Our Independence Legacy—Fifty-Five Years On

By Gérard A. Besson 

When asked to write on independence I remembered a line in the foreword of a book of Angelo Bissessarsingh’s that read, “. . . Angelo is concerned with legacy. Legacy in this case meaning both what is received and what is passed on.” Then, someone rang up to ask what I thought about the renaming of Queen Street in Port-of-Spain. I felt that the one had to do with the other: 

The roots of our indifference. 

Our history is unlike that of other islands in the Caribbean. Trinidad, not Tobago, did not have as long a gestation in the womb of colonialism as say Barbados or Jamaica, which commenced their social and economic development before the 1600s. Caribbean slave societies, sugar economies with mostly ethnically homogeneous populations, they matured through a long history of societal gestation. 

In the case of Trinidad, our disparate and even then segmented population arrived suddenly from 1783 with the Cedula for Population. Before that, Trinidad was an almost deserted island. Not Tobago. From 1783, Europeans and Black people who were not enslaved and those who were arrived, mostly from the French islands.  Many were refugees, political enemies and strangers to each other.  Some had actually been involved in the slaughter of the relatives of the people next to whom they lived in Port-of-Spain. After the British conquest of 1797 to this milieu were added Chinese, Portuguese and African freedmen. Then, after much miscegenation, some decades later, Indian indentureship commenced, and latterly the Lebanese and Syrians arrived. It was, in the majority, an Afro-French–Creole society from which the Indian segment was kept separate and who themselves maintained separateness. It served the interest of the British colonial administration to maintain these divisions.

In spite of this segmentation, which still exists, Trinidad and Tobago had a really good start. Although there was great inequality and institutionalised racial prejudice that kept everybody in their respective places, the colonial period did actually put into place the mechanisms that formed the bedrock for the democratic institutions of today. Compared to many other newly independent nations of the 1950s and 60s, Trinidad and Tobago has done, in that regard, remarkably well. 

The divisions that shaped our colonial experience have continued to blight our post-independence existence. This is so because of the politics of independence, which did not take sufficient consideration of the assimilation of the Indian-descended population that had been in Trinidad for over 100 years and then represented over one third of the population. It was not taken to heart by the shapers of the independence movement, who were Creole people of a generation born in the 1910s. They behaved as though the Indians were transients who had outstayed their welcome and would somehow return to India. The Colonial Office, knowing that the Indo-Trinidadian politicians had a very shallow professional and intellectual base and were not familiar with the Civil Service, tended to favour the independence movement. 

Dr. Eric Williams’ personality was in many ways formed by 19th century notions, and his academic study of African slavery had shaped his worldview. He appears to have had, personally, a heightened sense of victimhood. All this he turned into the politics of entitlement, which were readily accepted. That, coupled with his belief that guilt could be inherited, served to alienate the European segment in general and the French Creole and off-white community, to which he was connected, in particular. Thus one form of racism was replaced with another. 

We are still living out, in our social life and in our politics, Williams’ divisiveness. Independence did not create a unity of identity; it merely gave us the right to elect politicians from the tribal elements. There lies the challenge for future leaders.

When people change, things lose their relevance.

Here are two examples of what has further contributed to our inability to arrive at a commonly held sense of identity, which should have given us a commonly shared belief in the idea of legacy.

First. Over the last 55 years, we have had an experience that no other Caribbean island has had. Of the more or less 50 percent of the population who are not of Indian descent, more than a third have gone abroad. Raymond Ramcharita tells us that in Wendel Samuel's "Migration and Remittances" he finds that between 1950 and 1959 4,000 people emigrated.  This number increased astronomically in the next three decades: 110,000, between 1960-1969 left the island, 94,700, between1970-1979, and 75,000 between1980-1989. At the same time, about the same amount of people or more than that of those who left, have come from the islands of the Caribbean.  (there is no real record) Those immigrants’ backgrounds were mostly rural and primary school educated. 

This unique demographic transformation has impacted on Trinidad and Tobago politically, socially and culturally, and has significantly diminished the identity of the Afro-Creole sector. More than a ‘brain drain’, it was a deep cultural alteration within the context of the local Afro-Creole culture. The fruit of that culture, produced throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th century, have emigrated, taking their legacy with them. This is why carnivals appeared in New York, London, Toronto. That tells you who went away! And this is why there are fewer and fewer people to whom the state of the Red House, President’s House or if Queen Street changes its name, has any relevance. When people change, things lose their relevance.

In the Indian-descended segment, now in their fifth or sixth generation of being born Trinidadians, a burgeoning business and professional class has developed, producing a growing middle class, possessed of a large tertiary-educated cohort and a large and growing middle class. The decedents of mostly rural people they have no great personal or emotional interest in Port of Spain its built heritage or its historical significance as the Creoles do.

On the other hand, the decline in intellectual capital amongst the Afro-Creole segment through emigration and immigration has led to the shrinking of their middle class, and to what Professor Selwyn Ryan understands as “the loss of hegemony” of that segment, resulting in what economist Dr. Terrence Farrell describes as an “underachieving society” also in that particular segment. 

It is ironic that the independence movement, which was crafted mainly for the advancement of the Afro-Creole sector, has seen such decline while the marginalised Indo-Trinidadian sector has advanced.

The second factor that has negatively impacted on our collective identity as a people, certainly on discipline and on productivity, was the end of the agricultural economy. Agriculture in Trinidad and Tobago prior to independence was large, racially inclusive and very diverse. It had existed for 200 years, and gave us shared notions of identity, built through the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th. 

For example; there were 13,000 acres planted in citrus that produced 432,000 crates of citrus in 1954. Bananas saw 45,546 stems exported in 1953. Rice production from 288 mills drawn from 18,000 acres produced 12,000 tons of rice. Forest production reserves in 1953, 49,000 acres; protected reserves, 194,900 acres; sugar estates’ cane acreages, 36,000. Farmers’ cane acreages, 44,000; number of farmers, 111,000.

Coconuts, 40,000 acres under cultivation produced 21,400 tons of copra valued at  $1,840,509 in 1953. Our famous cocoa had 120,000 acres under cultivation, this produced 200,000 cwt of cocoa in 1954. Can you imagine the work, the productivity, the discipline, and the compassion that all this engendered? 

One of the effects of the loss of the agricultural sector is that we have become a compassionless society. When you have hundreds of thousands of people, whether they are Indian, white, mixed-race or African people, who are all devoted to the bringing up of livestock, market gardening, vegetable planting, cocoa and coffee cultivation and so on, you have people who have a lot of love for their animals and for their plants. You have to love your donkey! Which brings us to livestock: in 1954, there were 37,900 cattle in Trinidad and Tobago, 3,000 water buffaloes, 39,000 goats, 5,000 sheep, 35,000 pigs, 2,400 horses, 2,800 mules and 6,000 donkeys.

When things lose their relevance, their meanings change. 

The social transformation caused by emigration and immigration within the Afro-Creole segment, in combination with the destruction of the agricultural economy as well as other factors, created a profound dissonance in the body politic and in commonly held ideas of identity and a shared understanding of legacy. 

This dissonance causes us to honour Angelo Bissessarsingh with national awards for his preservation of legacy on the one hand, but to erase, with impunity, the historical street names of our capital city on the other.

The Company Villages

People of African descent came to Trinidad and Tobago in various ways. Some arrived in Spanish times as slaves; however, because there was hardly any industry, these early arrivals were distinguishable from their owners only by their colour and lack of freedom, in that all were more or less equally impoverished.

With the French colonists came some 10,000 slaves. It has been said that the majority of these were creoles, that is, born in the Caribbean. Slaves out of Africa came in considerable numbers from 1783 to 1807. During this period, free black people with wealth, education and slaves of their own arrived as well. Under the aegis of the Cedula of Population, they enjoyed significant rights and privileges unknown to blacks in other islands in the Caribbean. Other freed men came to this island: men from disbanded West India regiments who had served in the Ashanti wars and in the Gambia were given lands at Manzanilla and Sangre Grande.

During the period between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in 1834, disbanded regiments from the American Wars arrived here. However, tens of thousands of West Indians, by far the majority of any other group of Africans, came to Trinidad from the first decade after emancipation down to the present. The other interesting migration of people of African descent came about as the result of the British taking slaves off of Portuguese slavers in the mid-Atlantic in the 1850s and bringing them to Trinidad and Tobago, where they lived in freedom. The subject of this article is the penultimate category, the Americans.

Heading along the swift highway, the Northern Range, behind you fading to a paler shade of blue. Going beyond San Fernando always makes one feel that Trinidad is larger than it is. Over to the east, the Montserrat Hill with Mount Pleasant and Mount Kelvin. See it 185 years ago, thick virgin forest, as impenetrable as the Amazon's, crowded with wildlife, a world unknown. In the world outside, significant events were taking place. In Europe, Napoleon's doomed army was invading Russia. The Duke of Wellington, Britain's greatest general, was at the start of the Peninsular Wars to liberate Spain and Portugal from the French stranglehold. On the other side of the Atlantic, the young nation of the United States of America declared war on Britain and had invaded Canada. The war at sea saw three American frigates, the "Constitution", the "United States" and the "President", designed to outclass all other frigates and to outrun England's ships of the line, for a time get the upper hand. On land, the British army marched into Washington, which was defended only by a small force of militia, some of the British officers arriving in time to eat a dinner at the White House that had been prepared for the President and Mrs. Madison.

In the south, an army of frontiersmen, led by tall, long-haired Andrew Jackson, wearing his old leather cap and patched blue cloak and oversized unpolished boots, defeated the British army under General Pakenham at New Orleans, giving rise to the song:

"We fired one round and the British kept a'coming,

there wasn't as many as they were a while ago,

we fired another and they began a'running

from the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico".

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary and unnecessary war was that the peace treaty between England and the United States was signed in Europe before the Americans signing the treaty got the news of Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans.

During this was, as in the previous war for independence, many men of African descent fought for the British and many also fought for the Union. Their pay was always the same, freedom. As this war in America wound down, black soldiers in British regiments were offered the opportunity of settlement in Trinidad. Several companies set out to an unknown island in the distant west.

The island was passing through a difficult period of adjustment. Its laws and institutions were Spanish. The British military administrators had imposed martial law for some 18 years. The landowners were a mixed group of Spanish, English and French. There were black families who had very big estates run by slave labour. These formed a separate establishment. All these people had very mixed loyalties. When we see huge crowds today filling the stadium of thronging the streets at Carnival time, it is difficult to believe that in 1811 there were only 8,455 free people, white and coloured, in Trinidad, and the total population, slaves included, was only 30,742, about the size of a crowd at the Oval when it is filled to capacity.

The sugar cane had been introduced by refugees from Santo Domingo; the Otaheite variety by M. St. Hilaire Begorrat who owned a plantation in Diego Martin.

The soil was fertile. Governor Woodford, the first British civil governor who took office in 1813, declared in a dispatch in 1824 that "in other islands, the planting of canes is attended with great bodily exertion to the labourer—with all this trouble, the canes do not rattoon or sprout afresh for above one or two seasons after the first plantation, when the land must be again enriched and replanted.  In the new lands of Trinidad, it is sufficient to clear the surface and to lay the cane in the soil where it will for 18 or 20 year throw out fresh canes. The cultivation of cocoa, of which there are 101 plantations established with 1,622 slaves of all ages producing 1,166,224 lbs of cocoa or 719 lbs per negro, forms a very distinguished feature in the agriculture of the colony".

But only a small part of the land mass was under cultivation, only about 44,000 acres out of the 1.5 million! The island was short of people. Indeed, shortages of labour is one of the salient features of the history of Trinidad throughout the whole of the 19th century. Such is the background. Now we must link the war between the United States of America and England with the newly conquered British colony of Trinidad, which was short of people.

Some of the free Africans in the United States joined the British forces and fought for them against the Americans. At the end of the war, groups of these people were brought to Trinidad. A party of fifty arrived in 1815 and in the following year, 34 men, 15 women and 17 children were brought in. Other followed. All of these "Americans" were finally settled round about Savanna Grande (now Princes Town). They did not want to become tradesmen. Land was to them a symbol of security and of liberty. They all wanted to settle on the land to own it, cultivate it and be independent.

By and large, the "Americans" were members of the Baptist church, and so in 1843, a Baptist missionary began to work among the men and women who settled around Savanna Grande. Other mission stations were established as well at the first Company Village, at Mount Kelvin and in the third village at Mount Pleasant, where the settlers were part cultivators and part hunters.

It is said that the second Company Village was never founded because the settlers were lost at sea. The descendants of these brave men and women are now woven into the colourful quilt of this the most cosmopolitan island of the Caribbean. They have become another element of the overall African diaspora in the Western World.

The African Prince

 "Sail off the starboard, bowmaster Jackson," snapped at Captain Peppard. Midshipman Jackson trained his glass along the steadily rising and falling horizon. The Portuguese barcantine appeared to be making directly towards H.M.S. Vigilante.

"Looks like slaver, sir."

"Trifle worse for wear."

"Order number two to fire."

"Fire number two!"

The order shouted from the quarterdeck was immediately carried out by a grinning sailor whiteout a tooth to his name. Boom! an indeterminate period, and a splash, well to the port of the Portuguese.

"Take her about, Mister Jackson, and see to the main gallants. Fasten the mizzen halyard, no luff today, Mr. Jackson!"

"Ay ay, sir!"

Captain Peppard moved to the rail.

"Stand by to board the Portuguese. Look lively at the divots!"

"Ay ay, sir!"

"Helm's alee, Captain, sir!"

"Fire number four."

"Fire number four!"

Several seconds - Boom! - huge splash just off the barcantine's starboard gunnel.

"He's put her into irons, sir. Not a breath to her canvas, she's dead in the water."

"Sergeant, board her."

"Ay ay, sir!"

The Portuguese out of Goa bound for Recife, her bow now in the wind, heaved and wallowed in the startlingly brilliant mid-Atlantic green. The sky above, true blue. From 30 yards, the Royal Marines in the Vigilante's longboat could smell the cargo: human beings, chained together in despair.

Britain's blockade of the Portuguese slave trade in the mid 19th century, the 1850s, created a different class of African people in Trinidad and Tobago. Freed from slave trading ships, they arrived on these islands 20-odd years after the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. They knew nothing of plantation life and its attendant depredations, nor were they caught up in the variegated cross-currents and miasma of coloured creole society that confused the free blacks and people of colour with the slaves, both before and after abolition.

They were distinguished by this lack of experience. All the same, they were thrown into the crucible of colonial prejudice and racial discrimination.

The number of freed Africans was quite substantial in the British West Indies: some eight or ten thousand were dispersed in the Caribbean. Among them, one day, was a prince.

The Royal House of Oyo was descendant of the Gods. At a time now so distant that it could be grasped only in metaphor and expressed purely in ritual, the great old ones had come and had allowed themselves to stay. He had been entrusted to their care of young Olumide so as to benefit from his knowledge of the earth and of what walked upon it. Because he was his father's eldest son, he was a prince, and as such was one of the sons of the Gods.

The tall, ascetic youth and the boy were walking swiftly along the path that made its way through the tall grass. The sun was huge and red and out of shape as a result of the heat of the day. It was close to setting, causing the village huts to stand out sharply in classic silhouette like black, hooded shapes.

This was where tragedy struck. Suddenly, strange men were upon them; hard blows were delivered, a net thrown upon them, and they were hoisted upon long poles and borne away. They had been stolen, and were soon to be sold to the Muslim trader who in turn sold them along with a party of Ibo from the north to the man who owned the wharves where the ships came.

Put aboard the Portuguese barcantine, they were herded below decks. They now possessed nothing, but they had a secret. No one knew who or what the boy was, and for many years after, he kept his secret of being a prince.

Arriving in Trinidad, he took the name Charles Robinson; maybe it was given to him. He and his tutor fell into Trinidad's life of the 1850s, and witnessed many wondrous sights. 1851 was the year of jubilee for the Roman Catholics, and he saw a grand procession make its way from the city's Romanesque cathedral to the hill of Calvary, just off Piccadilly Street in Port of Spain. Twenty days later, the cross was struck by lightning.

The first horse races were held that year at the Queen's Park Savannah. He had never seen a horse or a horse race before he came to Trinidad. His tutor continued his education, worked and looked after the boy. He took the name of Charles Robertson. They both became Catholics. Charles grew into a hard-working, thrifty young man and traveled down the main to Venezuela, where he bought a parcel of land and went into farming.

Five or six years later, gold was found on the land, and his parcel, along with others, became the famous El Callao mine from which Charles made a fortune. Returning to Trinidad, he married a member of the Blandin family and had three sons and a daughter. He did not live to enjoy either his wealth or his family, but passed away early. Today, his dozens of descendants live around us, among them the McShine, the Davis and the Carters. His old tutor became brother Vincent of Mt. St. Benedict.

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Education and the first Model Schools

Both parties, masters and slaves, were engulfed by the rumours of the impending emancipation. The rumours that the slaves were soon to be freed became more insistent as news from the antislavery lobby in England reached them.

Governor Sir George Fitzgerald Hill, Bart. (1833 - 1839) and the planters had made the strongest representations possible to London and to their friends in high places there. They insisted that any sudden freeing of the slaves would mean absolute ruin for the colony. Estates would be abandoned and, in the event of the slaves becoming violent, even the 19th Regiment and the militia would not be able to safeguard the population. The terrible events in Haiti, the revolution, the slave revolts, the massacres of the Europeans were still in living memory.

They claimed that in view of the acute shortage of slaves since the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, it was to be anticipated that the Africans, when freed, would not return to work on the plantations. There would be no way of avoiding the complete collapse of the colony’s economy. The Europeans would go away, it was said, and the former slaves resort to savagery in the bush.

Emancipation in 1834, however, was one of those significant events that marked both an end and a beginning. In terms of race relations, it marked the end of a period when things were very clear-cut. It was also the end of clearly defined labour relations. Instead, social and occupational ambiguities would now enter the scene of things.

None of the terrible predictions of upheaval and bloodshed came to pass. Yes, plantations were ruined, fortunes were lost, lands changed hands. The labour shortage occurred, and less than 20 years later, fresh labour was found and fortunes were re-made.

In 1838, 20,656 slaves had been freed. Given the size of the island, this was not a large number, particularly bearing in mind the among of women, children and domestics amongst them.

One of the controlling factors of slavery was access to learning. At the end of the period of slavery, only the chosen few could read or write, perhaps no more than a dozen or so. The social, political, religious and emotional dislocation of the vast majority of the former slave population is hard to imagine nowadays - to describe them as ignorant would be to miss the point.

In the middle of all this, the Africans were not entirely unsought after. Rivalries between religions were as keen then as they are now and both the Catholics and the Anglicans vied with each other for converts. With the prohibition against giving education to the Africans gone, the offer of schooling was the attractive way to create converts. The British government also supported the possibilities  of an education for the former slaves’ children - especially since they were French and Patois speaking and had to be taught English. The various denominations were encouraged to start schools. The quality of this education in those schools, however, has been described by historians as low.

As the result of the plantation system and society in the towns being dominated by the French creoles, French language and the culture of the south of France were endemic. Catholicism was entrenched, and the hierarchical structure of the society almost feudal. The British, on the alert, did not want the former slaves to coalesce even further with these alien French, formerly aristocrats of an overturned regime.

There was a political need to break this alliance of interest, formed of a shared alienation to the British Crown. British education was the answer. It would benefit the Africans, and it would serve to gain their loyalty. During the mid-19th century, the majority of the Africans who were socialised French was diluted by the influx of former slaves from other West Indian islands, many from Protestant cultures like Barbados. They came to work in the fields, however, they did not stay there long. Little by little, the process of segmentation of the Africans along denominational and cultural lines crept in - Catholic/French and Protestant/English.

When Lord Harris assumed governorship in 1845, there were about 54 primary schools in Trinidad, many of them organised by different churches. Lord Harris was an unusual individual for his time - he was interested in mass education and voiced the opinion that “education was essential for the lower classes in order to fit them for freedom.”

He felt that education should not be handed over to the denominations, but instead was convinced that these religious bodies were competing for increased numbers in their individual congregations. The pursuit of these various ‘gains of converts’ would only lead to the creation of deep divisions in the society. Lord Harris advocated a state school system, which was secular and in the hands of the government. In thinking this way, Harris understood the inherent problems of a society segmented in various ways - of which he had enough on his hands with the beginning arrival of Indians from the other end of the British empire.

The creation of the education ordinance in 1851 which established a school in every ward, free and secular under the control of a board of education with salaried inspectors, was a landmark event in Trinidad. Dr. Bridget Brereton writes in her book ...:

“Instruction was to be entirely secular, but each week at stated times the clergyman of the majority faith in the ward would undertake to teach religion, with parents free to withdraw their children if they wished.”

In Port of Spain, a ‘Normal School’ was to be set up to train teachers for the ward schools, with ‘Model Schools’ attached to them for the teachers in training to practice and to come to grips with the challenge of their calling. This was the foundation of the school system in Trinidad.

Notwithstanding Lord Harris’ laudable intentions there were problems. Too few new schools came into existence - only 30 by 1870. Language was a real problem. Since English was the only language used for instruction, it went over the heads of most pupils, who spoke only French patois in their homes and in their community. Within a couple years, the population became entirely bi-lingual. There was also the problem of properly trained teachers as well as a lack of motivation to teach in the inadequate and dilapidated buildings that served as schools.

Sir Arthur Gordon, who arrived in Trinidad as governor in 1866, made a decision to take up the challenge of education. Harris’ ward school system of the previous decade had served to lay the foundations.

The Catholic church had become stronger now, as its main adherents, the French creoles, had once more gained financial ascendancy. The Catholics took the view that only state-aided denominational schools would be acceptable to them. They felt convinced that state-run schools were essentially ‘godless’ and that they placed Catholic youths in mortal danger for their souls.

At Governor Gordon’s request, an Irishman, Patrick Keenan, was sent out to investigate. Keenan was an expert in the field of organised education, and he produced a landmark document in the history of education in Trinidad. He recommended that the church schools be allowed state aid under certain circumstances. This met the Catholic churches’ necessities. The education ordinance of 1870 put into place a dual system of state-supported church schools alongside government schools in the wards.

To what extent this beginning of an education system served to divide the emerging society in its lowest and most vulnerable levels is a topic that historians discuss to this day. In the chequered landscape of our society, with its bewildering collection of faiths and creeds did we get off to a bad start?

Next time you take a shortcut through Lord Harris Square in Port of Spain and walk past his missing statue, or stroll down Harris Promenade in San Fernando, spare a thought for a noble man who spared a thought for children.