Tribute to Lloyd Best
A Man After My Own Heart
Kenneth Ramchand

When I marvel about how this place never manage to kill Lloyd Best/ and how he never get weary yet, and how he never lose his conviction about the green light the sustaining future that we can. build with our own hands and minds, I remember one of my favourite inspirational passages from Joseph Conrad.

In the novel Lord Jim, a man who has lived a full life is speaking to the narrating character Marlow about moral courage:

"A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns... I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hand and feet in the water make the deep deep sea keep you up. So you ask me, how to be? ... I will tell you… In the destructive element immerse. That is the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream - and so- even to the very end."

I would not say that Lloyd Best is an. optimist. And no one can accuse him of being an escapist or dreamer dosing his eyes to the realities around/ behind and in front him. In fact, from day one Best has held that our greatest drawback has been a refusal or inability to see and understand what is before us and around us, and that the base and foundation of our development is finding out about oarscives and the place From day one. Best has immersed himself in the destructive element" and made it keep him up. Look at some surprising evidence.

Naipaul's The Mimic Men appeared in the same year/1967, as Bests –Independent ~rh<)ught and Caribbean Freedom/. Amazing coincidence: the novel and the essay, in their differentm^es cov^ almost exactly the same ground. Yon could almost think that Bes and Naipaul sit down and had akmg talk and then thev went tneir separate ways to write their own thing,

In his opening paragraph Best declares that he is trying to encompass "the cultural, social, political and economic foundations of the sugar plantation variant of the colonial mind/' These are the foundations and this is the same disinherited mind that Naipaul's great novel brings to dramatic and theatrical life.

Naipaul projects politics as empty theatre/ and works upon our senses, overwhelms us with the imagery and dramatisations of drift, disorder, and institutional and personal mimicry. So people get vexed with Naipaul. They say he is anti-West Indian. But is Naipaul more severe than Best?

Almost everywhere. Best begins, -"there is disorder: fragmentation^ segmentation and disarray. What is more, it is mounting disorder../' In Best's analysis, "the economy which underlines this disorder is literacy a pappyshow" prompted as ever by metropolitan demand. and metropolitan investment.

A critique of imitation and mimicry is strong in Best's comprehensive analysis of our social, political and cultural institutions/ including the institutions of learning and the intellectuals who are as implicated in the values and procedures of institutions abroad as are the firms of the economy which are really branches of metropolitan corporations.

Best is most devastating in his analysis of a pattern of economic development which is reliant upon metropolitan initiatives and which is rationalised by Governments as an interim goal "separate and distinct from political independence and social equalisation". You cannot miss the omens of further disorder and seemingly inevitable chaos. How a man can see all this and carry on as if the Frank Worrell trophy is still ours to play for7

Best has applied himself with unblinking rigour to understanding the brink from which we have come, the stasis or chaos in which we stand/ the direction in which we are pointed, and where we can end up if we don't take our bearings and set our own course. Nobody complains that he is depressing; and he is not himself m a state of: depression. When you read him or talk to him you don t feel to ask him, if all of this is true why you don't kill yourself or go and lecture in America?

Best is more severe than Naipaul. Ryan says m. the Introduction to hldj?^n<i£nL,Jllo.u^ht^.an^ eeciom (2 0 0 3) t Is a t "'controversy followed him continuousiv''; and in the Foreword to the same book. Rex Nettieford speaks of "his trenchant prose which sometimes .rankles even while it enlightens"/ But nobody quarrels with him for his severity. He is not destructive.

The individuals and mstitutiony lie has castigated turn round and honour him. Not because they want to take what he says to heart but can't, and not because they are thick-skinned. 1 suppose they know he knows they mean well, that they want: better possibilities or fulfilment for everybody, and thai his quarrel with them. is a quarrel about means not ends., So the. region's politicians and the organisation, he has found wanting confer on. him. the Order o( the Caricom Community, tt is the only way they can respond to what is really a. call for dialogue.

Dialogue, (t is a key word for understanding Best. I have never known a man who knows so much and who listens so intently to what you have to say. I have never known anyone who is so definite in his analysis of what is wrong yet so tentative, provisional and open-mmded when he begins to trace what needs to be done.

The young man of twenty-three who saw the need to create a journal for young West Indian scholars and thinkers to create their own discourse did nol- know exactly where New World Quarterly was going. Ali he knew was the need for dialogue. The proposal for a Constituent Assembly in 1970 is also a call for dialogue/ •'•'a political process of finding out and sifting", a political process of give and lake welding different: points of view and community inlerests for "'a new politics, and new parties and new leaders/' Let us talk and talk and talk. and vv'e will find out. Community interests cannot for long replicate ethnic polarisations.

The advocacy of dialogue comes from an appreciation of the capacity of people to transform their environment This appreciation is based upon solid evidence, knowledge of the achievements of people who were brought: here five hundred years ago as labour l-o do work on the land and of their descend ants who became .farmers, writers, painters, craftsmen, builders, teachers, musicians, entrepreneurs, pundits, baba.s, pan.rn.en, calypsonians, the whole lot.

It is an appreciation of facts that does not need a romantic concept of the people or the folk. j thought he did not know this and that .1 was the only one who saw it untiH heard him say at me Conference held in his honour at St Augustine in 2003: "What is this concept of the people? I dop/i have this concept of the people? Which people? When I talk about people I mean everybody in the country. "

Everybody in the country. Everybody can contributo l-o the process of change. If we look we will see that they did it in the past. It is not a leap In the dark to imagine they can do it again.

Lioyd Best is not an optimist. That is a sentimentality his mind will not permit. He is not a pessimist That is a. self-indulgence his knowledge would decisively arrest. He is not a high priest-or doctor of any ideology or orthodoxy. His sense of dialectic and of the variety of human opinion and points of view rejects any intellectual monopoly or imposition. He is not a doctor (it so happened he didn't bother to do any doctorate for any University) and has chosen to remain an independent and enquiring spirit.' He is a treader of water, a believer, a man who will keep doing all he can while was ting.

If I had to settle on one term,. I would say he is a. man of faith. Faith in man's unconquerable mind., Faith in Ihe power of knowledge to make things hang together. Faith in preparation for the future. Faith in himself. Faith in work.

Absolutely not that vaunted faith in tilings not seen, but a faith in people, based on the evidence of what he has seen, understood, and learnt:

I have a lot of patience; I can wait one hundred, years, but 1 want to install the mechanism to make it possible jfor a constituent assembly to bloomi some time in the future, on the assumption that people are going to learn, and that people are intelligent and reasonable, and sensible, some of them, not all of them can be. And if you get sufficient people like that – we don't know what the magic number is, 55, 105, 20 - then the civilisation could save itself by its own exertions, and save its neighbours by example.