According to Sir Arthur Lewis in his pamphlet ‘The Agony of the Little Eight,’ in August 1960 the premier of Trinidad & Tobago Dr. Eric Williams met secretly in Antigua with Jamaica’s premier Norman Manley “to resolve their differences on West Indies Federation.” For two years they had been shouting at each other across the Caribbean Sea, championing their opposing views on the subject, “to the great delight of Sir Alexander Bustamante—for with each shout a few more Jamaicans were disgusted with federal spectacle and a few more votes were garnered for what would be the final show in September 1961.”
Still in Lewis’s telling, at last the two leaders were meeting for a quiet talk. They soon reached an agreement. Each jettisoned his extreme position. The new federation would not be weaker than the old, as Manley had demanded in his white paper of May 1959. Neither would it be remotely like the model advocated by Dr. Williams in his ‘The Economics of Nationhood’ of September 1959. Instead they invented a reserve list of federal powers to be added to “the exclusive list and the concurrent list.” The matters in dispute between them would be added to the “reserve list,” whence they would be removed only by votes representing a majority of the population. Other tendentious issues were solved by allowing periods of grace. Customs union, freedom of movement, and income tax would all come—but gradually.
The meeting was a triumph of commonsense, by Lewis’s measure, but it was marred by a tactical mistake: its conclusions were kept secret. Thus “the other eight islands were drawn together in a bond of suspicion and hostility.” Most of them, with the exception of Antigua, had liked ‘The Economics of Nationhood,’ since it provided for Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados to subsidize the rest. After the meeting it was seen that Dr. Williams had abandoned ‘The Economics of Nationhood.’ But no one knew what he had put in its place.
It was unclear to the writer why the two leaders kept silent about their conclusions. But the result drove a wedge between themselves and those who looked to them for leadership. The Eight now began to assemble under the banner of Sir Grantley Adams who became suspicious of the other two leaders and who had nothing to lose by the growing hostilities. Thus at the crucial series of discussions of the proposed federal constitution, from October 1960 to June 1961, Trinidad and the so-called Little Eight got more and more on each other’s nerves, creating an atmosphere of mutual antipathy that would lead directly to Trinidad going it alone after the referendum.
Dr. Williams kept to his bargain; he consistently supported Jamaica’s plan to create a federation, which, though weak at the start, might grow stronger with time. Once Mr. Manley had announced the referendum, Dr. Williams had seen that there was no hope of keeping Jamaica in the federation except on the terms proposed by Manley. Neither Sir Grantley Adams nor the Eight understood the weakness of Manley’s position. They continued to hammer him. To help, Dr. Williams issued a warning: “Don’t drive Jamaica out of the federation. If you do, Trinidad will also leave.”
The warning was hardly noticed when it was first issued, somewhat cryptically in October 1960, Lewis notes. Repeated more starkly in May 1961, it sounded ominously in the ears of those who knew how close would be the Jamaica voting. So, when in September 1961 Jamaicans voted by a small majority to leave the federation, relations between the political leaders of Trinidad and those of the Eight were at their lowest ebb. If commonsense were to prevail, the departure of Jamaica would be hailed as a chance to build a strongly centralized federation, to which most of them had at some time been committed. But commonsense cannot flourish in an atmosphere where everybody is angry with everybody else.
In ‘Agony of the Little Eight’ Sir Arthur cites what he referred to as “the political crisis in Saint Lucia,” when George Charles lost his majority in the legislature and in a general election was defeated by John Compton, who became the chief minister. “To Mr. Compton,” wrote Lewis, “the position reached by his fellow ministers in the middle of 1964 seemed obviously inadequate. The point that all federal constitutions are compromises and that all compromises are inadequate did not register. He was ready to start again. In a moment of extravagance one of his ministers [J.M.D. Bousquet?] tore up the Barbados draft in a session of the Legislative Council.” In Lewis’s telling, federation was “the only framework that will guarantee law and order, good government, financial stability, the recruitment and retention of good technical staff and the ability to attract financial assistance from outside, including the power to borrow, and including also the kind of stability that attracts private investment.”
As Paul Theroux famously observed, the torch of time lights up the darkest corners. We know today that the failure of the West Indies Federation did not deny the politicians of our region “the power to borrow.” Sir Arthur was also off course when he noted in ‘The Agony of the Little Eight’ that “ultimately West Indians will come together in political association, but only after the present generation of leaders is dead.” The leaders mentioned in this piece have all gone to their maker. Still we could not be further apart as a region, with our respective populations at one another’s jugulars in an internecine war with no end in sight. We seem unable to come together even in opposition to COVID-19, as we crow about who has best coped with the deadly virus.
We have different approaches to the problem of getting stranded nationals back home, concentrating instead on who has suffered the least casualties—indicative of which islands were best prepared, which were “worst.”
Often nature intervenes when we refuse to do for ourselves what must be done. Be reminded, too, the price has always proved far costlier than we can imagine!
