Midnight's Children and the Legacy of Nationalism

Author(s): Patricia Mohammed

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 20, No. 4, Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean: A Special Issue
(Autumn, 1997), pp. 737-752
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299404 .
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MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
AND THE LEGACY OF NATIONALISM

by PatriciaMohammed

Prelude
Above the headmaster's desk in the primary school I attended in rural Trinidad,
there was a blackboard on which was neatly chalked the names and titles of heads of
state and other important international officials of the time. In my recollection, there
were no local government figures represented on this board before 1962, except
perhaps Sir Solomon Hochoy, the Crown appointed Governor General, who was
sufficiently memorable to a child anyway because of the intriguing looking headgear
he wore on State occasions. The eminent bodies featured on the blackboard were
persons such as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, our Head of State, John Fitzgerald
Kennedy, President of the United States, the Secretary General of the United Nations,
Nikita Krushchev, the Premier of Soviet Russia, and others of that ilk. We had to learn
these names for "general knowledge" tests, repeating their titles with little clue about
their significance to our small primary school in Barrackpore, South Trinidad. On
Empire Day, which I barely recall being celebrated, the entire school, staff and
students joined in a cacophonic rendition of "God Save the Queen." The empire/s
surrounded us in many ways, in the songs we sang, the flag we bore allegiance to and,
most of all, in the idea of ourselves as a colony and colonized.
The shift to self-government and independent nationhood would at first only
register in the symbolic changes around us. To the blackboard above the headmaster's
desk, other important official names we had to learn, like those of the local ministers
of education and health, were slowly added. Chief among them was the enigmatic
Prime Minister, the Right Honorable Dr. Eric Williams, enigmatic for us as children
since his expression remained permanently mysterious, obscured by the large dark
glasses he always wore.' In preparation for independence in 1962, we were introduced
to a new flag, the significance of the colors red, white and black meaning nothing to
us then; it was not explained to us, nor the watchwords, Discipline, Production and
Tolerance.Our primary school teachers labored at teaching us new songs, including a
national anthem which we sung in parrot-like fashion without any appreciation of its
chorus, "Here, every creed and race find an equal place." It took many years, and my
The original version of this paper was presented at the conference entitled "Capitalismand SlaveryFifty Years
Later: Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean," at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine,
Trinidad, September 24-28, 1996. It was first published in SmallAxe 2 (November 1997), a journal edited by
David Scott and published by Ian Randle Publishers, Jamaica, and is reprinted here by their permission.

Callaloo 20.4 (1998) 737-752

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CALLAL
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own study of a social history of Indians in Trinidad society, to begin to grasp the
complex relationship between Williams' writing of Capitalismand Slavery, his perceptive understanding of politics through historical knowledge, his experiences of study
and sojourn abroad, and the way all of these nurtured the ideas which helped to
formulate a concept of nationalism for this society.
Salman Rushdie's brilliant novel Midnight's Children,from which I have crafted a
title for this essay, is about the birth of a child and a nation.2 Saleem Sinai is born at
midnight on August 15, 1947, the very instant that India attained independence. In
Rushdie's novel, nation and child go through the pangs of birth, the tantrums of
childhood, the traumas of adolescence and the anomie of adulthood. This essay is a
different but parallel investigation about the birth pangs and growth of nationalism
in Trinidad, viewed from the perspective of a young girl of Indian descent, born
shortly before Williams came to power in 1956. My generation was just old enough to
experience the remnants of the colonial state evident in early self-government in
Trinidad, and to begin absorbing the new messages which nationhood brought. This
essay is therefore a personal and political analysis of Williams' contribution to
nationalist ideas, to the way nationalism was perceived, and was directly or indirectly
beneficial to many of my generation, ethnic group, and sex. Rushdie's phrase "midnight's children" is also applicable to my examination of nationalism in another sense,
one which is consistent with the verbal doubleentendrecharacteristic of a Trinidadian
mode of humor and social commentary. "Midnight's children" evokes the idea of
blackness and therefore the question of negritude, which was confronted in the
nationalist movement. Secondly, the darker shades of gender oppression would
remain submerged despite the affirmations of equality, but in time these ideas would
surface with the growth of the nation and its peoples.

Childhood
Capitalismand Slavery was completed as a doctoral dissertation and submitted to
the Faculty of Modern History of Oxford University in September 1938. It was
published as a book in 1944 during the time Eric Williams lectured at Howard
University in the United States. In the Preface to the book Williams writes: "Every age
rewrites history, but particularly ours which has been forced by events to evaluate our
conceptions of history and political development."3 Eric Hobsbawm describes the first
few decades of the 20th century, the period in which Williams was engaged in
evaluating past history, as both the age of catastrophe and the age of total war.4In the
third decade of the 20th century when Williams began his rewriting of history, the first
world war had ended and the events which would begin the second were already in
motion. When this book was being published, the different empires which had sliced
up the West Indies and divided the region among themselves since the 15th century
were at war. Williams' attempt to grasp the relationship between slavery and capitalism contained both a personal and political goal. My perception of this period for
Williams is that it was his way of understanding the motors of history which shaped
his lived experience as a black man in western society, and of deciphering the
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C A L L A L OO
economic processes which led to the actual creation of a colonized West Indies.
Williams himself explains in the Preface that Capitalismand Slavery is not "a study of
the institution of slavery, but of the contribution of slavery to the development of
British capitalism.... It is strictly an economic study of the role of Negro slavery and
the slave trade in providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in
England and of mature industrial capitalism in destroying the slave system." His
subsequent books, including A History of the People of Trinidadand Tobago(1962) and
FromColumbusto Castro(1964) are all part of his search to understand the identity of
Caribbean people.
Williams' search for identity, for self, for people of his race, and for people of his
native lands was premised on a more complex understanding of racism than, in my
view, has been fully appreciated. "Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly
identified with the Negro," writes Williams in Capitalismand Slavery. "A racial twist
has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not
born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New
World was brown, white, black, and yellow, Catholic, Protestant and pagan. The first
instance of slave trading and slave labor developed in the New World involved,
racially, not the Negro but the (native) Indian" (7). It is far beyond my competence at
present to assess the merits of Williams' arguments that the economic reasons far
outweighed other social ideologies which determined who should be subordinated.
Kim Johnson, in a brief review of the arguments and historical evidence provided by
this book, observes that whether the abolition of the slave trade was a result of
economic initiatives as was suggested by Williams, or was prompted by liberal
ideology as others have proposed, is still unresolved.5 The point though is that in his
first major work, Williams had also begun a process of emancipating himself "from
mental slavery."6
That Williams should conceptualize such a study in the third decade of this century
is itself an exceptional achievement for a young black man from Trinidad. His
subsequent and equally remarkable careers of lecturing at Howard University in the
United States until 1948 and as deputy chairman of the Caribbean Research Council
of the Caribbean Commission in Trinidad until 1955 prepared him for the role he
would undertake from 1956 until his death as leader of a popular national movement,
a movement which instilled the early ideas of nationalism and shaped the society of
Trinidad and Tobago in its formative years of sovereignty.
The emergence of national society in Trinidad and Tobago is clearly the combined
work of numerous men and women who predated and worked alongside Williams in
the political history of this society. The contribution of C.L.R. James in this regard, for
example, is still obscure, yet his ideas in the early critical stages must have been
important to an understanding of the journey to a nationalist consciousness.7 History
has always been written selectively and adapted consciously. Human actions are
delicate and complex phenomena. In history, this complexity is necessarily reduced
to measurable events and causality and, depending on the historian's purpose, leads
to a deliberate selection of the key actors in these moments. In this instance, nonetheless, it is generally accepted that Williams was a unique political tactician and thinker,
and crucial to the development of mid-20th-century nationalism in Trinidad.
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CALLAL

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Gordon Lewis argues that the genesis of a national spirit out of colonial obscurity
actually began with Captain A.A. Cipriani and the rehabilitated Trinidad Workingmen's Association. Lewis, however, points out that among the other limitations of his
time, Cipriani "lacked the intellectual's capacity to set the problems in terms of
historical perspectives or first principles, and his opposition was founded less on the
reading of books than on harsh personal experience."8 Williams fortunately combined
both qualities as a politician and leader.
The intervening period before Williams' rise to power saw the emergence of other
colonial politicians, most of whom are recorded in history as individualists, some
bombastic, others divisive and clannish. Lewis writes of these men, "To read the
biographical sketches of its leading figures for the decade after 1946, with their
opportunism, their playing to the gallery and their unprincipled perambulations
from one 'party' to another is to realize how it all accurately reflected the local racial
and religious divisions" of the migrant society (211). Trinidad was a relatively recent
settlement compared to Barbados and Jamaica, and both culturally and ethnically
more heterogeneous. By the fourth decade of the 20th century, the idea of a common
Trinidad identity was still to coalesce in the minds of the disparate ethnic groups. V.S.
Naipaul, much maligned for his asperity but perceptive nonetheless, would draw
attention to this heterogeneity in TheMiddlePassagepublished in 1962: "Every one was
an individual, fighting for his place in the community. Yet there was no community;
we were of various races, religions, sects and cliques; and we had somehow found
ourselves on the same small island. Nothing bound us together except this common
residence. There was no national feeling, there could be none."9
Cipriani, as an early nationalist, and later politicians had failed to understand and
address the fundamental structure of colonial society as it has been established in
early Trinidad, a society made up of migrant populations, each with different cultural
identities, loyalties and affiliations. As an historian, scholar and clearly astutely
aware of the dangers of the individualism in this migrant mosaic, Williams, in the
symbols of nationalism he formulated for the nationalist movement, found a way to
embrace the different groups. Red, white and black combined the colors of all its racial
groups. In Trinidad "red" also signified mixtures of Black and White, Chinese and
Black, and so on. Perhaps the nationalist movement was prescient of the rise of a
mixed group in Trinidad who would have great difficulty in dividing political
allegiances primarily on the basis of race or ethnicity. Discipline, Production and
Tolerance were to inform the nation's psyche of education, work, and social interaction.10Added to this, an extremely farsighted concept of equality was adopted and
expressed in the national anthem, allowing for the diverse cultural ethnic groups with
their different religious beliefs to find a secure place in the society.
Gordon Lewis in The Growth of the Modern West Indies, Bridget Brereton in her
History of Modern Trinidad 1783-1962, and Selwyn Ryan in Race and Nationalism in
Trinidadand Tobago,among other historians and social scientists, have given considerable attention to the factors which allowed for Williams to function as politician and
philosopher, historian and writer in Trinidad."1They draw attention to his dominant
personality and his brilliance as a political tactician in bringing the nation to selfgovernment and independence by 1962. Others have commented on his failures,
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among them his own practice of the very feature he attempted to modify in the
national character. The editorial of the Trinidad Express, March 1984, observed:
"Indeed one of the ironies of his time was that the very individualism he saw as being
so damaging to forging a national community was a hallmark of his style." This
editorial immediately questions whether Williams could have founded a nation
without that unique individual leadership. It is agreed generally that he was strategic
in his mobilization of collective public consciousness by rallying public sentiments
and forcing the idea of unity against a common enemy, first the colonial government,
next the United States, and so on. His exposure to the race question in the United
States prepared Williams to understand the social and political configurations of the
multiracial community in Trinidad scientifically. He understood that an educated
and enlightened people made informed choices, unlike the messianic styles of Jamaican nationalist leaders of the time who played on the backwardness of the masses. The
importance of education and of a university for the West Indies was also shaped by
the American pragmatic tradition. Added to this, Williams also came back to Trinidad
at a period when the tide of decolonization had already begun to surface and anticolonial sentiments were more virulent and critical than in the days of Cipriani. In
1970, in his independence speech to the nation, Williams reminded the society of this:
When we achieved independence on August 31st, 1962, the tide
of decolonization was at its height. France had been decisively
defeated in Vietnam, the United Arab Republic had taken over
the Suez Canal, Algeria had won its war of liberation, Ghana,
Nigeria and Tanzania had achieved independence. The Independence movement had also spread to the Caribbean and Jamaica's
national day precedes ours by a few days. (TrinidadGuardian,31
August 1970)
The issue which united the nationalist struggle was rage against the external enemies
of the colonial era. Internally, the notions of uniting creed and race did not so much
ignore gender but, in the consciousness of the time, took it for granted as subsumed
in the struggle. That gender was not a critical political point of departure is evident
in Williams' many addresses and interviews as for instance that reported in 1969 in
the TrinidadGuardian:
I recognize more than anyone else that at Independence in 1962
we inherited an amalgam of peoples and a very very difficult
situation: races artificially created to serve the needs of the sugar
plantation, a centuries old colonial economy, a society religiously diverse, racially fragmented and stratified along color lines, a
set of institutions derived from metropolitan countries; and a
culture and set of values and tastes largely imported from outside. (TrinidadGuardian,25 December 1969)
The recognition of the different roles played by men and women in a movement for
change was not part of the agenda of the movements of the time. The program of the
nationalist agenda vis-a vis-women's roles was very consistent with other emergent
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movements, as for instance the struggle for socialism which had long before recognized gender oppression but had theorized that, with the removal of class oppression,
gender subordination would also automatically disappear. Nationalism therefore
incorporated women freely with an understated concept of equality. This feature of
nationalism, I argue, has worked in favor of women in Trinidad in the postcolonial
era, and has inadvertently also contributed to freeing women of Indian descent from
an additional patriarchal boundary.

Midnight
Carl Campbell makes the observation in Colony and Nation: A Short History of
Educationin Trinidadand Tobagothat "The PNM did not regard women as occupying
any specially disadvantaged position in the education system in 1956 although the
public issue was secondary education for girls."112He notes, however, that "Williams'
expansion of education at all levels did benefit girls" (93). This serendipitous comment is inadvertently indicative of the attitudes to and practices of gender equality
which existed at the time among the majority of men and women.
We must recall that the anti-colonial nationalist struggle in the third world
predated the second wave of the feminist movement which gained momentum in the
United States and Britain after 1960. The idea of a dual subordination of women as
workers and as a result of their sex had emerged as a political issue since the late 18th
century in France and Britain, and had gained more adherents in the 19th century. By
the middle of the 20th century with the publication of The Second Sex by French
philosopher Simone de Beauvoire, the notion of woman as subordinate to man
attained new theoretical significance.13 In addition, a sophisticated analysis and
understanding of the role of gender were evident in the anti-colonial struggles in the
1950s, as Frantz Fanon's A Dying Colonialismsupports.14Fanon's interpretation of the
symbolic importance of the veil worn by Algerian women is instructive here. "Behind
the visible, manifest patriarchy, the more significant existence of a basic matriarchy
is affirmed," wrote Fanon. "The role of the Algerian mother, that of the grandmother,
the aunt and the 'old woman' were inventoried and defined. This enabled the (French)
colonial administration to define a precise political doctrine: 'If we want to destroy the
structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer
the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and
in the houses where the men keep them out of sight"' (37-38).
As the consummate politician, Williams would have been very aware that he
required the support of women, and that they needed to be encouraged to participate
in the political process. He could not, however, overstep the prevailing ideologies of
patriarchy among Caribbean peoples at the time which held women as subordinate
creatures, strong and resourceful, but still dependent, and to be kept dependent on
men. Had he over-promoted female visibility in the forefront of the party, he would
have alienated male support for his government. That he was very aware of the
nuances of gender relations in his society is clear from his references to calypso lyrics,
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CALLALOO-

a critical medium through which gender ideology was debated and conveyed within
the society. "These songs," wrote Williams, "some vulgar and banal in the extreme,
have become a vehicle of social philosophies....
Advice to young women that it is
better to be a young man's slave than an old man's darling, to young men to avoid old
women and marry ugly girls; the 'sweetness' of the black woman . . . these are the
themes, always amusing, invariably clever, of these local songs."15To overturn this
fundamental belief in male superiority which was threaded into the cultural practices
of all the groups comprising the society would have capitulated to a philosophy of
equality far beyond its time. Some parallels with the Algerian anti-colonial movements were apparent, nonetheless, in the approach of the People's National Movement.
As in the Algerian situation, there existed in the Caribbean an ideology which had
persisted since slavery of the strength and resilience of black women who, despite
their limited access to political and economic power, were seen to be powerful behind
the scenes. Having his pulse on the different rhythms of the society, Williams was
clearly very aware of the strength of the patriarchal ideas which dominated the
society. As an historian he was also possibly more informed of the contradictory
position in which Caribbean women were placed, subject to a colonial domestic
ideology but in reality workers and breadwinners, a situation which both workingclass and emergent middle-class women found themselves in.
Rhoda Reddock points to the strategic positions which women, largely of the black
and colored middle class, held at this time. Social work provided an avenue for
women of the middle class who, by this time, had had access to education, to engage
in the public sphere. The Teachers' Economic and Cultural Association, organized by
women and men, argued for increased teachers' salaries and equal starting rates for
both sexes. Despite prevailing colonial ideology that men were the family breadwinners, the struggle for equal pay was based on a realistic knowledge of the local
situation, that single mothers were also supporting families and deserved equal
recompense. By 1949, Reddock notes, Trinidad and Tobago had become the first
country in the British Empire to institute equal pay for equal work for teachers, and
this victory was won by the joint action of men and women, a struggle undivided by
sex. Similarly, women also participated in the People's Education Movement which
launched an influential series of lectures; among the topics debated were "the
position of women, prostitution and marriage, the family, birth control and sex
education." Reddock observes: "Although a minor aspect of the total research area,
the inclusion of these topics here and in other parts of their program, served to give
prominence to women and the issues concerning them previously denied by political
organizations" (301). This tradition of a collaborative struggle between the sexes was
therefore built into the early days of nationalism in Trinidad along with an uncontested assumption of the equality of the sexes.
Though unacknowledged publicly and in subsequent writings by Williams himself, women formed the backbone of support which rallied both the People's National
Movement and Williams into power by 1956. He had recognized shrewdly that no
popular movement would gain momentum or become important without the support
of women. As Reddock also points out, Williams was extremely astute in his evalu743

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CALLAL

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ation of women's situation in this period (303). In his book, TheNegro in the Caribbean,
he acknowledged the under-representation of women in the educational system and,
in his Education in the British West Indies, he proposed the education of women at
university level as a means of counteracting the economic handicaps they suffered,
and reversing the backward attitudes to women's roles in society."6He was clear about
women's need for recognition in the society, a recognition required by both the
educated and unlettered ones. Without unduly disturbing the patriarchal barriers, he
channeled the energies of primarily black women, of both the middle and rural
working classes, into community and village organizations, areas which were ultimately the strongest of his links with his society.
Reddock concludes her assessment of the role of women in the PNM with the
assertion that "this case shows clearly that women's participation in party politics
may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for their emancipation" (301). I would
like to amplify this statement with my observation that this initial participation by
women laid the framework for continued expression of sexual equality, thereby
defining a relatively progressive situation for women in Trinidad.
In the 1950s, the consciousness of female equality and the rhetoric associated with
a contemporary feminist movement would not yet have entered popular discourse
and ideology in Trinidad. This does not mean that both women and men in the past
did not conceive of equality of class, race and gender; rather, the actual struggle for
gender equality would not develop momentum and mass appeal until the 1970s. At
the same time, it must be recognized that this movement was built on previous
victories such as the struggle for the vote, equal access to education, equal pay for
equal work and, by the 1960s, the control over reproduction through the widespread
introduction of contraceptives. Juliet Mitchell has described this ongoing process of
incremental change as the "longest revolution" in a book by the same name published
in 1966. Mitchell proposed the path to gender equality as a long and ongoing one for
the following reasons:
The situation of women is different from that of any other social
group. This is because they are not one of a number of isolable
units, but half a totality: the human species. Women are essential
and irreplaceable; they cannot therefore be exploited in the same
way as other social groups can. They are fundamental to the
human condition; yet in their economic, social and political
roles, they are marginal. It is precisely this combination-fundamental yet marginal at one and the same time-that has been
fatal to them.17
In a recent essay another writer extends this thought but takes issue with the term
revolution itself: "To theorize feminism in terms of revolution is to romanticize both
revolution and feminism.... To establish revolution as the standard by which the
success of a social movement (feminism) should be measured theorizes revolution as
a time limited and permanent outcome rather than as a complex process of change."18

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The movement for gender equality, as with other social movements, is continuously being defined through theory and praxis. It follows that the conceptual understanding of gender equality, as well as levels of achievement, will vary also from culture to
culture. It seems to me that in Trinidad, certainly from the late 18th century onwards,
there has been an ongoing and complex shift in the position of women vis-a-vis men,
and in gradually changing definitions of masculinity and femininity. By the 1950s,
women's important even if widely unacknowledged participation in nationalist and
postcolonial struggles, in the Black Power movement of the 1970s, and a recognized
second wave feminist movement from the late 1970s onward in Trinidad society,
suggest that there is a continuum along which changing concepts of equality are being
debated. In an article on the second wave women's movement in Trinidad, I argue that
women made enormous gains in the few decades from the 1950s onward: "Despite the
heavy 'macho' culture of the Trinidadian male, an interesting contradiction in this
society is the flexibility and freedom which women maintain. Women in Trinidad
have smoothly entered the completely male occupation of taxi-driving, without a
single discouraging word from male taxi-drivers."19
In my view, Williams' co-optation of women in the nationalist movement engendered a greater consciousness and acceptance of women's agency in the society, and
embedded more firmly into the local terrain the tradition of female political participation and their confidence to struggle for change. That the women who supported
Williams were not resentful of the part they played is evident in a newspaper
commentary by Max Cuffie in 1992; he observed that at the eleventh anniversary of
Williams' death, to his knowledge, the only commemoration of the event was by way
of a memorial service organized by the Women's League of the People's National
Movement.20

Adolescence
In the newly developing society of Trinidad, with its emphasis on verbal mastery
of the English language and aspirations toward white collar occupations and professional status, education was one of the most important avenues for social mobility
during the late colonial and immediate postcolonial period.21 By 1939, overall female
school enrollment was 45.9% of total enrollment and this had increased to 49.3% in
1959. In 1946 state provision of education accounted for 2793 school places for boys
and 1754 for girls. Where parents paid for their children's education in the intermediate forms of secondary schools, female enrollment surpassed that of males increasing from 55.9% in 1952 to 60.3% in 1959 (Reddock 232, 236).
The occupational distribution by sex between 1946 and 1960 records a significant
growth for a period of fourteen years in a small developing society, and it is useful to
recount this as a measure of change in a fairly limited time. By 1960, female participation did not only show an increase, but became visible in the occupations in which
they were unrepresented in 1946.

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1946
Female

1960
Male

1960
Female

n.a.
97
454
63

n.a.
72
126
10

Occupation

1946
Male

Architect/Draughtsman
Chemist/Druggist
Ecclesiastical Worker
Dentist

235
343
493
56

Engineer

713

1027

10

Legal Profession
Trained Nurse
Physician/Surgeon
School Teacher
Accountant/Auditor
Bookkeeper/Cashier
Office Clerk
Stenographer/Typist

151
18
139
1509
411
516
7278
432

285
194
251
2714
623
2428
7281
579

6
1528
33
3021
71
2084
1,819
3220

208

894
8
1713
33
646
1241
1021

(Source: CSO Research Papers, No. 6,1969, "A Note on Educational Development in Trinidad
and Tobago," 1956-1966 by Leo Pujadas.)

The impact of the nationalist movement and its message to young boys and girls
in Trinidad is best gleaned from a valuable study on the aspirations of youth carried
out by Vera Rubin and Marisa Zavalloni on education in Trinidad.22The study was
based on two successive surveys, the first of which was carried out in 1957 on a
representative sample of nine hundred students from the fifth and sixth forms of
thirty schools, including all government, government-assisted secondary schools,
and several registered private schools. The sample in the first survey represented the
four major ethnic groups-Colored, East Indian, Negro and White-and was also
disaggregated by sex. The second survey was conducted in 1961, and although more
limited than the first, carried out on the eve of Independence, it attempted to examine
the shifts in ideas which may have occurred between 1957 and 1961. This source of
data provides some of the richest insights into the attitudes of young women at this
time in the society, the same young women who would begin to change occupational
division by sex.
Educational goals were a major preoccupation of both boys and girls of African and
East Indian descent of working-class origin. Education was a means to personal social
recognition, allowed mobility for the individual and the family, and brought economic rewards. The reasons for their aspirations are best summed up in this statement by
one student of East Indian descent: "We wish to be looked upon. I hope the examination would be a further step in my achievement of being someone to be looked upon"
(67). This quotation inspired the title of Rubin's and Zavalloni's book We Wish to be
LookedUpon. The desire for recognition and to help parents and family who sacrificed
to educate them was a recurrent theme in the essays of working- and lower middleclass students who were selected for the first survey carried out by the researchers in
1957. In contrast, the White or Colored upper- and middle-class students expressed
no such burning aspirations to achieve either fame or a higher level education.
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We Wish to be LookedUpon is now a valuable document in the annals of contemporary history of education and society.23It is one of the few well-written, documented
studies where the voices of young people of all races and both sexes can be heard quite
openly and frankly expressing the aspirations and optimism of the period of nationalism. Rubin and Zavalloni describe the mood which infected the youth at the time
eloquently: "New nations bear the promise of new life chances and new potential
identities, especially for the young of formerly disprivileged classes" (75). In the
essays written by a selection of the students, there is ample evidence of their
confidence in the new regime. "We Trinidadians are eager to take over all the places
previously held by the Englishmen. Our nation will need more and more specialists,"
writes one young man (designated coloredby the authors). Another (negro)young man
observed that, "The island will need men of integrity, knowledge and capability.
Great emphasis is being laid and will be laid in the industrial expansion of the colony.
The men needed to direct, control and supervise such, will be local men with
knowledge and capability and I hope to fill a place in that field" (75-76).
Career choices of boys ranged from professions such as medicine, law and engineering, to teaching, clerical work or the civil service. There were significant differences to be found between the different social classes and races. For instance the
researchers pointed out that lower-class boys frequently specified the intermediate
occupations they hoped to undertake, such as teaching and clerical work, in order to
earn sufficient funds to attend university abroad. Many of the Colored students
responded to the social change by fixing their goals towards professions such as
economics and engineering, again, with the view that the new society needed "men"
with these new skills. Interestingly enough and to be expected perhaps, there was a
consistent congruence between choice and possibility for the white students in the
sample. Although the final aspirations of Negro and East Indian young men were
"higher" professions like medicine and law, with East Indians showing a marked
preference for these occupations, they were fully cognizant of a discrepancy between
an aspiration and an achievable goal, and set for themselves instead realistic intermediary goals in lower professions as a first occupation.
In the aspirations and the ideas expressed by the young men of the time, there is
an uncontested assumption of the dominant role to be adopted by men in constructing
the new postcolonial society. Women were integrally involved and their role crucial
to the nationalist struggle as we have noted above, but it is hardly expected that there
would have been a gender consciousness then as exists at present. In 1957, Rubin and
Zavalloni note that the "girls who form part of their sample represent an even more
special group of students than the boys ... as it was still somewhat unusual for girls,
particularly East Indian and lower-class Negro girls, to continue to the fifth and sixth
forms and to prepare for examinations for higher studies" (88). In their assessment of
the responses to girls' career choices, Rubin and Zavalloni found that 60% of the East
Indian girls selected occupations requiring university degrees in contrast to 30% of
the Colored girls, and 39% of the Negro girls. In addition, White girls were largely
indifferent to careers outside of the home, envisaging their future as wives and
mothers. The study found that 23% of White girls specifically eliminated career
considerations, compared to only 4% from the other groups who specify marriage
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only as a career. A conflict of choice between marriage and career which must have
presented itself to young women of the time would have different nuances to that
encountered by young women of today. Gender roles were more rigidly contained in
ideology if not in practice, and the ideal of the bourgeois middle-class housewife
fulfilled in her domestic role of mother and wife, and assisted in her chores by the
increasing labor saving devices ushered into the market, no doubt appealed as a
gracious future.
Nonetheless, the issue of equal educational access for girls at the secondary level
had not been absent from policy discussions on education in colonial society and, as
is generally known, had been addressed by the denominational schools in the
provision of separate girls schools since the turn of the century. This church provision
had particularly benefitted East Indian girls who were restricted from education, not
only because of the expense, but also because of the prevailing conceptions of
womanhood among this ethnic group. It was considered a waste of time to educate
one's daughter because her role in any event was to be a good and obedient wife.
Education gave her too many opinions of her own and opportunities to mix and
mingle with young boys at the formative stage of puberty. An Indian woman born in
1918 in north Trinidad, recounted in an interview with me that she was prevented
from going even to primary school in her childhood because her father was afraid she
would learn to read and write, and thus write letters to boys.24
By the middle of the 20th century there had been many changes and developments
and these are reflected in the career choices and aspirations of the young girls who,
having had access to a secondary education, formed the elite student population in
Trinidad at this time. Certainly by the 1940s and 1950s, primary schooling had become
more or less the norm for both East Indian boys and girls. What must be considered,
however, is that within the East Indian population, there were vast class and religious
differentials in the access of Indian girls to secondary education. The more wealthy
could afford to educate their daughters and extend their girlhood for a few more
years, while the less fortunate girls were to assist in household or other laboring tasks
while awaiting an arranged marriage. Those girls, whose parents had converted to
Presbyterianism, had more hope of a secondary education since the Canadian Missionaries had ensured since 1910 that two single-sex schools provided education for
girls.25 In the majority of cases, however, access was limited to a few years of
secondary enrollment and little hope of tertiary education (the latter feature in fact
applied equally to girls of all ethnic groups at the time). G.W. Roberts could still
observe in a study on school enrollment in Trinidad published in 1967, ten years after
the first survey was carried out by Rubin and Zavalloni, that "females tend to leave
school at a somewhat younger age than males.Y26
By this time there were many role models available to girls of African descent and
culturally a greater openness to ideas of modernity as these were filtering through to
the young. "As every modern girl, my plans and hopes for the future take the form of
a career; and, perhaps later, marriage, home and children," wrote one young (Negro)
girl on career choices (Rubin and Zavalloni 91). The responses to career choices of East
Indian girls who were to be found in secondary schools in 1957, and who had
participated in the survey, are doubly interesting given the cultural differences in
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femininity at this time between Indians and Africans. For many Indian girls education
was still viewed as a preparation for a more equitable partnership with a man, not
primarily for a future career. This accounts for contradictions in the girls' reasons for
being educated. One Indian girl wrote:
When I am married I think the woman's place is in the home. So
unlike many women, I would be at home instead of going to
work. I would like my husband to feel that he is the breadwinner
and consequently the head of the family because I thoroughly
disagree with this idea of women wanting to wear the pants; or
henpecked men. The marriage vow is to love, honor and obey
and I think that is really as it should be. Yet, I would not be a drain
on my husband's neck, and if at all it becomes necessary for me
to work, I will have my qualifications and will be perfectly
capable of doing so. (94)
There is an undercurrent flowing through this passage; the mixed tides of eastern and
western ideologies clash yet combine, and situate the woman as subordinating her
goals to those of her husband. The young Indian girl expresses a sensible understanding of the state of being a woman in Trinidad society, a pragmatic awareness of the
negotiations in marriage, yet an unwillingness to assume complete dependence on the
male, despite the elevated status he is consciously allocated.
Despite the cultural expectations of East Indian womanhood, in practice, there was
an awareness of change on the part of some parents. Indian girls showed a relatively
high level of aspirations and a desire for unusual goals given the time in which this
survey was carried out, as for instance those found in these passages:
Like any other young person of my age, my hopes and expectations for the future are very high. I am studying very hard in
order to make a good grade. If I do well in this examination, my
parents have promised to send me abroad to study and as anyone
can imagine, I do not intend to let such an opportunity slip. In
fact I even have hopes of attempting to win a scholarship, so that
I may not expense my parents who are not very wealthy. [She
plans to study law at Manitoba University in Canada.] After my
university career which I intend to be a success, I shall take up a
post as a barrister-at-law in my native country, which is Trinidad. [She also plans to take an active part in politics.] . . . and
then would have the respect and admiration of the people of my
country. (East Indian)
I will go up for the Legislative Council Elections. If I am
successful I can then help the people of my country most of all
whether I am the Minister of Health or not, though I would be
extremely happy if I am the Minister of Health or Education.
(East Indian). (Rubin and Zavalloni 89-90)
At the time of this survey, no women were in ministerial positions and not until
shortly before 1969 was the first woman appointed Minister of Health, only to be
replaced shortly after by a male physician in the post. From the above table there were
only six female lawyers in the country.
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C A L L A L OO
The essays of these young girls who would have in a sense predated my generation,
but with whom I share a historical legacy, have always drawn me back to a contemplative study of this survey. Why would a young girl of East Indian descent in 1957
have aspirations and ambitions which far exceeded that of most women? By this time
only a few women of East Indiap descent had entered other professional careers than
that of teaching or nursing. One influence might be that of role models provided by
other Indian women before them. The 1945 CentenaryReview of Indians in Trinidad
listed 236 names under the who's who, men and women who at this time were leading
figures in the Indian community. Twenty of these were women and among them there
was already one practicing medical doctor, Stella Piari Abidh, daughter of County
Councillor C.C. Abidh, and four others who are listed as medical students studying
abroad. In 1945, Stella was the Medical Officer of Health appointed to the Borough of
San Fernando and the first of these women to enter the medical profession in Trinidad.
From the little I have understood of her life, she had a profound interest in public
health and devoted much of her attention to developing this field in Trinidad.
Subsequent data analyzed by Reddock support the findings of Rubin and Zavalloni that Indian women and Indian men have continued to take greatest advantage of
the educational opportunities made available in the period between 1960 and 1980,
with Indian women showing the highest mobility.27 Nonetheless, until the last few
decades of the 20th century, the majority of Indian women were limited in terms of
individual choice of marriage partners or even a freedom of choice between careers
and marriage. It appears to me that the ideas and symbols of nationalism, a message
of equality of race and creed, along with the visible public participation of women also
had a profound effect on the generation of Indian girls who were coming of age during
the period of Independence. The availability of free secondary education meant that
there were greater opportunities for those who before were prevented due to limited
finances. Education was, I argue, of greater importance for Indian women than for
women of other ethnic groups, as other groups had already benefitted from new
cultural definitions of femininity in the society. The period of nationalism and
independence with its emphasis on free secondary education opened new opportunities and possibilities for deferring marriage, for contemplating a career, for expanding literary or creative potential, for challenging the negative and dominant ideas
about female morality and, most of all, new conceptions of the term equality itself. It
offered Indian women opportunities to meet and mix with other groups and to
expand their knowledge of Trinidad society as it incorporated other gender belief
systems. While this was a major shift in ideology for men and older women of this
group to adjust to, many had recognized that their daughters along with their sons
must be educated to face the new challenges of a different era.
Tradition and Continuity
I referred near the beginning of this essay to Williams' statement that, "Every age
rewrites history, but particularly ours which has been forced by events to evaluate our
conceptions of history and political development." The postcolonial period has
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involved many different revisitations of history, among them that of writing gender
into history. This essay has been a cursory attempt to continue doing so, a task still in
its infancy in the Caribbean and elsewhere. A gender critique of nationalism is still
necessary to continue unraveling the threads which tie us together as a people, but
separate us as distinctive groups which brought with them different traditions and
practices, all of which were mythologically woven together to create the fabric of
nationalism. The challenge of the present age, in which the issues of ethnic, gender
and national identity have emerged as popular currency, forces us also to evaluate
continuously our conceptions of history and political development.
I began the essay, however, with a personal anecdote, the memory of which
situates in my mind the coming of a new and idealistic age, a period which heralded
the shift from colonial "parenthood" to youthful sovereignty. It appears to me that as
midnight's children, now into adulthood, the message of nationalism in the optimistic
period of the 1950s and 1960s, experienced not only in Trinidad and Tobago but in
other developing societies, has provided us with a valuable legacy: the primary
schools where we could read the writing on the blackboard, the secondary schools
where we were privileged to learn, the university where we would begin to write our
own history and contribute to its development. This, perhaps, was the greatest legacy
which Williams left to us.

NOTES
1. Williams became Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1956 and remained in power with
the party he had helped to develop, the People's National Movement, until his death in 1981.
2. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children [1980] (New York: Knopf, 1981).
3. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery [1944], (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), 1-2.
4. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael
Joseph, 1994).
5. Kim Johnson, Book Review, Capitalism and Slavery, Institute of Social and Economic Research,
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, 1984.
6. This phrase is adapted from Bob Marley's "Redemption Song."
7. Selwyn Ryan records some of the contributions of C.L.R. James in his book Race and Nationalism
in Trinidad and Tobago (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine: Institute of Social and
Economic Research, 1974): 203, n.17; 214, n.15.
8. Gordon K. Lewis, The Making of the West Indies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 2056.
9. V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (London: Deutsch, 1962), 43.
10. Erica Williams Connell observes, in a semi-autobiographical interview on her life with her
father, that Williams was himself an extremely disciplined and hard worker and that her
classical education was broadened tremendously by growing up under his tutelage. See K.I.
Boodhoo, Eric Williams: The Man and the Leader (Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
1986), 3-12.
11. Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783-1962 (London: Heinemann, 1981); Gordon
K. Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968); and
Selwyn Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago(Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1972).
12. Carl Campbell, Colony and Nation: A Short History of Trinidad and Tobago (Jamaica: Ian Randle,
1992), 93.
13. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [first published in French in 1949 as Le Deusieme Sexe]
(England: Penguin Books, 1979).

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14. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1982). Fanon's book was published
in French in 1959, and was not translated into English until 1965.
15. Cited in Rhoda Reddock, Women, Laborand Politics in Trinidad and Tobago:A History (Jamaica:
Ian Randle Publishers, 1994), 301. Reddock's examination and analysis of the role of women in
the PNM and, in general, their political role in the society until 1962 is one of the few studies
which deals with the importance of women to the nationalist struggle.
16. Eric Williams, TheNegro in the Caribbean[1942] (New York: Haskell House, 1971); Eric Williams,
Education in the British West Indies (New York: University Place Press, 1951).
17. Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution [1966] (London: Virago, 1984), 18.
18. Chrys Ingraham, "You've come a long way baby ... or ... the Revolution will not be Televised,"
Perspectives: The ASA Theory Section Newsletter 18.3 (Summer 1996): 8.
19. Patricia Mohammed, "Reflections on the Women's Movement in Trinidad: Calypsoes, Changes and Sexual Violence," Feminist Review 38 (Summer 1991): 38.
20. Trinidad Guardian, 5 April 1992: 9.
21. One can argue of course that education is no longer perceived as having the same importance,
not only in Trinidad, but elsewhere in the world.
22. Vera Rubin and Marisa Zavalloni, We Wish to be Looked Upon: A Study of the Aspirations of Youth
in a Developing Society (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969).
23. Another useful study which I do not have access to but which is referred to by Rubin and
Zavalloni is A.C. Sieuchand's "A Study of the Aspirations of Three Racial groups in the
Grammar schools of Trinidad, West Indies," Thesis, Diploma in Psychology of Education,
University of Leicester, 1961.
24. From an oral history interview carried out with one of many old men and women I interviewed
for research on Indians in Trinidad as part of historical research data for a social history, from
a gender perspective, of Indians in the first half of the 20th century. The life stories of many of
the women and men who lived in the first half of the century are recorded in my Ph.D. thesis
entitled, A Social History of Indians in Trinidad 1917-1947: A GenderPerspective, The Hague, 1994.
25. These schools were Naparima Girls' High School in San Fernando, South Trinidad, and St.
Augustine Girls' High School in the north east.
26. G.W. Roberts, "A Note on School Enrollment in Trinidad and Tobago," Social and Economic
Studies 16 (1967): 116.
27. Rhoda Reddock, "Social Mobility in Trinidad and Tobago," Social and Occupational Stratification in Contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, ed. Selwyn Ryan (St. Augustine, Trinidad: Institute
of Social and Economic Research, 1991), 225.

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