Tribute to Lloyd Best
Jason Mohammed

For me to pay tribute to Lloyd means that I must first give a short account of my past and what led me to his work and its profound influence on me.

I did not know of Lloyd Best when I went up to read Natural Sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge at the age of nineteen, in 1988. I left Trinidad a very naïve, and narrow middle-class teenager. My life had been all school, science, sport, sea scouts. How little I knew of both my country and myself was dramatically highlighted as a foreigner in England, as I became more and more aware of their political, social and economic issues in the waning years of Thatcherism.

The resistance of my fellow students at University to the unfair Poll Tax, which I paid mostly out of fear for my foreign student status, when they absolutely refused to comply, left a significant impression on me that widespread, vocal and vehement public resistance was an acceptable and productive approach to letting an unpopular Government know that it needed to reconsider its actions. At the time, it made me realize how apathetic I was compared to my English peers.

And then, 1990. I was more shocked than my English friends at the events in the news that July that I spent working in my Department’s lab on my second-year summer project. As I explained to them, it was unbelievable to me that a group of my fellow Trinidadians felt motivated so strongly to execute an attack against the Government. For me, as an observer thousands of miles away from the terror and curfews, this event was significant in making me realize how little I understood and knew of the society and culture that I had been raised in.

So when I returned home in late 1991, I was determined to learn as much as I could about my country and what and how it had made me.

Coincidentally, Lloyd had also recently returned home from Africa, and started writing articles for the Express. I clipped his articles out of the newspapers, along with those of Elton Richardson, Denis Solomon, Wayne Brown, Diana Mahabir-Wyatt and any others that would help me better understand the condition of our eccentric culture and society. However, for me, it was Lloyd’s that were the most rich, and the most dense. I would take to his weekly article last of all, with a highlighter pen, a dictionary and at least an hour. It turned out to be an effort that was well rewarded.

Lloyd would ask questions without necessarily giving the answers. I know for most, including me, this was truly maddening. But once you had the patience to go beyond being mad, the questions made you look at the world, your reality, differently. They forced you to go beyond your assumptions and delusions. They forced you to reflect on why you thought what you thought, and how you knew what you thought you knew. This is the real essence of Lloyd’s influence on me.

My scientific training at university had given me a lot of useful tools – an analytical mind, the discipline of working rigorously and logically from first principles, a problem-solving orientation, and the always-required habit of doing a reality-check. That kind of training in the scientific method gave me great respect for its contributors; in this case thinkers from Aristotle to Galileo to Descartes to Darwin. In addition, the application of science to the development of technology and engineering had impressed me into believing that the civilizations and societies that generated most of these achievements were frankly, also to be modeled when it came to how they conducted their social and economic affairs. If they did it, whatever “it” happened to be, then it was probably good for us to do “it” too.

It was my reading of Lloyd that helped me to question that invisible underlying assumption and the effect it had on my sovereignty over my thinking. The tools I had gained at Cambridge were of great value, but I needed to lose my assumptions about the power of their makers, and apply those tools to finding and making my own powerful ideas and understanding about my society, my culture, and myself.

From this realization, prompted by Lloyd, I started framing questions of my own, re-engineering my cultural schema, changing my assumptions about “first world” and “third world”, “developing” versus “developed”, learning to truly think historically in the context of how we came to be what we are, and what might be possible for us to change for the better. Lloyd invited me to become more reflective and more self-aware, and paradoxically, even as I realized how much I didn’t know, I became more self-assured because I was sure about what I knew I didn’t need to know any more.