November 2018


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Book: “The Social & Economic Effects of the American Occupation in Trinidad during the 2nd World War 1939-1945” written by Nyahuma Obika

Review by Bridget Brereton
Bridget Brereton is Professor Emerita of history at UWI, St Augustine, and author of Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad and A History of Modern Trinidad, among other books.

The former High Commissioner to Nigeria, Nyahuma Obika, has just published a short book, The Social & Economic Effects of the American Occupation in Trinidad during the 2nd World War 1939-1945. Obika is a St Augustine graduate from the 1970s, and is currently completing a M.Sc. in Global Studies at the Institute of International Relations.

The main text (77 pages) consists of Obika’s final-year undergraduate research paper, then as now a requirement for graduation in the humanities. (There is also a lengthy appendix about the decision of the African Union in 2012 to declare the African Diaspora its “sixth region”.) The paper was written in 1976 and has not been revised. The downside of this, of course, is that there is no incorporation of material in the many books, articles, papers and theses, relevant to the topic, which have appeared over the last 40 years.

But since the original paper was based on primary sources, the book includes valuable data. The author relied on the Trinidad Guardian (as it then was called), the colony’s “newspaper of record”, as his chief source (so did Michael Anthony in his Port-of-Spain in a World at War 1939-1945, which was first published in 1978). Obika also utilized the lyrics of wartime calypsos, especially in chapter 8. He didn’t use the oral history method, even though in 1976 there were many folks who lived through the war years (there are far fewer today, of course), but that is understandable given the limitations of doing an undergraduate paper.

The heart of the book is to be found in chapters 5 to 7, which deal with the socio-economic effects of the “American Occupation” as seen in the pages of the Guardian. The presence of thousands of American soldiers and civilian workers, and the building of the huge air, army and naval bases, transformed many aspects of Trinidadians’ lives, in both positive and negative ways. In chapter 5, for instance, Obika writes about the eviction of hundreds of people from the villages of the north-west peninsula, the prohibition of fishing in the surrounding waters, and the loss of public access to the beaches of the area. On the more positive side, the Americans built the Lady Young road and the Churchill-Roosevelt highway.

In chapter 6, Obika looks at the effects on the labour market. What he describes as the “fantastic” wages offered to workers on the bases—I’m not sure they really were “fantastic”, though they were certainly better than wages for field work on the sugar estates—pulled many away from agricultural labour, causing a near collapse of the sugar industry. Bus drivers left their jobs too, creating severe transport problems. Shortages of imported food, and of charcoal (used by thousands as their main domestic fuel), caused steep rises in the cost of living.

Chapter 7 links the American Occupation to overcrowding in Port of Spain as locals, immigrants from the nearby islands, and Americans competed for limited housing. Shortages of affordable housing and steep rises in rents were noted from as early as 1941, both in the capital city (near the Chaguaramas naval base) and Arima (near the army base at Waller Field). The capital’s water supply also came under severe pressure. None of these problems was new to Trinidad, but wartime conditions certainly exacerbated them.

Chapter 8, on the cultural effects of the American Occupation, is based mainly on wartime calypsos, and therefore follows the conventional narrative about moral decline and wayward local women working for the American dollar and abandoning their men. Obika doesn’t interrogate the calypsonians’ masculine viewpoint, and so the “Jean and Dinah” story goes unchallenged. This is a weakness, in my view, but the reproduction of the lyrics of many of the calypsos of the period, otherwise hard to find, is certainly valuable.

Obika’s book contributes usefully to the literature on Trinidad during the war years.