Respectability

That remarkable quality that Trinidadians like to boast about, that is even touted on political platforms, and euphemistically describes us as a "Rainbow Country", essentially derives from our 19th century experiences during which race, class, colour and caste arranged themselves to create an elaborately complicated, intricately woven pattern of human relationships.

These, frozen, as it were, in the mould of colonial rule, stamped or stigmatised by colonial prejudices for almost two centuries, have only just in the last 40 odd years since independence, begun to thaw out. Like the mythical Sleeping beauty, we stir and sigh and open our eyes to the brilliant dawn of reality. we look about and see our castle overgrown and the people who had been frozen in time are somehow left behind, as they cling to the modes and mores of the previous century.

This kiss that has brought us to consciousness is the reality that to move forward, with all our inherent potential, we must grasp and understand the historical process in which we slumbered and the truth to which we have now awakened.

West Indian Society, in fact New World society as a whole, has been pervaded since the 18th century by racist ideologies (not even to speak of chauvinist ones!). Donald Wood, in his work "Trinidad in Transition", wrote that the whole intricate experience of the Afro-European encounter since the renaissance, the stereotypes formed by slavery, the legacy of master and servant relationships from the first slaves to arrive in Europe from sub-Saharan Africa and carried to Portugal, taken by Antâo Gonsalves in 1441, has produced the elaborate complex of attitudes and prejudices which inform the "white view" of the "black personality". A mixture of affection and contempt, patronage and fear was carried into the period of post-emancipation from the times of slavery.

In Trinidad, this was complicated further by the circumstances of the development of the island's economy, and the nature of its government. As a neglected Spanish colon with a small Spanish ruling elite, a handful of black slaves and a debased Amerindian population, its first cultural shock was to come with the French colonists, their free coloured cousins and their slaves. With the British conquest a decade and a half later, yet another culture was intruced. It was in the dawn of the British period, the 1800s, that the first conflict of class, race and religion began in this colony.

The French, marooned on this island by the revolution, were mainly a remnant aristocracy, and Catholic. They had the following view of the arriving English: "There was not a gentleman amongst them, except perhaps in the military." (W. Day). Also, the English were Protestant.

Black and mixed people who for one reason or another were not slaves, but slave-owning themselves (and this group outnumbered the whites by far!) were holding on to the rights and privileges granted to them by the Cedula of Population by the skin of their teeth. With emancipation, their position plummeted in the eyes of the Europeans. Slaves and former Free Black people were now "all black together". It was at this point that the concept of respectability began to be institutionalised.

Respectability was a very important idea in 19th century Trinidad. In many respects, the real difference in the society was between those who were respectable and those who were not, rather than between the white people and the black. White people, whether the French Creoles or the British or other expatriates, were by definition respectable. White people would have to do something very shocking in public to loose respectability.

In the case of blacks, coloureds and the Indians, the onus was on them to establish, prove and maintain their respectability. To be respectable today did not mean that you were generally, so you had to be respectable all the time, in private and in public.

On respectability, Dr. Bridget Brereton comments:

"It was assumed that they [the blacks] were not respectable, unless they showed that they were, by their education, attainments, occupation and style of life."

It was this that made the difference between the black masses and the black middle class - not access to money or complexion. It was manners, European culture, education and life style.

Other conflicts had their genesis in the crucible of Trinidad's 19th century landscape, particularly between the newly arriving East Indians and the 'respectable' coloured middle class intellectuals. These gentlemen engaged in an anti-white, anti-colonial struggle for the reform of colonial rule, and they were against labour brought in from India - not on humanistic grounds, but from the point of view that cheap Indian labour enriched the white establishment (especially the English) and that it drove down wages. Their agitation found support from working class blacks on the wages issue, support from the racists who were keen to hate white people generally, but most significantly this black middle class movement was instrumental in stereotyping East Indians through the use of newspapers owned by them as "immoral, wife-killing aliens". Left unnoticed by the early Indians and unchallenged by the British administration, this middle class movement too proceeded to become institutionalised.

Tobago as an entity had a different social, political, economic and religious experience from Trinidad. For more than 150 years before Trinidad was colonised, Tobago was a Protestant island, and as an older colony, its economy has had its ups and downs in cycles different from Trinidad's. Its main population was a "pure black" peasant, land holding society. Having had no experience of French creoles or Indians, cocoa panols, Portuguese or Small Islanders, and with the collapse of Tobago's economy, the Tobagonian whites found themselves in the same boat as the blacks. Towards the end of the 19th century, the island was experiencing an economic downturn and was without much ceremony joined to Trinidad. A culturally and sociologically more obvious choice should have been Barbados.

During this period, Portuguese peasants started to arrive. Because they were poor and not educated, much like the Syrians and Lebanese of 50 years later, they were not seen as "sociologically white", and had no place in white Trinidadian society, at least not until they made a lot of money. The same applied to the Chinese, most Venezuelans and lower class Europeans. Insofar as caste and class were concerned, the white French creoles together with a handful of Irish and Germans that they had married formed an elite, distinguished by its inbreeding and social exclusivity. During the 19th century, the French Creoles gave the country distinguished public servants, administrators, wardens and scientists, particularly in the field of medicine.

As a fossilised element in the body politic, however, the French Creoles became easy pickings for the first version of the PNM, whose leader in lieu of revolution put them into opprobrium and in a short space of time, 1956 to 1961, effectively removed them from the political scene after 150 years of dominance.

As the 20th century dawned, all these various peoples as a result of ongoing sexual contact had produced individuals with a mindboggling mixture of races, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Class became the only yardstick by which they could recognise each other. Century-old beliefs in "white elitism" and access to European cultural values by an established hegemony started to become brittle at the edges. In their aspiration towards respectability, the black and coloured middle class had produced a number of significant professionals, who came from property and estate-owning families. Those individuals went to universities in the British empire, received awards and knighthoods, and formed that particular elite that had their roots in the free people of colour of the late 18th century.

In the early years of an independent Trinidad and Tobago, the coloured creole middle class was also shunned by the politics of the day, described as "Afro-Saxon" and lumped together with the French creoles. Thousands of them emigrated, taking their culture and attainments with them. A sad loss for our country, and a gain to coloured society in New York, London, Toronto and other metropolis: to mention the fact that Trinidad-style Carnival was established by these cultured expatriates would only be to skim the surface of the "brain-drain"!

Thus, the respectability patterns of the 19th century were significantly changed over  time through education, industrialisation and two wars. The softening up of the rigid society has made it easier for the individual of any ethnic background to fulfill his or her dreams. In a true humanistic sense, the word "or" of the vocabulary of the 19th century has been replaced by the word "and" in the 20th. Let's see if the global village of the 21st will replace it with the word "with"!

The Segmented Society

As the Caribbean’s most cosmopolitan society, Trinidad and Tobago has been described by historians as a ‘segmented society’, notwithstanding 200 years of ‘miscegenation’, the inter-racial procreation of children. Interestingly, there seems to be no positive word for mixed-race people in our language, as the prefix 'mis' does not convey a plus. It conveys the idea that this was something inherently bad.

There are people in Trinidad and Tobago today who, in all honesty, describe themselves as Indian or African. Others may confide that they are French creoles, and if they know you really well, admit to a ‘touch of the tar brush’. People refer to themselves as dougla, hackwi, cocoa panol and to each other as red, dark, brownskin and half-Portuguese-Spanish-Indian-something.

All this is the product of economies. Economies which commenced in the 1780s with the slaves, their French creole and coloured masters, their coloured descendants and their relatives. They had come under the Cedula of Population of 1783 to establish a sugar economy. They met Spanish, Amerindian and apparently black people here, some of whom were already of mixed heritage. The Spaniards had come to these islands for pearls and gold, real and imagined.  The tribal people who had been around all along and worked the first economy for the Spaniards, the pearl diving economy, in the Gulf of Tears, now the Gulf of Paria. The Africans were few then, as there was no gold to dig, thus hardly any economy to speak of.

The French, however, changed all that. The Cedula of Population, a legal guarantee of entry to Trinidad as long as you were Catholic, set a precedent. The British, who inherited it in 1797 under the articles of surrender, used it to allow unlimited entry to the extent that British Prime Minister Canning could describe the island a few decades later as an ‘experimental colony’.

Some say the slaves were freed by England in 1834 so as to acquire the lands in the Caribbean islands that had been won from France and Spain. These islands were negotiated in pacts drawn up at the end of twenty years of war with France With the slaves freed and the French and coloured planters broke, the British bought the land and now had to experiment with importing labour. Chinese, Indians, Portuguese, impoverished Europeans, some of them criminals on the run or the religiously persecuted - various people found themselves in Trinidad and Tobago for the purpose of economies. Sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee and cocoa brought people from all over the Caribbean to ‘la belle Trinidad’.

The British had no problem with all this, and formalised a simple segmentation of the society:  from 1845, Indians were put to work in the cane. The former slaves and the previously free black people worked as artisans, labourers, gardeners, clerks, minor trades people or did nothing at all. The Chinese couldn’t do the agricultural thing, neither the Portuguese, so they made their way as shopkeepers, barkeepers, grocers and poor clerks. The returning Amerindians cum Venezuelans were the ones that really opened up cocoa, creating by the late 19th century a vibrant economy from which the French creoles and others of all races profited enormously.

Thus, stereotypes in British Trinidad were soon cast. In a simplistic sense, one may say that Chinese had laundries, bakeries and restaurants. Portuguese had rum shops and groceries, and so did some Indians and Chinese. White people was not in that. More and more black and coloured people worked in government’s lower levels, as train conductors, policemen, nurses, teachers, clerks, later as lawyers and doctors.

In the segmented society in the making, none of these people were sleeping only with their respective segments. But in the eyes of the British administrators, it did not really matter what was produced in a subjected people. As for the French creoles, they married their cousins and updated their pedigrees. Later, the Syrians and the Lebanese would do the same. It all had to do with maintaining economies, and of course how one was socialised.

Two powerful forces were present on the colonial stage of the segmented society: the Afro-French Catholic culture of the older economies and the Indian culture of the more recent sugar economy. They were segmented by colonial fiat and racial prejudice on all sides.

It worked quite well for the British administration. The economies flourished. The Indians in the cane, the cocoa panols, Africans and some Indians in the cocoa, over-the-counter trade with the Chinese, Portuguese, and the French and English in commerce.  Under the aegis of empire, a belief system which was loyal to the throne and organised as religion, civil law and with institutionalised force, was simply imposed.

Independence, when it came in the second half of the 20th century, was not sought after for patriotic, emotionally driven reasons. Like the freeing of the slaves in 1834, the granting of independence was an economic choice. England could no longer afford an empire. She had won the most terrible war ever fought for the maintaining of western civilisation as we know it, and so had to get rid of the colonies. Inheritors of the coloured reformists movement and black intellectuals were allowed to take the country into an era of independence with no resistance from Great Britain.

The descendants of Indian indentured workers who were represented at the independence talks in Britain became the opposition in the legislative, later in the parliament. The segmentation of the society, created by men who wore powdered wigs and buckled shoes more than 200 years ago, is to this day a powerful political instrument.

Segmentation only works if people perpetuate it. Otherwise, it vanishes, and integration takes place. In history, we can see segmentation of societies having been reversed and forgotten about it. The Greek slaves of antique Rome who stayed on in Naples stopped being slaves and are today indistinguishable from other Italians. In Germany, where sixty years ago segmentation was carried ‘ad absurdum’ by the politicians, people don’t even know or care nowadays who is Jewish and who is not. And whereas in Ireland religious segmentation is still perpetuated, Catholics and Protestants live in greatest harmony in integrated societies the world over.

If a society, however, is segmented along racial lines like Trinidad’s, segmentation becomes a handy tool for people seeking power. The absurd idea of structuring a society along immediately visible physical features of its members - and expecting the segments to behave accordingly - is a demonstration of great historical tenaciousness in multi-ethnic societies.

Today, some forty years after independence, we are still a segmented society, claiming to be Trinidadians and Tobagonians in our more emotional moments. Mostly, however, we describe ourselves with great sincerity as Indian, Syrian etc. etc., even though we have not lived anywhere else but here for more than 200 years, four, five, six generations. Such is the power of the segmented society, institutionalised by a colonial experiment many centuries ago.

Tribal myths in the segmented society

Unresolved issues have now produced in this year of grace 2000 an interesting phenomenon. In ignorance, in pursuit of power and personal wealth, in self-aggrandisement and in the seeking of control of economies, present-day leaders in the form of politicians, trade unionists, calypsonians and social scientists create and utilise tribal myths. Supposedly, this is the natural progression in a segmented society - instead of resolving issues, myths become historical reality.

“Tribal myths emphasize not what men have in common, but what divides them,” remark ... in their book ‘The Messianic Legacy’. “Tribal myths do not pertain to the universal and shared aspects of human experience. On the contrary, they serve to extol and exalt a specific tribe, culture, religion, people or ideology - necessarily at the expense other tribes, cultures, peoples, religions or ideologies. Instead of leading inwards towards self-confrontation and self-recognition, tribal myths point outwards towards self-glorification and self-aggrandisement. Such myths derive impetus and energy from insecurity, blindness and prejudice.”

Tribal concepts in a segmented society willfully create scapegoats. Having no real internal core, segments invent an external enemy. Tribal myths reflect a deep-rooted uncertainty about one’s inner identity.

Entire populations in these islands are the product of the European wars and revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. These arranged themselves into productive economies in the conquered territories as segmented societies.

Ignorance of our historic past is our greatest pitfall, as Trinidadian historian P.G.L. Borde already lamented a century ago. Like in other former colonies, history has been hardly studied in itinerary and far less, been passed on to the young. The era of independence in Trinidad and Tobago seemed to mean the forgetting of our past and the shared experiences of the last 200 years. This nationally institutionalised amnesia has created a tremendous loss in the body politic of our country, and unfortunately, where amnesia sets in, tribal myths soon fill the gap.

Ultimately, history is about the present. We need history so that we can organise our futures