Some years ago, I had the privilege of working with an energy sector expert on a monthly bi-weekly column. He was not only an international consultant on developing a national energy strategy, he was someone who deeply understood the historical significance of the sector to the development of Trinidad and Tobago. He hoped it could be used today as a model for another massive developmental push.
“We don’t need another plan,” he said. “T&T is a graveyard of uncompleted plans, some of them quite good. We need a shared national vision, a shared story that can power our intentionality towards change.”
His words came back to me this past September, listening to speakers discuss the legacy of the man at the heart of T&T’s extraordinary growth as the young republic unshackled itself from its colonial overlords.
“Eric Williams,” said UWI Chancellor Mr Robert Bermudez, “had a very clear vision of what we should do and what he intended to do with post-Independence Trinidad and Tobago.”
He was speaking on September 30 at a panel discussion titled "Reflections on the Legacy of Eric Williams: Business and Development", hosted by UWI St Augustine and held at the Dr Eric Williams Memorial Library in Port of Spain. It was held as part of The University of the West Indies’ 75th anniversary commemorative activities taking place this year.
The discussion was a look at the works of the late leader, who served as the first Prime Minister from 1962 to 1981, and is considered the father of the nation by many, both to assess his impact, and also perhaps more importantly, to find in the example he set, the solutions to help T&T navigate our most perilous era since Independence.
The lecture was the first event held at the library that was established earlier this year through an agreement between UWI St Augustine and the government. The campus plans to move the over 7000 items that make up the Eric Williams collection currently housed at the Alma Jordan Library on campus to the new location.
“We want to bring the university to the people,” explained Campus Principal Professor Rose-Marie Belle Antoine, “... we want to go out to other towns, Arima, San Fernando, Sangre Grande etc. We want to go to rural areas.”
She added, “and how much closer to the people is the University of Woodford Square, at the heart of the city, in this historic building?”
Calling Dr Williams “an academic exemplar”, she said “we are also here this evening because it is important for a nation to pause, reflect, review, reassess, and self-assess, and to me, a university that is grounded in community must be central to that process.”
There was a surprising aura of urgency over the proceedings for what was essentially a historical examination of a leader who passed away over four decades ago. Almost all of the panellists dedicated a portion of their presentations to the urgent issues of today.
AMCHAM CEO Nirad Tewarie spoke of “new threats” such as crime and intolerance. Former parliamentarian and head of the South Trinidad Chamber of Commerce Diane Seukeran warned of the dangers of climate change and food security. Mr Bermudez cautioned that T&T faces the risk of society “breaking up into factions”.
As Dr Aakeil Murray, history lecturer at UWI St Augustine, said, “In some areas of both education and business, we are yet to achieve a degree of success fitting a 21st century developing nation.”
The panellists looked at the late leader’s policies in developing the business sector, his relationship with the business community, and how business, as well as heavy industry, contributed to the overall development of the republic. They spoke as well about his policies for education.
Professor Bridget Brereton, Emerita Professor of History at The UWI, gave a succinct analysis of Dr Williams’s relationship to business. She said that, despite his most famous work, Capitalism and Slavery, employing a Marxist analysis, he was not a socialist.
He “advocated instead a middle way between socialist control of the economy and unfettered liberal capitalism”, she explained.
“I think,” Professor Brereton told the audience of leading political figures, scholars, and business people at the memorial library, “that Eric Williams was above all a pragmatist who went in for ideological flexibility. But he was an economic nationalist.”
Dr Williams’s existential adversary was colonialism, not just as the empire itself, or its local agents, but the economic system, and culture it imposed upon colonised people. As sociologist Dr David Muhammad pointed out, his famous “Massa Day Done” speech in 1961 was a repudiation of colonialism as an idea.
He quoted Williams, “Massa is not a racial term. It’s a symbol of a bygone age. Massa day is a social phenomenon and denotes a political awakening...”
The ambitious movement away from agriculture to oil and gas, petrochemicals, and heavy industry can be seen as the ultimate symbol of the repudiation of “Massa”.
“For the historian,” said Brereton, “the sugar plantation and the master, old or new, was the great symbol of colonial oppression and enslavement/indenture.”
The development of the Pt Lisas industrial estate and the monetisation of natural gas are two of the most important accomplishments of T&T under the leadership of Eric Williams. They were both major contributors to and symbols of a breathtaking industrialisation and modernisation project that many of us take for granted today.
Ms Marina Salandy-Brown, founder of the Bocas Lit Fest, described the colonial, pre-industrial period as one of “cruel poverty”.
Chancellor Bermudez said, “Trinidad was a backward place... The conditions of work in agriculture, whether it be cocoa, sugar or whatever else, were appalling. People lived in houses that were not painted. There were no toilets, no running water. The objective of a job on a cocoa plantation was to get enough food so that your children would not starve.”
However, even though the movement away from agriculture to industry was a major contributor to national development, the need for local food production has become an increasing concern.
As Mr Gregory Aboud, President of the Downtown Owners and Merchants Association (DOMA) said, quoting economist Lloyd Best to great applause, “No society can achieve greatness without a strong, vibrant, and productive agricultural sector.”
Mr Aboud, although complimentary of Dr Williams’s legacy, was also critical. He questioned the application of the social services implemented by the late leader.
“Free education, free healthcare,” he said, were “noble objectives, but we have stumbled because we have not been able to deliver them” properly.
“That’s because the management model cannot serve us in delivery. It can serve us in euphemisms. It can serve us in good intentions. It can serve us in caring for each other, but it cannot deliver the product,” he said.
However, overall the assessment of Eric Williams’s legacy was positive, especially for those who experienced that early post-Independence period.
“There’s nothing that anyone can say to really capture what it was like to be a child at that time,” said Ms Salandy-Brown. “To be one of the people that was able to help design the flag, and to write the national helm, and decide what the national emblems were. It was very empowering.”
Ms Seukeran was even more forceful in her views.
“What an enigma. What an extraordinary man, was Eric Williams. He was a macho man. Very much so. A man who knew what he wanted, and set out to achieve it,” she said.
Perhaps, more than anything else, the ultimate lesson of Dr Williams’s time in power is the ability to envision a better society and the internal stuff to make it happen.
Mrs Seukeran is confident we can:
“We have everything that Williams gave us. We have the wherewithal. We have the will.”
