-Challenging message from Shridath Ramphal
“THE BLOODSTREAM of our regional integration process is threatened by anaemia, and needs an infusion of people power to resuscitate what we know as CARICOM (Caribbean Community)…” That stark warning has come from the eminent West Indian, whose name has been integrally linked to decades of efforts in promoting economic and political integration, and spreading the gospel of our ‘oneness’ as West Indians —- Sir Shridath Ramphal.
The former long-serving Commonwealth Secretary-General, Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, and chairman of The West Indian Commission was passionate in reflecting his personal distress by what he views as leadership failure by governments to arrest the continuing decline in the health of CARICOM.
The Guyana-born Ramphal, who has settled down in Barbados, chose, just over a week ago, the ‘Tenth Sir Archibald Nedd Memorial Lecture’ in Grenada as his forum to articulate his deep concerns over CARICOM’s future by posing the challenging question: ‘Is The West Indies West Indian?’ as his central theme.
As guest speaker of the Grenada Bar Association, organiser of the memorial lecture, Sir Shridath wrapped his theme around the late Grenadian thinker and journalist, ‘Teddy’. A. Marryshow.
He had pioneered, from the first edition of his newspaper, ‘The Westindian’, 95 years ago last month, the concept that ‘The West Indies Must Be Westindian’, and regularly featured on the masthead of his newspaper, with ‘Westindian’ symbolically joined up as one word.
In commending the outstanding contributions of Sir Archibald, a son of Grenada, “learned in the law, and a West Indian distinguished in his practice in regional jurisdictions,” Ramphal noted:
“We honour his memory best by allowing these occasions to have a sweep beyond Grenadian shores…,” and so set the tone for an informed and eloquent address, which deserves a much wider audience, and certainly should be read by all CARICOM Heads of Government and key officials of the public and private sectors, the region’s labour movement and non-government organisations.
Basic contradiction
As West Indians, he told his Grenada audience, “we have always faced a basic contradiction of ‘oneness’ and ‘otherness’; a basic paradox of kingship and alienation. Much of our history is the interplay of these contrarieties. But they are not equal in weight. The very notion of being West Indian speaks to the identity of oneness…”
“That identity,” he said, “is the product of centuries of living together, and is itself a triumph over the divisive geography of an archipelago which speaks to otherness. Today, CARICOM, and all it connotes, is the hallmark of that triumph, and it is well to remember the process which forged it — lest we forget, and lose it…”
Then came a bit of history on the region’s influential roles at the hemispheric and international levels to win allies, and keep check on divisive forces as collective efforts continued to be made to advance the goals of the economic integration movement, now in its 37th year since its inauguration on July 4, 1973 at Chaguaramas in Trinidad and Tobago.
Hailed in an assessment of him by the late Rex Nettleford — a household name in the spheres of West Indian education and culture — as ‘Sonny’ Ramphal, “part Asian, part African, part European, part Native American but totally Caribbean,” Sir Shridath stressed at the Sir Archibald Memorial Lecture:
“The West Indies cannot be West Indian if West Indian affairs, regional matters, are not the unwritten premise of every government’s agenda; not occasionally, but always; not as ad hoc problems, but as the basic environment of policy…”
Lamenting that “it is not so now,” he noted that only the Prime Minister of Grenada (Tillman Thomas), new chairman of CARICOM, took time to mention CARICOM in his New Year’s address.
“For most West Indian governments,” he argued, “Caribbean integration is a thing apart, not a vital organ of national life. It seems that only when it is fatally damaged, or withers away, will (national) Cabinet agendas change…
“When the unsung benefits of regionalism are no longer available as instruments to bolster local development and bargaining with larger countries, and coping with the destructive reach of drug trafficking — only then, perhaps, will our governments be forced into reconstructing those vital elements of regional support that neglect had helped to destroy…”
‘Identity’ issue
While the seminal 1992 report of The West Indian Commission remains buried — along with subsequent major works by other West Indian thinkers — in government offices and institutions, Ramphal was underscoring in Grenada his contention:
“There may be grouses, even anger, at not being treated ‘properly’ at immigration counters, but that is because as ‘West Indians’, we expect to be treated better…
“Our anger hinges not on the absence of identity, but on its assumed reality; on the conviction that our common identity is not a garb we wear outside, but shed when we come home. We groan when West Indian cricket grovels, and jump when it triumphs…”
What, he asked, “is all this but identity,” and argued: “It is not an identity crisis that we face. We are a family; we know we are. But our family values are less sturdy than they should be — those values that should make regional unity real, should move it from rhetoric to reality; should make integration an intuitive process, and the CSME a natural bonding…”
A former legal draughtsman of the short-lived West Indies Federation, and Attorney-General and Foreign Minister of Guyana, Ramphal was emphatic: “Until we live by these values, smoothing out the wrinkles so that all the family prospers, we degrade that identity…”
He applauded Prime Minister Thomas’ recent call, as current CARICOM chairman, for the West Indian people to be better informed and more intimately engaged in the regional project, emphasising that:
“CARICOM is essentially about people; about West Indian people, but in truth, they have been too remote from its being. They are its heartbeat, but in the small states that we all are, governments tend to control the bloodstream of the integration process; and when anaemia threatens, as it does now, it is an infusion of people power that is needed to resuscitate CARICOM…”
ON CCJ: As Ramphal sees it, “nothing speaks louder of this current debilitation than our substantial denial of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ),” and he pointed out:
“The Bar Association of Grenada is host to this Lecture Series, which is a memorial to a great West Indian lawyer. It is poignant that the inaugural lecture, delivered in 1996 by JS Archibald, Q.C., was entitled: ‘Essentials for a West Indies Supreme Court to replace the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the final appellate court for Commonwealth Caribbean States and Territories’.
Sadly, he noted, “fifteen years later, it is still apposite that I address this issue when we talk of being West Indian,” stressing that:
“As a West Indian, I despair; as a West Indian lawyer, I am ashamed that the West Indies should be a major reason for the unwelcome retention of the Privy Council… This absurd and unworthy paradox must be resolved by action. In law, as in ourselves, the West Indies must be West Indian…”