Strange Cultural Affliction of Unresolved Matters

07, Feb 2000
She sat there, pretty as a picture and well-shaped, this banker cum scholarship student, who listened attentively to our favourite, heart-rending story about banking in T&T and, at the end of it all, her response inspired a trend of thought and brought again the realisation that in this country matters are never resolved. A strange cultural affliction, indeed!

There never seems to exist here the political will to resolve the fundamental questions. So the two Tobago senators have been removed and the much touted "constitutional crisis" has been swept under the carpet. No attempt to persuade, no negotiation, no dialogue initiated by government, no plebiscite to ascertain what the people want.

That is why we have always been in crisis. And if "crisis" has always been with us, then crisis will never be recognised as such, once it is always present then that which the very word, "crisis", presumes becomes meaningless. If death is ever present, then surely death loses its sting.

These island-societies began supposedly as "outposts of civilisation" with the complete genocide of the indigenous and the forced enslaving of people and/or indenturing by deception of others, all shipped here in order, at first, to develop these bases to intensify the search for many El Dorados of exotic, primary stuff. Later on, they would become dumping grounds for waste and surplus manufactured goods.

What kind of societies could emanate from such? All we have ever known here in terms of socio-political relations is tantamount to barbarity.

The colonial governor, an extension of the "king", and all his satellite social milieu were always brutally and mortally opposed to any and every form or creative endeavour and manifestation that represented the masses of people below.

As Stalin, the calypso-artiste would say, "they hold we, enslave we, beat we, educate we and free we." As if to suggest that in the very process of freeing there was/is an element of enslaving. Our "educated" elites have yet to come to know and feel this.

These, our local elites, seek to make their own history but the circumstances are not of their own making, so all they end up doing is dressing up in borrowed clothes and spouting borrowed language.

They spout "Westminster system of politics", an ideal of British/European enlightenment, but in the end they all fight vehemently to be king in the Caribbean context.

So we came to adult suffrage, political parties and independence and ended up, as Best would say, with a series of regimes all "dead in office", so dead that the crisis is ongoing and so defies the very dynamics and acute opportunities usually associated with progressive revolutionary moments.

The point is that the coming to power in 1956 of local elites and their vanguard organisation did not signify the beginning but rather the culmination of the struggle of their antecedents, the free-coloureds, not to transform the basic, fundamental social, economic and political relationships, but to become the new masters.

Once you become master there is no longer any need for politics of change. All you then do is maintain and death commences forthwith.

The present regime in power today represents the very same consciousness, only on behalf of a different sect of the same group of elites.

These elites never consider what the masses of people below are demanding. One knows what the masses are saying more so by what they do and what they demonstrate over periods of time. You can discern clear patterns. In these islands from the very inception, they have never accepted the fundamental relationships forced on them from above and this is evident in how they constantly organised themselves to struggle, the broad democratic forms in which they all participated, and to which all felt they belonged.

In all the highpoints of their struggles from the days before and after emancipation, down to the 20th century, when they sought to establish their trade unions to manage the relations within the production process their intention was always evident.

When they tried to form their own broad democratic organisations to confront the political establishment, their intention of broadening democracy in all social activity has been clear.

The mistake at each point was to hand over the reins of control to educated elites organised in minority parties, in whose interest it is to legally constitute their authority and domination.

The present Constitution does exactly that and allows the executive, managed by a new form of king (ie Prime Minister) to run roughshod over all else, usually under the pretext that there is "no time to consult".

The people have never been interested in such constitutions because such constitutions by law defy their natural democratic instincts.

They want to participate at all levels, they want their councils and committees and assemblies, the very forms that they have set up from time to time to wage struggle, to be properly constituted as actual new forms of governing.

Democracy must not ever be defied by constraints of time. All the people, where they live and work and study, must be involved in the exercise of self-engagement, dialogue, negotiation and persuasion. That is democracy! Everything else is about kings and peasants.