By Caldwell Taylor
We salute our Trinbagonian
sisters and brothers on the occasion of their 39th anniversary of
independence. Trinidad and Tobago acceded to nationhood on August 31, 1962,
first runner-up to Jamaica- the first of the British West Indies to cut ties to
the Mother Country. Truth be told, the twin- island nation did not make
a smooth passage to what the political scientists like to call
post-colonialism: many will recall the fears that were very publicly expressed
by the country’s Indian population in the run-up to Independence. Those fears
have not disappeared, but the fact that the country now has an Indian prime
minister is certainly a measure of how much has been accomplished in a mere
thirty-nine years.
TRINIDAD’S CALALOO TOO THICK?
No joke,
an Indian prime minister is a major achievement in a country that was seen by
many as certain to establish a Negro dictatorship in the wake of
its grant of independence from Britain. While you mull over the significance of
this achievement, keep in mind the fact that Trinidad’s racial and cultural
heterogeneity was always viewed as a cause for considerable pessimism.
Visiting in 1859,Anthony Trollope
saw nothing but trouble coming from Trinidad’s calaloo of Roman Catholicism,
“French Negroes and hybrid mulattoes”. It bears pointing out that at the time
of Trollope’s visit and, indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, Trinidad
was a British colony dominated by French creole aristocrats many of whom came
from Grenada.
The French Grenadian planters
migrated to Trinidad following the issuance of a Cedula by the King of
Spain in 1783; the Cedula was issued as a result of representations made to the
Governor of Spanish Trinidad in 1780 by a French Grenadian
planter called Phillipe-Rose-Raoume de Saint-Laurent. Monsieur
St. Laurent and many of his kin left Grenada because they were being persecuted
by the island’s English administration. By the way this persecution was the
proximate cause of the French-led (Fedon) uprising of 1795.
French immigrants
came also from Quebec (Canada), Guadeloupe and Martinique. In fact, Trinidad’s
first known calypsonian, Gros Jean (Big John), was from
Martinique. Gros Jean was declared Maitre Kaiso (Kaiso Master)
back in 1784. (1)
MORE OFFICIAL
PESSIMISM
In 1922 Major
E.F.L Wood (he later became Lord Halifax), of the Wood Commission,
worried over the lack of a homogeneous public opinion in Trinidad, and a little
more than thirty years later the Federal Site Commission Report (Mudie
Report) stated that Trinidad’s East Indian population constituted a “disturbing
element” in the country’s national life; approximately 150,000 East Indian
“indentured servants” were brought to Trinidad between 1838 and 1917.
Trinidad’s racial and cultural
complexity might also have caused some worry on the part of the nation’s first
prime minister. Writing on the eve of independence Eric Williams stated:
On August 31st 1962, a country will
be free, a miniature state will
be established, but a society and
a nation would not have been formed.(2)
Prime Minister Dr Eric Williams was merely echoing the
words of a colonial Governor of Trinidad. In 1848,fourteen years after
emancipation, Governor Harris remarked:
As the question now stands
a race has been freed but
a society has not been formed.(3)
Trinidad
and Tobago became a single administrative unit on January 1,1889,the two
islands being relative latecomers to the British colonial fold.Trinidad
was Spanish until it was captured for Britain by Sir Ralph Abercromby in
1797. Tobago had a more checkered
colonial experience: the island had French, British and Dutch masters at various
times in its history. Tobago became British in 1763 and for twenty years it was
ruled by a Governor whose headquarters was in St George’s, the Grenadian capital. Ceded to France in
1783, it was returned to the British in 1814.
TRINIDAD&TOBAGO AND GRENADA?
Trinidad,
Tobago and Grenada had a brief fling with the idea of fusion in 1905- Grenada
was the active partner. In the early 1960s the three islands flirted with the
notion of Unitary Statehood. About the unitary statehood plans a
Grenadian wit said this: “the idea did not last as long as a sno-cone”. Be that
as it may there are, probably, as many Grenadians in Trinidad and Tobago as
there are in Grenada itself.
Trinidad
and Tobago paid a heavy price for having become British by conquest: the price
was heavy-duty Crown rule, a condition that remained intact for more than a
century. Some constitutional relief
came in 1925 when the islands’ Crown Colony status was modified by an elected
element in the legislative body. The 1925 constitutional change owed everything
to the agitations of Captain Arthur A. Ciprini and his barefooted
brigades. More constitutional relief came in 1946, in 1950 and again in 1956,
and of course in 1962.Republican status was achieved in 1976.
REASONS TO BE PROUD
Trinbagonians have every reason to stand tall today. For one thing,
the twin –island republic has built itself something of a national identity, a
commanding height from which it can both see and make sense of the world. And
for another thing, the Land of the Pan continues to be the hardest
working verb in the yeasty grammar of Caribbean culture.
FOOTNOTES
1 Kaiso was the original name of the song form. The word “calypso” came into use
during the latter years of the eighteen –nineties.
2. Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (P.N.M. Publishing
Co.Ltd.,Port of Spain,1962), p.284.
3 W.L Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the West Indies
(Jonathan Cope, London, 1937), p.370