22
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 4TH OCTOBER, 2015
Reginald Dumas has been described
as a mandarin:
a member of a scholarly elite devoted to public service,
perhaps an endangered species in these days. His
contributions to nation-building in his own T&T
and to regional and international causes have been
multifaceted, distinguished, and sustained over a
lifetime.
Now he has published a memoir—he calls it a
retrospective—covering his first 30 years. (We must
hope that subsequent installments will amount to a
full-fledged autobiography.) Dumas says in his preface
that he has focused more on the social environments
he inhabited than on details of his personal life, and he
provides many pages of valuable historical background
and context for the different stages of his education
and career up to age 30.
As a historian, my main interest in Dumas’
memoir is its value as a source for T&T’s history in
the twentieth century. Now, historians are trained to
be wary of this kind of source. When someone writes
a memoir or autobiography, he is crafting his own life
story, he is hoping to make his readers see it as he sees
it, and we are all naturally biased in our own favour.
At the same timememoirs can open a window into
the past; through one life, which may or may not be
typical of its times, we can enter the society in which
that person lived. This is definitely the case here; we
learn a great deal about T&T during the 1940s to 1960s
through the pages of Dumas’ memoir.
For me (but probably not for many readers), the
first three chapters, taking the boy and young man up
to the time he went to Cambridge (chapters 1 to 3), are
especially rich. Dumas was the classic ‘scholarship boy.’
The son of an ambitious, educated, but far from rich
mother (his father died when he was quite young and
seems to have been less influential on the boy), he won
them all: college exhibition to Queen’s Royal College
(QRC), house scholarship to go on to sixth form, and
the supreme prize, the Island Scholarship which took
him to Cambridge.
Though both his parents were Tobagonian, the
young Dumas grew up in Chaguanas, where his
formidable mother was the district midwife and
government nurse. His was a middle-class household
by virtue of her profession and local influence, and her
lifestyle, but it was often cash-poor, especially after his
father’s death when he was ten. Dumas remembers a
racially mixed neighbourhood but no racial friction.
Hismost influential teacher at Chaguanas Government
School was a Presbyterian Indo-Trinidadian, Isaac
Sinanan.
BOOK REVIEW
Bridget Brereton is Professor Emerita at The UWI, specialising in Caribbean History.
AMANDARIN’SMEMOIR
B Y B R I D G E T B R E R E T O N
4, Dumas goes on to write on his posting in the civil
service of the Federal Government (1959-62). Like
so many young West Indians who had been educated
abroad in the 1950s, he was deeply disappointed when
the Federation collapsed in 1962. It was the shattering
of the dreams of so many. Altogether, his time in
the Federal civil service does not seem to have been
especially challenging; but the course of his future
career was set when he was selected for training in
Geneva as a diplomat, to serve in the (future) Federal
Foreign Service.
This never came to pass, since the Federation
collapsed before it gained independence and thus
control of its foreign affairs, but the year’s training
meant that Dumas was an obvious choice for the new
Foreign Service of independent T&T. Many readers
will be especially interested in the last chapter, which
deals with his experiences between 1962 and 1965, and
his relationships with Ellis Clarke and Eric Williams.
He was sent toWashington as a junior member of
the newEmbassy there, headed by Clarke. Dumas gives
a lively account of life as a very junior diplomat under
Clarke, who greatly influenced him, and writes of his
shock at being exposed for the first time to American
racism—Washington in the early 1960s was still very
much a southern and segregated city, despite being
the national capital.
This last chapter includes an eye-opening account
of how foreign policy in the newnationwas developed,
with Williams (of course) as the chief architect of that
policy no matter who happened to be the minister of
the day. The new ministry had little input into policy
making and ambassadors like Clarke usually had no
clear instructions: Clarke simply “deduced” that T&T
should take a non-aligned position when the nation
entered the UN.
Probably because of Clarke’s close personal
relationship with Williams, Dumas was chosen to
make the on-site arrangements for the PrimeMinister’s
celebrated trip to Africa in 1964—his first experience
of Africa—and then to open a T&T Embassy in Addis
Ababa (Ethiopia) in 1965. He was just 30 when he left
on this mission.
This memoir gives us a valuable source document
for understanding T&T’s social and political history
in the 1940s to 1960s, when the modern nation, for
good and for ill, was in process of formation. And it
also illuminates the early years of a distinguished son
who has contributed to nation-building in so many
ways, and continues to do so in these troubled times.
The move to Tunapuna when he was 14 (in 1949)
brought the youth to amuchmore ‘modern’ town, with
electricity, pipedwater in the homes, cinemas, a library,
andmany schools and religious and social institutions.
In 1952 there was much rejoicing in Tunapuna when
the three boys who were first placed for the Island
Scholarship all came from that lively and multi-racial
town: Lloyd Best, John Neehall and Dumas.
The chapters on growing up in Chaguanas and
Tunapuna in the 1940s and early 1950s are excellent
sources for social history. Many readers will be
especially interested in the chapter on Dumas at QRC.
He was there in its glory days (1946-53) and he gives a
rich description of the ethos of the school, its traditions
and its masters, which can be compared with C. L. R.
James’ celebrated account from an earlier generation.
After Cambridge (1954-58), described in chapter
THE FIRST
THIRTY YEARS
A Retrospection
Reginald Dumas
