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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 11 JUNE, 2017
I am interested in memoirs
and autobiographies as a way
of remembering and constructing history via life stories told
by the person himself. In his foreword, Dr. Keith Mitchell
says that Caribbean autobiographies are rare. This used to
be true but is less so now—I think of the books by our Prime
Minister, Dr Rowley, or by our former Vice-Chancellor
Sir Alister McIntyre, or by the late business magnate
Anthony Sabga, to cite just three recent examples. But
autobiographies by scientists are certainly rare, in the region
and perhaps everywhere. I’m always pleased to learn of new
autobiographical publications, partly because they can be
inspirational for readers, partly because they are valuable
sources for studying the past (my profession).
Harold is of Indian descent from a Hindu background,
so his book adds to a rapidly growing literature of Indo-
Trinidadian life stories published over the last few years,
including autobiographies andmemoirs, biographies, family
histories and fiction (novels and short stories).
I was especially interested in Chapters 1 and 2, which
deal with Harold’s growing-up years and his education.
Harold’s struggle to get a secondary and university education
against the odds is obviously a key theme here, but, with
respect, this is NOT a “rags to riches” story. First, I’m not
sure that Harold is exactly rich right now, and second, he
didn’t come from “rags” ie fromdire poverty (always related
to the historical context).
Harold grew up in a rural Hindu family. His great-
grandparents were indentured immigrants from India, so he
is a third-generation Trinidadian. He was surrounded by his
two extended families, and especially on his mother’s side,
there were people who owned businesses and land, growing
canes, cocoa and food crops. There’s no doubt that cash was
very scarce as he grew up, and of course his childhood home
lacked what we think of as basic amenities (electricity, piped
water in the house), but that was standard in most rural
houses in the 1940s and early ’50s.
The great advantage the young Harold enjoyed, besides
his own intelligence and fierce determination, and his being
the first son, was the support of his parents and the two big
extended families, some of whose members were well-off
by the standards of the day. But money was always scarce,
and Harold was the first of 11 children. (As an aside, what a
great example of the demographic transition and the shift in
life patterns over one generation: Harold’s parents married
at 19 and 17 and had 11 kids, Harold married at 35 and he
and Tara had two.)
Harold grew up between Tabaquite, where he spent
most of his childhood and where his mother came from, and
Penal, his father’s home village. He paints a nice picture of
the contrast between the two villages in the 1940s-50s. Penal
was almost wholly Hindu, and nearly everyone followed the
traditional rural life of Indo-Trinidadians in this period, as
described so well by Morton Klass in his study of Felicity in
the early 1950s. Tabaquite was a mixed community, with a
significant “Spanish” element and a strong Roman Catholic
tradition.
BOOKS
A Remarkable Journey Indeed
B Y B R I D G E T B R E R E T O N
My Journey: The Autobiography of Harold Ramkissoon
link with his Catholic primary school. For most of his
time there he took the bus from Tabaquite, a journey of
at least one and a half hours each way, leaving at 5 am. He
used the time on the bus to study, yet another discipline-
instilling practice which taught him time management and
organization as a young boy.
Adjustment to college life wasn’t easy for the rural
Hindu boy; here he was in the city, with many middle-class
classmates from varying ethnic backgrounds, but few of
them Hindus. As he puts it, it was the roti lunch, not eaten
too openly, versus the sandwich lunch, a situation quite a
few Indo-Trinis of his generation experienced.
He did well in his Higher School Cert exams (the
equivalent of A-Levels) in 1960, but a health crisis prevented
him from trying for an Island Scholarship. There would be
no easy path to university for Harold; UCWI at St Augustine
had just opened but didn’t offer an honours degree inMaths.
He taught at PresentationCollege Chaguanas for three years,
saved his money, and entered UWI Mona in 1963, with
enough money to finance his first year in the BSc Maths
programme.
Harold was at Mona from 1963-66, and he greatly
enjoyed the regional experience, with students from all
over the Caribbean—something we have largely lost. It was
Leslie Robinson, head of the maths department, who got
the T&T Government to award Harold a scholarship for his
second and third years. And it was Robinson who came to
Taylor Hall at night to tell him personally he’d got a First, a
true achievement back in the day, and helped him to gain a
CIDA scholarship to do anMSc at the University of Toronto.
That was the kind of personal, one on one interaction
that many of us enjoyed at Mona in this period. “Mona
spoiled us”, Harold writes; no wonder he felt the contrast
at Toronto, a big city campus where you were left to your
own devices and there was none of that personal caring (I
remember feeling exactly the same thingwhenwe went there
to do our MA). But, as always, he persevered, and went on
to study for his PhD in Fluid Dynamics at the Universities
of Alberta and Calgary.
Harold began to teach in the Department of Maths here
in 1976, and the rest, as they say, is history. He had a stellar
academic career, becoming a Reader in 1990 and a Professor
in 1998. He became an Ambassador for Caribbean science,
helping to create and run several organizations which seek
to raise the standard of science in the region, and to link
our scientists to their international counterparts. You can
read all about this, his travels and his many posts, and his
memorable moments, in the rest of the book.
It’s a remarkable journey which certainly deserved to
be written up and made available to all, and I congratulate
Harold onmaking this effort; I hope it inspires many young
people.
This is a version of the review presented by
Professor Bridget Brereton
at the launch of
the autobiography on May 2, 2017.
There was one other advantage that Harold had, though
he may not have seen it at the time: like virtually all rural
children growing up in this period, regardless of ethnicity,
he worked on his relatives’ fields, doing various jobs, on
weekends and school holidays.This kind of childhood nearly
always instilled discipline and the values of hard work; Dr
Rowley describes exactly the same thing about his childhood
in rural Tobago a few years later.
Harold went to the Tabaquite RC primary school,
because it was nearest home, and his teachers encouraged
his precocious abilities. A caring headmaster of the old
school coached the Exhibition Class, of which Harold was
the brightest boy. And when the exam results came out, he
came in at a mark of 197 (out of 200 possible awards) along
with eight others. The government agreed to award 208
exhibitions that year because of this “tie” of nine children,
and so Harold became the first Tabaquite child to win a free
place to a secondary school. This was indeed his passport
out of relative poverty.
Harold went to Presentation College, San Fernando—I
assume he chose it over Naparima College because of the
Harold Ramkissoon
