A Public Address from the Archives:
Vol. 13, No. 53, Pages 3–9 (July–December 1971)
(The Graduation Address delivered at the U.W.I., Cave Hill, Barbados,
on 5th February, 1971.)
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. I too want to get into this popular stream, but I am also a little more anxious to find out just what it is all about. Obviously West Indians cannot be different from other men in everything, since we all belong to homo sapiens, so one has to ask where we should draw the line; in what respects should we be the same as other peoples, and in what respects should we strive to be different?
My only qualification for talking about this subject is that I have probably thought about it more than most other West Indians. Since no job was available for me here when I graduated, I have had to spend most of my life out of the West Indies. And in striving to earn my living in the great wide world I have had to try to master the highly competitive skills of my profession. In the process I have become what is now called in the West Indies an Afro-Saxon. The term is meant to be abusive, but what in practice it seems to mean is a black man who can hold his own in competition with white people on their own ground. Facing this difficult challenge, I have had to ask myself over and over again over the past thirty years what sort of person I ought to be trying to be. West Indian, yes, but just what does this mean that is intended to distinguish us from other human beings?
Obviously one must not take to its extreme conclusion the proposition that West Indians must live differently from other men. If so, it would be wrong for Barbadians to play cricket, which is an Englishman’s invention; or if Barbadians do play cricket, they should make their own special rules. Taken to the extreme, the proposition would prevent Trinidadians from playing in steelbands, since the steel from which the instruments are made comes from iron ores which are not found in Trinidad. Trinidadians should make music instead exclusively from bamboos, which grow luxuriantly in that island, and which make splendid musical instruments.
I do not wish to make fun of the proposition that we should be different, which, as I have said, I accept: I am merely emphasising the fact that the proposition is not as universal as some make it out to be. There are people who worry at the level of the commodities we use, and insist that it is wrong to use imported materials, or to eat imported food—which to me seems an economic question rather than one for nationalist emotions. Other people are [heated] up about the clothes we wear, or about our hairstyles, which seem to me to be trivial and ever enchanting phenomena hardly worth the glance of the philosopher or statesman, even though I recognise that difference in these respects gives emotional comfort to a great many people: men have fought bitterly about the wearing of a turban. That we should be different seems to me a good proposition and one which is easily nonsensical or trivial, unless one defines rather carefully what it is we are to differ in.
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.
Even with this fatal simplification, the proposition is hardly meaningful, and always bemuses Africans who make its acquaintance. In the first place, Africa is the most diversified of all the continents in terms of strictly indigenous institutions, languages, food patterns, clothes or any other index which you care to choose. There are hundreds of tribal and national groups, very different from each other, so there is no unique African model that West Indians could imitate. In the second place Africans themselves are trying hard to get into the modern world, and are in the process shedding a great number of the characteristics which they developed in isolation. The idea that we should choose as models what they are discarding seems to them a little quaint. To use the popular jargon, the Africans are having as big a crisis of identity as we are. In stretching out to them we shall find sympathy and understanding, but hardly remedies for the condition in which we both find ourselves.
However, let me come back to my theme, the proposition that we strive to be ourselves, not Englishmen or Africans or Indians or Chinese, but West Indians.
Different in what ways? Since we are not racists, we are committed to the proposition that we are essentially the same as other men. Societies differ not in the underlying humanity, but in what they make of themselves and of their environment. What differs is the human achievement. So when we say that West Indians are to be different, we mean that they must make something different—our achievement must be unique.
In framing the problem in this way I am automatically ruling out what is in practice the most obvious difference between peoples, namely their manners and customs, especially their clothes, language, accent, mannerisms, and food. When you meet your friend should you shake hands with him? The traditional answer is: If he is an American, Yes. If he is an Englishman, No. If he’s a Frenchman, shake hands with him every five minutes. When we say that a man is typically German, or Chinese, or that we can always recognise a West Indian on the streets of Harlem, it is to these superficial characteristics that we refer.
Inevitably, manners have strong local roots and differ from place to place, and inevitably local conservatives and local revolutionaries get very excited with every new importation. Traditionally it used to be the most highly educated and well travelled who were least identifiable by these local mannerisms, since they tend to follow the precept that when in Rome one does as the Romans do; but today, thanks to records, television and films, it is the masses of the population who seem to be quickest in adopting the international lifestyles of the world’s young adults, and the whole world is now coming to look and sound alike.
No doubt West Indians will and should evolve their own ever changing system of manners, but this is not what we have to examine. The charge against the Afro-Saxon is not that he does not dress like a West Indian or speak with a West Indian accent, but that he does not think like a West Indian. Hence our question has to be: how should West Indian thinking differ from other thinking? And to answer it we have to look at the whole realm of human thought, and to ask what opportunities it offers for national characteristics. This is a very appropriate question for a university community, since thought is our stock in trade.
The human achievement is all the product of thought, applied to work. It is rather small. Man has existed for a million years, but it is only within the last 5,000 years that we have made significant progress. This is because nature is hard and cruel, and has had to be fought every step of the way. The fight has not been led by any one nation; nations have had very little to do with it, and nationalism has been more often destructive than helpful. Individuals of many nations have contributed, each building on the work of his predecessors from many different nations at many different times. What has resulted from this is a body of knowledge which is now the heritage of all mankind. This knowledge divides into three areas—first, knowledge of how phenomena work, which includes the natural and social sciences; secondly, moral knowledge, or if you like, opinion as to how human beings ought to behave towards each other if human society is to be tolerable; and thirdly aesthetic knowledge, or how to be creative in the arts. Each of these combines elements of universality with some opportunity for differences between national groups.
Let us take first science, natural and social. The evolution of natural science was delayed for a long time by prejudice, or as we would now say by lack of objectivity. Indeed the very notion that science should try to be objective was bitterly resisted, by those who thought that we should accept only results which seemed consistent with what was already revealed about God. Science was to serve religion, or as we might now say, to serve the purposes of history. The social sciences are fighting the same struggle today against those, including many social scientists, who not only deny that social scientists can be objective, but also argue that they should not try to be objective, since their science should serve the purposes of history. If they were right, social science would differ from society to society; but they are not right. Genuine social scientists, gathered together from all parts of the world, have no difficulty in understanding each other’s concepts, and in my profession of economics we have found that any tool which is illuminating in one part of the world—like monetary theory or linear programming or the discounting of future returns—is equally illuminating everywhere, whether in the Soviet Union, or the U.S.A. or Tanzania.
I am of course talking about theory. The applied part of any science is naturally environment-related. Any scientific group is bound to contribute more to the study of its own environment, or its own history, than will be contributed by other groups elsewhere. Every colony has had to fight the battle to have its own curriculum in its schools and colleges. This is obviously right, but is also easily overdone. We make progress in science not only from studying the local environment, but also from elaborating our basic theory. This kind of theoretical elaboration frequently derives from wide comparison. Particularly, if you want to be a revolutionary in science, achieving some great new breakthrough, you have to understand the existing system which you wish to overthrow better than it is understood by its supporters, not less so. Keynes was able to invent a new economics because he thoroughly understood the old. If any new physics or sociology is going to come out of the West Indies, it will be from people who have mastered the old physics or sociology, and not just from people who have rejected the old without really coming to grips with it.
In sum, we will make our special contribution to applied science, but we must first master the basic universal theoretical principles of the disciplines we use. And our chance of contributing to those basic disciplines will depend very largely on the excellence of our secondary schools and the respect accorded to basic theoretical studies in our university colleges. In this respect, West Indians will not differ from other men.
I have dwelt somewhat on this point because there is a strong current of thought that West Indians should study only things West Indian. This is an egregious error, and a danger to the young. The old are not so easily moved, since we have learned each to go his own way; but the young are very conformist, and are easily bulldozed into acting against their better judgement.
Let me turn now to the second area of human thought, that of morals, or of what behaviour towards each other should be. This itself divides into two parts, personality and social structure. Manners could also be included here, but I have already dealt with this topic.
There is a distinct West Indian personality, marked by its aggressive nature, which in turn derives from the insecure family life in which such a large proportion of our children are reared. Not all West Indians are aggressive, but it is the quality we most admire in our leaders. This aggressive personality has some advantages; it is the chief reason why West Indians figure disproportionately in the black leadership of the United States. But it also has its disadvantages. For example, as Sir John Mordecai’s book on the breakdown of our federation shows, the chief reason was the inability of our three leaders in the same federal political party to maintain normal personal relations, and compromise with each other. We also make rather poor businessmen, compared with say the Nigerian Ibos, because unlike the Ibos we are spendthrift, and not very reliable in keeping our commitments punctually.
On the whole I do not think that it is an advantage for West Indians to have a distinct personality of our own. Philosophers and religious thinkers have meditated for five thousand years on what ideal human beings should be like, and there is no reason to believe that these ideals should differ from one country to another. For my part I think our aggressive personality makes us inferior to our African brethren, who bring up their children in warm stable and secure family situations, and who therefore produce a stable personality. If we must imitate the Africans, this is what I would urge our countrymen to imitate. Also, if we continue to be unbusinesslike and spendthrift, our society will have no long-term future, since it will not survive in this Darwinian world.
In the moral area we have also the subject of social structure—family relations, the political system, class, economic relations and so on. There is an immense variety of social structures, as one moves from place to place. None embodies perfection, and all change nowadays with unprecedented rapidity. Men have imagined and written for five thousand years about every kind of social system, and it seems highly improbable that West Indians will come up with a new kind of social structure which has never been heard of before; this is no doubt why those of us who do not like our existing structures find ourselves having to import our ideas from abroad instead of trying to invent some unique West Indian social system. If perchance we did invent something new of our own (which is admittedly possible even though unlikely) and it proved to be good, it would soon be widely imitated elsewhere, since what was good for us would be equally good for other social groups. For my part, I believe in the open, egalitarian, raceless society which we do not now have, but to which most of our leaders are committed. But when we get there we shall find ourselves in company with many other nations.
In sum, in the area of human relations, national difference is either trivial, in so far as it relates to manners, or undesirable in so far as relates to personality or to social structure. This is because the underlying principles of ethics are of universal validity; what is good for one society is likely to be good for every other. It would be nice if West Indians could have a better community life than other nations, but there is no reason to expect our struggles to be easier than anybody else’s.
Finally I come to aesthetics. Music, literature and art are as important a part of the heritage of mankind as are science and morals. They differ from science in that they do not represent what is, but are products of the creative imagination. They have therefore infinite scope for variation. And yet they tend to be distinctly national in character. This is because artists live in colonies, like ants or porpoises. Some great artistic figure attracts other artists to his school; they see or hear alike; they help and criticise each other. And their product is clearly distinct from that of other schools.
It is thus of the very nature of the game that as aesthetic activity burgeons in the West Indies, our art and music and literature will be clearly distinguishable from that of other peoples. We shall have our own schools of painting and music and poetry and drama and the rest. This is the essential and most valuable sense in which West Indians must be different from other peoples. This is the contribution which above all others we know we can make to the common human heritage.
I stress the word common to avoid misunderstanding. The human heritage includes Chinese art, European art, African art; Hindu music, which is quite different from Ashanti music, which in its turn differs from the diatonic structure of jazz and the European classics. This is our common heritage, because the civilised man learns to appreciate as many of these different styles as he can, just as he learns to like French cooking and Chinese cooking and Malay cooking, which are essentially different. For any person to wish to exclude himself from any part of the human artistic heritage, in favour of his local nationalism, is simply boorish. And what is one to say of the incident in South Africa last year where three African pianists were turned away from a Beethoven competition on the ground that Beethoven is not part of African culture? Beethoven belongs to all of us.
We must also note that it is true of the arts, as it is of science, that one learns most by comparison. Our writers must study other writers—not just in English but in other languages—when they are young, in order to have a basis for developing their own styles. Difference must be grounded in wide knowledge and not in ignorance of all except the local effort.
Fortunately we have already established the beginnings of an artistic heritage. In literature we have had the great explosion of novels since the 1950’s. In art, starting also in the 50’s, a steadier pace has been maintained, but we have already reached the position of having established artists who manage to make a living just by selling their works. In music we are still far behind, since despite our great contributions to popular music, we have a dearth of well trained musicians, and especially a dearth of the string players needed to maintain a symphony orchestra.
The principal handicap is of course that there are so few people who understand and enjoy the creative arts in our communities, that our artists, musicians, writers, actors and so on, have too small a market. So they have to go abroad and scatter instead of making their little colonies here, which would be very much more productive. The smallness of the market is the fault of our secondary schools, which fail to develop this part of our children’s personalities.
A society without the creative arts is a cultural desert. I would commend to our statesmen that they put a lot more money into the creative arts departments of our secondary schools.
To conclude, as I look ahead at the evolution of the West Indies, I see many respects in which we should strive to be like other peoples—like having a well rounded personality, or scientists and scholars of world repute—and many respects in which we will be different—like having some distinctive manners and customs, our own curricula in schools, our own applied science, natural and social, and our own musical and other artistic achievements. The main point that I would leave with you is that our chance to make something good of our own depends on our studying carefully what other peoples have done, and learning from their mistakes and their successes. If we are going to close our minds in a box of pure West Indianness, we shall achieve nothing worthwhile.