Arts for the 21st Century

Sir Arthur Lewis

Sir Arthur Lewis

Sir William Arthur Lewis (1915–1991), Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics (1979), was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, to Saint Lucian parents who had immigrated from Antigua. World famous for the “Lewis Model” of dual-sector development, he held professorships at the University of Manchester and Princeton University, was the first president of the Caribbean Development Bank, and Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (1959-1962). He was knighted in 1963. His work remains highly relevant to modern studies on economic development and structural change.

ON BEING DIFFERENT

A constant theme in today’s West Indies is that we should stop imitating other peoples, and do our own thing. We should be different, and West Indian. It is an attractive theme; has indeed become almost a bandwagon theme; every other public speaker takes the chance of recording his adherence to it.

ON BEING DIFFERENT

Before I tackle this question let me first note that the ground is not entirely occupied by Afro-Saxons and the advocates of an exclusively West Indian culture. We have in our midst a third group who advocate that we should model ourselves on the Africans, since Africa is where most of our fathers came from some two centuries ago. I will leave aside the complication that there are more Indians than Africans in Guyana and nearly as many Indians as Africans in Trinidad—and follow the proponents of this idea in arguing as if West Indians were all descended from Africa.
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