Ghost of the Massa
Too early for a brunch meeting in Port-of-Spain, I stood by a hotel bar, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, wanting to boil my head to stop the noise of the music that had kept me awake all night.
Handing me a cappuccino the bartender, a young woman, informed me that they would continue for another hour till 10 am.
The Independence Day party began at 2 am.
Holding my head in my hands, I wished her Happy Independence Day. “For me, it’s just another day, picking cotton,” she said, looking weary. “But how can you feel like that? Look we have our own army, our own police, coastguard, constitution, elections, democracy.”
She looked weary. “Yes, but when the day done, we still depending on Massa to invest in oil to keep the politicians paying CEPEP and the Public Service. What do we own that is ours truly, eh? We stopped producing sugar and cocoa. We don’t farm. We don’t manufacture anything—only assemble. Look how Petrotrin turned out.” She turned away.
I waited in the lobby. Two men joined me. “We from South,” one offered leaning into me, alcohol on his breath. “Happy Independence,” I said, “does that independence mean to you, cricket, drinking?”
The younger one said, apologetically: “I does fast. Ganesh puja, same as India, you know?” I didn’t. They appeared to know little about Trinidad, less about India, had fallen into the cracks of being nowhere men. I said: “You ever read anything by Dr Williams?” “Nah, I doh like to read.”
Broad smiles. I whipped out my phone, googled Eric Williams and read: “Eric Williams was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1911, the son of poor Catholic parents only two generations from slavery. His father, a government postal worker, was determined that Eric, the oldest of 12 children, should become a physician or attorney and strongly encouraged his sons’ academic achievements. Williams mastered Latin, French and Spanish as well as British and European History.
Where he was tutored by CLR James. In 1931 he won the colony’s scholarship to Oxford.” They looked at me as if I was speaking Russian. I said: “You know anything about Dr Rudranath Capildeo politician, mathematician?” Blank looks. My reading drove them away.
I thought of Eric Williams books that my father insisted we bought on arrival, insisted we read, from Capitalism and Slavery to Inward Hunger, and wondered for the thousandth time why there is no museum dedicated to Dr Williams’ work and how any nation could dismiss him without reading him, how we limit our sense of self to cricket carnival, chutney, calypsonians.
Williams’ dreams of healing from slavery and indenture, self-sufficiency and economic independence from the new massas, multinationals, is outrageous. Even a cursory reading of his writing will demonstrate, for instance, that his phrase “Massa Day Done” was taken out of context.
Consider Williams’ Independence Day Address in 1962: “This is what I meant when I gave the Nation its slogan for all time: Discipline, Production, Tolerance, Indiscipline whether individual or sectional is a threat to democracy. Slacking on the job jeopardizes the national income, inflates costs and sets a bad example The medieval churchmen had a saying that to work is to pray. It is also to strengthen our democracy by improving our economic foundations.”
He must be turning in his grave at how misinterpreted he is, how forgotten. I want to plead to our Nation’s teachers. To celebrate our impending Republic Day, ask your students to perform plays and poems on Eric Williams, Ellis Clarke, Rudranath Caplideo, CLR James and every one of our leaders. I’m pleading with architects and artists, create museums and squares for our leaders, so we breathe their dreams.
At a chance meeting this week Basdeo Panday dismissed Williams as racially divisive though he admired Butler and Stephen Maharaj. He has a right to his opinion. It’s informed, and he was equal to Williams in creating history as the first Indian PM of this country.
“Why,” I asked Mr Panday, “do we have a mob mentality wanting to pillory and crucify leaders at every level, go for the zero-sum game, death threats, instead of wanting dialogue, solution?”
The silver fox replied as fast as lightning: “In the populations’ eyes, any leader is the “overseer” or the “slave driver.”
Fifty-Seven years and billions of oil dollars on, we believe in the ghost of the Massa. Time to return to the drawing board.