Chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission (CRC), Sir Hilary Beckles (Credit: FLickr / UWI)
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) — Vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Professor Hilary Beckles yesterday called for a rekindling of the Caribbean revolution if the region is to make any meaningful headway in developing new strategies for socio-economic growth in the future.
“All of those countries that have achieved phenomenal economic development in the last 30 years they were driven by a desire to turn around the legacy of disrespect that their citizens have experienced in the colonial period.
“They are driven by the need to turn around the disrespect imposed upon their citizens in the colonial period and whether it is China, whether it is Japan, whether it is India, all of those countries are driven by this imperative. The United States was driven by that imperative in the 19th century.
“We in the Caribbean have to use our historical experience as a source of energy to drive our civilisations and our peoples out of doubt and despair. In other words we have to rekindle the Caribbean revolution,” Sir Hilary told delegates attending the second day of the Forum on the future of the Caribbean.
The three-day event is being attended by academics, political leaders, non-government organisations as well as service leaders into what the organisers said the sole purpose of which is “to shock the region into new ways of thinking and doing business”.
The forum is divided into three main themes — Stimulating Radical ideas; Re-Thinking the Caribbean future; and Taking Action for Sustainable Outcome”. It is being organised by UWI and a number of regional and international agencies as well s the Trinidad and Tobago government.
Sir Hilary, a prominent Caribbean historian and academic, told the forum that the Haitian revolution had provided ordinary people for the first time able to “mobilise to bring a democratic sensibility to their society, to uproot slavery and to say ‘as from today all persons in this society are free and are citizens'”.
“The first time in this hemisphere that reality was a part of our civilisation and we have to respect that and begin with that. This is where we took our first step into the modern world,” he said, adding that the belief “our development has stalled is primarily because there is a view that many of the things we have been doing have been counter-revolutionary.”
He said many other ways in which the region has conceived of development within the context of Caribbean history “have been counter-revolutionary” noting that Caribbean people had been able to overthrow the “most oppressive regimes ever created in human history and to do this required tremendous confidence and self-belief”.
“From the Haitian people to Toussaint L’Ouverture all the way through Marcus Garvey and beyond to create the modern democratic Caribbean required tremendous confidence and self-belief. The views that our confidence as a people is waning, the view that doubt is overtaking the Caribbean world (and) to live in a culture of doubt is counter-revolutionary because we Caribbean peoples have no historical reasons to have doubt or to lose our self-confidence..
“So we are speaking then of the regeneration of the revolution to restore confidence and self-belief as the physiological basis to drive our engine forward. We have to leave home finally. We have to stop seeing ourselves as appendices and appendages of other power systems in the world,” Sir Hilary said, said adding, we have to say to Western Europe and all of the other civilisations that we are Caribbean peoples and we are living home”.
He said that the new Caribbean paradigm must begin with the process of reparatory justice for the region.
“Reparatory justice for all of the crimes that have been committed in this region is critical to the rebuilding of our self-respect as a people. It is critical to the maturity of our sense of citizenship. It is going to be critical for our sense of the ownership of the Caribbean.
“This is our home and all of those who have committed crimes in our homes must be held accountable,” said Sir Hilary, who is also chairman of the Caribbean Community Commission on Reparation and Social Justice.
Sir Hilary said that it is often forgotten, even as we celebrate the 100th birthday of the region’s first Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Sir Arthur Lewis, who in 1942 argued that this crime of slavery has to be accounted for and until this is done the Caribbean will not reach its maturity.
“We have been schooled to accept as a norm the widespread poverty in our midst,” he said, noting “this Caribbean has been built upon the impoverishment of our peoples that was its overriding philosophy (and) we as Caribbean people today must say that we are committed to uprooting the normalcy of this poverty that is binding this region together”.
He said poverty cannot be the basis of a modern citizenship and “we have to confront all of those things we were told to accept as a norm”.
“I do not accept poverty is a norm, it is historically manufactured and it can be historically uprooted in the future,” the Barbadian-born academic said.
He said he was also not in agreement with those advocating that the state must be marginalised iwithin “our economic development models”.
“If you examine the economic model of any successful nation on this planet, not one of them is based upon the notion of the marginaliSation of the state. All of them are based on the assumption that the state has a responsibility to provide and create environments for individuals to creatively and bring in values to their communities.”
He said for the Caribbean states to retreat into their margins of their cultures at this time “would be to render our peoples even more vulnerable than they have been in the past”.
He said the region needed to confront that economic dogma that seeks to impose upon it a language that is inconsistent with the Caribbean’s historical past.
Sir Hilary said that an examination of all of the development models in which economic competition becomes a critical part, there are three main sectors, competing at the level of prices, competition at the levels of quality and also creative innovation.
“This is where we are trapped at this moment in our Caribbean world, we are not competing at the level of creative innovation.”
The academic also made a plea for regional countries to invest more in education and praised Trinidad and Tobago for developing a policy that makes it among the top countries in the hemisphere as it relates to the education of its citizens.