The fact is that in Trinidad power is so evenly distributed – whites in business, Indians in business and the professions, Negroes in the professions and the civil service – that racial abuse is without meaning. What the Calypsonian Sparrow predicted quite recently has already come to pass:
Well, the way how things shaping up,
All this nigger business going to stop.
And soon in the West Indies
It will be ‘Please, Mr Nigger, please.’
In spite of the abuse in which the white indulges, particularly for the benefit of the outsider, there is no general feeling against the local whites. Against ‘expats’, however, there is a growing animosity; their presence in positions of power is a threat and a humiliation, a reminder of the days when top posts were reserved for expatriates, and a reminder of prejudice encountered in England. But this animosity is not widespread; it does not go beyond certain insecure sections of the middle class.
The virtual by-passing of white prejudice was inevitable. The cultural involvement of the Negro was with the white world in general and not so much with the local whites, who had shown little interest in education and who rarely entered the professions. The break-up of the colonial system made plain their inaptitudes at the same time that it released the pent-up ambitions of the better equipped non-white. The chaotic social divisions also help. Each of the island’s many cliques believes that it is the true élite. The expatriates believe they are the élite; so do the local whites, the businessmen, the professional men, the higher civil servants, the politicians, the sportsmen. This arrangement, whereby most people don’t even know when they are being excluded, leaves everyone reasonably happy. And most important of all, the animosity that might have been directed against the whites has been channelled off against the Indians.
Throughout the Caribbean today the Negro’s desire to assert himself is a constant quantity. This brings him in collision with white, coloured, Chinese, Syrians and Jews in Jamaica, white and coloured in Martinique, Indians in Trinidad. The animosity between Negroes and Indians is, at first sight, puzzling. At all levels they share the same language, the same ambitions – My Mummy has a lovely Valor – and, increasingly, the same pleasures. Their interests don’t clash. The Negro is a town-dweller; the Indian is an agriculturist. The Negro with a good handwriting and a head for intrigue goes into the civil service; the Indian similarly equipped goes into business. Both go into the professions.
Of late, with Indians entering the civil service and small-island Negroes muscling in on the taxi business, there has been a certain direct rivalry; but this is outweighed by a long-standing division of labour which is taken so much for granted that Trinidadians are hardly aware of it. Coconut-sellers, for instance, are Indian; it would be unnatural and perhaps unwise to receive a coconut from a black hand. No one, not even an Indian, will employ a mason or a carpenter who is not a Negro. The lower down the scale one goes, the nicer the divisions of labour become. Negroes sell ice and its immediate byproducts: shaved ice, ‘presses’, snowballs. Indians sell iced lollies. Before the war Indians swept the streets of Port of Spain; Negroes emptied the cesspits. Each felt a hearty contempt for the other; and when, during the war, Negroes from the smaller islands began sweeping the streets, it was felt by some Indians that this was another example of Indians losing their grip, the virtues of their fathers.
In St Kitts, if the emigrant on the Francisco Bobadilla wasn’t lying, a Negro can bake bread with moderate success. But St Kitts is St Kitts. In Trinidad a Negro who opens a bakery runs a considerable risk, and he is begging for trouble if he opens a laundry. Whatever goes on in the back rooms, Trinidadians like to feel that their clothes are washed and their bread handled by white or Chinese hands. Equally, for all the complaints about white and whitish staff in the banks, there is a strong feeling among Negroes that black people, even when they can be trusted, don’t know how to handle money. In money matters generally there is almost a superstition among both Indians and Negroes about the unreliability of their own race; there is scarcely a Trinidadian who has not at one time felt or said, ‘I don’t have any luck with my race.’ It is an aspect of the multi-racial society to which sociologists pay little attention.
All this speaks of accord. But Trinidad in fact teeters on the brink of racial war. Politics must be blamed; but there must have been an original antipathy for the politicians to work on. Matters are not helped by the fierce rivalry between Indians and Negroes as to who despises the other more. This particular rivalry is conducted by the liberal-minded, who will not be denied the pleasure of appealing to their group to show more tolerance towards the other group, and who are deeply annoyed when it is claimed by liberals of the other party that it is the other group which has to do the tolerating. There is also considerable rivalry as to who started the despising.
It is sufficient to state that the antipathy exists. The Negro has a deep contempt, as has been said, for all that is not white; his values are the values of white imperialism at its most bigoted. The Indian despises the Negro for not being an Indian; he has, in addition, taken over all the white prejudices against the Negro and with the convert’s zeal regards as Negro everyone who has any tincture of Negro blood. ‘The two races,’ Froude observed in 1887, ‘are more absolutely apart than the white and the black. The Asiatic insists the more on his superiority in the fear perhaps that if he did not the white might forget it.’ Like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise one another. They despise one another by references to the whites; and the irony is that their antagonism should have reached its peak today, when white prejudices have ceased to matter.
Few non-Indians know much about the Indians, except that they live in the country, work on the land, are rich, fond of litigation and violence. There were undoubtedly small criminal and army elements among the Indian immigrants – one or two low Indian army ranks survive as surnames – and parts of the Indian countryside, with their recurring unsolved murders, used to have a mafia-like atmosphere. Everyone in Trinidad knows that to run over an Indian in an Indian village and to stop is to ask for trouble; whether it has ever occurred that the driver who stopped was beaten up I don’t know.* Nothing is known about Hinduism or Islam. The Muslim festival of Hosein, with its drum-beating and in the old days stick-fighting, is the only Indian festival which is known; Negroes sometimes beat the drums. Indian weddings are also known. There is little interest in the ritual; it is known only that at these weddings food is given to all comers. Even the simple distinction between Hindu and Muslim names is not known; and the Negro makes less effort than the average English person to pronounce Indian names correctly. This is partly because of the attitude that nothing which is not white is worth bothering about; partly because Indians are difficult to know; and partly because so many Indians have been modernizing themselves at such a rate that Indian customs have come to be regarded as things out of which people grow. So although Indians make up more than one-third of the population, their customs and ceremonies remain quaint and even exotic.
Everything which made the Indian alien in the society gave him strength. His alienness insulated him from the black—white struggle. He was taboo-ridden as no other person on the island; he had complicated rules about food and about what was unclean. His religion gave him values which were not the white values of the rest of the community, and preserved him from self-contempt; he never lost pride in his origins. More important than religion was his family organization, an enclosing self-sufficient world absorbed with its quarrels and jealousies, as difficult for the outsider to penetrate as for one of its members to escape. It protected and imprisoned, a static world, awaiting decay.
Islam is a static religion. Hinduism is not organized; it has no fixed articles, no hierarchy; it is constantly renewing itself and depends on the regular emergence of teachers and holy men. In Trinidad it could only wither;
but its restrictions were tenacious. Marriage between unequal castes has only just ceased to cause trouble; marriage between Hindu and Muslim can still split a family; marriage outside the race is unthinkable. Only the urban Indian, the Indian of the middle class, and the Christian convert were able to move easily out of the Indian framework. The Indian Christian was more liberal and adaptable in every way; but, following far behind the Negro on the weary road to whiteness, he was more insecure.
Living by themselves in villages, the Indians were able to have a complete community life. It was a world eaten up with jealousies and family feuds and village feuds; but it was a world of its own, a community within the colonial society, without responsibility, with authority doubly and trebly removed. Loyalties were narrow: to the family, the village. This has been responsible for the village-headman type of politician the Indian favours, and explains why Indian leadership has been so deplorable, so unfitted to handle the mechanics of party and policy.
A peasant-minded, money-minded community, spiritually static because cut off from its roots, its religion reduced to rites without philosophy, set in a materialist colonial society: a combination of historical accidents and national temperament has turned the Trinidad Indian into the complete colonial, even more philistine than the white.
Much of the West Indian Negro’s drive arises out of his desire to define his position in the world. The Indian, with no such problem, was content with his narrow loyalties. Whether he knew his language or practised his religion, the knowledge that a country called India existed was to him a pole. He felt no particular attachment to this country. It is said that Indian Independence in 1947 encouraged Indian racialism in Trinidad; but the explanation is too simple. The Trinidad Indian who was concerned about the Independence struggle and contributed large sums to various funds, washed his hands of India in 1947. The struggle was over, the shame was removed, and he could settle without self-approach into the easy, undemanding society of Trinidad. Indians who went to India returned disgusted by the poverty and convinced of their own superiority. The relationship between Indians from India and Indians from Trinidad quickly developed into the relationship of muted dislike between metropolitans and colonials, between Spaniards and Latin Americans, English and Australians.
1947 is not the date. 1946 is the date, when the first elections were held under universal adult suffrage in Trinidad. Then the bush lawyers and the village headmen came into their own, not only in the Indian areas but throughout the island. Then the loudspeaker van reminded people that they were of Aryan blood. Then, as was reported, the politician, soon to be rewarded by great wealth, bared his pale chest and shouted, ‘I is a nigger too!’
Though now one racialism seems to be reacting on the other, each has different roots. Indian politicians have created Indian racialism out of a harmless egoism. Negro racialism is more complex. It is an overdue assertion of dignity; it has elements of bitterness; it has something of the urban mob requiring to be satisfied with bread and circuses. It has profound intellectual promptings as well, in the realization that the Negro problem lies not simply in the attitude of others to the Negro, but in the Negro’s attitude to himself. It is as yet confused, for the Negro, while rejecting the guilt imposed on him by the white man, is not able to shake off the prejudices he has inherited from the white man, a duality which is responsible for what the Jamaican novelist John Hearne, on a visit to British Guiana in 1957, described as ‘the pathetic nostalgia that corrupts so many Negroes. The retreat into apologies for their condition, their endless “historical” explanations and their lack of any direction. The sentimental camaraderie of skin which provides the cheap thrill of being “African”.’
In the Negro–Indian conflict each side believes it can win. Neither sees that this rivalry threatens to destroy the Land of the Calypso.
It is characteristic of the Trinidad sense of humour, with its ability to turn grave international crises into private jokes, that the unsavoury and dangerous night-club stretch of Wrightson Road in Port of Spain should be called the Gaza Strip – Gunplay in Gaza Strip was a headline I saw – and that by this local association the name should be repeated in country cafés by proprietors anxious to give a touch of drama to their unpretentious establishments. It was not surprising, therefore, with the Congo occupying the headlines for weeks, that the sonorous names of the Congolese leaders, Kasavubu, Lumumba, Mobutu, should have caught the Trinidad imagination. Anyone in authority, particularly foremen and policemen, became Mobutu: ‘Look out, boys. Mobutu coming.’ The names of Kasavubu and Lumumba could be applied to anyone; and I came across one person whose temporary nickname was Dag (Hammarskjöld). This sophisticated play-acting is part of that Trinidad taste for fantasy, already noted, which finds its full bacchanalian expression on the two days of Carnival.*
Then comedy turned to tragedy. Lumumba was captured, his humiliations were photographed, and he was killed. Some weeks after the news of Lumumba’s death I came upon a procession in one of the main streets of Port of Spain. It was an orderly procession made up wholly of Negroes. They were singing hymns, which contrasted with the violence of their banners and placards. These were anti-white, anti-clerical and pro-African in an ill-defined, inclusive way. I had never before seen anything like it in Trinidad. It was a demonstration of that ‘sentimental camaraderie of skin which provides the cheap thrill of being “African” ‘ of which John Hearne had written. It represented all that was barren in Negro racialism. The Gaza Strip and the policeman who was Mobutu stood for the Old Trinidad. This hymn-singing procession was the new.
I thought then that it was a purely local eruption, created by the pressures of local politics. But soon, on the journey I was now getting ready to make, I came to see that such eruptions were widespread, and represented feelings coming to the surface in Negro communities throughout the Caribbean: confused feelings, without direction; the Negro’s rejection of the guilt he has borne for so long; the last, delayed Spartacan revolt, more radical than Toussaint L’Ouverture’s; the closing of accounts this side of the middle passage.
* These facts about immigration are taken from The West Indies in the Making, by four hands. London, 1960.
* ‘A clever and sympathetic Indian journalist took me to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. A hundred and twenty miles by car, through the parched, dust-clouded countryside. At every village, the driver slowed down to ten miles an hour and kept his thumb on the horn. “If a car ran over a man in one of these places,” my friend said, “the people would burn the car and kill the occupants.” ’ John Wain: ‘A visit to India’: Encounter, May 1961. The old province of Agra was one of the areas from which Trinidad Indians came.
* George Lamming, the Barbadian writer, encountered at Lord’s cricket ground in 1957 on the day Sobers scored a hundred against the M.C.C., told of the West Indian who exclaimed delightedly: ‘A century on his first appearance in the Kremlin of cricket, man. In the Kremlin.’ So the drama of the cold war is adapted to homelier events.
3. BRITISH GUIANA
If there were but a snug secretaryship vacant there – and these things in Demerara are very snug – how I would invoke the goddess of patronage; how I would nibble round the officials of the Colonial Office; how I would stir up my friends’ friends to write little notes to their friends! For Demerara is the Elysium of the tropics – the West Indian happy valley of Rasselas – the one true and actual Utopia of the Caribbean Seas – the Transatlantic Eden.
Anthony Trollope, 1860
FROM THE AIR Trinidad’s Atlantic coast was outlined as on the map, the waves steadily rolling lace-patterned foam towards the shore, green edged with yellow. The waves began far out and rolled in evenly. On the bright blue water cloud shadows were like submerged rocks or like dissolving drops of ink. Soon blue water turned to brown, its progressively darker shades neatly contoured and sometimes marked off in white. Then the South American continent: a grey-green tufted carpet, worn brown in patches, with rivers like cracks in drying mud. Fo
r minute after minute we moved rapidly over the unchanging, unwelcoming land, a small corner of a vast continent, where trees grew and collapsed on muddy shores.
One can learn much about British Guiana from the air: its size, its emptiness, the isolation of its communities. Six hundred thousand people live in a country the size of Britain, and when you fly over the populated eastern coastal strip you see why there is so much unrest in a country which, from its bigness, should be a country of opportunity. The land here is fertile. The sugarcane fields, intersected by ruler-straight ditches, are like machine-made carpets. They go on and on, until the pattern is broken by a huddle of white-and-rust wooden houses, laid out as precisely as the fields: workers’ houses: sugarcane land, you feel, going to waste, and the site arbitrarily chosen, for the settlement could have been put down anywhere else in that clear green expanse. ‘To force the Negroes of the Virgin Islands to work,’ Michael Swan writes in The Marches of El Dorado, ‘the Danes cut down their soursop trees, and today in British Guiana sugar must use a hundred subtle methods to maintain asufficient labour force – tropical people prefer a subsistence and little work to hard work and a higher standard of living.’
And emptiness. Fly to the interior. First you go over the sugarcane fields beside the brown Demerara River. Abruptly the fields stop and bush begins; and in the bush there are little irregular areas of timorous destruction – indicating attitudes you will learn to associate with British Guiana – where forest has turned to marshland, for the soil here is poor and hardwood trees cannot easily be made to grow again. Within minutes towns, fields and clearings are passed, and you are over the forest, thick and choked and even, occasionally flawed by a river that is black or, when caught by the sun, glinting, a vein of gold or red through the dead green. And the forest continues. You cease to look, until, thirty or forty minutes later, the land breaks up into hills and valleys, beyond which lie the savannah lands, in the dry season marbled in green and brown and ochre, scratched with white trails, the beds of diminished streams lined with rich, succulent-looking palm trees. Brazil is not far away, equally empty, a vastness not to be comprehended.
The Middle Passage Page 9