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Caribbean Islands The Road to Independence
Self-government was gradually increased between 1946 and 1961.
The elections of those years served as dress rehearsals for
independence. From 1946 to 1955, East Indians were the best
organized group in Trinidad and Tobago. Comprising only 35 percent
of the population in 1946, East Indians united under the leadership
of Bhadese S. Maraj and won almost half of the elected seats in the
Legislative Council that year. They used their votes to finally
secure the legal right to marry and bury their dead according to
Hindu and Muslim rites. Since their arrival in Trinidad more than
a century earlier, many East Indians had been classified as
illegitimate because no unregistered marriage was considered legal
for inheritance purposes (see Population, this ch.).
Political parties remained fragmented in the 1950 elections,
often united, as one historian has put it, by nothing more than a
"common passion for the spoils of office." One hundred forty-one
candidates contested the eighteen elected seats; the single largest
bloc of seats on the Legislative Council, eight out of twenty-six,
was captured by an alliance between the "Butler party" and East
Indian leaders. The British and the non-East Indians disliked the
idea of having Butler and his supporters come to power. After the
1950 elections, none of Butler's party was chosen to sit on the
Executive Council, the result being that Gomes practically ran the
government. Within the restrictions of his semiautonomous
government, Gomes tried to function as a mediator between capital
and labor and to placate both Britain and Trinidad and Tobago. He
had limited success, however, and constitutional reform was
postponed until 1955, with elections scheduled for the following
year.
The election of 1956 was a watershed in the political history
of Trinidad and Tobago because it determined the course of the
country for the next thirty years. Gomes was defeated, and a new
party, the PNM, captured power and held it until 1986. PNM founder
and leader Eric Williams dominated the political scene from 1956
until his death in 1981.
Williams was a native Trinidadian who had spent almost twenty
years abroad in Britain and the United States. Although his family
was poor, Williams had received a very good education by winning
scholarships and had earned a First Class Oxford degree. Williams's
academic prowess set the standard for all Trinidadian and
Tobagonian political leaders through the late 1980s. While at
Oxford, Williams was subjected to a number of racial slights, and
he also suffered racial discrimination when he worked for the
Anglo-American Caribbean Commission in Washington from 1948 to
1955, an organization created in 1942 to coordinate nonmilitary
aspects of Caribbean policy. This discrimination profoundly and
permanently affected Williams's outlook on life and his politics.
He was a man who knew himself to be the intellectual equal of
educated people in Oxford, London, and Washington, and he felt that
he had not been accepted as such. Returning to Trinidad in 1948 as
deputy chairman of the Caribbean Research Council of the Caribbean
Commission, Williams involved himself in cultural, educational, and
semipolitical activities and became well known. In 1956 he decided
to enter politics and to forge a political party, the PNM. The PNM
was created by middle-class professionals who were mainly but not
exclusively black. Its main support came from the black community,
although Williams was also able to attract some whites and East
Indians. Williams gained a public constituency and a loyal party
following by giving lectures in Woodford Square, the main square in
Port-of-Spain. His lectures on Caribbean history were attended by
thousands, and Williams dubbed his interaction with the crowd the
"University of Woodford Square." There, Williams forged a bond with
the people that remained even after his death twenty-five years
later. Trinidadians and Tobagonians were proud to have an
international scholar in their midst. Williams gave them a sense of
national pride and confidence that no other leader was able to
match. His charisma and leadership made it possible for the new
party to be independent from existing political organizations and
from trade unions. PNM leaders envisioned a broad national party
that would include both capitalists and laborers; as such, the PNM
rejected socialism and welcomed foreign capital investment.
In 1956 the PNM captured a slim majority of the elected seats
on the Legislative Council, receiving 39.8 percent of the vote.
Butler's party and the TLP split the other elected seats. The
British governor, who controlled five appointed seats and two ex
officio seats, filled all of these with men acceptable to the PNM,
thus giving the party a majority of two-thirds of the seats on the
Legislative Council. Because the British were hoping to form a
Caribbean federation or, as a second choice, to launch viable
independent countries, it was in their interest to support
Williams, a charismatic black leader who had founded a strong
political party, who had international education and experience,
and who believed in private domestic and foreign investment.
Between 1956 and 1962, Williams consolidated his political base and
resolved two very important issues: federation and the presence of
United States bases on Trinidad.
The British created the West Indies Federation in 1958 (see The
West Indies Federation, 1958-62, ch. 1). During the next four
years, ten island nations, including Trinidad and Tobago, struggled
without success to make the federation into a government. The two
largest nations, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, had opposing
viewpoints; the former advocated a strong federal government,
whereas the latter preferred a weak one. Trinidad and Tobago, with
its higher revenues, preferred representation according to
financial contribution, but Jamaica, with its larger population,
wanted representation on the basis of population. After Jamaica
decided in September 1961 not to remain in the federation, Trinidad
and Tobago also decided to withdraw, not wishing to be tied to
eight small, poor islands for which it would be financially
responsible.
Despite British assistance and Williams's compelling
personality, the PNM did not come to rule Trinidad and Tobago
without a struggle. A number of groups united to oppose the PNM in
the federal elections of 1958 under the banner of the Democratic
Labour Party (DLP). Once again the campaign became racially
polarized as the DLP attracted the East Indians and others who were
left out of the PNM. East Indians felt that their cultural identity
might be lost if they did not stick together. They deplored
marriages between East Indians and blacks because they considered
blacks to have an inferior culture; East Indians were less hostile
to marriage with whites. Blacks also looked with disfavor on
intermarriage with East Indians. In addition, the East Indian
middle class, which had developed since the 1930s, seemed a threat
to the black professionals who were just coming to power. The PNM
increased its share of the vote in the 1958 election from 39.8
percent in 1956 to 48 percent; under the winner-take-all rule,
however, the DLP won 6 out of the 10 contested seats, as most of
its victories came in regions where the East Indians had an
absolute majority.
The PNM profited from the British policy of granting increasing
self-government to Trinidad and Tobago. Cabinet government was
introduced in 1959; the governor no longer presided over the
Executive Council, the Executive Council and chief minister were
renamed cabinet and premier (the preindependence title for prime
minister), and the premier had the right to appoint and dismiss
ministers. Mindful of their slim majority in the 1958 election,
leaders of the PNM determined to take whatever steps were necessary
to win the 1961 elections and be the party to lead Trinidad and
Tobago into independence. The PNM decided to use the issue of the
withdrawal of the United States from the Chaguaramas naval base to
unify the country and solidify their political base. In party
rallies in 1959 and 1960, Williams pledged that the flag of
Trinidad and Tobago would soon fly over Chaguaramas and also
declared independence from Britain and from the 1941 Lend-Lease
Agreement. Declaring that Trinidad and Tobago would not exchange
British colonialism for the United States variety, Williams rallied
the country to oust the United States from Chaguaramas and to
support the PNM.
When British prime minister Harold Macmillan came to Port-of-
Spain in June 1960, he told the government that he would open
negotiations between the United States and Trinidad and Tobago over
Chaguaramas and that Trinidad and Tobago would be an independent
participant. Once Williams had won the right for Trinidad and
Tobago to sit as an equal with the United States and Britain, he
cooled his anti-imperialist rhetoric. The December 1960 settlement
gave the United States base rights until 1977 and granted Trinidad
and Tobago US$30 million in United States Agency for International
Development assistance money for road construction and education.
The United States closed the naval base at Chaguaramas in 1967 (see
Historical Background, ch. 7).
The December 1961 election, which took place after Trinidad and
Tobago had received full internal self-government within the West
Indies Federation, was characterized by the use of racial appeals
by both parties. The main constitutional issue was the drawing of
electoral boundaries. Pro-PNM supporters broke up DLP meetings with
stone throwing; the government declared a state of emergency in
areas where East Indians were a majority and called out 3,000
police. The PNM used its government leadership to good advantage.
Responding to labor unrest, Williams gave all government workers a
raise during the summer of 1961. He also moved politically to the
right, purging some left-wing supporters who had been prominent in
the Chaguaramas fight. The PNM profited from the fact that the DLP
was not a unified party. Its leader, Maraj, had been ill, and
younger East Indians felt that his lack of education was a
liability when contrasted with Williams. During the DLP political
infighting, the new generation of East Indian professionals chose
R.N. Capildeo, a high-caste Hindu, to head the DLP. Although
Capildeo was highly educated, a Ph.D. and a fully qualified
barrister, he lacked Williams's ability to appeal to the masses.
Eighty-eight percent of the voters turned out for the December 1961
election; in a vote that largely followed ethnic lines, Williams
and the PNM won with 57 percent. Reflecting the ethnic split,
Williams filled the twelve cabinet slots with eight blacks, two
whites, and two East Indians--one Christian and one Muslim.
Appointees for the newly created Senate followed similar lines. As
Trinidad and Tobago faced independence, the black middle class was
firmly in power.
Data as of November 1987
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