the Court. And won! Rodney was overjoyed.

But I was still on half pay. Walter Rodney was most concerned. He felt that with white western hostility aroused, because of the nascent international black movement around progressive ideas, that I and my family could not continue to survive on half pay. He was so concerned that he wrote to my wife Arah as well, a very fine letter, giving a series of historical women who had endured privation in the cause of liberation. It was written simply and beautifully and I remember that there were several quotations from Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. Arah and I were over the moon. Our personal structural adjustment was of even less concern. Though Arah, by cutting and contriving had always made it seem like nothing at all. The children lacked nothing essential.

My own mother was a tower of strength. She often volunteered to keep the children and would make some excuse when we went for them insisting they should stay with her. She would provide to save our structurally adjusted means, that was her unspoken intention. My mother a simple woman of limited means, rose to the challenge. Rodney sent my mother a card. She kept it on her dressing table near the Sacred Heart of Jesus, until her death in 1978. Rodney’s humanity, deep, abiding and profound paid serious attention to what others would not even notice. He had a profound sense of the personal, as the political. Walter Rodney’s revolutionary concern, like the great Bard’s love, did not alter when it alternation found, nor was it Time’s fool, it endured, like the Bard’s, even to the edge of doom.

Having gorged ourselves on Rodney’s letter to Arah, we were dropping off the children at my mother’s, and carrying, the letter to show Lukie (Conrod Luke) when it dropped in the gutter just after heavy rains. All four pages. And before either of us could put down the two children we were carrying the letter was soaked. Irretrievable. As high as we had mounted in our delight, in our dejection did we sink as low. Arah was beside herself with sorrow because it was out of her bag the letter had fallen, while practically everything else was saved, except the letter. C’est la vie, I said in consolation. That became a phrase my eldest son Ché always repeated from that day to this. It probably etched itself on his mind because of the gravity of the situation in which it was first used.

Later, the government with no case against me, and because I had gone to teach at a private school, Hill Secondary School, as headmaster, insisted on terminating my service. Rodney felt I could have avoided this impasse, though he was overwhelmed by the underlying terror of it all. He saw a desperate state, acting desperately.

Later yet, that government would lose power, and the new Bird government would compensate all public servants who were victimised by the previous government. I was the only one excluded from that compensation package. I had lost 16 years of service, with not a penny of my just due. I made sure Rodney knew nothing of this.

Two governments, led by Trade Unionists each mutually hostile to the other, had collaborated, wittingly or unwittingly, to deprive me of my just due after more than a decade and a half of public service, as a teacher. Beginning at the Antigua Grammar School, then at All Saints Secondary, then at the Teachers Training College, after that the Antigua Girls High School, and lastly Princess Margaret School. I had taught at more secondary schools than most teachers. Though I had won a Commonwealth Scholarship, I always felt it was the taxes of the working poor here which had educated me. Therefore I had to give back whatever little knowledge I had acquired to them and their children. Walter Rodney too, would be denied a teaching post at the University of Guyana though, and left high and dry to fend for himself. His wife Pat, was an even greater tower of strength. Both regimes intended to starve us into submission, or driven into exile. He had found himself in my shoe, and could not charge me with "adventurism" any longer. I now worried for him. Burnham was far more specious than Bird. We had traded places, and his situation was far worse than mine. His passport was seized. To travel he had to resort to stratagems, bold and brave. He could not, immensely qualified as he was, make a living in his own country. And he was been prevented, without a passport from making a living abroad.

Even later yet, and after I went to teach at Hill Secondary School as Headmaster, the Bird government would end a subsidy of $5,000 per year to that school, as an act of spite, forcing the school’s closure in 1980.

That act against Hill Secondary School, as political spite against me by those with state power, was to have disastrous effects on education here. The elimination of the private schools which resulted from this act of state spite, meant that the public schools already crowded were over-brimming. No new secondary schools have been built in the ensuing 20 years. Overcrowding became a plague to teaching and to education. The teachers demoralised by the use of legal horrors against them in the 1979 Teachers Struggle, this compounded the problem, from which education here has not recovered. The spiteful political directorate did not give a damn. Worse it never even thought about what it had done! The persecution and prosecution of the alternative voices for thorough-going change, would lead to degraded politics by these self-perpetuating elites.

When I met Walter Rodney for the last time early in 1980 in Grenada, he was alarmed at my situation, even though his was no better, if not worse! He was aware then of how U.S. intelligence had set the cat among the pigeons in the black international movement we had started, as ACLM, with what passed for ideological disputes. Distinguished American intellectuals, whom I shall not name, adopted Maoism and the International African Liberation Day Movement was stymied and rent asunder. I had needed Walter Rodney’s aid to combat this sectarianism. But he was not at hand until the Sixth Pan African Congress in 1974. He felt he had let me down, and we resolved to fight the good fight together, forever eradicating this sectarianism. But it had gone too far. Rodney felt though that I and ACLM had proceeded to build this Black international movement without paying due care and attention to the machination of external forces. I felt that attention to such machinations often paralysed the targets into inaction.

In the process, the Caribbean delegation was banned from the sixth and last Pan African Congress held in 1974, and CLR James, Walter Rodney and all of us from the region were excluded by African and Caribbean State fiat. External forces were combining with internal powers to nullify our efforts. CLR who had headed the Sixth Pan African Congress organising committee, resigned in protest over the exclusion of the Caribbean delegation. The point was, the International Black movement was being divided, despite our best efforts. Imperialism saw to that.

Walter Rodney was dismayed. Dismayed but not discouraged. Dismayed that after the ordeal of Guyana, and how imperialism had set one against the other, unravelling the most important section of the regional nationalist movement, Caribbean and African governments, even in spite of Cheddi Jagan’s very notable work, The West on Trial, still had not learnt. In spite of Fanon’s masterly The Wretched of the Earth, intellectuals still warred with each other, over minutiae, exaggerating differences into antagonisms, with external agents spurring and egging on the senseless fight. The Sixth Pan African Congress ended in a whimper, incapable of a bang.

But then up came the Grenada Revolution virtually in tandem with the Nicaraguan Revolution, and after the fall of Patrick John in Dominica who in his degeneration was caught collaborating with Klu Klux Klan, our hopes were raised sky high. So, Rodney and I in our last meeting had planned to rebuild a Regional Progressive Movement. Then, he would be cruelly assassinated, and so would our hopes for a Regional Progressive Movement. Others in the region would not rise to the challenge. They remained occupied and preoccupied with home base. Parochialism?

Maurice Bishop who had opposed the Regional Progressive Movement at that time, the Soviet Union saying it was the wrong conjecture, "and against the international correlation of forces" and other such Stalinist claptrap would find himself isolated, and undone by Stalinists. These made a fetish of some ideological abstraction known as "democratic centralism", which degenerated in Grenada into "Joint Leadership", perhaps á la Kosygin and Brezhnev which joint leadership had long ago collapsed. In spite of this having a failure in the Soviet Union, it became gospel in Revolutionary Grenada. Indeed, Stalinism in Grenada had separated a revolutionary leadership from the masses. The Stalinists turned the guns of the State on the genuinely revolutionary leadership and all collapsed in a blood-bath.

Walter Rodney was dead by 1980 and the Grenada Revolution was s till in firm alliance with Burnham, despite the obvious degeneration. The Grenada Revolution was dead by 1983. The Nicaraguan Revolution, worn down by a U.S. sponsored counter-revolutionary movement would also be dead. Death and decay was all around. I was left in compassion to mourn, so differently from what both heart and head had arranged.

The Caribbean retreated into parochialism while proclaiming regional integration. The parochialism meant grandiose regional integration as decision, but, without implementation. The Cold War would end. The United States and Europe would then try to re-create the whole world in its neo-liberal capitalist image, and call it globalisation. The Caribbean, fragmented, would find itself like Goosey, Goosey, Gander, where shall I wander in the face of this globalisation.

Walter Rodney had written how a triumphal European capitalism had underdeveloped Africa. Now after his death we would understand how a triumphal American capitalism would underdevelop the whole world. The one was related to the other. While Europe, as the largest trading bloc, seek to protect itself, often joining, but sometimes resisting U.S. hegemony. It is in that milieu we find ourselves now, parochial, fragmented, structurally adjusted. With Jamaica delivering another blow to the milk-and-water regional integration we have been pursuing, in one step forward, three steps backward in sabotage, by withdrawing from the proposed Caribbean Appeals Court to replace the British Privy Council. Rodney turned groaning in his grave.

What in fact has gone on in the Caribbean since the 1970’s is not development. The Political elite is engaged in nothing more and nothing less than self-perpetuation. The shifting of power between Two Parties of the same political elite, each in two Labour parties, or as in Guyana two "socialist" parties, is coming to an end. In Jamaica Patterson and the PNP is into an unprecedented third term. The fourth is assured. In Barbados, the Barbados Labour Party has taken pre-eminence over the Democratic Labour Party, routing it and raiding it of all its remaining important leaders. And this after the Democratic Labour Party, in power, under Sandiford, turned a petty dispute into an irreconcilable antagonism. And, in consequence, self-destructing. The UPP is doing the same thing here, though out of power. The Birds rule the roost, though the whole coop is decaying on all sides, worn-eaten by state-patronage and corruption. Can civil society, by self-organisation, lift itself out of this morass? That is the question.

In our last meeting that concept of "self perpetuation" was raised by Walter Rodney. We were at a party and both of us were spoiling the party by having our usual argument. I had put forward to him that the WPA should after a period of organisation and activity join with Cheddi Jagan’s PPP. This I said, with himself and the new WPA leaders on the scene, firmly committed to non-racial politics, would destroy the rigged elections and rob Burnham of any legitimacy, nationally and internationally.

Rodney replied that the PPP was a self-perpetuating elite, talking socialism at the top, but deeply steeped in racialism at middle and base. In such a milieu the self-perpetuating instincts of the PPP would involve and include, either constant petty feuds, with WPA figures or smooth-sailing only to end in a sudden demoralising break, with dependence on racialism, to get elected, being the real cause

I accused him of being like Brutus in Shakespeare’s Caesar, believing without evidence that Caesar wanted to declare himself King of Rome and so "Lest he may, prevent". Brutus had joined the conspiracy against Caesar on an unfounded, if not confounded presumption. He, Rodney was acting on the same presumption, though less unfoundedly so. Rodney insisted that I was missing the point. Racialism was the cancer in Guyana, and one could not join it in either form. One had to make a complete break with it.

This was irrefutable. But I only think so now, 21 years later!

I was worried about Burnham’s relentless attack on him, and Rosie Douglas who was close to Burnham, kept telling me how Burnham was working overtime to penetrate and derail the WPA. I thought Walter’s personal safety, if not salvation, lay in the larger mass of the PPP. We had traded places completely now. To Rodney’s irrefutable point that one could not join with racialism in one form to defeat it in the other form, I replied with Hegel’s famous philosophic maxim, that the ideal is not attained with the speed of a shot from a pistol. And joining with the PPP was a step towards the ideal, though not the ideal.

We broke off the argument to resume later, and to let the party spirit flow, with the argument suspended, to be continued later. I never saw him again.

TO BE CONTINUED