Following is the text of a speech I made to the Caribbean Studies Association, today, Thursday May 28. The Caribbean Studies Association meeting here at Perry Bay at the Multipurpose Centre is the largest gathering of scholars and cultural workers ever to come to Antigua and Barbuda.

To begin any discussion of Caribbean philosophy, that is, ideas that moved the history of the Caribbean and the world, one must of necessity begin with perhaps the most amazing person of all in Caribbean history. I speak of the leader of the only successful slave revolution in history and the first black man to establish a free-state in the New World, the first black Republic. That man, of course, is Toussaint L'Ouverture.

On January 26, 1801, at the very dawn of a new century Toussaint was handed the keys to the city of Haiti by a French Governor.

He at once abolished slavery and commanded slave ships in the harbour to surrender their slaves as free men, forthwith.

Toussaint, in the name of the State, took possession of two-thirds of the plantations in Haiti from which the whites had fled or died. The state had taken charge of the commanding heights of the economy.

Note well that Toussaint made this thorough-going change, in direct opposition to the overwhelming majority of the African slaves who had fought in his revolutionary ranks. The slaves wanted above all else, to escape from the dreaded plantations to the independence of farming their own land.

Toussaint virtually militarised production on both plantation owned by the State and privately held plantations, workers were forbidden to leave without "a legal permit to do so."

The underlying fact is that Toussaint had nationalised production. He had too, allowed private property to continue, in pursuit of the policy of reconciliation with the white owners. I should perhaps interject, here that at the start of the Haitian revolution there were some 30,000 whites. By 1801 only ten thousand whites remained. In the revolution some 100,000 blacks or one-fifth of the black population had been killed. Their deaths involved the loss of much needed skills in agriculture, industry, commerce and construction.

Toussaint not only nationalised production and made state property co-exist with private property. He did more. In 1801, mark you, Toussaint made it the law of the land that pregnant women must have a month's rest before and after delivery. So that Malouet, no friend of the Haitian Revolution, wrote this: "All accounts agree that there is a decrease in mortality among negro infants. This is ascribed to absolute rest enjoyed by pregnant women under the better working conditions."

Toussaint did more. The workday began at 5 o'clock in the morning and ended at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, with 3 hours rest in between. Toussaint had established the 9 hour working day, long before Europe dared.

Whipping was forbidden, and when Toussaint learned that his second-in-command Dessalines was resorting to whipping on plantations under his control for infractions, Toussaint threatened to strip him of his command, at once. Today in the Caribbean learned men, who attended the great western inns of court are advocating the use of the whip as criminal punishment. Toussaint was light years ahead of these modern Caribbean reactionaries.

Toussaint was interested in 1801 in export led growth, and ordered the cultivation of export crops like coffee, with land concessions as an inducement.

Toussaint encouraged the restoration and construction of buildings by local architects and builders as a source of national pride. He established schools. Had bridges built; he initiated a programme of road building that soon enabled four-wheeled vehicles to be used for the first time in the country.

Toussaint worked with five secretaries, dictating letter after letter, memo after memo, throughout the night and signing nothing that he did not at first read. He slept only two hours a night. He lived for days on a spare and Spartan diet of water and a few bananas. This is in striking contrast to the conspicuous consumption practised by modern day Caribbean rulers.

Toussaint invented a new state-craft arriving, they say with lightning speed to inspect agricultural management, building programmes, or the quality of the schools. His inspections became an institution and raised the level of efficiency, as he was accompanied by knowledgeable experts. Haitian productivity increased unbelievably.

The English writer James Stephens remarked in this respect "So raped was the progress of agriculture, that it was a fact, not believed at the time in England that Haiti promised to yield in the next crop, one third part as large a return of sugar and coffee as it had ever given in its most prosperous years. This considering all the ravages of a ten years' war, and the great scarcity of all necessary supplies from abroad, is very surprising, yet has since clearly appeared to be true."

Without a doubt then Toussaint's philosophy of government and statecraft had kindled the enthusiasm of the people of revolutionary allowing them to overcome insuperable odds.

Concerned as ever to promote reconciliation between black and mulatto, and black and white, Toussaint granted a general amnesty without a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

So far so good.

A devout catholic himself Toussaint allowed his private prejudice to govern public policy. He ordered the military to destroy voodoo altars and to detain any who persisted in Voodoo practices. This was a policy doomed to failure.

I have outlined Toussaint's revolutionary policy the product of his revolutionary philosophy. Where did Toussaint get this philosophy.

Remember this nationalisation of the major means of production was carried out by Toussaint in 1801, 17 years before the great Karl Marx was born, and 47 years before the Communist manifesto, one of the great philosophical and political works of all time, a point conceded by all modern thinkers of note.

Toussaint had gone well ahead of the French thinker Mably who denounced private property as the chief source of evil men do to their fellowmen. Mably had argued that only through communal ownership of the means of material production can justice be ensured and the minority of the strong prevented from oppressing the liberty of the weaker majority. Mably however, went back to the pre-feudal communalism as the solution. Not so Toussaint. Another French philosopher, Moudly, in his Le code de la nature, had outlined the doctrine that the sole source of injustice and misery is the unequal distribution of property.

Voltaire, Diderot, Helevétius and the great Encyclopedists had with great passion argued that change would avail nothing, unless accompanied by guarantees against the unequal accumulation in private hands.

Rousseau did not advocate the abolition of private property, but he denounced competition, blatant inequality, the unbridled accumulation of property, wealth and power.

The French Revolution itself occurring at the same time as Toussants Haitian Revolution did not encourage nationalisation, nor the freedom Toussaint granted to women, nor the shortening of the working day. In fact the French Revolution had proclaimed among the sacred rights of every man and citizen the right to property in unlimited amounts. Though to be fair, Robespierre passed a law aimed imposing state control upon the unlimited acquisition and enjoyment of resources.

The vast transfers of the property of the enemy classes, the aristocracy and the Church, the austere Robespierre in control or not, did not go to the State in revolutionary France but to private individuals who enriched themselves, becoming the classic nouveau riche of the great French Revolution of 1789.

The point ought to be clear, Toussaint put his Caribbean country of newly liberated slaves at the head of the world class, in philosophy, in theory and practice. Hundreds of black slaves who in 1790 trembled before the back of a single armed white man, were now in the vanguard of philosophy, beyond Rousseau, beyond Diderot and Voltaire, my favourite Encyclopaedists. From the pits, the very bottom of human degradation, chattel slavery in the plantation Caribbean, Toussaint had catapulted himself and revolutionary Haiti to the head of the class in human thought and the realisation of that thought. The first Black Republic, in human history, had come onto the world stage, not with a whimper, but with a military, political and philosophical bang. The most backward had become the most advanced apostles of human freedom. A revolution, a genuine revolution, leaps a thousand years in but a day.

I have I think made and substantiated claims for Toussaint and Caribbean philosophy more boldly than any of the condescending historians of Europe and those who follow Eurocentric historical writing. I do not think any can refute. But there will be those quick to note that Haiti is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But to assert that, and leave it there, is to forget that for more than 50 years Europe and America combined to bring Haiti to its knees. Be that as it was, there can be no doubt either that Toussaint as soldier, as statesman, as exponent of Caribbean philosophy had no peer in his time. Others wrote rigorous and voluminous philosophical tomes, still poured over by scholars. But in the combination of philosophic theory and practice, Toussaint had no peer.

Napoleon Bonaparte, Europe's only rival of Toussaint, had a mean-spirited racism in his character. He persecuted the mulatto, General Dumas. In July 1802 Napoleon banned black and coloured people from coming to France. He set about to restore slavery in Haiti. And, from Haiti and the French colony in Louisiana, Napoleon proposed to conquer the United States, having first secured the agreement of the Revolutionary United States to restore slavery in Haiti. All that is a matter of record.

Toussaint, unlike Napoleon, was anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-monarchy. The Caribbean through Toussaint had made an imperishable claim to be among the foremost in the struggle for freedom and a new and higher humanity.

I leave 1801 and race to 1901 and do not be surprised when I get to 2001! What was the situation, the human condition, like in the Caribbean at this juncture in time.

Patrick Bryan writing in 1899 very succinctly and very aptly had this to say: "Her Majesty's black and coloured subjects .... have to choose between death from starvation in their native islands and suffering and ill-treatment in Santo Domingo, where many have sought employment under the circumstances that their native islands are merely Islands of Death". Merely Islands of Death. A most graphic and descriptive phrase.

And just in case you think this is a literary exaggeration, let statistical reality confirm the description.

In a remarkable piece of contemporary Caribbean scholarship Winston James in his Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia published this year provides us with the necessary data. Between 1910 and say 1930, Dr. Winston James points out in his very fine book "Barbadian men lived on average 28.5 years, and while Barbadian men were dead before their twenty-ninth birthday, Jamaican men lived to almost 36 years, Trinidadians lived to 37.6. In 1920 - 22 Barbadian women died before they were 32, while their Jamaican and Trinidadian sisters lived to 38.2 and 40.1 years respectively."

I add that in Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, men here lived an average of 29.5 years with women dying before they were 32. These were indeed Islands of Death.

The great Caribbean figure and poet Claude McKay writing in 1912, in a poem aptly entitled "Hard Times" articulated the feelings of the labouring population in the language really spoken by men. Claude McKay wrote:

The poet had expressed it as only a poet can in verse, showing the harsh realities of race and class. While a waterfront worker in Jamaica, at the dawn of the 20th century, in the great Waterfront strike in Kingston, when some 800 - 1000 wharf workers went on strike, expressed it this way in the Daily Gleaner. He wrote "We, the labouring classes, do strike for higher wages, for we are under the advantage of the Agents of ships, we asked for more wages, so that we may be able to sustain ourselves in a respectable manner." Continuing the waterfront worker wrote expressing his own consciousness "We been suffering a long, long time under the tyranny of small wages, so it is time we look around ourselves." A Caribbean worker, probably the son of a slave, was repudiating a system imposed on him from within and without, "the tyranny of small wages," and rejecting that tyranny and determining for he and his fellows to "look around ourselves" for an alternative. The worker was speaking for himself, not being just being spoken for.

A system could not meet the basic needs of the overwhelming majority of the population in the Caribbean who wanted to live "in a respectable manner". Something had to give. The system had collapsed and had not been replaced by another. Life was unbearable. People left. Migrated in droves. As Dr. Winston James points out: "Between 1881 and 1890 some 78,000 Jamaicans migrated to the Isthmus of Panama, and between 1891 and 1915 no less than 91,000 left the island for Panama." The same was true for Barbados, Antigua, St. Kitts. The heartless colonial government imposed exit taxes on those leaving. Add to this between 1919 and 1931 some 83,885 Jamaicans migrated to Cuba. The same pattern occurred in the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean. Dr. Winston James concluded that the migration were the next best thing to revolution. In the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands the migrant flow to the United States picked up apace. A system, virtually unchanged since the abolition of slavery, which abolished chattel slavery, but not the conditions which fostered it, could not meet the needs of the people. The people escaped, "glad to leave, but too sorry to go" as one migrant so profoundly expressed the complex of emotions.

It may well be, and most likely was the case, that the oppressed workers in the Caribbean at the beginning of the 20th century could not develop more than a wages consciousness, and were preoccupied with the "tyranny of low wages" since real wages throughout the region had not increased much between 1834 - 38 and 1920.

But a new consciousness would come, not so much from within, but from without. The outbreak of World War I had West Indians enlisting in the West India Regiment "to save king and country". They were unaware, that in no circumstances did the British want Black West Indians killing white Europeans, not even their mortal white enemies. English racism did not allow for that - no way! The West India Regiment was confined to menial jobs. They died from horrible conditions, 1,071 dying of illness, whereas only 185 died of battle wounds. They were segregated and humiliated. On December 6, 1918, the West India regiment at Taranto, Italy revolted. Fully assimilated to British ways, they had marched into Taranto singing "Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves" only to be cut short by British soldiers that the song was not for such as them to sing. The West India regiment, scorned and humiliated, decided to take it no more. They "mutinously" refused to work. Shootings and bombings occurred. The Worcestershire Regiment had to be despatched to restore order.

But on December 17, some fifty or more West Indian sergeants met and formed an organisation with an astonishingly simple name. It was called "The Caribbean League". The League made up of sergeants from British Guiana in the South to the Bahamas in the North, demanded "self-determination of the Caribbean. The West Indies should have freedom and govern itself" they declared. The Caribbean League pledged to organise a general strike throughout the sub-region when they got back home. There would be a regional body with headquarters in Jamaica. Some demurred on the choice of location. The Caribbean League was betrayed, some said by a Garrot, who reported the discussions of the meeting to his commanding officer. The British determined the League had "Seditious dangers." The League disbanded in the face of the betrayal from the 'garrot' among them.

But there on the battle fields of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Italy a new Caribbean consciousness had been forged in the life and death business of war. A Caribbean consciousness emerged. The dread plantation system could not be defeated in one place, it had to be defeated in all Caribbean places, preferably simultaneously. And to this end the Caribbean League decided (quote) "Force must be used, and if necessary bloodshed to obtain this object."

I want you to note that in their determinations the Caribbean sergeants in the Caribbean League had made a quantum leap. Their thought leapt over a national insular consciousness and went straight to a regional - consciousness, in a regional state! In the authentic moment of their intense struggle against racism, at once colonial and international, this is the category of thought they arrived at --- a Regional State. It is a truly astonishing philosophical leap.

Nor did the Caribbean League end in Taranto, Italy. It came to the Caribbean. In Trinidad, food, clothing and furnishings in the war years had risen by 145 per cent for the colony generally and 126 per cent in Port of Spain. The same was true for Jamaica, Belize, Guyana and the OECS territories. In Trinidad and Belize members of the Caribbean League led the uprisings which took place in 1919. CLR James was then 18 years old, as this movement, this revolutionary movement from below took place in his native Trinidad. Members of the Caribbean League, became leaders of the Garvey Movement, still the largest black organisation and movement in history, and which laid the philosophic basis of Black Nationalism, with its own means of transport, its own industries, it own rulers.

But be it noted too the philosophic dilemma of the Caribbean in the 20th century. The people lived in an outmoded plantation system, which never met the needs of the people, even as slaves, and which could not meet the needs of a modern, 20th century people. The Caribbean then oscillated between Rebellion and Immigration, to Panama, to Santo Domingo, to Cuba, to England, the Virgin Islands, the United States, to Canada.

This tendency to migrate out of an outmoded system which had not been replaced by another, provoked this comment from Barbadian migrant Clyde Jemmott who wrote:

"When you take away large numbers of the strong, the able-bodied and healthful members of a community, then those who are economically strong the middle class, and finally those who are ambitious, progressive and far-sighted you are practically skimming the cream of society, and the results are a preponderant increase in the mediocre members of the community .... there takes place a gradual weakening of the physical and mental vigour of the people and a lessening in the number of those progressive and far-seeing people, without whom no society can go ahead."

This then is the philosophic position of a transplanted society, in which the overwhelming majority are dispossessed, rooted only in a sense of cultural formation, without economic linkages to the sea-scape and land-scape.

That particular mode of existence, produces what the BBC recently gave expression to when it praised the Caribbean writer V.S. Naipaul "as the best writer of the English language in the world today, and the most English of writers" Naipaul the Indo-Caribbean, had never had a home-coming, but expresses the Caribbean genius in mastering a language not his own, and the Caribbean dilemma, where nearly everything is imported, importing an identity, in his case, Englishness.

To be continued