Our historic mission

January 22, 2000

A Constitution is a social contract among people bound together by history, geography and landscape. History, geography and landscape, therefore, determine, in many ways, the purpose and mission of people bonded together in society.

How we interpret our experiences in our specific environment and how we organise ourselves to reproduce our livelihood therein, are the underlying fundamentals to any society and are the bricks that make up the structure of all the institutions we create in order to preserve and extend our civilisation.

All our activities and affairs, be they political, economic, cultural or judicial, have, in fact, to be informed by our historic purpose and mission. The extent to which we are confused or out of sync with our historic mission is the same extent to which the Constitution, the highest body of laws of the land, will prove problematic.

The spirit and the letter of the social contract will, at most times, be at odds with each other if the fundamentals of the mission are not kept foremost before our eyes. All those who call for constitutional reform without the demand to revisit our historic mission are being irresponsible.

What is our historic mission?

We are island-societies of a specific region, peopled in a particular way and by a particular process, developed to be the hinterland and outposts of metropolitan epi-centres and designed to be a large labour pool to satisfy the vagaries of international capitalism.

From the Joint-Stock West India Company of the 1640s to the BP Amocos of today, the relationships have remained fundamentally the same. We were forged by the processes and structures of socialised labour such as slavery, indenture and wage-work into being a unique, Caribbean people, whose whole purpose is being free - to be free and democratic - and all our struggles in this region have been geared towards making ourselves our own reason for being and making ourselves the masters of these island-societies.

When the mass movements of the 20s, 30s and 40s were centre-stage, the historic mission of Home Rule (ie Independence and Republicanism) and Federation of the islands were foremost on the political/economic agenda.

They never deviated.

It was only in the 50s with the coming to the fore of the "middle-class" intelligentsia, who seized the leadership and control of the mass movements, that our historic purpose was compromised.

The middle-class intelligentsia, educated precisely for that reason by the system, educated to be eternally conservative, never seemed to desire the complete removal of the old relationships, but instead tinkered with the fundamentals to fashion their own style of managing the old order.

Both the 1962 and 1976 Constitutions reflect this conservatism and deviation from the historic mission. That explains why every thrust upwards from the people, and almost every dispute today between rival forces among the elite, tend to be expressed in terms of constitutional crises.

"Race" was not a major factor in Caribbean reality when the workers and farmers movements were centre-stage. Cipriani and Rienzi (formerly "Deonarine") could lead the largely Afro-Caribbean TLP (Trinidad Labour Party) and oil workers; just as Butler could be offered to lead the Indo-Caribbean sugar workers.

Again, the history is there to show that the racial cleavages intensified and crystallised with the emergence of the middle-class intelligentsia as leadership on both sides of the divide.

By the time of Independence, one half of the population had already come to be mortally afraid of a Home Government comprised largely of Afro-Caribbean people, and even more so a Caribbean Federation in which they would be even more a minuscule minority.

The work of people like HP Singh was crucial in promoting such a perspective, while the incumbents in power did nothing to change or transform the view.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the most violent elections in our history were the ones of 1958 (federal elections) and 1961 (the national election just prior to Independence of 1962.)

One recalls that in El Dorado, Tunapuna, houses belonging to people on either side of the racial divide were attacked and/or burned down, causing many to sleep in Perseverance Hall and at the police station.

After all was said and done, the Federation collapsed and each island sought to move to Independence on its own. Independence came and the fears previously expressed never became reality, even though racial tension from time to time would flare up.

The irony, though, is none of the individual island-societies could exist without intra-regional trade and political relationships. It is this political-economic regional demand that will force us back to our historic mission.

It is forcing us even now to consider a single currency to facilitate the further development of the regional market rather than the option of "Dollarisation," which will only take the management of fiscal measures out of our hands, away from our Central Banks, and put it in the hands of foreign metropolitan agencies and institutions, thereby furthering the old order.

Trinidad and Tobago's manufacturing sector is now the most aggressive and competitive one in the region, and the rest of the region is beginning to complain.

Will we seek only to make profits off the region and not take responsibility for further integration and development on behalf of all in the region?

Jack, Duprey, Sabga, Mohammed (Cole Cold) etc must answer this.

Any constitutional reform must, first of all, be informed by these regional political and economic demands. The rest is really secondary.

The question is: Will we in T&T ignore our historic mission and remain forever a "recalcitrant minority" within the region?