People want to know why Jamaica run, from the Federation,
People want to know why Jamaica run away, from the Federation...
In his calypso "Federation" the Mighty Sparrow laid the blame for the break-up on the shoulders of the Jamaicans, who had voted in a referendum earlier that year to stand against the grouping of ten then British colonies which had come together in an ill-fated attempt at political union in 1958.
But a new book by Jamaican historian Colin Palmer, the latest in the chronicles of the life and times of Dr Williams, sheds disturbing light on this period in recent Caribbean history. His research is suggesting that while the referendum engineered successfully by Jamaican opposition leader Alexander Bustamante may have been the catalyst, there was much else that threatened the existence of the federation. From one man rat to the next, and from one issue to the other, the generation of leaders across the region harboured their own doubts, misgivings and mistrusts of one another. Such disharmony at the top had doomed the union from the start, and whereas in Trinidad and Tobago no one questioned the Williams arithmetical formula that "one from 10 leaves nought", this was simply his own fanciful way of getting out of it.
How many Barbadians alive today know that Sir Grantley Adams, their avowed national father-figure, was characterised as lazy and lethargic, or do the Guyanese people know that Williams despised both Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham! To what extent do Trinidadians and Tobagonians know the level of anxiety expressed across the rest of the region when it was decided to site the federal capital in Chaguaramas?
This location, it turned out, was the third choice by the British-organised Federal Capital Commission, behind a location in Barbados and one in Jamaica. The Commission had been initially troubled by "the instability of that island's politics and the low standard accepted in its public life". It found credible the "widespread reports of corruption in the public life of Trinidad" that "these practices appear to be tolerated" and that such tolerance "would be a disquieting augury for the future of a capital located there". Dr Palmer presents these discoveries in "The Challenge", the second chapter of his book entitled Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean. It is the chapter which deals with the enduringly disturbing undercurrents which conspired to ruin the first direct attempt at decolonialisation and anti-colonial organisation across the British West Indies.
Much of the discontent was inspired by the divide and rule tactics employed jointly by the British and the Americans, as revealed in Dr Palmer's research of the colonial records for the period under review. But among the documents he uncovered much that remains difficult to digest with respect to how these leaders independently dealt with and regarded one another.
All of the region's first generation of post-colonial political standard bearers are not just made human, they are brought low. The book reveals tremendous private duplicity and disrespect among them, while at the same time they were giving the impression of working for unity. Everyone of them had his own ideas of what constituted leadership or development, leading one to wonder what really lies behind some of today's headlines when the current generation of leaders talks now about some of the same issues.
"Eric Williams possessed the energy and the impatience of one who was new to the political fray," Dr Palmer writes of the period, towards the end of the chapter on Federation. His elders-Adams, Manley and Bustamante-viewed him, however, "as an iconoclastic upstart who declined to follow their lead. But Williams also had the distressing tendency to alienate his colleagues with his sharp tongue, his difficulty in absorbing criticism or dealing with opposing points of view, and his marked intellectual arrogance".
After the break up of the federation and Williams tried to engineer another formula for unity with a number of other islands in the eastern Caribbean, those leaders distrusted his motives, describing him as "the threat from the south". Although he had, in Palmer's view, articulated the need for a Federation with more passion than any of his contemporaries, he had been too critical of the slow pace in moving forward.
In 1960, incensed by some of those attacks, Adams was to declare that "desire to interfere has now become greater than his desire to help". He felt the need to declare also that such personalities as T Albert Marryshow and Captain AA Cirpriani were in the forefront of the effort to build up a strong labour and nationalist movement "when Dr Williams was still a schoolboy".
Marryshow, the great Grenadian trade unionist, politician and journalist, Palmer also reveals, was Williams' godfather.
Adams had been chosen as the Federal Prime Minister principally because both Williams and Jamaica's Norman Manley did not stand for the federal elections in their respective countries. In Jamaica, Bustamante wondered how can "this insular Adams, who lacks sufficient imagination, do any good for the ten states, having ruled over pauperised Barbados for so long, obviously without realising the state of poverty there"?
Williams and Adams were also at loggerheads because Adams felt in 1958 it was the Federal government's prerogative to deal with the Americans (a foreign power) over the issue of reviewing the American lease on Chaguaramas. Williams had embarked even then on an aggressive campaign to take back Chaguaramas. He was angered by what he saw as the federal government's passivity over the matter and was "deeply offended when Adams, without consulting him, accepted an Anglo-American proposal to review the lease agreement in ten years".
But the British and the Americans also had little respect for Adams. He had "a somewhat sleepy exterior and is in fact lazy, though he has an agile mind, particularly in a political tight-spot" the Colonial office concluded in 1961, as it prepared for a meeting with him and British Prime Minister Harold McMillan. This, despite the conclusion that he had a reputation for polished urbanity and a rather old world charm. This report also found that after he had received red carpet treatment in Canada, reports had surfaced about his "growing irritability, swollen-headedness and a readiness to take offence". Generally, the report concluded his position as the federal Prime Minister was "not wholly secure".
While Bustamante delighted in every opportunity he got to taunt Adams, the Prime Minister's relationship with Manley and Williams, one Palmer describes as "frigid at best". Adams often bristled at the criticism of his leadership coming from his colleagues.
The Jamaican opposition leader, Palmer writes, had played on significant ambivalence among Jamaicans about the federation and forced Manley to take positions to which he was not passionately committed. In one case Bustamante referred to Williams as "an intellectual fool" in one exchange of words on the question.
Backed into a corner and forced to make extreme demands for his country's acceptance of its place in the union, Manley took positions which angered Williams, who then began plotting his country's withdrawal if Manley lost the referendum he agreed to hold. Those differences grew more intense and could not be resolved when the leaders met at the famous Lancaster House conference in London in 1961, to formulate a constitution for the Federation.
A proposal for freedom of movement across the region was said to have been a major bugbear. Then, as now, it held a great terror for residents in some of the territories, and equally, remains open to manipulation by opposing politicians. The opposition in Trinidad and Tobago had used this as one of the reasons why it opposed the federation, in the same way it opposes fresh ideas about political union now.
Prior to the conference in London, Adams had written to Manley in 1960 complaining of what he discerned as a plot among the others to remove him as Prime Minister. Conspiracy, he said, was not too strong a term to use. "Manley did little to reassure him," Palmer writes; and even before this, Williams and Manley had drawn swords over a decision by Manley to build an oil refinery in Jamaica, granting Esso tax incentives and protection against competition. Williams regarded this move as contrary to Trinidad's interest, "and it soured his relationship with his Jamaican counterpart". Then when Adams did not censure Manley for this decision, "Williams was furious". He accused the federal government of deliberately endorsing a policy which it ought to recognise as leading to the federation's destruction.
Contrary to what was believed by his political opponents Williams was fearful even in his staunch advocacy in favour of the federation about a possible influx of migrants into Trinidad and the impact this would have on the social and economic conditions.
At the same time, however, the leaders of those islands were terrified of what they termed "Trinidadian imperialism" and were not likely to give up their identity for a union with their larger sister island, Palmer concludes. "There was also the added complication that Williams would not have won a popularity contest in any of those territories, and his relationship with their leaders was consistently rocky."
Grenadians also would not be amused by the manner in which Williams despised Eric Gairy; and while he worked to find a solution to the problems of race-based politics in Guyana, Trinidad's neighbour to the south, Williams also saw nothing to applaud in the personalities of either Cheddi Jagan or Forbes Burnham.
