J.B. Philippe

"My Lord,

            Relying on the liberality and candour so prominently distinguishing Your Lordship's character, and on that calm and moderate spirit which has ever persuaded all the actions of your life; I have presumed to address you on a topic of consummate consequence to a remote, much injured, and considerable portion of His Britannic Majesty's subjects."

With these opening words Jean Baptiste Philip set into motion a sequence of events that has unfolded over the centuries even to this day. J.B. Philip was born in 1796 in Trinidad.

His family was among the wealthy elite coloured sugar planters of the Naparimas. At an early age his father, Louis, brother of Judith Philip of Grenada, Carriacou, Petite Martinique, had noticed that his son was remarkably bright for his age and that he had the potential for a university scholarship. Concerned however in educating the boy to the point where enlightenment might work against him in the context of the slave society in which they lived and where prejudice may be directed at him by ignorant Europeans, he was hesitant to send him abroad. The boy's mother, a free negress, herself unable to read, was the one who convinced her husband, Louis, to send Jean Baptiste to England.

He may have arrived there around 1808 and prepared himself for university. He was regarded as very bright. He entered the University of Edinburgh in 1812. Prof. Carl Campbell in his paper ‘Man from the Naparimas’ remarks:

“Fortunately for him there were at that time no regulations governing the age of entry."

Jean Baptiste remained there until 1815 when he graduated as a doctor at the youthful age of about 19 years. He had written his thesis in Latin, on the subject ‘Hysterical Moods’.

He toured Europe and attended lectures at Montpellier and at Leyden. He had a strong personality and attracted several bright young rich people. He met a beautiful European woman and fell in love with her. But he heeded the advice of a friend who warned him of the impolicy of taking a white wife back to Trinidad. Campbell comments:

"It is not known what degree of racial mixture Philip represented, but it appears that he was sufficiently removed from white to be easily recognised as a man of colour."

When he left England, the island of Trinidad, freshly conquered from Spain, was still a free-wheeling frontier town. Men carried swords and pistols. There were duels; matters of honour were settled in public, Governor Picton burnt, hung, exposed the heads of the decapitated in public places - he did this to slaves as well as soldiers from the Duchy of Hesse who were under his command. There were men who walked the streets who had been present at the massacres of the French royalist in other islands. Child prostitutes lived with men old enough to be their grandfathers. The noblemen cultivated Epicurean taste in their octaroon mistresses.

Upon his return, life was becoming settled. Neapolitan Harps had become popular, duels were outlawed and the public executions were now private. The French creoles in perpetual pursuit of pleasure still kept mistresses, although, for the first time the question was being raised as to the propriety of giving the result of these liaisons their illustrious last names, in some families anyway.

Generalised lawlessness was giving way to institutionalised colonial prejudice under the governorship of Sir Ralph Woodford (1813 - 1829). The free blacks, slave owning, plantation possessing, educated,  began to feel the pressure of British crown colony rule. Gone were the days where atrocities and ‘sad depredations’ were visited on everyone, black as well as white, bringing comfort in the thought  of misery shared. Now it was a one-way street.

The most common Europeans had the rights and privileges of the high born educated upper classes when it came to dealing with free blacks. Woodford stopped them from being called ‘Mister’ and refused their commissions. They were not allowed to practice their professions. They may not inherit land. For the family of Philippe, land was vital; the ownership of land defined their personalities. J.B. Philip did not lose much time. He returned to England to fight a landmark case in the highest court of the Empire. He won it. Prof. Carl Campbell makes these remarks in the end:

"There is no mistaking the heroic quality of the life and achievement of Dr. Jean Baptiste Philip. There was youthful intellectual talent; a providential appearance when needed by an underprivileged social group; courage in the face of dangers; sacrifice of a professional career which could have supported a quite financially rewarding life; a book mature beyond the years of the author, as a personal testament to a principled struggle, and finally an early death at about age 33 just before the moment to triumph. Philip died two weeks before the proclamation of the law granting full civil rights equality to free coloureds. His entire adult life was consumed by the free coloureds' struggle. He did not live long enough to disillusion his admirers; or to sully his record by immersion into politics of conversion of paper rights into actual reality. Even so the issue of slavery, the fact that his family owned slaves as well as he himself, the absence of a clear call for the abolition of slavery from the man who saw the injustices done to his own social group - this, slavery, was the first major stumbling block to his acceptance as a hero to blacks and coloureds, especially the former, who had been slaves during the time of Woodford. Whatever explanations were offered in the post-emancipation period to mitigate Philip's personal involvement in slavery were probably less important as a healer of wounds than the passage of time itself. As slavery became more a memory than the actual experience of many living persons the conditions were created for the commencement of a more generous estimate of the work of the Naparima doctor. No monument was built in his memory as was suggested by a sympathiser in 1842, but some 30 years later there was a torch light procession to his grave in San Fernando, and speeches in praise not of a leader of the free coloureds, but of a hero of the underprivileged people.”

Your Free Paper Burn

The tragedy of slavery came to Trinidad with the Cedula of Population. This remarkable document, promulgated by the Spanish Crown, made it easy for Catholics to arrive in this deserted, neglected, but in terms of the times very strategic island. In terms of significant beginnings, this was a big one for Trinidad.

Prior to 1788 the island had no economy and was very impoverished. The difference in life style between the few enslaved and their owners was made even more opaque by the status of the children they shared.

One of the significant things that occurred with the Cedula of Population was the arrival of a large quantity of black people who were not slaves. Some had been born into slavery but had gained their freedom in various ways, for example as rewards for acts of kindness, faithful service or heroic action. Some bought their freedom. Others had been born that way as a result of parents being themselves free.

The fact is that of the ten or twelve thousand free people of colour who came to Trinidad with the Cedula, the majority were slave owners and a handful were big time slave masters. As an institution, the ownership of your fellow human being was an economic necessity. There was no economy outside the plantation system, except in shipping and trading, and money did not change hands as we have seen from earlier articles on the history of banking.

It has been put forward by Vidia Naipaul in his ‘Loss of El Dorado’ that part of the British government's disaffection with Sir Thomas Picton was that he followed the lead of the planters, both French and the coloured, and made Trinidad into a slave island by the 1800s. What was becoming policy was to offer Trinidad as being soft in slavery as a sop to the abolishment. Be that as it may, by the time the British government announced its decision to free the slaves, the real reason was not humanistic, but purely economic. From one day to the next, black slave owners and the previously held slaves were one and the same in the eyes of the law, society and to each other, although this may have been very one sided view. Both the white planters and their coloured counterparts were faced with economic collapse as their workforce walked.

Equally keenly felt was the hard-won ‘maintenance of status’ by the  black former slave owners. The terms of the Cedula by which they had come to Trinidad provided a very unique arrangement for free black people at the time. They could own land, slaves, benefit from tax relief, inherit property, educate their children in respectable professions, become commissioned in the militia, make a lot of money: in short, live life for all intent and purpose like the white people.

With the conquest of Spanish Trinidad by Britain in 1797, these terms relating to the free blacks were enshrined in the articles of surrender. In the period after the Napoleonic wars, that is in governor Sir Ralph Woodford's time (1813 - 1829), there was a move to repeal those articles relating to the free coloureds. Fortunately for them, produced from their ranks a wealthy, highly educated, politically active and energetic person, whose name was Jean Baptiste Philippe.

Philippe travelled to London, armed with a petition, and made important representations. His case for the rights of the free coloureds in Trinidad was upheld in the House of Lords. Free blacks and people of colour were able maintain their status under the law. Racial prejudice, dished out to them by the Europeans under the Woodford administration, was dealt with. At the end of the day there still existed a social abyss between them and their slaves, which was not to change before emancipation in 1834.

This awesome dichotomy between the people of African descent, slave and former master, has eroded through the centuries, and the real historic reasons have long been forgotten. The myth that black people naturally do not like to see their own prosper has its foundations in the class structure among people of African descent, which has been formalised by the end of the 1900s. Those were the years that local political movements began to group themselves, but  later the successors of those same political organisations could not fill the lack of unity. People of African descent became mixed up about whether they are Trinidadians or merely the ‘African problems’ of the segmented society. The social problems of this segmented society, and this has not to do with tribalism, may be summed up in the obituary of a well-off coloured businessman:

"Rich, educated, strictly moral, yet he had no place in society, because of those social distinctions with which the country is cursed. And he was not without manly pride, which enabled him to be satisfied with a very small number of chosen companions rather than to court those whom he felt to be his inferiors morally and intellectually, and whose only claim to consideration consisted . . . in the purity of their Caucasian blood . . . He felt keenly the disabilities under which certain races, notably that to which he himself belonged, were subjected." 

It was not in England's interest to deal with the social, moral and economic fallout of these beginnings. The responsibility lies with us at any point in time, because history is about capturing a beginning and following its resulting course of events in an attempt to organise meaning.

Party Politics

Dr. Eric Eustace Williams founded the ‘People’s National Movement’ in the early 1950s. History could argue that both he and the political party that dominated Trinidad and Tobago for almost half a century had its roots ultimately in the French and Patois speaking, free coloured intelligentia of pre-emancipation days and in the Afro-Franco reform movements of the later 19th century. These came into existence largely as a reaction to British Crown Colony rule. Was this the genesis of party politics along racial lines? That these 19th century ‘movements’ did not include the slowly arriving Indians, whose indentureships kept them on the estates and whose way of life ensured that they remained rural, that this isolation was encouraged by the colonial government and the planters lobby even after 1917?

During this period of indentureship and in the years that followed immediately after, significant leaders on the political stage did not come forward from the Indian community. Dr. Kusha Haraksingh attempts a definition of Indian leadership in the indentureship period, which was published in Caribbean Issues, Dec. 1976 (see pages 36 - 37), where he describes that with immigration to Trinidad, hereditary patterns of authority in family, caste and village were removed and institutional leaders like drivers and shopkeepers stepped into that vacuum, influencing the behaviour of other Indians.

“On the estates, the emergence of people as leaders purely on the basis of personal qualities was rendered difficult by a number of factors which generally coalesced in the atmosphere of coercion which pervaded the system. In reality, the estate managers chose the leaders they wanted and tried to ensure that no other worker achieved prominence as a person with influence. The Indians were always operating at a loss.”

Indian leadership seems to have operated through extended families, religious life and through the trade unions, producing personalities such as Sarran Teelucksingh and Ajodhasingh by the 1930s.

There is a real need to understand these 19th century reformists, what was achieved by them, the legacy that they have left behind and the people who took up the challenge. 

J. B. Phillipe, who may be described as the first reformist to challenge the British government’s policy in Trinidad in the 1820s, provided leadership with regard to racial predjudice directed at the ‘free blacks and people of colour’ by the Woodford administration, but he was not promoting the liberation of slaves.

The reformists of the second half of the 19th century sought a franchise that would eventually produce a freely elected legislature. They did not lobby for independence, however. They did however oppose indentureship. The arguments of politiians like Sir Henry Alcazar, C. Prudehomme David, Stephen Laurence and others, and of the newspapers such as ‘New Era’ and organisations like The Workingman’s Association, led to the Comissions of Enquiry to investigate indentureship. They rejected the idea that Indian immigration led to unemployment. Already by 1909 the reformists’ positions were hardening.

The chosen slogan for the reformist movement in 1870 was ‘Trinidad for Trinidadians’, meaning black, mixed and French creoles - the creole-born Trinidadians. Indians, however, were seen as transients. Trinidadians were dissatified with the British administration’s incompetent and high-handed officals and extravagant spending. The reformists felt that the use of public funds should be monitored by the representative in the Legislative Council, elected by tax payers. They felt strongly that local people with the right qualifications should man the upper levels of the Civil Service. Many of the reformists were either black people or coloured descendants of the free blacks of pre-emancipation days, and these were the people who should be elected. Sir F. Napier Broome, governor from 1891 to 1897, described them as “a middle class upheaval” and saw them as a bunch of lawers and businessmen who were seeking out their own interests.

Leadership was provided during the 1880s by Phillip Rostant, a French creole, who during his education in Ireland had taken part in Irish radical politics against British occupation in Ireland. He knew the power of mass meetings and understood how the British government would react to huge petitions containing 5,000 signatures. He was however compromised by his heritage. He was decended from the nobility of the Bourbonnais and held a deep respect for the property rights. Rostant could not bring himself to offer the vote to all people. He felt that the vote should be given to the people who were able to understand the responsibilities of citizenship. But as a French creole, he shared in common with the black intellectuals a dislike and distaste for the British administration. He was anti-colonial and he demonstrated that he could organize public support dramatically. This upset and startled the planters, however, who felt threatened that the working class was listening to the beat of another drum, particularly as the drummer was one of there own.

The black leadership that succeeded Rostant was more moderate. They perhaps had more to loose. Sir Henry Alcazar, a lawyer with a strong grasp of local politics, was on one hand ‘black enough’ to be accepted by the working class, and on the other sufficiently brilliant as a thinker and as a speaker to command the respect of the British administration. Alcazar was able to put it plainly in saying “it had not been proposed to place power in the hand of the working class, but only in those of the wealthier middle class.”

It is out of this struggle for self-determination, framed in nationalistic sentiment, that the baton was passed to Captain Arthur André  Cipriani, who in turn supported ‘the barefoot man’ and went the next step to put back-bone into the new-born trade union movement, the Trinidad Workingman’s Association, itself a product of the reformists. Cipriani was however compromised by the fact that he was, like his predecessors, a loyal colonial and not a revolutionary. Challenged in his old age by the young, vigorous, out-spoken and ‘man of the people’ Portuguese politician, intellectual and trade unionist Albert Gomes, Cipriani faded from the stage of local politics.

The Gomes years, important to the development of nationalism, stretching from the middle 1930s to the early 1960s, were the period when middle-class trade unionists were allowed to play at politics by the Colonial Office. The ministerial government brought together Gomes, Roy Joseph, Norman Tang, Victor Brian and Ajodhasingh, the ‘Knox Street Quintet’. “We had all been elected to the Legislature,” said Albert Gomes, “from different party platforms and one of us even had socialist aims.” Playing at politics with no real agenda, this representation, meagre as it was, had been hard-won with blood in Fyzabad and Apex in 1937, and in the Water riots of 1903, and the Canboulay and Hosay riots in the 1870s. Gomes, according to Owen Baptiste in his work on Cyril Duprey, “slammed the door on trade unionism when he joined the executive council of Sir Bede Clifford, governor in 1946. A year later, he was surprised to see that he had lost the seat in the city council that he had held since 1938.He no longer possessed the support of the working class.”

And this is where Eric Williams appeared on the scene. He was doubtlessly the  inheritor of the Afro French creole intelligentia of the previous century, he proved himself eminent in scholarship, in debate and his command of language. He possessed the common touch, was arrogant enough to deal with both the British and French creole establishment. He was the locus of the entire French/African colonial process. His stature was messianic. What he said, what he did in those formative years are cast, to this day, in iron, immutable, or so it would appear.

Dr. Williams took advantage of the post-war disenchantment of the ‘Gomes government’ and its loss of working class support. But he was now not alone in terms of locally-grown ‘genius’. The first generation of significant Indian leaders on a national level was defining its role on the political scene. The Capildeo brothers, Lionel Seukaran, Mitra Sinanan, Badase Maraj and others ranged from the local estate life and rural politics on through to the Legislative Council in the Red House. An opposition in the waiting.

Was Williams a revolutionary? No, he was a colonial. Did he continue the reform movement? In launching the People’s National Movement in 1956 he said, “you ignored the warnings” and went on to describe the then government as former “leaders of labour who have now become leaders against labour”. Williams attracted black middle-class professionals and the black working class. The PNM, he assured them, would not be a labour party. History may well pose the question whether it was a version of the reformist party in the mid-20th century, a nationalist party, a socialist party? Fact is that in 1956, the PNM found its most formidable opponent in Badase Sagan Maraj’s PDP. Williams emerged victorious with 39% of the vote and 13 of the 24 seats. The PDP won five seats and 20.3% of the vote. The Butler party won two seats and Gomes was annihilated. The era of party politics had begun.