Just over 120 years ago, the late 1870s, life in Trinidad reflected the ups and
downs and overall uncertainties of the colonial experience.
All in all, the island was prosperous. Sugar was making
money for those with money. Cocoa was on a sound footing, providing a
trickle-down economy whereby many benefited. The indentured Indians laboured in
the hope of either repatriation or in resignation to being consigned forever to
this island.
Already, the central plains were acquiring the look of
India that they would never see again, or which their children would never
know. Jhandis fluttered over backyard shrines, dedicated to Lord Shiva as
devotees murmured mantras, maintaining a transcendental connection to
half-forgotten ashrams on the banks of Gangama; all these frozen in memory,
evoked with ganja, specially imported by the British authorities as a solace
and as a relatively safe alternative to the demon of rum.
Already there was an organised importation of West Indians
negroes, mostly from the island of Barbados, who were more self-possessed than
their local equivalents. They provided inexpensive labour and filled the ranks
of the nascent civil service. They were also Protestant, which served to swell
the numbers of that denomination favoured by the British. In those days, the
real politic took place not between rich or poor or even black or white, but
between Catholics and Protestants. This really meant between the British
establishment, the governor and high officials, business people and
professionals, and the local French whites and their coloured adherents. At the
end of the day, what mattered was the cost of labour. Indians from India, negroes
from the impoverished smaller islands, ensured that the price of raw materials
for export was kept as low as possible. colonial rule was simple. The Indians
in the cane, the negroes in the slums.
Where the real social action took place was in the murky, slightly
out-of-focus interface between the people of African descent, from dark to
light complexions, local or from other British territories, who were moving
upward by dint of education and that most nebulous criterion of all,
respectability. Nice manners, well-made clothes, a good grasp on the
distinction between servility and graciousness or perhaps gratefulness—these
educated people of colour had their champions who put up a show whenever
obvious racial discrimination was dished out. Black editors complained:
"One class is protected blindly, without regard even
to decency and propriety; and other classes degraded with a similar disregard
to prudence, common sense and even safety ... The authorities show a lamentable
want of discretion and judgment by irritating so often, so determinedly, and so
unnecessarily, a sensitive race ... The dominant race enjoys to the top of its
bent everything it can desire—power, place, emoluments, social position. It
lives, it luxuriates, on the fat of the land. Why does it not enjoy itself
quietly? And not every now and then insult the Children of the Sun by acts of
gross injustice..." (from contemporary newspapers, as quoted in Prof. B.
Brereton's "Race Relations").
Some made it as in the case of a Mr. O'Brien, whose recommendation by his boss went,
"he is a coloured man, and it is difficult to find appointments for men of
his class," but, "the fact that he is annually chosen as secretary of
the [Horse] Race Meeting shows the sort of consideration in which he is held by
the community generally".
O'Brien was acceptable to the whites and so could work in
the upper middle ranks of the service. It was regarded as scandalous in 1894
when a registrar of the supreme court, Ralph Monier-Williams, wrote a letter to
the governor, requesting him to appoint to a clerkship "a person with as
little coloured blood as possible and, if practicable, with no coloured blood
at all, as these have given considerable trouble in the department within the
last two years".
Trinidad, being as it is, the letter became a topic of
discussion even before it got to the governor. The "Long Tom Cigar-Smoking
Club of Almond Walk", made up of "a collection of rogues, intellectuals,
chantwells, mystic-masons, gentlemen of leisure", to name a few, who met
every morning to sit outside Mouttet's dry goods store on Almond Walk, now
Broadway, to smoke cigars, take coffee and discuss the events of the day,
condemned the occurrence. There was talk that he the official in question
should be "tarred and feathered".
It was arranged for posters to be put up all over town,
asking "what shall we do with Monier-Williams?" A police constable
was ordered to protect him. The reaction of the governor was to appoint a
"jet-black" man to the post. Many of the commentators of the day felt
that Monier-Williams had been set up by the prejudice of people in his
department who had attempted to use him to make a point and "to further their
own notions about race". At a Long Tom meeting, held one rainy morning in
August 1899, the Hon. Maxwell Philip observed "the coloured and black
class in the West Indies occupy an intermediate position". "Marginal
men" he called the educated, genteel, well-dressed, hopeful applicants to
positions they could hardly imagine. They, the club members, knew what he
meant. The English thought them treacherous, fickle and unstable, clever, yes,
but lacking in moral worth.
Louis Fabien, raising to avoid a leak dripping from the
ceiling in the old shop, said, "Insecurity, my dear, is the root of
ambivalence on the one hand. We want to be like everybody else." "You
mean you want to be accepted at the Union Club?" "Yes, I don't see
why not!"
They laughed, knowing full well that the bags of cocoa that
filled Jean Mouttet's store rooms, in fact what they were sitting on, belonged
to Louis Fabien. Maxwell Philip proposed having a ball, and proceeded to
organise it, at which, because of his prestige and wealth, he brought together
what was in their opinion the best of the coloureds and the most acceptable of
the whites.
They were not many actually "black" people at the
ball. It was held at the Princes Building and was considered a success.
Isolated as an event, it however caused comment. The "New Era", a
newspaper owned by a coloured man, wrote in his editorial, "Europeans
arriving in the West Indies believed that the natives were savages and
cannibals". Educated non-whites had a strong sense of their moral and intellectual
worthiness to move in the "best" circles. They felt that society was
divided into "those who justly deem themselves entitled to a social
position in the island consistent with their means and general behaviour, and
those who believe that they have a prescriptive right to dictate who shall or
shall not, be received into the ranks of the colonial society."
In the weeks that followed Philip's ball, two young men
entered Monier-Williams' office in the Red House one evening and, to his
surprise, emptied a pail of warm tar over his head and then the contents of a
large pillow case. It is of interest to note that they were both white...
Some sixty years later, in the 1930s, C.L.R. James wrote,
speaking of his own time, "There are the nearly whites hanging on tooth
and nail to the fringes of white society and these hate contact with the darker
skin far more than some of the broader-minded whites. Then, there are the
browns, intermediates, who cannot by any stretch of the imagination pass as
white, but who will not go one inch towards mixing with people darker than
themselves."
The society tortured itself, "writhing in the confines
of the racist ideology of local and metropolitan whites," writes Prof.
Bridget Brereton. Quoting historian Donald Wood, she notes, "the whole
intricate experience of the Afro-European encounter since the renaissance, the
stereotypes formed by slavery, the legacy of the master and slave relationship,
the complex of prejudices and judgments which formed the white view of the
'negro character' during slavery a mixture of affection and contempt, patronage
and fear was carried into the post-emancipation adjustment."
The people of mixed race, who had risen from poverty or, in
some cases, never were there, they bought into the white attitudes while taking
on board various European mores, styles and points of view as they could
manage. They tried to disassociate themselves from the working class blacks.
Writing letters to the press, asking government "to act more stringently
against immoral drum dances, for the sake of the respectable coloured sector
which, being coloured, was sometimes classed with the scum that took part in
the dances".
The colonial experience created a definition of self-hate
that was remarkable, profoundly segmenting the society. Calypso, ever the
mirror of society, went:
"Dan is the devil, the devil is dan,
brown nigger more bad than baccraman
but black is the baddest in the land."
J.J.Thomas, a black educator who expressed strong racial
pride, spoke out against the extent to which self-contempt and self-hatred
existed in his fellow blacks. He condemned the internalising of European values
with regard to their superiority. he wrote, "colour prejudice is a ladder
with almost endless rungs. It is a system of social aggression and retaliation."
J.J. Thomas was insightful with regard to his concept of
Afro-America. He recognised that there were common links binding all blacks in
the New World, realising that it was and is in fact the black presence that
defined the New World.
His writing influenced many of his contemporaries. One of
them was Edward Blyden, the founder of "African Nationalism" and
"Négritude". As Prof. Brereton points out:
"Many Trinidadians saw that race prejudices were not
the monopoly of any one group. It was not, said J.J. Thomas, a matter of
oppressing whites and oppressed blacks. Race prejudice and discrimination were
practiced by all sectors, and the coloured and black middle class was the most
shade-conscious of all."
The equation of whiteness with superiority had been
thoroughly internalised by many educated coloureds and blacks and the
consequences of this indoctrination were easily noticed. There were those
self-styled whites who desperately tried to conceal their 'negro blood'.
According to the radical coloured activist Edgar Maresse-Smith, Philip Rostant
was one of those. He wrote to the press:
"Mr. Rostant, in defiance of his crisped hair and the
copper colour of his skin, has elected to be a white man. This would be
harmless folly if Mr. Rostant would persuade himself of his bequéism and allow
others to think as they please. But he feels that he dupes no-one and therefore
falls into convulsions as soon as the word 'African' is pronounced, for fear
that a hyphen will be placed between himself and the detestable African
race."
Maresse-Smith and Rostant were political enemies, and Dr.
Brereton points out, "the accusation may well have been entirely untrue,
but the letter describes what was probably a well-known phenomenon."
It is of interest to note that both of these men were ardent
nationalists, staunch supporters of greater local representation in elected
bodies and justice for the poor. J.J. Thomas pointed out that educated and
respectable creoles of all skin tones shared a common love for their country
and a common sense of identity. This was a view that was shared by many, as one
contributor wrote:
"The descendants of the old French and Spanish
families, whether they have preserved their distinctive idiosyncrasies by
intermarriages among themselves, or have formed a distinct race by the
intermingling of African blood, as well as those who form that portion of
intelligent blacks who have of late come to the front, are now known and
designated as Creoles. These different sections of the native population are
now so well linked to each other by intermarriage and daily intercourse that
they form a compact body."
Creole society in the colonial period was dependent on
social stratification, both in terms of class and caste. The white upper class
excluded those with a "touch of the tar brush", notwithstanding
wealth, breeding or the lightness of his or her complexion. They also excluded
other Europeans, deemed not socially white, such as the Portuguese or the
Syrians for that matter, and many of their own countrymen who did not belong to
their social order. On the other hand, the line between the black masses and
the non-white middle class was class-consciousness.
A working class, black person from the lower levels of
society could, through education and the making of money, move upwards amongst
the blacks and coloureds who had acquired respectability, and as such had
become teachers, civil servants, or journalists. One could say that there were
three significant indications by which a person's class may have been defined.
There is by and large a certain yardstick of values in the society in terms of
which families may be judged and ranked. In the context of Trinidad, to believe
in and subscribe to the idea of superiority in being white, of a command of
European culture, and of having a place, real or imagined, in the European
ranks of the nobility. Other factors such as land ownership, once having
possessed slaves, acceptance as such amongst their peers.
Both the white creoles and the coloured and black educated,
land-owning professionals, shared and practiced a broadly similar lifestyle, in
that they both modelled themselves on the European upper and middle classes,
and subscribed to their cultural and social values. The white creoles with more
cash in hand could make a better show of it. For lower-class blacks, the
masses, they lived an entirely different life in a world very far removed from
their sometimes close neighbours or relatives for that matter.
Thus, the
roots of the segmentation of the society were laid. To this day, they run deep,
and as such may be manipulated by clever people to support their own ends. One
should bear in mind that these prejudices were in the first place artificial
and were perpetuated by the colonial power for the purpose of dominating a
subject people. "Divide et impere"—divide and rule. We all must now
know that those days are past and we must condemn those who would have them
return!
