February Revolt

In the early months of 1970, thousands of Afro-Trinidadians marched up and down the roads and public spaces of Trinidad and Tobago shouting "Black Power," "Power to the People," and other related slogans. The Black Power movement (or the "Black Power Revolution" as it was termed by some commentators) was part of an international movement of African peoples protesting their continued marginalization—both in countries with white majorities and in those such as Trinidad and Tobago that had black majorities and were led by blacks. In what has been termed the February Revolt, Afro-Trinidadians expressed their profound disapproval with the way resources, material and symbolic, were being allocated in the society. The protests continued and grew larger in March and April before the government eventually declared a state of emergency and jailed the leaders of the demonstrations. Sections of the army also mutinied on April 21, 1970, before surrendering several days later to the government.

In Trinidad and Tobago, young blacks were protesting the fact that, although self-government and political independence had been won from the British in 1962, the engines of the economy (the oil refineries, the banks and insurance companies, and several other critical firms) remained in foreign hands, even though some had been juridically "localized." The protestors also lamented the fact that the industrialization strategy known as "Operation Jobs" that was being pursued by the ruling People's National Movement (PNM), depended heavily on direct foreign investment, which was capital intensive and did not create the number of jobs that had been promised.

There were also complaints that, political, or "flag," independence notwithstanding, many of the key symbols of the society, and the manner in which power and status were defined and allocated, continued to reflect the old socioeconomic order based on the sugar plantation and foreign-owned oil. A few blacks had been co-opted at the management level but they allegedly remained "Afro-Saxons," a pejorative term used to describe English loyalists in the tropics, also known as "Black Britishers."

The prime minister of the country at the time, Dr. Eric Williams, was a distinguished black scholar who had written the classic book, Capitalism and Slavery (1944), as well as The Negro in the Caribbean (1942). Both of these books had led his supporters to regard him as the providential messiah who would lead his people to the promised land. He had also authored several radical pamphlets, such as Massa Day Done (1961), in which promises were made to restructure the old colonial order. By 1970, however, this promised social revolution, though underway, was not visible enough to many impatient young blacks, who believed that Williams had either sold out the country or abandoned all that he had once stood for.

In response to the challenge posed by the marchers and a mutinous army, Williams repressed the movement by declaring a state of emergency and arresting many of its leaders. He then proceeded, however, to implement many of the policies that the protesters had demanded. Ironically, the movement provided Williams with the leverage he needed to force the private sector to broaden and deepen local participation in the economy. Williams went on to boast that he was the "biggest black power in the land," and that he supported all the positive things that the movement stood for.

Williams was of the view that his Afrocentric critics were not sufficiently aware of what the PNM had done between 1956 and 1970. As he declared in a nationwide broadcast on March 23, 1970:

We have consciously sought to promote black economic power. We have … created 1,523 black small farmers over the country; we have encouraged small businesses in manufacture and tourism…. We have brought free secondary education within the reach of thousands of disadvantaged families who could not dream of it in 1956…. Our Public Service … is staffed today almost entirely by nationals, mainly black. We have unceasingly sought to control or at least to alleviate the unemployment which we inherited, and which has increased with the tremendous rise in the birth rate. We have created no fewer than 68,200 new jobs between 1956 and 1969.

Williams, however, came out fully in support of the programmatic agenda of Black Power, particularly its demand for economic power and black dignity. He urged the nation to "proceed to work more positively than ever towards the economic and social upliftment of the black disadvantaged groups in our society of both African and Asian origin, as the only way to achieve the genuine national integration to which so many of us are dedicated. If anyone wishes to continue to march and demonstrate, by all means let him do so…. But I urge that this should be done without violence."

Also of consequence was the greater willingness on the part of blacks to acknowledge their blackness and to cease "atoning" for being of African provenance. The change in dress and hairstyles (including what the author Vidya Naipaul referred to as "threatening hair") was part of this process, as was the growing tendency to regard native cultural offerings as valid.

The system of social stratification also changed significantly after 1970. In the colonial era, and even in the post-independence period, foreign and local whites were at the top of the social pyramid, the Chinese and mulatto element was in the middle, and blacks and Indians were at the bottom. The caste system had begun to fray at the edges in the 1950s, but the basic outlines of the system had remained. Beginning in 1970, however, the pace of change in the social order accelerated considerably—particularly after 1973, when a dramatic rise in oil prices revived the economy. Revenue from higher oil prices provided the government with the funding to implement some of the changes called for by black radicals.

See also Black Power Movement; Peoples National Movement; Williams, Eric

Bibliography

Meighoo, Kirk Peter. Politics in a "Half Made Society": Trinidad and Tobago, 1925-2001. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003.

Oxaal, Ivar. Race and Revolutionary Consciousness: a Documentary Interpretation of the 1970 Black Power Revolt in Trinidad. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1971.

Ryan, Selwyn D. Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: a Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.

selwyn ryan (2005)