BLACK INTELLECTUALS COME TO POWER
OVERVIEW
Oxaal’s historically descriptive and sociologically interpretive study is not an overambitious or exhaustive analysis, and is concentrated on Trinidad with brief digressions to the Caribbean area as a whole seen as a political and economic sphere of interest of the metropolitan powers. He looks at the racial and cultural configurations of the Island, widely thought of as “cosmopolitan”; the historical setting which created the social and economic legacies of deprivation and cleavage; and examines the political development from colonial· ism, hinting at slavery and the plantation establishment and also indenture, and on through a treatment of the development of a sense of nationhood to independence.
Looking at the economic development of the territory, he sees that economic control and dominance have passed from the hands of the metropolitan interests in the merchant houses of mother-country Britain to the monopolistic multinational corporations operating from bases ,n the United States. On the foundation or sub structure created by this enclave – type economic conditions of dependence, according to Oxaal, are erected the political superstructure and ideological forms which have distorted the self-image of the nation in its attempt to assuage and accommodate the political, economic and military presence of the United States.
With these and the ‘Westminster model’ of parliamentary bicameralism and party system in mind, Oxaal analyses the historical development of party politics and ‘hero -worship’, with an elitist bias, through the rise of labour leaders and later through the capture of the leadership of the masses by the middle-class intellectuals and he tries to interpret the impact of all these on the class structure and the racial and cultural sections of Trinidad .
He shows how colonial education was used ,as a tool for manipulating and subjugating colonial peoples, siphoning off through a rigid selection process those creoles particularly of black or coloured vintage to the exclusion of Indians, thus not only perpetuating the divide-and-rule philosophy but orienting, socialising and indoctrinating any colonial who showed sparks of initiative , creativity or intellectual brilliance to metropolitan values and culture. This was geared to ensuring a ‘packed’ bureaucracy with strong loyalty to the British Crown.
After exposing some of the tensions created m the society by the colonial policy and the strains and conflicts which plagued the terminal stage of internal self-government and involvement with the West Indies Federation, Oxaal concludes on a fairytale note of an “era of good feeling” in independent Trinidad.
Perhaps as a touring expatriate, who spent seven teen months of intermittent residency in Trinidad viewing that Caribbean Island as a laboratory to test or analyse his social theories and political ideas with “as much, objectivity’ and yet as an ‘involved observer’ – abiding by Malinowski’s injunction to some extent – Oxaal’s purpose has been largely achieved and this, in my opinion. despite the fact that his investigation, his field work, was ooncentrated on the political and educated or intellectual elites, the middle classes and the intermediate party functionaries. Somewhat more than Wendell Bell’s study of the Jamaican leaders his seems to have involved to a greater extent the masses or jamette class of Trinidad’s society.
In presenting his case study of the social and cultural development of Trinidad as it pertained to the emergence of and the problems facing, a national movement conditioned by the impact of European and particularly British ideas and institutions. Oxaal shifts his attack on the United States, the new metropolitan power spreading its “protective umbrella” over the Caribbean Hinterlands, and blames the state of affairs – the continuation of the dependency-mentality and suffocation of local initiative – on the domination of U.S. policy and the economics of exploitation which have gone hand in hand with the attempt to keep the Caribbean ‘safe for democracy’ and as a corollary safe from the ‘red peril’ of communist subversion. He holds that the intellectual and even the professed radical who attains power in the area is necessarily constrained by a myriad of forces and that despite his best intentions and efforts in branching out on a radical departure from the normal course he is forced to consider not which models are desirable, but which are possible. He asserts that the social composition of the national leadership in Trinidad predisposed it to an accommodative posture or in many ways left it bereft of a choice or any alternative to that of shaping policies in the light of the reality that the Caribbean is an American lake . The evidence of the Bay of Pigs, the Dominican intervention, the operation of the C.I.A. m Guyana for him hangs like a sword of Damocles or a dark ominous cloud threatening on the horizon. The overwhelming shadow of the great Colo ss us creates a sense of irres1st1ble pressure to conform – a pressure which subverts and corrupts West Indian nationalist movements and straight-jackets them causing them to deteriorate. In the light of the Cold War Oxaal finds it impossible to say whether the straight jacket can be removed short of a radical redefinition of the U.S. world role.
