Lloyd Algernon Best, one of Trinidad and Tobago's most acclaimed intellectuals is dead.Described as "economist, politician, publicist, political commentator, philosopher and 'doctor of doctor politics'", Lloyd Best developed an intimate relationship with the University of the West Indies, beginning his illustrious multifaceted career as a Junior Research Fellow in 1958 at the Institute of Social and Economic Research of the UWI in Jamaica.
This relationship solidified with his tenure at the St. Augustine Campus as a Lecturer in Economics.
Known for his radical non conventional philosophies, Lloyd Best was not the passive participant in the Region's status quo. He dared to disagree and advance cogent alternative viewpoints about the political, economic and intellectual realities of Caribbean society. Yet this by no means captures the brilliance, tenacity and fertile intellect of a great West Indian social philosopher and thinker.
Lloyd Best, in the 1960s, co-founded the New World Group of independent thinkers who theorised and philosophised about the economic, social and political systems of their time.
This intellectual giant of the Caribbean stimulated a rethinking of accepted models and practices in institutions of politics and economics and development as a whole, giving direction to the principles that support the establishment and continuity of the Caribbean integration movement.
He is said to have "bestrode the regional intellectual world like a colossus" and it was for his contribution to the Region's intellectual advancement that he was deservedly inducted into the membership of the prestigious "Order of the Caribbean Community".
(1) David De Caires, Publisher, Stabroek News, Guyana:“…..Lloyd Best has for the last forty years been involved in making a symbolic statement of some kind, perhaps quixotic, often deeply flawed, marked by rhetorical excesses, marred by human weaknesses, sometimes almost incoherent, to the effect that we have not done enough, we have not achieved our potential, we have not aimed sufficiently high, we have not completely shaken off the shackles of the plantation, we are mediocrities, just not good enough.
……Yet if one looks at the body of Lloyd's work one cannot fail to see that it is always motivated by a redeeming hope that things could be better if only, as he would put it, the educational system were not so bankrupt or the validating elites took more responsibility for their conduct. It is this unquenchable optimism that has always made him a little larger than life, this conviction that a brave and better new world lies in the future if only we had the wisdom and the fortitude to get there…..”
(2) Lloyd Best: the 3rd Annual Jagan Lecture presented at York University, March 3rd 2001.
“….The thing about the Caribbean is that ….so many different people coming into the situation plus the business of dealing with the colonizer... Right from the start there’s a dimension of complexity that you’ve got to deal with. The Caribbean is the workshop of the world in that sense. Over the period of five hundred years, in a short period of historic time, in very intimate social situations, small island communities -- we’ve had to come to grips with a whole new reality in five hundred years. You have a short time in a small place, and all the problems that are posed of ethnicity in the whole world are dramatized four times over in the Caribbean so you can’t miss them. That is what we have to sell. What we have to sell to the world is that experience --because globalization is imposing that experience on everybody now. But we have lived it for five hundred years and we need to write it down ….”
1 comment:
Dear Frances-Anne:
Thank you for this. Maybe you saw a piece I did on Lloyd about three years ago, when academics and supporters here were trying to raise money to help with the building of a climate-controlled library for the Tapia House archives. I gather that this didn’t get off the ground, but that money which was raised was used to continue the general building program which had been undertaken.
You may find this of interest. Certainly he was an extraordinary man.
I wasn't near enough to the front to get a word with you at the ReelWorld launch last week, but was certainly pleased to hear that "A Winter Tale" is to open the Festival. Congratulations.
Colin
Caribbean People with Colin Rickards
The legacy of Lloyd Best
By Colin Rickards
More than 50 years ago a group of West Indian students and young staff at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica met regularly at the home of Trinidad-born Lloyd Best to debate the future.
It was 1961, and the 10-unit Federation of the West Indies was in its death throes. Jamaica’s Sir Alexander Bustamante opposed Federation with the other islands, and Premier Norman Manley had convinced the Colonial Office that he could win a referendum and settle the matter once and for all.
The question was: “Federation: Yes or No.” Manley lost. The public voted “No.” Jamaica was out. Trinidad’s Premier Eric Williams declared: “One from Ten leaves Zero.” Trinidad was out. A “Little Eight” idea foundered.
The student group was called “The Society for the Study of Social Issues.”
“We met at Lloyd’s home every Thursday evening,” recalls Grenada-born Sir Alister McIntyre. “We ended up, in the early hours of the morning, at Monty’s Restaurant…for curried goat patties, Red Stripe beer and more talk. These were the seeds of what became The New World Group.”
The name of Lloyd Best crops up time and again in the history of politics and politico-social thought, theory --and sometimes even action -- in the Commonwealth Caribbean over the past half-century and more.
Born on February 27, 1934, in the town of Tunapuna, he attended school locally and then went to Queen’s Royal College. From there an Island Scholarship took him to Downing College at Cambridge University (1953-56), then Manfield College at Oxford University (1956-57).
He returned to the Caribbean in 1958 as a Junior Research Fellow at the UWI’s Institute of Social and Economic Research. The young West Indians who rallied around him included the likes of McIntyre, William Demas, Lloyd Braithwaite, Roy Augier, Dudley Huggins, M.G. Smith and R.T. Smith, among others, many of the best brains the Caribbean has produced.
Out of the informal Society came the formal New World Group -- co-founded by Best -- and their publication, The New World Quarterly. In the first issue, he wrote an article called “Toward Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom,” in many ways as relevant today as it was then, and the Group provided political analysis and studies of such topics as the bauxite-alumina, sugar and tourism industries from a truly Caribbean perspective.
Many of its members gradually abandoned or personally revised some or all of Best’s ideas as impractical or passé. They went on to become regionalists, university professors in the West Indies and beyond, and distinguished bureaucrats plying their craft locally and internationally, but few were left untouched by their contact with him.
Best remained an intellectual and thinker and, following brief stints lecturing at McGill University in Montreal, the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Paris, he returned to Trinidad in 1968 and joined the UWI’s St. Augustine Campus.
His independence of thought and action was not always appreciated, and led to his very public resignation, and his founding of The Tapia House Movement, also a regional “think tank” and political “ginger group.”
Among the many ideas Best propounded was that “politics” and “government” were two different phenomena, and that Caribbean elections were meaningless, as they involved the former rather than the latter.
He challenged the status quo, advocating, instead, a “party of parties” and a “macco senate,” where community and corporate groups would sit in a “House of Parliament,” to complement the elected “House of Government.”
He took a swing at politics himself in 1976, running on a Tapia Movement ticket. The resounding defeat at the polls, said Best, was because “the people were not quite ready for the obviously sound and relevant policies of Tapia.”
The following year he transitioned the Movement into The Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies. It publishes the monthly Trinidad and Tobago Review -- successor to The New World Quarterly -- and remains an important “think tank” for academic theory from a regional viewpoint.
Even those who consider Best to be “arrogant,” “eccentric,” “a loose cannon” even, with ideas which are impractical or outmoded, cannot deny the man’s extraordinary contribution to Caribbean development.
When The Order of the Caribbean Community was conferred on Best, the citation said it was for “his resolute passion for exploring the ‘truth,’ [and] for his fearless advocacy of independent thought and Caribbean freedom.”
He is 70 now, and his dream is to leave a tangible legacy in the form of a modern, climate-controlled, state-of-the-art library building to house the books and archives of the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies.
“This is a collection encompassing over three decades of Caribbean thought -- original, creative, critical -- and more,” says Trinidad-born, Toronto-based academic and author Ramabai Espinet, who is involved in a fundraising appeal here to raise $25,000 to help raise the necessary money. “It surely constitutes a heritage which we ought to treasure and preserve for ourselves and for future generations.”
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