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Saturday, January 4, 2025

MAKANDAL DAAGA AND BLACK POWER

by

20160814

The pass­ing of Makan­dal Daa­ga last week per­mits an op­por­tu­ni­ty to cel­e­brate his life as well as to re­flect up­on his con­tri­bu­tion to the so­ci­ety. The 1970 Black Pow­er up­ris­ing is large­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the move­ment that he led called the Na­tion­al Joint Ac­tion Com­mit­tee (NJAC).

The term "Black Pow­er" ap­pears to have been coined by the Trinida­di­an-born Amer­i­can civ­il rights leader Stoke­ly Carmichael who is re­port­ed to have used the term on June 17, 1966, at a ral­ly in Mis­sis­sip­pi, USA.

In the con­text of T&T, it rep­re­sent­ed an af­front to the pre-colo­nial race and class struc­ture that had large­ly re­mained in­tact af­ter the grant­i­ng of in­de­pen­dence.

The fact that noth­ing of sig­nif­i­cance had changed with re­gard to that struc­ture af­ter in­de­pen­dence led to a strug­gle that would place Daa­ga (who was known as Ged­des Granger at the time) firm­ly at odds with Er­ic Williams and the PNM.

There is de­bate about where to lo­cate the first pangs of the move­ment that would chal­lenge Williams on the is­sue of Black Pow­er. Some say it was the lat­er re­ac­tions against the en­act­ment of the In­dus­tri­al Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Act 1965, oth­ers con­tend that the spark came from the sit-in by black stu­dents at the Sir George Williams Uni­ver­si­ty in Mon­tre­al, Cana­da, in Feb­ru­ary 1969, an­oth­er view is that the na­tion­al bus strike of April 1969 led by the Trans­port and In­dus­tri­al Work­ers Union was the spark.

Whichev­er it was, the lead­er­ship of Daa­ga and his col­leagues al­lowed a wide range of griev­ances to earn a fo­rum through which a move­ment emerged. That fo­rum was NJAC. The biggest bat­tle for the demon­stra­tors in 1970 was how to chal­lenge Williams and the PNM on the is­sue of black dis­ad­van­tage and over­come the pow­er struc­ture that sup­port­ed them.

In 1970, it was the killing of Basil Davis on April 6 that led to an in­crease in pub­lic sup­port for the move­ment and Davis' fu­ner­al was an event that raised the lev­el of aware­ness of the cause. In­deed, on April 13, 1970, ANR Robin­son re­signed from the Cab­i­net of Dr Williams and the PNM over his sup­port for Black Pow­er.

It was the un­con­nect­ed Reg­i­ment mutiny that led to a full frontal at­tack on the sta­bil­i­ty of the Williams regime. The Gov­ern­ment was fac­ing a pos­si­ble col­lapse which it avert­ed by im­pos­ing a state of emer­gency on April 21, 1970.

Daa­ga had raised the lev­el of black con­scious­ness in the so­ci­ety through his move­ment. Their con­cept of black pow­er was that the Afro and In­do pop­u­la­tions of T&T need­ed to unite be­cause they had been di­vid­ed by the colo­nial au­thor­i­ties for po­lit­i­cal pur­pos­es and those di­vi­sions were be­ing per­pet­u­at­ed in the post-in­de­pen­dence pe­ri­od in or­der to sus­tain the pre-colo­nial pow­er struc­ture.

This was a strug­gle that Daa­ga nev­er gave up through­out his life and it is one that is clear­ly iden­ti­fied with him. Some may ar­gue that be­cause NJAC un­suc­cess­ful­ly con­test­ed gen­er­al elec­tions that they were not rel­e­vant, oth­ers have ar­gued that their con­tri­bu­tion came from their in­flu­ence over changes to so­cial at­ti­tudes to­wards em­ploy­ment prac­tices and the ad­just­ments that Williams and the PNM had to make af­ter 1970 in chang­ing course for their sur­vival.

In­deed, Williams recog­nised that he had to change his di­rec­tion and he called a spe­cial con­ven­tion of the PNM in No­vem­ber 1970. At that con­ven­tion he was able to have the PNM ap­prove "The Ch­aguara­mas De­c­la­ra­tion: The Peo­ple's Char­ter Re­vised."

That doc­u­ment gave the PNM an in­tel­lec­tu­al tra­jec­to­ry that an­swered many of the cries of the demon­stra­tors in the streets for state con­trol of the econ­o­my and the re­jec­tion of for­eign own­er­ship of the com­mand­ing heights of the econ­o­my.

There was al­so an in­tel­lec­tu­al bat­tle in­side of the Black Pow­er move­ment in­so­far as di­vi­sions ex­ist­ed be­tween some of the key ad­vo­cates. Writ­ing in his re­cent book Crit­i­cal In­ter­ven­tions in Caribbean Pol­i­tics and The­o­ry (Uni­ver­si­ty Press of Mis­sis­sip­pi, 2014), Bri­an Meeks ar­gues as fol­lows about the dif­fer­ences be­tween Lloyd Best and NJAC:

"There were cer­tain­ly dif­fer­ences be­tween NJAC's more race-cen­tred po­si­tions and Lloyd's 'in­dige­nous thought' ap­proach, but I sug­gest these were not sub­stan­tial enough to war­rant a dis­tanc­ing of the two trends. Both ap­proach­es shared a re­flex­ive hos­til­i­ty to for­eign dom­i­na­tion; both were root­ed in some no­tion of Caribbean au­then­tic­i­ty ac­com­pa­nied by a cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion in val­ues and new ap­proach­es to liv­ing. Were they re­lat­ed to a clash of 'doc­tor' politi­cians, in which Lloyd, the se­nior doc­tor and in­deed teacher of many of the NJAC lead­er­ship, would be asked to en­ter the al­liance as a ju­nior part­ner, in an un­ac­cept­able role re­ver­sal ? I have no doubt that this is part of the sto­ry." (pp 88-89).

This fac­tor to­geth­er with the adop­tion of a sub­stan­tial por­tion of the NJAC agen­da by Williams and the PNM as their own may have con­tributed to the sur­vival of the PNM and the de­cline in pub­lic sup­port for NJAC.

Daa­ga's work is not fin­ished, but his lega­cy is there for all to see.


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