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June 2015 |
Where the West began: The region is a cradle of the modern worldBy Professor Hilary Beckles
The future now calls for a deliberate detachment from many conservative and reactionary aspects of our traditions. The Minister has brought us here to plan this revolutionary departure. I have read his remit and my understanding of it is that it beckons us to complete the detachment of our Caribbean world from its colonial scaffold. The assumption is that the Caribbean is fixed to inhibiting structures while the world is rapidly evolving and moving on. This circumstance has assured our economic dependency and social backwardness. It is a matter of common sense, one is urged to conclude, that the rocket cannot be launched unless from the scaffold. In the Caribbean we have been seeking to do just this for over three hundred years. The uprooting of slavery was a critical nineteenth century development which was followed by the rejection of indenture and the rise of nationhood in the twentieth century. In all of this we have sought to propel the region into a matured sense of social integrity and economic legitimacy. Critically, we have been in flight from the legacies of the imperial crimes that have been associated with our modern origins. Taken collectively, these actions suggest that Caribbean people have been among the most revolutionary people in the world. We have placed the mental states of social justice, cultural tolerance, political freedom, and economic self-determinism at the centre of our existential being. This morning we are gathered to pay respect to this liberating and uplifting legacy, and to call for a return to our philosophical source. We are here, today, ladies and gentlemen, to rekindle the revolution. There is a strong perception within our region that many of our development failures and limitations can be accounted for in terms of the stalling of the revolutionary momentum. There is also a belief that we have gone adrift because our compass is no longer fixed on that which matters most: THE LIBERATION OF THE POTENTIAL OF OUR PEOPLE. The colonial scaffold is keeping us attached to backward economic structures and reactionary political relationships, obsolete economic thinking and oppressive governance models, and critically, the untrue conclusion that the intellect and cultures we carry in our heads and hearts are not the riches of the region but the wealth that lies beneath our feet. In response to the Minister’s invocation, the call I wish to make this morning is for the rekindling of the Caribbean revolution. I wish to draw attention to the need to re-energize our thrust and to refocus our agenda for transformative development. I am not worried that some of you may very well respond by suggesting that I am asking for us to swim against the tide. This has long been our history. Swimming against the tide has been the logic of the Caribbean revolution. It has been an integral and ancestral part of the desire of the colonised to pursue the ‘American dream.’ Colony by colony we have come awake from the Columbus nightmare. Colony by colony we have realised the importance of loading the Admiral back on to the Santa Maria and sending him back to Spain from whence he came. My academic discipline is economic history, not theology. I chose this discipline as a young man, a teenager in fact, because I was occupied, maybe obsessed, with the matter of development. I was driven to find an understanding of economic transformation as an instrument for the uprooting of abject poverty. I knew then what we all know and want now. We wish to see the Caribbean world develop more aggressively in its material dimensions; we wish to see systems of governance and political relations that are rooted in the Caribbean philosophy of justice ‘as a must’ and freedom ‘as a fact.’ We wish cultural and ethnic tolerance and respect. We wish for inner and outer respect for our evolving Caribbean identity. That is, we wish for a validation of the Caribbean revolution. We must fully understand this if we wish to be advocates for the unlocking, the unchaining, of our Caribbean potential. We must return forcefully to the historical source to find the energy we will need for the future. To historicise who we are is a prerequisite for creatively imagining what we must do in order to achieve what we desire. The notion that the Caribbean is at a crossroad, for example, conceals more than it reveals. It is an incomplete conception. The truth is more evident in the notion that the Caribbean is a crossroad, and has always been. The Indigenous people knew this. The Caribbean, for them, was the crossroad that linked the north and south of the hemisphere to a centre. Then came the crushing moment of modernity’s madness; in it we saw generations lost to genocide. This was followed by the importation of millions of enchained Africans and indentured Indians. The project was to accumulate wealth and build prestige for Europeans without limits upon human costs. This project was the origin of the ‘West,’ a transatlantic economy and cultural ecology with its vortex in the Caribbean. The ‘West,’ then, began in the Caribbean. It was an economic civilization centred upon the Caribbean. The business of buying and selling African bodies was the world’s leading commodity trade. The Caribbean was the principal market. The world’s shipping, finance, banking, insurance, brokerage, and entrepreneurial energy turned to the Caribbean and created the most dynamic centre of global capitalism. But this ‘West’ has now relegated mother Caribbean to the ‘south.’ We are now faced with an immoral outcome, an unacceptable geo-politic, in which the Caribbean as cultural centre finds itself in the economic south. This is the heart of the crisis we face. History, it seems, has dealt us a hard blow. We are seeking to return to the centre without the legacies of un-free labour. This is the reason we are gathered here this morning. The Caribbean revolution has sought to move the region from the economic south to the centre of our ‘West.’ It is this unification of history and economics that haunts every conscious moment of our being. The Caribbean, then, is at once a crossroad and a cradle of the modern world. We are the world’s first global village. We are the most globalized people on God’s earth. Just look around and see in our faces what we really are! We are the migrant progeny of Africans, Asians, and Europeans, inhabiting a world long integrated by our surviving indigenous hosts. We are also their admixtures, the inescapable triumph of humanity over ideology; the search for love within the hate culture of labour; a determination to find peace in the war zone that was the plantation. No one can therefore tell us about the features and forces of globalization. No one is qualified to lecture us about the economics and politics of globalization. We are the owners of the brand. We are the homeland of the brand. We know of it as a doubled-edged sword. We know of its genocide, chattel slavery, and its deceptive indenture. We also know of its wealth created by trade; its fortunes forged in the financing of production; and the institutions through which foreign nations networked our region for their domestic preparations to dominate the world. Modern imperial Europe matured in the Caribbean. The modern ‘United States’ began its journey as a colonial system serving as an appendix of what it now calls the ‘the islands.’ Modernity was made in the Caribbean. It owes the Caribbean respect. For three hundred years the finest minds of women and men in the region have been dedicated to detaching it from the colonial scaffold in order to liberate the potential of its people. They have insisted upon the internal unity of the descendants of genocide, slavery and indenture. These crimes against humanity have been declared as three acts of a single play performed in a theatre of imperial warfare and colonial mayhem. More blood has been shed on the Caribbean stage than any other. No one can tell us about globalization. We know of it because we have it within our blood. We are globalization in every intelligent use of the concept. We have to understand this; we have to begin by believing in this. This truth must inform the philosophical and economic basis of our detachment. The first step we must take is to believe, once again, in the moral integrity of the Caribbean’s rightness to respected nationhood. The development of the region cannot be based upon a parley with pirates. Citizens must insist upon a meaningful possession of their space and to the right to define its organization by popular engagement and action. The legacies of piracy must be placed firmly and irretrievably behind us. All those who have committed crimes against humanity within our homeland in order to extract and extort wealth should be held accountable. Reparatory justice must be a part of the healing and development process and a critical aspect of the definition and defence of citizenship. Economic models rooted in the colonial dispensation cannot be legitimised as sustainable. In order to indigenize our economic thinking we must accept that we are crafting a revolutionary reversal of these historical trends. Let us take for example the concept of nation building. Building nations out of this historical experience is in itself revolutionary. The rooting of the project in the philosophy of freedom with material development is also in itself revolutionary because our bodily bondage and economic backwardness were grounded in the inhumanity and barbarism of chattel slavery, deceptive indenture and native genocide. Economic development and political freedom, therefore, are revolutionary in this context. The notion that the production and equitable distribution of wealth in this region is for the benefit and advancement of its people is revolutionary. It is contrary to historical models in which the production of goods and services and wealth accumulation were primarily for the benefits of societies beyond our shores. The development of our democratic sensibility is also revolutionary against this context. Contemporary Euro-American civilization locates its ideological roots and political centre of gravity in the value systems of ancient Rome and Greece – societies that embraced and celebrated slavery and imperialism as development models. This was the cosmology brought to the Caribbean by Admiral Columbus. He unpacked this world view and unleashed hell upon the region. This is why I have said, time and time again, that until this region repatriates the Columbus mentality to mainland Spain, we will be harvesting his seeds for generations to come. The Caribbean is the antithesis of the ontology of the European. From the beginning it was the site of resistance and creation of the new modernity. Europe’s Enlightenment was fraudulent from a Caribbean perspective because it led to genocide and slavery. The English celebrated the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton at home and sent the infamous John Newton, slave trader, to the Caribbean. The French celebrated ‘Liberty and Fraternity’ at home and sent the ‘Code Noir’ to the Caribbean. We have to recognize and accept that in our Caribbean world the philosophical seeds of justice and freedom, of equality and citizenship, were sown not in Rome or Athens but in Port-au-Prince. It is on the battlefields and in the legislature of Haiti that this region first breathed the fresh air of humanity: free at last. The Americans fought for their independence against imperial Britain. They won, but kept slavery as the basis of nation building. This was because their revolution was rooted in the ideas of Athens and Rome. These ideas meant that the new nation was forced back unto the battlefield a century later to fight the world’s bloodiest civil war in order to clean up the mess that resided in a basic truth: that slavery, racial oppression, and democratic freedom cannot coexist as the basis of a free nation. The Haitian founders drafted laws that declared slavery a crime against humanity. They also declared all inhabitants equal citizens. This is where in our region and hemisphere, for the first time, ordinary people were able to mobilize to bring a democratic sensibility into their society. This is where we took our first step in claiming Caribbean leadership of the modern world. This truth has been a source of fuel for two hundred years. From Haiti, every Caribbean community aspired to nationhood and citizenship. Today, 80% of our people are living as free citizens. Colonies exist still, standing in oppositions to the Caribbean revolution and the Haitian declaration. The Caribbean Revolution has not failed. It cannot fail. It has been pushed back, driven on the defensive. Counter-forces surround us and have made their local recruits. But we must be clear in our thoughts and focussed in our actions. It is not that we have failed in our development agenda. It is that our progress has stalled. It is that we have been driven off target and our commitment to ideals weakened. With reduced self-awareness our actions have strengthened the hand of the counter-culture. Many of the ideas with which we still conceive our development came with the Santa Maria, and hence our drift away from the ideas of Port-au-Prince. Let us look at the significance of all of this. Caribbean peoples were able to overthrow the most oppressive regimes ever created in human history and to establish our democratic sensibility. To do these things required tremendous confidence and self-belief. From L’Ouverture to Rodney, from Garvey to Bishop, imagining and attaining the democratic Caribbean required tremendous confidence and self-belief. We should recognise that counter-forces are seeking to dismantle this mental construct and to replace it with mendicancy and mediocrity. These forces seek also to assure that we lose faith in the legitimacy and the logic of a Caribbean world that finds existential energy in our sense of self-reliance. If the Caribbean revolution is defeated, they imagine, the people will turn inwards upon themselves, against themselves, and in a cannibalistic fashion, devour their young. I cannot accept the success of this train of thought any more than I can accept an inevitable defeat of Caribbean freedom and development. We Caribbean people have no historical reason to have doubt or to lose our self-confidence. The world is what it is. We are who we are. We have made much of the modern world, and it is for us to continue its remaking. We are at the centre and must behave as if we are. In our journey from the ‘South’ of our ‘West’ to its centre we have suffered many setbacks. But a setback is not a defeat. It is not a derailment. It is what it is: a retreat in order to advance. It is a physical step that knows within its biomechanics the irresistible and inevitable urge to step forward. So we are gathered at this forum to speak about rekindling the revolution. In order to do so we must recognise the need to restore our confidence and self-belief by returning to the philosophical vision that drives our engines. Put simply, we cannot stay within the decayed and crumbling scaffold of colonialism. We cannot believe that these ancient, imperial relations will save us from the aggression of globalization. We cannot believe that within these old relations are seeds for our salvation. Within these relations we have seen the subversion of our agricultural regimes, the weakening of our financial services industries, and the creation of new challenges to our tourism sectors. Simply put then, the Caribbean must leave the plantation great house and navigate its journey across those open lawns into the twenty-first century. We have to stop seeing ourselves as extensions and appendices of other power systems. We have to leave this dependency mentality at the back door of the twentieth century and learn the art of forging new alliances with a new agenda. In our Caribbean world we have sources of energy from India, Africa, China, Brazil, and beyond. These are our indigenous energy sources that have been marginalised by Europe’s domination of our world. We must turn over this upside down world of relations and rebuild from the bottom. With these new energy sources activated we must then complete the development discourse by foregrounding the need for closure in respect of reparatory justice for this region. Reparatory justice for the crimes that have been committed in this region is critical to rebuilding our self-respect as a people. It is critical to the maturity of our sense of citizenship; it is critical for our sense of ownership of the Caribbean. I repeat. This is our home and those who have committed crimes within it must be held accountable. Only within this process will the lion and the lamb find peace. It is often forgotten, even as we embrace our great son, Sir Arthur Lewis, whose centenary we celebrate this year, that in his 1938 little book, “Labour in the West Indies,” he argued the case for reparations. The crime of slavery, he noted, the two hundred years of unpaid labour, have to be accounted for. Until it is accounted for the Caribbean will not reach its political maturity. Reparatory justice in every instance begins with the capacity of the victim to assert a claim. Not to do so is to sustain the disrespect of the criminal beneficiary. No one wins in this scenario. No one is freed. The crime festers. The suppression of this truth resides at the core of our contemporary acceptance of the widespread, abject, inhumane poverty in our midst. If the poverty-stricken native ‘Carib,’ African and Indian are deemed undeserving of reparatory justice because they are the wretched of the earth, the scum of the society, then the slums in which they wallow are legitimised as their just entitlement. How much longer can we surrender our citizens to the vulgarity of such reasoning? There is too much poverty in our Caribbean. While we accept our responsibility to remove as much of it as we can, we must insist that those primarily responsible must return to the table and participate in cleaning up the mess. This Caribbean was designed to create and sustain the mass impoverishment of our peoples. That was its overriding philosophy and economy. We must commit to uprooting the mentality that accepts this poverty as normal. It cannot be the basis of a modern Caribbean citizenship. Let us look at the role of the State in all of this. We are being told that in modern systems of political governance the State must remove itself to the margins of the development model. To this I say, back up just a moment. If you examine the economic development model of any successful nation, not one is based upon the marginalization of the State. All are based on the assertion that the State has a core responsibility not only to create and sustain environments, but to be a major player within these ecologies. The State urges and empowers individuals and organizations to act and creatively react in bringing enhanced values to their communities. It is also expected to be a role model within the model. The State must pass laws and create legal infrastructure that empower entrepreneurship, particularly in balancing public and private capital in order to create public goods and accumulate private property. The State is the custodian of the wealth of society, and must redirect that wealth for the development of the many. If in the Caribbean it retreats at this moment into the margins of economic thinking and action, it will render citizens even more vulnerable than they have been in the past. We must reject this external economic dogma that seeks to impose upon us a language and literature that is inconsistent with our historical experience and contemporary reality. Let us now look at the issue of building entrepreneurship. All of us have been critical of the role of imperial entrepreneurship in our civilization. All of us have been calling for an indigenous entrepreneurship that takes upon itself responsibility for the creation and redistribution of wealth that will benefit our communities. To be critical of our relationships to foreign capital while being dependent upon it is merely to recognize the need for public accountability and responsibility. I believe that this is important and necessary. In recent decades our economies have competed at only two of the three necessary levels. If you examine our economic history you will find that we have successfully competed at the level of price; that we have successfully competed at the level of quality; but today we are failing in our competition at the level of creative innovation. This is where we are trapped at this moment. Logic suggests, then, that this is the moment for unleashing our creativity in respect of innovation for competition. There is no other key that will unlock our potential. To do this we have to focus upon education, research, and the commercialization of our ideas. There is still in the Caribbean a crippling mutual suspicion in the relationship between industry and academia. We do not have a highly developed research culture but we are not going to achieve innovative creativity for competitiveness without respect for research and the application of funding to value creation. Our universities are still not effectively aligned to this process. When we enter into Asia, for example, and we see the remarkable development projects and models, what we find at their core is an alignment of research, academia, entrepreneurship and innovation. Universities and industries are articulated into a process of value creation and the redistribution of the wealth of that innovation. In the Caribbean we are disjointed in our development thinking. Private capital has not warmly embraced education and innovation as the salvation of entrepreneurship and development. The suspicion of new knowledge and critical thinkers still resonates negatively in our political cultures. It is now a threat. It is counter-revolutionary. CARICOM officials are being crucified; but they have committed no crime. The evidence that drives the accusation is not with them; it is with us, the citizens and our leaders. We should begin at the beginning. Each Caribbean community still sees itself as a nation that desires to be larger than the whole. We imagine ourselves as discrete nations when in fact we are just communities within the nation. The political logic of the last fifty years has been that the parts are seeking to be greater than the whole. These are fragments to be unified. But we still experience them as shards cutting apart our minds. The madness of myopia is now endemic. Trapped in our spaces we curse the geo-politics of insularity. We ran from the plantation into a prison. We want to be free. The 1805 constitution of Haiti declared that all native and enslaved people of the region who arrive on its shores will be declared free and a citizen. We need in 2015 to reconnect to the thinking of 1805. There are two hundred million people who can rightly claim the Caribbean as home. From Mexico through the islands, to the coast of Colombia and into Caracas, the Caribbean world beckons to be functionally unified. We are not going to find the strength of our collective consciousness upon the notions of nations built with two hundred thousand people. It is counter-revolutionary to think and to act that way in the context of Caribbean history. Nothing that is sustainable can be achieved with these sub-systems of myopic thought. They have reached the end of their absurdity. We need to follow the native trail. The indigenous people travelled the Caribbean north-south and east-west. We must allow history to teach us economics, politics and sociology. If we follow the native trail we shall find water. They saw the Caribbean as one survival space. Our archaeological researchers have found their commercial and domestic goods that were made in Mexico, Belize and Guatemala in Barbados and Trinidad and elsewhere in the islands. Upon this ancestral perception of the Caribbean as one survival place, we have imposed the absurdity of insularity. We have to wake up from this imperial divisive dream. We are a common civilization made up of dozens of languages, many of them inherited from our colonial legacies, but we do not speak the languages of our neighbours. We have maintained an educational system that does not make it mandatory for every child to speak Spanish and English. What kind of future are we imagining in this Caribbean world if our children are lost before translation? How can we imagine a Caribbean economic future without the fundamental of effective communication? We have to invest much more in the education of our young people. At the moment we are faced with a tragic circumstance. In our hemisphere, from Alaska to Argentina, the Caribbean has the lowest enrolment of the youth (age cohort 18 to 30 years) at the tertiary level. Furthermore, it appears that numbers are shrinking in some communities. It is particularly disturbing when you realize that a society’s potential for economic development and social transformation – read sophistication – is a function of the number of people within it who have been exposed to formal training and higher education. The successful development models we have examined have emphasized the same fundamental point. Citizens must be exposed at the higher level of education with technical and philosophical content if their societies and economies are to develop. Minister Dookeran, I wish to say this. At the moment the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has established the most expansive investment in tertiary education in the region. This has to be celebrated; this has to be seen as the model for the future. In Barbados we have seen a disastrous thirty percent collapse of nationals enrolled in university education in the last two years. The country is struggling to achieve one percent growth in the economy within the context of a widening fiscal deficit. The country opted to reduce the investment in higher education as a response to this circumstance, but it is now evident that the roll back will weaken other critical macroeconomic variables necessary for development. The tertiary sector is simply not a site of expenditure but an investment platform on which development is launched. There is no logical separation of learning for self and society. They insist upon cross fertilization. Furthermore, the principal drag upon Caribbean economic development at this time is not a shortage of capital, but a chronic shortage of relevant skills and critical areas. We have a human resource crisis, not a capital crisis. Investments follow skills and consciousness. The Caribbean needs to be sharpened up and made aggressively investment-ready. In addition to the acquisition of technical skills and knowledge those countries that have achieved phenomenal economic development in the last thirty years found national mobilization in the desire to reverse the legacy of disrespect citizens had experienced in the colonial period. They were motivated by the need to turn around their diminished reputation, and to chart a path of dignified existence within the world. The United States of America was driven by this imperative in the nineteenth century, as were the colonised countries of Asia and Africa in the twentieth. We in the Caribbean must continue to use our historical experience as a source of energy. To drive our peoples out of a state of doubt and despair will require these understandings. We must therefore rekindle the Caribbean revolution. This is the mandate of this post-recessionary circumstance. Self-reliance must never be alienated from our thinking. We must detach from the colonial scaffold, and forge new global relationships based upon our historical and cultural experiences. The deepening of our democratic sensibility, both within the economy and in public governance, will redound to the benefit of the youth in whose name we act. An assault upon the hardened poverty that surrounds us must be attached to the demand for reparatory justice for historical crimes. Education, health, and cultural institution reside within this framework. Also, the regional integration movement is not simply about economic institutions and political governance. It is about ethnic relations, gender equality, and cultural interaction. On this emerging leg of our journey there is no place for race. No space in society for class bigotry. The arrogance of ethnicity is counter-productive and must be rejected as contrary to the collective community sense of self and sensibility. We are the world’s first global village. We must resolve to teach the world how to demand and pursue economic growth with social justice, peace, tolerance, and the display of dignity. Our world was founded in the mayhem of imperial greed and the system expression of man’s inhumanity to man. We, the Caribbean world, are the carriers, the custodians of the antithesis of these inhumanities. It is within these contexts that we will see good reason to rekindle the Caribbean revolution as both vehicle and vision for our global world. I thank you! Professor Sir Hilary Beckles is Vice-Chancellor of The UWI. This is an expanded version of his opening statement on the second day of the Forum on the Future of the Caribbean, May 5-7, 2015, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. |
Honourable Ministers of Government, distinguished guests, a very good morning to everyone. I wish to begin by thanking our host, Minister Winston Dookeran, for extending the invitation to address this forum. Minister Dookeran is arguably the most dangerous man in the Caribbean this day simply because he has called for radical and critical thinking in order to drive forward our civilization. In the not very distant past such a call would have incurred the wrath of the powers and principalities responsible for our governance. But times have changed.