Tribute to Lloyd Best
Filling the Political Vacuum
Lloyd Taylor

Lloyd Best, as political activist and public opinion catalyst, has had an extraordinarily long run, since he launched the Tapia House Group (THG) as an intermediate political organization in Trinidad and Tobago 37 years ago, in 1968. Eight years later he would take another momentous step by resigning from teaching at the University of the West Indies to contest the General Elections of 1976 under the rubric of the Tapia House Movement (THM), the party, together with 33 young political fresh-men and women on a slate that was short of the full 36 candidates.

The task at hand was to take action appropriate to filling the political vacuum marked by collapse of the West Indies federal experiment in 1958 and the successive failures of the regional independence movements to vest decision-making in our island societies in a way that harnessed fully the energies of West Indian people to induce professional political participation and to encourage indigenous economic capital expansion.

In Lloyd Best’s attempt to advance an independence West Indian enterprise, the notion of filling the political vacuum went beyond the routine exercise of contest for political office. His ultimate purpose was in fact to expand West Indian capacity to perform effectively on all fronts with our national integrity intact and uncorrupted. The concept encompassed every aspect of social life – economics, politics, education, constitution reform, sports – beginning where we were in Trinidad and Tobago and elsewhere, and it involved applying the resources we converted from God’s earth, into inputs for the reconstruction project.

Over the years his efforts involved several initiatives of recruiting cohorts for different tasks to inspire the growth of a nation out of its colonial past. In the nature of case and given the resources and the limited state of collective West Indian consciousness the organization of colleagues to collaborate on these ends could only advance on the basis of politics, which is to say persuasion, and not in any programmatic manner. That such participation could not be bought even if he wanted to, simply because there was no money for that purpose, underscores the significance of pursuing one specific mission for all of a life time.

So it was ten years prior to THG, Lloyd Best would be instrumental in launching the West Indian Society for the study of Social Issues, The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, following what would be a rancorous breakup of the West Indian Federal arrangements. Then the generation of men and women that ushered in island- state independence, had betrayed our cherished hopes by ducking the responsibility of forging a West Indian state. West Indian society, a unique cultural sphere remained, as CLR James pointed out, stateless across the Antillean archipelago. The Society for the Study of Social Issues was but one small step toward filling the vacuum. In time, it would foreshadow by five years the emergence of the New World Group and its flagship the New World Quarterly, beginning in 1963 with an Economic Development Plan for Guyana. New World Group represented a new mobilization of a West Indian party, albeit among men and women of letters, drawn from every island and instituted in most every community in North America where a cadre of West Indians had been schooling themselves abroad.

Beginning in Georgetown, Guyana, cohorts that included David De Caires, Miles Fitz-Patrick, Clive Thomas, Kwayna (Sidney King) would produce the New World Fort-nightly before it was transmuted into the NWQ. For this enterprise copy had to be assigned, the habit of writing prompted by numerous arts of nurturing and publication undertaken to give the New World movement visibility and a distinctive West Indian preoccupation in character and reach. In time a whole generation of people writing in the arts, poetry, history, politics and economy would be spawned across the region and a generation of West Indians would discover the means to self-validation. Publication of NWQ was defined by the rhythm of sugar plantation production such as Dead Season, Crop Time, Crop Over and High Season. Chapters founded by initiates in Kingston, Toronto, Washington, London, Basseterre, Georgetown, Bridgetown and Port of Spain would spring up. These chapters attracted popular attention by the process of open discussion, but would draw the eyes of political incumbents mindful of any activity, even remotely subversive of their political tenure. Several years later, I would discover, while thumbing through the pages of the Guyana Independence Issue, NWQ, in the library of the UWI, St. Augustine, located then in what is now the Administrative building, a one phrase biographical blurb, penned by the Barbadian novelist: “Lloyd Best – generally recognized as the driving force behind New World enterprise.” In the context of the time to blurb was an impetus to find out who Lloyd Best was.

In the middle of the New World Group phase of the mission to fill the regional political vacuum Lloyd Best was laying down another foundation block, crucial for deepening self-awareness by pushing back the boundaries of ignorance about those frustrations that bedeviled society and what we can do about it. The NWQ and NWF were in place but more work needed to be done simultaneously. This was the process of intellectual capital goods creation. Following a discussion Lloyd Best had with a group that included Alistair McIntyre, from which the idea of Plantation Economy emerged, he would assemble a cadre of young professionals at McGill University, Montreal. The mission was to flesh out his idea of plantation economy model. Led jointly with Kari Levitt, his collaborators would include George Beckford, Norman Girvan, Ainsworth Harewood, Edwin Carrington. His perception was that economic theory was often bound by place, time and circumstance and an independent people had a responsibility to examine their historical antecedents and founding conditions of society in order to discover for West Indians, ourselves what precisely explained our economic underdevelopment and to let the emerging comprehension inform solutions. Skeptical to the end that he could be wrong, Best allowed the passage of time to test the relevance of his plantation economic models and refused to publish them for almost 40 years.

The next phase, Best would move toward direct politics through a series of intermediate stages. In the process of advancing the development of capacity to fill the political vacuum Best’s mission would be to found a permanent professional participatory political party and to build into it all the attributes for self-sustenance and enduring existence. After 37 years of unrelieved endeavor, Tapia people as much as the West Indian community, as a whole, are a long way from that goal. Considerable advance has been made in understanding the root causes of our failings. Like Lloyd Best we all face the question he posed for himself: How do we convert the initiative of an individual into a movement for change? The story of Lloyd Best and Tapia House Group provide many clues, but no sure answers. If we knew the answer we would exist in the realm of the gods. Therefore in the absence of one, in order to fill the political vacuum, West Indians are fated, in the words of a famous Tapia idiom, to continue to play for change.