Darcus Howe: a Political Biography

Bunce, Robin, and Paul Field. "Son of a Preacher Man." Darcus Howe: A Political Biography. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 11–26. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 3 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544407.ch-001>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 3 October 2021, 02:52 UTC. Copyright © Robin Bunce and Paul Field 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 1 Son of a Preacher Man We know nothing, nothing at all, of the results of what we do to children. My father had given me a bat and ball, I had learnt to play and at eighteen was a good cricketer. What a fi ction! In reality my life up to ten had laid the powder for a war that lasted without respite for eight years, and intermittently for some time aft erwards – a war between English Puritanism, English literature and cricket, and the realism of West Indian life. On one side was my father, my mother (no mean pair), my two aunts and my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, all the family friends (which included a number of headmasters from all over the island), some eight or nine Englishmen who taught at the Queen ’ s Royal College, all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, the Director of Educa- tion and the Board of Education, which directed the educational system of the whole island. On the other side was me, just ten years old when it began. (James 1963: 39) Th ese words, particular as they are to their author Cyril Lionel Robert James, also carry profound signifi cance for his nephew Darcus Howe. It is no overstatement to say that James ’ description of his childhood conveys the pattern of Howe ’ s early life. For James, the balance of forces in this formative struggle were overwhelming and his triumph against them extraordinary: . they had on their side parental, scholastic, governmental, and many other kinds of authority and, less tangible but perhaps more powerful, the prevailing sentiment that, in as much as the coloured people on the island, and in fact all over the world, had such limited opportunities, it was my duty, my moral and religious duty, to make the best use of the opportunities which all these good people and the Trinidad Government had provided for me. I had nothing to start with but my pile of clippings about W. G. Grace and Ranjitsinhji, my Vanity Fair and my Puritan instincts, though as yet these were undeveloped. I fought and won. (Ibid.) DDarcus.indbarcus.indb 1111 110/18/20130/18/2013 66:42:33:42:33 PPMM 12 Darcus Howe Th e course set out for Howe was almost identical: he was told early on in his childhood ‘ You will win an Exhibition to Queen ’ s Royal College like CLR James, your uncle,1 and then you will become somebody. ’ Th ese were not just the hopes of parents ambitious for their son to use education as a means to ascend the ossifi ed class structure of colonial Trinidad, but also the expectations of a mother and father who were, respectively, Howe ’ s fi rst teacher and headmaster at his primary school in Eckels village, Williamsville. Th e resources which the young Howe drew upon to resist and ultimately repel this adult onslaught were in some respects just as curious as his uncle ’ s. Instead of James ’ infatuation with William Makepeace Th ackeray’s Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair , the fi rst character to become Howe ’ s close friend was Dickens ’ Philip Pirrup. In the place of James ’ Puritan instincts, Howe was imbued by his father with the values of Christianity and a love of reason, an incendiary mix which Howe would ultimately employ to ruthlessly question the injustices and myths of race, class and religion itself. Whereas James ’ youthful rebellion was symbolized by his skipping his duties to illicitly play cricket, Howe rejected the social elitism of Queen ’ s Royal College (QRC) and the middle- class aspirations of his parents by befriending and becoming a Renegade, the street gang of hustlers, street fi ghters and urban youth who coalesced around the steelband of the same name in East Dry River, Port-of-Spain. Rhett Radford Leighton Howe was born in 1943 and raised for the fi rst 10 years of his life in Eckels village, a small rural hamlet located 3 kilometres from Williamsville in southern Trinidad. Th e village folk consisted then, as now, of agricultural labourers, who were the descendants of the indentured Indian sugar cane workers, and a smaller number of black Trinidadians, most of whom worked in the nearby oil refi nery at Point- à -Pierre or in the city of San Fernando to its south. Howe ’ s father, Cipriani, had qualifi ed as a teacher at a young age and had gone on to become head teacher of Eckles Village School: English Catholic (EC). It was his second headship, his fi rst Moruga EC. Cipriani transferred to Eckles Village EC when Howe was 3 years old. Th e family lived in a cottage beside the village school. Th e house was surrounded by acres of cane plantations owned by Tate & Lyle, and local farmers, and had a clear view of the oil refi nery. Howe ’ s father liked to boast that the oil produced in the village kept British warships fi ghting during World War II. Cipriani ’ s drive to succeed as a teacher owes much to Howe ’ s paternal grandfather who had worked hard as a stevedore and barge driver in Port-of-Spain in order to give his son an education so that he might become a teacher and escape a life of drudgery. He named his son, Cipriani, aft er Captain Arthur Cipriani, founder of the Trinidad Labour Party, DDarcus.indbarcus.indb 1122 110/18/20130/18/2013 66:42:33:42:33 PPMM Son of a Preacher Man 13 Figure 1 Howe, aged 5, standing outside his grandmother’s house in Princes Town, southern Trinidad. Young and innocent? ‘I know that fellow very well – he was never innocent!’, comments Howe. who used his support among black dock workers in Port-of-Spain and working- class East Indians to lead a mass movement for self-government and against British rule in the 1930s. An immigrant from St Vincent, who was vulnerable to arrest and deportation, Howe ’ s grandfather knew to always carry a wallet full of money with which to bribe the police if he was stopped and questioned about his presence in Trinidad. Stevedores were not paid cash; they paid themselves with the goods they brought ashore from cargo ships which could not negotiate Port-of-Spain ’ s shallow waters. Howe recalls that his grandfather ’ s home was an Aladdin ’ s cave of sweets, clothes and jewels. Howe ’ s parents stressed the transformative power of education, making their expectations clear from an early age. Unlike his literary friend Pip, it was not the generosity of a mysterious benefactor that would ‘ raise up ’ the DDarcus.indbarcus.indb 1133 110/18/20130/18/2013 66:42:33:42:33 PPMM 14 Darcus Howe young Howe, but his own hard work and appetite to learn. On a visit to Howe ’ s primary school in Eckels village during the summer of 2011, one of the authors of this book chanced upon Claudine Forbes-Valdez, who attended school at the same time as ‘ Radford ’ and his older sister Carolyn 60 years earlier. She remembered that although strict, Howe ’ s mother was like a mother to all the children she taught. She cared about their well-being and would always make sure that the poorest children in the village would go on the school trip, even if she had to use her own money to pay for them. Howe ’ s father, she said, was an excellent teacher, ‘ but we were fearful of his belt if he thought we hadn ’ t tried hard enough ’ . On the strength of her early education, Forbes-Valdez had herself gone on to teacher training college where she qualifi ed as a teacher, before returning to Eckels Village School where she taught for 40 years (Forbes-Valdez 2011). Howe ’ s parents did not tolerate prejudice against the Indian pupils they taught despite enmity between Creoles and Indians being common in Trinidad at the time. Use of the term ‘ coolie ’ to describe Indians, a racial pejorative which Howe ’ s father likened to the word ‘ nigger ’, was regarded as an abomination and a ‘ sin ’ by Howe ’ s father. Such sentiments between black African Trinidadians and Asians were in large part the legacy of imperial strategies of divide and rule and of British attempts to break the economic power of black small holders following their emancipation by encouraging the large-scale migration of indentured Indians to the Caribbean where they were treated as little better than slaves themselves. Racist attitudes and cultural misunderstandings towards East Indians are oft en satirized in the Trinidadian literature of the time, from the racial insults of the headstrong Masie aimed at the Indian maid Philomen in James ’ Minty Alley to the tensions over food and living space which emerge between the black couple Joe and Rita and their Indian friends Tiger and Urmilla in Sam Selvon ’ s A Brighter Sun . Cipriani Howe, at the time a lay Anglican preacher, made no distinction on the grounds of race. Indeed, he visited the Indian labourers in the village to persuade them to allow their children to stay at school as long as they could aff ord before joining their older siblings in the sugar cane fi elds.

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