Graduation Address

"The Developing Nation in the Modern World" (20 May 1965). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

I am very greatly honoured by the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws which the University of New Brunswick ha conferred upon me and by your invitation to deliver today’s Encaenia address. It is not often that a representative of a small country has the opportunity of an intellectual forum in a larger country. I am particularly happy that this opportunity should be afforded me in Canada. Canada and the West Indies have had throughout the present century very close relations, both economic and intellectual, and we in Trinidad and Tobago value these ties very highly.

Ours is a tiny country of less than two thousand square miles and less than one million people, principally descendants of immigrants from West Africa, India and Pakistan, with smaller numbers of Chinese, Syrian, and Lebanese, British, Portuguese and Venezuelan ancestry. Its diversity of racial origins and religious affiliations links it with the many heterogeneous societies in the modern world. The outstanding fact of this diversity is the historical antecedents, and the social legacies bequeathed by them, of African slavery, Asian indenture and British colonialism.

If, therefore, I presume to speak today as the representative of a University fraternity in the West Indies to one of Canada’s many University fraternities and as the representative of on Commonwealth country to another, you will not, I hope, deny me the privilege of emphasizing our own particular vision, however limited, on the most urgent problem of contemporary humanity. That is the division of the world into developed and developing nations – or, to the extent that geographical considerations dominate our analysis, between North and South.

Our small country achieved its independence from the United Kingdom within the Commonwealth on August 31, 1962 – less than three years ago. Our small university, the University of the West Indies located in Jamaica with constituent faculties and colleges in Trinidad and Barbados, achieved its independence from the University of London on April 2, 1962 – barely three years ago. Efforts to achieve a West Indian Federation, whose first Parliament was officially inaugurated on April 22, 1958, collapsed four years later; the University of the West Indies is one of the few common services that have survived the dissolution of the Federation.

The history of Trinidad and Tobago’s accession to independence necessarily, therefore, colours its approach to the basic issue of the division of the world into two groups of states – developed and developing. In this basic issue we can identify three salient particulars which are of universal rather than sectional importance, and which are profound and ever-increasing significance to the University community all over the world, not least in the United States of America.

These are, first, the role and future of small nations in the modern world; second, the lingering on of colonialism and the emergence of neo-colonialism; third, the equality of races and the eliminations of man’s inhumanity and indignity to man.

Canada’s own history – its emergence from colonialism to independence, its present conflict of language, culture and religion rooted in French fears of americanisme saxonisant, the current uncertainties about its future federal vitality, its lasting contributions to the structure of the new Commonwealth, the inescapable conflict, in its relations with its powerful neighbour to the South, between geopolitical realities and socio-economic aspirations, its leading role in the theory and practice of peacekeeping under the auspices of the United Nations – Canada’s own history makes this University congregation an appropriate forum for the discussion of these three salient particulars.

With respect to the first particular, the role and future of small nations. Nationhood is a powerful emotional consideration for an ex-colony; nationalism is a powerful economic consideration for a new state cribb’d, cabin’d and confin’d for centuries within a metropolitan economic system and nurtured in the shadow of the slave plantation.

We in Trinidad and Tobago are the historical product of generations of imperialist rivalry in the West Indies, where manifest destiny and la mission civilisatrice have fluctuated and changed from century to century. Just two centuries ago Canada was contemptuously dismissed as comprising merely a few acres of snow and signifying merely a few fur caps, as against the contribution of Guadeloupe’s sugar to the French balance of trade. Today Canada is a valued trading partner and is regarded as a valuable source of economic aid to the West Indian area.

But, our history being what it is, we cannot be expected to forget our origins and deny our sympathies with other small nations. Our policy has been deliberately to seek refuge in the larger international community, the United Nations, and in the juridical equality of its member states.

Thus, we had last year the responsibility for seeking solution of British Guiana’s troubles, we proposed, logically, to our Commonwealth colleagues a United Nations trusteeship under a Commonwealth Commissioner who had no vested interest in British Guiana; we suggested New Zealand. Our proposals were treated as waste paper, our remonstrances against continued colonialism mingled with the air, and Trinidad and Tobago has remained unimpressed with the expedients which have been substituted.

Our stand on international issues remains clear and unambiguous – the development of the United Nations into a meaningful body with sufficient power and influence to protect the independence of smaller countries. Victims of intervention for centuries, living in a perpetual state of betweenity between various flags, we necessarily oppose intervention of any sort from any quarter in the domestic affairs of the countries of the world – whether in the Caribbean or Latin America or the Balkans or the Far East or Central Africa.

All else is indistinguishable from imperialism and leads straight to the balance of power and spheres of influence theories and the paeans of praise to gunboat diplomacy now being resuscitated by leading columnists. They create an intellectual desert and call it political peace. A state’s right to determine its internal structure, a people’s right to choose their own government, cannot under any circumstances, be abridged, circumscribed, infringed or abrogated by other individual states. If peacekeeping is involved, we must have an international policeman taking orders from or at least responsible to the United Nations. What toucheth all must be approved by all.

After all, the world’s history must be something more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. We in the West Indies have been historically the oldest victims of mankind’s imperialist crimes, follies and misfortunes. We have known imperialist rivalries for centuries – rivalry between Britain and Holland, Holland and Spain, Spain and France, France and Britain, the United States and Europe. Whoever sought to export his revolution, whether crusaders or sansculottes, Bolsheviks or Holy Alliance, what was exported to the West Indies was slavery, racialism, and colonialism. Whether exclusive control was based on Papal donation or Presidential doctrine or corollary or Bonapartist claims to world Leviathan, the manifest destiny of us West Indians has been conceived as serving as the passive objects of imperialist ambitions.

The arguments have been the same, the black of Haiti’s liberation movement being replaced by the red of communist intervention. And the results have been the same – Bonaparte intervened in Haiti to decide whether Europe would retain its Caribbean colonies while Woodrow Wilson intervened to ensure against that. Britain suspended Jamaica’s constitution in 1865 to prevent black people from achieving political power by constitutional means and British Guiana’s in 1953 to prevent red theories from retaining political power won by constitutional means, while France suspended the Counseil General of Guadeloupe in the same year to ensure white supremacy. The United States intervened in Haiti and the Dominican Republic yesterday to ensure solvency and collect foreign debts, today to keep out Communism. It has persistently sought to keep Cuba within its sphere of influence as a law of political gravitation. From 1492 to 1965, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Let us turn now to the second particular of vital concern to Trinidad and Tobago, the lingering on of colonialism and the emergence of neo-colonialism. Please understand that when I speak of colonialism I speak of a system which still exists in the larger part of the West Indies.

So that when the question comes up of Portuguese colonies in Africa or of the absence of independence in the Caribbean disguised in a variety of constitutional garb, we in Trinidad and Tobago have no choice in the matter. We are against colonialism, the government of a people or territory by another people and their subjection to the executive and parliament in another country which has the power to dictate their economic orientation.

But we in Trinidad and Tobago have repeatedly urged that the abandonment of colonialism must not be used as an alibi for leaving the new independent countries exposed and vulnerable to the full blast of the chaotic world economy. We recall the bitter West Indian experience of British free trade after 1946. The West Indies, compelled for generations to abide by metropolitan protectionist policies, were left to the mercies of free trade in the British market to which they were still politically attached. The results were disastrous.

Accordingly we have proposed in the present climate of multilateral trade that small countries historically associate with particular preferences on commodities where their production is an infinitesimal fraction of total world trade in those commodities should be specifically permitted a breathing spell to tide over the transition period in which they seek to accommodate and reorient themselves to the new dispensation.

The West Indies have been people by Africans and Asians brought over in their thousands as slaves and workers under contract for five years to produce sugar for the tea and coffee cups of the Western world. Within the past century, after all the turpitude and injustice of slavery and the inefficiency and corruption of indenture, the Western world discovers that, though at the time vested interests made every effort to stop it, the sugar could have been more easily produced in Africa and Asia themselves, and that, as Jefferson had envisaged, sugar is not a monopoly of tropical climates and that the metropolitan countries themselves can produce their own sugar.

The African-based sugar industry built up Britain, France, Holland, Spain, and the eastern seaboard of America. When one can no longer keep the workers slaves, one abandons the industry for which one enslaved them, and proceed to tell the West Indies to substitute white sand for brown sugar and to concentrate on producing flavours for the American ice cream industry. To stand the French proverb on its head, it is a case of sauter pour mieux reculer.

The demise of colonialism coincides with the birth of neo-colonialism. The emerging countries and the primary producers in general have repeatedly drawn attention to the increasing disparity between prices of raw materials and prices of manufactured goods. They have opposed also the growing restrictions in the markets of the developed countries on their own simpler industries. To develop, in these circumstances, a counter-programme of economic aid to developing countries is simply to miss the whole point.

The evidence is devastating today of the pitfalls of economic aid. Canada’s policies in respect of economic aid tend perhaps to be more liberal than those of other countries; but the fact remains that economic aid works often quite contrary to the best interests of the developing countries. It often forces them to buy the materials of the donor country, not infrequently competing with their own resources. The procedures associated with economic aid are cumbersome and time-consuming, and the opposition has been becoming more vigorous in respect of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America. The two most dangerous aspects of economic aid are first its military/political orientation, and, of perhaps even greater concern to the developing countries, the subordination of their own economic analyses and objectives to metropolitan emphasis and interests.

I turn now to the third consideration of world significance which is particularly important to the Governments and people of the developing countries and the West Indies. It is racial inequality and discrimination against people of colour, as if they are poison or disease.

All the peoples of colour who have now emerged into national independence are involved in this – the Africans as slaves, contemptuously referred to, both in the past and in the present, as “niggers”; the Asians – Indians ad Pakistanis and Chinese – as contract or indentured workers, contemptuously referred to, both in the past and in the present, as “coolies”. The whole structure of slavery and indenture rested on racial discrimination, and the role of 18th century statesmen like Jefferson and Franklin and 19th century intellectuals like Gobineau, Carlyle and Lord Acton was to justify this racial discrimination, propagate it among the masses, and disseminate it in the universities.

Today the world has worked out the curious hybrid of juridical equality of States and racial inequality of peoples. Australia is determined to remain white; Canada eases its conscience by accepting a handful of domestic servants; the contemporary slogan is “keep Britain white”, the very Britain which was built up by African and Asian labour in Africa, Asia and the West Indies. Whatever the Commonwealth may be in theory, it is in practice being increasingly tainted with a racial limitation. Viewed in historical perspective the Civil War in the United States is still raging.

Offensive Western literature, through Lord Macaulay, condemned the art and culture and scholarship of India; and, beginning with the celebrated philosopher David Hume and continuing through Professor Trevor Roper of Oxford, has propagated the great lie of history that before the European Slave Trade in Africa had no arts, no sciences, no manufacturers, no history. This literature still remains to demonstrate that, whatever may be the position with regard to the politics and economics of colonialism, intellectual decolonization has hardly begun.

As if Suez had never taken place and Dienbienphu had never existed, South Africa’s apartheid continues to disgrace the world and to pose the risk of a racial conflict in Africa which it will be extremely difficult to localize. The madness continues in Southern Rhodesia, as if the world would expect African and Asian and Caribbean States that have emerged in opposition to European colonialism and racialism to accept specious arguments for the continuation of the oppression of a black majority by a white minority.

The Western democracies steadily betray their own moral and intellectual heritage. They sneer at the one-Party States that have emerged in Africa, but thirty years ago the late Sir Winston Churchill was sneering at the Indian nationalists as people who had acquired a veneer of Western civilization and had read all those books about democracy which Europe was then beginning increasingly to discard.

The Sea of Faith was once at the full in the western democracies; today there is more genuine democracy in theory and practice in the multi-racial society of Trinidad and Tobago than one would find in many western democracies. The guided missile has superseded God in his Heaven, and all’s wrong with the world. The thoughts of men are narrowed with the process of the suns, and the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world remain the dream of scholar gipsies, vague half-believers of their casual creeds.

There is nothing that a small country can do as the irrepressible conflict approaches to engulf us all. Pangloss’ garden will not be safe from the fall-out.

Nor is there much that we can do to rewrite Caribbean history. France, which struck a medal in 1677 to commemorate the conquest of Tobago, today dismissed the French West Indies as specks of dust. Three hundred years ago the Dutch burgher would approve a son-in-law on condition that he first went to Surinam; today the Dutchman comes to Canada instead. European capitalists in Tobago wished Canada to buy the island at the end of the last century for £20,000, whilst planters in Barbados sounded out the possibility of joining the Canadian Federation. Where, fifty years ago, the United Stated was apprehensive of Kaiser Germany, and twenty-five years ago of Hitler Germany, today, Cuba, rejected by the United States, has embraced the Soviet Union. In 1941 the British surrendered large areas of Trinidad and the West Indies to the United States as naval bases for 99 years, and it was left for the nationalist movement in Trinidad a few years ago to renegotiate this perpetual colonialism and abdication of our people’s rights.

As the big powers continue the 473-year old fight for a share of Adam’s will in respect of Caribbean territory, substituting the American Mediterranean and international communism for Cromwell’s Western Design or the Franco-Spanish family compact, while the Caribbean countries seek temporary asylum here, there, or elsewhere, a small independent country like Trinidad and Tobago can merely seek in its own small way to serve the ideals of humanity and say in all humility: ”Mon verre n’est pas grand mais je bois dans mon verre”.