History Repeating Itself By Raoul Pantin

Columbus’ “discovery” of Trinidad on his third voyage in 1498 caused little stir in Spain.  The island, inhabited by Amerindians, lacked gold.  Trinidad would become well known as a port-of-call, en route to the riches of the Indies, but its first Spanish Governor, Don Antonio Sedeno, was not appointed until 1530, some 32 years after Columbus first sighted the three peaks he named after the Trinity.

Sedeno wasn’t interested in Trinidad.  For him, it was simply a base, from which he could and would launch repeated expeditions, often with disastrous results, into the neighbouring South American jungle.  Like many others who would follow him, Sedeno was in hot pursuit of El Dorado, the fabled Indian “city of gold”.  Between battling hostile Indians, envious Spanish rivals, and futile expeditions up Venezuela’s Orinoco river, Don Antonio lost a lot of men.  But he was relentless, even resorting to jailing and torturing Spanish soldiers opposed to him.

One night in 1540, to the shouts of “Long live the King who delivers us!” and “down with Sedeno who ill-treats us pitilessly”, Sedeno’s own soldiers rebelled, “went in arms to his quarters, disarmed him and placed sentinels at his door”.  Within ten years of his appointment, Trinidad’s first Spanish Governor had been overthrown in a coup d’etat.  Sedeno was eventually freed by loyal soldiers and lived to fight until the day, on another expedition up the Orinoco, a female Amerindian slave poisoned his food.

For more than 250 years, right up until the island was captured for England in 1797, Trinidad remained neglected – so much so that in 1784, the Spanish government had approved a Cedula of Population, allowing French settlers from neighbouring Caribbean islands to settle in and develop Trinidad.

Within five years, this French influx carried the population from 1, 000, with African slaves outnumbering the European population, to 10, 422.  That, too, would become a precedent – the need for labour involved Trinidad in both the slave trade and, with the emancipation in 1834, East Indian indentureship.

From the start Trinidad had proven no easy place to rule.  There was English government after 1797, but there were Spanish laws on the Statute books and a French plantocracy which maintained a traditional distrust and dislike for English rule.  Civil clashes between the English authorities and the French population were not infrequent.  And over this centuries-old European rivalry there always lurked the ominous shadow of slave rebellions.

Within the first 100 years of English rule there were two major confrontations with the authorities, one involving the African and the other the Indian population.  In 1881 there were the famous Canboulay (a predecessor to Carnival) riots, triggered by a government move to quell what was an African harvest celebration.  Four years later, a similar clash occurred when police tried to put an end to a Muslim Hosay festival.

Trinidad’s early political history soon set a pattern – the charismatic leader, the ululating crowds, civil strife, followed by some measure of reform.  Until the next round.

By the early 1900s, an incipient trade union movement took to the streets to demand recognition.  It began moderately, but by 1937 had escalated into an almost island–wide upheaval, led by a legendary figure, Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, a public agitator par excellence.  Butler was eventually jailed but riots erupted in his support, and on his release he went on to create a popular impact on Trinidad’s politics.

In the early 1950’s, a new and educated brand of messianic leader emerged in the person of Dr Eric Williams, an Oxford Ph.D history graduate.  Popular agitation was also his method, but it was a new message.

Dr Williams’ People’s National Movement (PNM), appealing largely to the African or black underclass, was suffused with the “wind of change” that was then blowing through Africa.  India’s independence in 1947 was the first step of retreating Empire.  The African colonies would soon follow.  Nationalism and Independence became the rallying cry of a new generation, and the English-speaking Caribbean was not to be left behind.

Trinidad and Tobago, its smaller neighbour, became independent on 31 August 1962, and a Republic within the Commonwealth on 24 September 1976.  Until his death in office in March 1981, Dr Williams and the PNM would dominate Trinidad’s political, economic and social life.  Their most telling impact was the ascendancy of a new black middle class, and the paling of European control and influence.

Free secondary and university education were hallmarks of PNM rule, but it was the newly-educated and black generation that, in the late 1960s, rose up in anger against that rule, to culminate in three months of Black Power street protests in 1970.  Black Power as protest had American origins, but not without a Trinidadian touch – the most famous Black Power activist in the late 1960s was Stokely Carmichael, Trinidad-born.

The rhetoric of Black Power was dead set against the “neo-colonial” style of the Williams government.  And when, on 21 April 1970, the government declared a nation-wide state of emergency to suppress the protest movement, a sizeable section of the then 800-man Regiment mutinied.

It took eleven days and nights of delicate negotiations between the rebel soldiers, holed up in their barracks deep inside Trinidad’s Northwestern peninsula, and a shaken government before the rebels could lay down their arms and surrender.  Two of the most prominent rebel leaders were both Sandhurst-trained Lieutenants.  They, along with another 80 soldiers, were subsequently court martialled and sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment.

But within two years their convictions were overturned by the Trinidad Court of Appeal, a decision upheld by England’s Privy Council, to which a startled government had appealed.  From the start of their trials, the rebel leaders had claimed they had been “tricked” into surrendering.  Promises had been made to them by their superior officers.  They had been “betrayed”.  The Court of Appeal leaned on their side.

Twenty years later, after a failed coup attempt by members of a black Muslim sect, The Jamaat al Muslimeen, there would be similar outcries of “trickery” and “betrayal”.  The Muslimeen was a natural by-product of Black Power.  Islam had taken a hold on the American Black Power movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.  It was regarded as an “African” religion, a counter to the suspect European churches.

And the new militant, or fundamentalist, flavour of Islam in the late 1980s also had its attractions.  Muslimeen leaders travelled to Libya, returning to Trinidad with fervent visions of a new and purer society.  On 27 July 1990, this new militancy erupted in a co-ordinated “military-style” takeover of Parliament, one of Trinidad’s two radio stations and its single television station.  A car bomb took out Police Headquarters in the downtown capital of Port-of-Spain.

The Prime Minister, half his Cabinet and several Opposition Members of Parliament were held “hostage”, along with another two dozen television personnel, for six tense days in 1990.  On 1 August 1990, celebrated as Emancipation Day, a public holiday, some 114 members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen released their hostages (a shot and sick Prime Minister had been released the day before), put down their weapons and, hands in the air, turned themselves over to a bristling army.

They now face charges ranging from treason to murder, both capital offences, though no one has been hanged in Trinidad for over a decade and the death penalty is now the subject of public debate.  As in 1970, the coupmakers have protested against being charged or tried.  They, too, have claimed “betrayal”, based on an “amnesty” they negotiated with the “hostage” government, which was subsequently signed by the President.  The validity of an “amnesty” signed in such circumstances is likely to involve legal battles that could drag on for years.

The insurgences of both 1970 and 1990 also had their roots in a deadbeat economy, and rising unemployment, especially among the young.  The jobless ran to 15 per cent in 1970, but the petro dollar “boom” of the 1970s mitigated that and eased the social tension.  By 1990 unemployment had soared beyond 20 per cent, after almost a decade of economic decline fuelled by the crash in oil prices.

The National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) government that defeated the PNM in a 33-3 landslide in December 1986 has had little choice but to cut the reduced economic cake thinner – and popular dissatisfaction has been the result.  Unpopular government, a mass of idle young people, the new Messiah preaching liberation and redemption – these were the ingredients that repeatedly had exploded in social unrest in Trinidad, whose recorded history had begun with a coup.

Raoul Pantin is a former editor of the Trinidad Express, a published poet, short story writer, playwright and author of Black Power Day, a contemporary history of Trinidad.