The Monad: The Hegemony of Personality—Eric Williams and the Post Independence Imagination of Trinidad, 1956–1981

Abstract

THE POST-INDEPENDENCE POLITICS OF Trinidad and Tobago (Trinidad) presents an opportunity to examine hegemony from a uniquely narrow perspective: the hegemony of one - the monad. This describes the phenomenon of individuals who, coming to power at crucial moments, are able to impose an extraordinary amount of authority over the citizens of the small states of which they have acquired control.This phenomenon is not unique to the Caribbean. In Stalin's Russia, Thatcher's Britain, and Reagan's America, individuals have defined nations, and created enduring perceptions of national characters. However, given the nature of those societies, they continue to evolve. In the Caribbean, the evolutionary trajectory, at least in Trinidad, seems cathexised, and the society continues to almost involuntarily manifest the characteristics it internalised from the intimate relationship with its founding (father) figure, its first prime minister, Dr Eric Williams. Given the heterogeneity of the Trinidadian population, there are several competing narratives and imaginative trajectories - Indo, French-Creole, Afro, and Colonial. The trajectory on which this essay focuses is that which has come to be known as the 'Creole' historical narrative - that is, the point of view which foregrounds the Afro-Creole historical experience, of which Williams was the apotheosis.1Trinidad fortuitously provides a theatre where this dynamic can be observed in some detail. The historical and environmental particularities include its small size, its small population, its variety and relatively brief history, and the paucity of pre-existent traditions, which made the (illiterate and oppressed) inhabitants receptive to originary narratives and identity discourses. The nature of its social and economic development up to the middle of the twentieth century, defined by the plantation system, saw the majority of the small population densely packed into a few populated areas: the plantations and two towns at the north and south ends of the island. The symbolic mechanics of hegemony - the non-verbal, institutional, visual and symbolic languages of government and dominant culture - thus had a sizeable, captive population to affect.The colonisation of Trinidad began only in the last few years of the eighteenth century. The Spanish Cedula of Population in 1783 saw several groups rapidly imported into an untamed frontier. After Emancipation in 1834, indentured Indians provided the cheap, resident labour needed to keep the plantations alive between 1845 and 1917. Institutions were weak, embryonic or nonexistent in the Crown Colony system, where authority and power resided largely in a single individual, the British governor. By the end of the nineteenth century, at least four distinct, settled, and competing sets of interests inhabited Trinidad. These were the formerly enslaved black working class and their middle-class and mixed-race interlocutors, Indian indentured labourers and formerly indentured Indians who had decided to remain in the island, the white Creole groups, and the colonial administration.By 1956, when the independence dispensation was being shaped, Crown Colony government and social dynamics persisted - the control of the one individual in whom all power resided. Naturally, this situation was not without critics or challenges. A small, determined group of educated black, mixed-race and white Creoles had constantly challenged the government. The challenges ranged from the benign reform movements of the nineteenth century to the more violent Water Riots of 1903, and many similar, smaller incidents. Simultaneously, the unschooled urban masses were slowly evolving into consciousness - there were plantation disturbances in the late nineteenth century, and links with organised labour in Britain from the early twentieth century provided urban proletarian labour organisation and a medium for political aspirations after World War I.All these factors created an apt situation for the ascendancy of the monad. …