(Cultural day presentation to the Pan African Movement: Guyana)
I thank the Pan African Movement of Guyana for inviting me to say a few words on the general theme: ‘In the footsteps of Kofi: referencing the Grenadian revolution of 13th March 1979’.
The invitation suggested that I knew the late Maurice Bishop, the leader of that revolution, but my interaction with Maurice in around the 1976/78 period was no more than that of passing acquaintance. Maurice came a few times to the Office of the General Secretary of the PNC and Ministry of National Development to speak with Elvin McDavid, who was then the Executive Secretary of the Department of Planning and Research in which I was in charge of the research, and I ran into Maurice once or twice. What he and McDavid spoke about I have no idea, but I did surmise that it had to do with his New Jewel Movement (NJM) winning support for his struggle against the dictatorial Eric Gairy regime. After all, from a socialist standpoint, whatever we may have thought about the Burnham regime at home, in some Caribbean socialist circles it was considered more progressive than other Caribbean governments. Indeed, it was around this same time that Burnham stunned even me when around this time in a New Year press interview with the late Kester Alves he proclaimed that the PNC was committed to Marxism/Leninism: an ideological standpoint from which I tended to stay clear.
Once the Grenadian revolution was mentioned in the invitation, events at home and in our neighbourhood quickly came to mind. Regardless of one’s assessment of Maurice Bishop and his revolution, one cannot fail to appreciate that it was but another episode in the eternal struggle that periodically takes place between radical idealism and the concrete realities of everyday living, which many a time have ended in failure. Karl Marx did take time to remind us that, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ ( Marx, Karl -1852 – ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’).
He suggested that to successfully go beyond those circumstances requires as much serious thought as he gave to the development of capitalism and its overcoming. Marx himself thought that his long study proved that in the movement of history, the antagonistic relations that had developed between capital and labour would inevitably lead to the destruction of the former and put an end to human alienation. Yet worldwide, attempts to implement this radical socialist project have largely failed after causing much suffering and loss of life. There are many theories as to why this has been so: that the concrete conditions were not sufficiently ripe; there were too many internal contradictions and/or geopolitical interferences, and so on. In our region, beginning from Cheddi Jagan in 1953, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela today, geopolitical interferences have rarely allowed space for us to need to assess the contributions of the other factors to the ultimate demise of these experiences.
Broadly speaking, in their retrospective commentaries, idealists tend to emphasise the nobility of such enterprises while conservatives point to the futility of not taking sufficient account of the concrete realities! History has shown that regardless of the obstacles, humankind will forever struggle to make real the ideals their context have allowed them to imagine. Therefore, perhaps from a different perspective, the idealism of which we speak is as concrete as one can get!
From the birth of mankind, everywhere there was slavery there were slave rebellions. After all, slavery is the epitome of servitude and thus is anathema to the human condition that cries out for freedom. When the brutality that is usually meted out to slaves is added to this already un-free condition, life becomes totally intolerable and leads to rebellion. Slave rebellions are not merely uprisings against the existing conditions of slavery but the very fact of it: there is no wish for slavery even under the most gentle conditions.
Thus, when on the 23 February 1763, Cuffy and fellow slaves began their struggle to break with slavery and release themselves from its barbarism by establishing an independent self-governing community, they were doing what human beings have done throughout history. Cuffy and his compatriots faced insurmountable odds, and perhaps defeat was inevitable and made much simpler by their own internal divisions. But one suspects that the demands of being men trumped the extant reality and perceptions they had of failure.
The interval between Cuffy and our time, in which I place Maurice Bishop and his New Jewel Movement, is considerable but the aspirations that drove the two events were similar if not as extreme. By Bishop’s time slavery had been abolished, but using a radical Marxist vision, Bishop and his compatriots sought to improve the conditions of their people over and above what they thought was possible under the existing capitalist system. To a degree, they were successful, for during their four years in office the NJM instituted free education, a successful literacy campaign, and expanded higher education. In the area of healthcare, milk was freely distributed and new optical, maternity and dental clinics were built. Better roads and public transportation bolstered the island’s economic infrastructure. Small farmers and manufacturing began to expand and with Cuban help, a new airport, with a 10,000 feet runaway was being constructed to revitalize the tourist industry.
On the minus side, democracy was not restored and internal divisions similar to those that contributed to the demise of the Berbice Revolution led to the death of Maurice Bishop and social chaos, providing the pretext for those who disliked and possibly feared the example of the revolution to eventually crush it.
That aside, speaking to a reality that is objectively verifiable, conservatives would argue that the conditions against which the NJM struggled were nowhere close to those of Cuffy and that there were credible alternative pathways to social development. Furthermore, the revolutionaries were careless, for in our region, history from Cheddi Jagan in 1953 to Salvador Allende in 1973, had clearly indicated that objections to the path they set themselves would have been too substantial for a miniscule underdeveloped island to overcome. But, as I have suggested, men will forever try to accomplish the vision of freedom their context allows, and today, some 40 years after the Grenada revolution, we have our neighbour, the Venezuelan government, under pressure for attempting a similar kind of experiment.
In 1900, when some of the African leaders of the New World met in London for the first Pan African Conference, they were tired and felt that they needed to protest and try to reverse the ill-treatment that was being meted out to people of African ancestry around the world. Most of them were not set upon overthrowing the existing capitalist order but sought equitable and fair treatment within it. That might sound quite ordinary today but even in 1900, it was regarded as seditious in some quarters. For example, in the progressive era of 1890 to 1920, one progressive, Professor Richard T Eyle, a founder of the American Economic Association, said of Africans: They ‘are for the most part grow-up children, and should be treated as such … We must give the most hopeless classes left behind in our social progress custodial care with the highest possible development and with segregation of the sexes and confinement to prevent reproduction’ (Sowell, Thomas – 2011 – “Intellectuals and Society,’ Basic Books).
Things have improved greatly since then but few will want to deny that in most countries in which they are found and in which comparisons are useful, Africans are still comparatively disadvantaged. The debate as to why this is so is unlikely to cease until the situation is rectified, and this must be the true African destination. The pathways to the goal of a world in which all peoples are treated and participate equitably are many and the quest of some of those who choose to travel in the footsteps of Cuffy will falter. However, I am certain that in the end we will all arrive there if only because of the unquenchable human desire for freedom and self-respect.
