Review of "The Cult of the Will" by Dr. Selwyn Ryan

It is perhaps a coincidence that the publication of Gerard Besson's controversial book, The Cult of the Will, should occur at the same time as the defeat of the People's National Movement (PNM) in the recently concluded general elections. The book is also being outdoored at a time—Friday 9—when the Eric Williams Memorial Lecture is scheduled to be delivered at the Central Bank. One of the basic arguments of the book is that Eric Williams and the PNM are "dead" or, if not, deserve to be. 

The book consists of two basic parts. The first deals with rise and fall of the family of Francois Besson to which the author belongs. That family portrait is however not a vain exercise. Drawing on a wealth of documentary data, including wills, Besson fashions a tapestry of the black and white French creole community in Grenada and later in Trinidad from which one learns a great deal.  

The second part of the book deals, inter alia, with wills and Williams, and argues that wills had a lot to do with who got what in Trinidad's racially stratified society. It argues further that two wills in particular, involving Eric Williams and his white forbears, had a significant impact on the post independence politics of Trinidad and Tobago. 

Our analysis is confined to three of the books main arguments. The first is that Eric Williams and his intellectual patron, CLR James, wilfully and deliberately conspired to produce a contrived account of the British anti-slavery movement which Williams misused for political purposes. According to Besson, a significant aspect of the narrative, much of which is found in Capitalism and Slavery and The History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, tends to stereotype the European planters and their descendents as "villains", and characterises the African slaves, and latterly their descendants, as "victims". 

Besson's argument is that Williams consciously revised the British narrative about the abolition of the slave trade and emancipation to counter the conventional version which anchors the anti-slavery movements in British humanitarian concerns.  

Williams claimed that he had unmasked a "gross historical lie" and had unmasked "a great academic conspiracy" which had lent credibility to the British claim that they were humanitarians who had a moral right to govern and civilise the colonies. 

These arguments have, of course, long been the subject of academic argument and counterargument. For Besson, however, they are not matters that concern only academics. They have had great political consequences for Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean. As he complains, Dr Williams would carry his conspiracy theory about the abolition of the slave trade and emancipation forward into his political life.
He would develop a political programme that would exploit these ideas. His revisionist narrative pilloried the European population in Trinidad and Tobago not only as descended from slave owners, but also of inheriting their guilt, while ignoring the complicity of the Africans who had sold their fellow Africans in exchange for trade goods. 

Besson makes two other basic points which are germane to his argument. One is that Williams' neurotic behaviour was informed by hostility to the white creole group to which his family belonged. In sum, his personality was misshaped by his belief that his family were "victims of the Will". The complaint was that the family was robbed or deprived of the various bequests that were made by their white relatives. 

This obsessive reaction was projected unto the "true inheritors" of history's bequest, viz the Afro-creole masses. His politics was thus about "revenge" and racial entitlements. "He conveniently forgot that his own forbears, his father's people, had been slave owners." 

Besson further argues that his "massa day" diatribe in 1960-61 was an attempt to exorcise his demons. It also excited the gullible and those inclined towards anti-white and anti-Indian racism. 

As Besson writes, "the Afro-creole masses would inherit what he and his family could not. He may possibly have seen his personal history as the country's destiny. He utilised political control to compensate the Afro-Creole population for the inheritance that they had long been denied. This was the basis of Williams' interpretation of the ideal welfare state, and would later form an integral part of the political culture of the PNM and of the entire country over the next 50 years." 

Besson's third thematic argument is that the paradigm that emerged from his version of history and which shaped the post independence politics of Trinidad and Tobago has now run its course. It is now time, he argued, to articulate an integrated New World narrative which treats all constituent groups as part of a whole. 

All should be beneficiaries of the will, figuratively speaking. As he argues, and we quote him at some length, "the PNM's version of who was legitimate politicised victimhood and guilt and the scapegoating of certain of its members…and served to erode ethnic harmony, respect for law and order and notions of moral and civic responsibility in the collective mind of contemporary society. The Williams narrative has contributed to the feeling that everything is outside the law and is up for grabs or reinterpretation. Many civil institutions (the police force, the administration of justice, the education system) have lost credibility and are hardly capable of conveying meaning or confidence in civil society." 

In sum, Williams and the PNM are seen to be largely responsible for most of our past and present discontents. Salvation lies in exposing the fallacies and the policies that emerge therefrom. Besson claims support in the experiences of Obama who, in his Audacity of Hope, also called for a new moral dispensation. As Obama had argued, "the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimised". 

There are some who would dismiss the book a as an anti-PNM rant, which would be a mistake. 

The book does debunk as myth a lot of what Williams and his supporters have said and did. There is however much in the book that is of great interest and which one would find intellectually provocative. It should spark public debate. The mood of the country in fact parallels some of the arguments of the book. 

It is also clear that while Williams was responsible for much that was positive about our national development, we are also paying the price for some of the behaviours which he authorised and legitimised.  

It is however too easy to blame almost everything that has gone wrong on the Williams narrative. Williams was part of a worldwide anti-colonial movement. His Massa Day Done rhetoric and his personal and cultural hubris fed on this worldwide Bandung spirit which would have flourished, stolen bequest or no stolen bequest. The discourse about the cult of the will make interesting reading, but is made to carry too much of the burden of what could be explained in other ways as I have attempted to do in my Eric Williams: The Myth and The Man."

Head first through the Wall

Born March 25th, 1911 in Port-of-Spain, Albert ‘Bertie’ Maria Gomes, politician, writer and publisher, was an Aries who lived up to the stereotype of his horoscope: never afraid to go head first through the wall!

Bertie Gomes was one of those ‘born Trinidadians’ who fitted in everywhere in the 1940s and 50s, but somehow didn’t. Perhaps because he was of Portuguese descent: in those times, this population minority was generally poor, and even though they were European, they were not socially accepted by the British elements of society, and the French (creoles) ostracised the Portuguese because they were not catholic. Until a Portuguese became very rich, and his son would come back from schooling in England with a British accent, looking like a sort of Italian to the ‘aristocracy’, few British or French would have allowed their daughter to marry him.

Bertie, however, was one of those personalities who made the stereotyping work for him. Dr. Brinsley samaroo understands him well in saying:

“Gomes is the man caught between two worlds - the attraction of the cocktail circuit on the one hand and on the other, the Portuguese who, as a result of his experience of segregation in the U.S. (1928 - 1930) and his Belmont boyhood, identifies with the ‘black soul’. This identification made him the defender of baptists, shouters, panmen and calypsonians [and of the folk art, particularly dance expressed by Beryl MdBurnie].

Wenzel Brown, an American who visited Trinidad in the late 40s, reports in his book ‘Angry Men, Laughing Men’ that Gomes was the ‘idol of the calypsonians’ and also ‘one of the principal butts for their tease’ and he quotes Lion:

“Oh what an awful thing

to see Gomes in a lion skin.”

Having grown up in Belmont, and educated at Pamphylian High School and City College in New York, Bertie could ‘talk the talk’ as one would say today. In colonial times, good rhetoric abilities were considered ‘the armoury of the human mind’, and while people paid very close attention to the degree of acculturation to European/British cultural values that was expressed in language, they also appreciated boisterous talk in politicians and calypsonians. For ordinary people to take you seriously, you had to talk big. And you had to make sense to them, too.

Bertie was able to do this, and his manner of speech struck home. Like many Trinidadians between the wars, his heart and mind was close to the working class.

Political Career

In the 1930s, when Bertie was a young, fiery voice, the colonial government was allowing a modification in politics. Gomes demanded workers’ rights, more pay, and criticised the colonial power structure with revolutionary arguments. Being the presidnet of the Federated Workers Trade Union, he eventually got elected into the Port-of-Spain City Council in 1938, in which he served for nine years. In 1945, he was elected a member of the Legislative Council, and made a member of the Executive Council in 1946. From 1950 - 1956, Gomes was re-elected to the Legislative Council and served as the pre-Independence Minister of Labour, Industry and Commerce. He was leader of the conservative Party of Political Progress Groups (POPPG).

From 1958, he served as a member of the West Indies Federal House of Representatives, which dissolved with the break-down of the federation in 1962.

When the POPPG was defeated by the only nine-month old People’s National Movement (PNM) in the 1956 election by winning 13 out of the 24 seats (that is, 1,458 votes more than the POPPG), Gomes took the defeat very hard and left Trinidad to live in England.

Literary Career

Bertie was the charismatic centre around which the truly brilliant and literary-minded West Indians gathered. He was the co-editor of ‘The Beacon’ from 1931 - 1933, and in the 1940s assumed editorship of ‘The People’. Both magazines were important literary developments which had spun out of the people. Everything that was not libelous was printed - from an interview with Joseph Staling by an American member of the socialist international, to biting short stories, written by Raoul Pantin’s father and Alfred Mendes. Out of Bertiee’s milieu arose such literary figures as C.L.R. James and Gertrude Craig. As one critic put it, they designed “the decisive establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel” as in Ralph de Boissière’s ‘Crown Jewel’ or in C.L.R. James’ lambasting of Dr. Sydney Horland, a geneticist at I.C.T.A. in the Beacon’s pages for making racist remarks.

A true lover of good literature, Bertie was there to publish fledgling Trinidadian writers. He was also the chairman of the Management Committee of the Public Library. A poet and author himself (and the owner of a pharmacy), Gomes was a columnist in the Sunday Guardian in the late 1940s and early 1950s, writing columns of social commentary, arts and literature. Other writers were invited to publish in his columns. Two books ‘All Papa’s Children’ and his autobiography ‘Through a Maze of Colour’ reveal his wll-informed, analytical, albeit aggressive and very subjective writing style, and in some passages make the reader whinny with laughter.

“The Second World War saw the birth of the ‘steel band’. It was both an innovation in musical expression and a social explosion in Trinidad. It also provided an unparalleled instance of Puritan humbug. It would be impossible to trace the origins of the steel bands. These must always remain shrouded in mystery and a subject of endless speculation - all things considered, a not surprising genesis for this musical aberration and gimcrack orchestration, whose romantic odyssey spans an arc of picaresque adventure that began in the slum areas in Port of Spain, recently reached Cape Kennedy, and is still orbiting.” (Excerpt from ‘Through a Maze of Colour’)

Albert Gomes, bigger-than-life, carrying more than 300 pounds in his days, lived in England until his death in 1978.

Name Changing

Poor immigrants often experienced name changes upon arrival in the colonies. Like the Chinese Scotts or the Chinese Bessons, the Gomes’ also experienced a name change. Bertie’s name changed from d’Abreau to Gomes because of extenuating circumstances. Listen to this colonial story.

“My paternal grandmother was previously married to a gentleman named Gomes; and when he died, she met and married my paternal grandfather whose name was d’Abreau. Antonio Gomes, her son of the first marriage, migrated from Madeira to Trinidad and achieved some success in business. He sent for his half-brother, my father, who took up employment in Antonio’s shop. The fact that he carried a different name - d’Abreau - left him open to suspicion of illegitimacy. When this anomaly became the subject of vulgar taunts hurled at him accros the counter of the shop by customers, my father decided that the solution was to adopt his half-brother’s name. Thus it was that d’Abreau, our proper name, was abandoned, and we got stuck with the name of Gomes. This would not have happened to ‘white people’!”