Tribute to Lloyd Best
The Conscience of his Culture
Milla Cozart Riggio

It is 4:00 pm on an autumn day in Hartford, Connecticut in the fall of 2003. A lecture hall that ordinarily seems cavernous has become stiflingly uncomfortable, as Trinity College [University] students and faculty vie with West Indians from Hartford’s north end for the few remaining seats before the doors are opened, chairs dragged out, and the crowd clusters first in the foyer and then down the hall. We think of setting up remote speakers to be sure everyone can hear. The occasion? Lloyd Best is giving a talk. Without notes, he explains in factual and specific detail the necessity for us in Hartford to understand his culture in the Caribbean: its messages, its lessons, its caveats and accomplishments. What it means in a shrinking world for a set of disparate peoples that have always had to “make space where there is no space,” make do, and come to terms with the realities of racial difference and multi-ethnic rivalries, to search for ways to reach across the Caricom boundaries and, in the process, through their failures as much as their successes to offer lessons to the broader world. He never pauses; attention does not flag. Despite the elegant formality of both his language and his person, he speaks as if to every individual, warmly and, despite a strong self-critique, affirmatively. The obvious point is not to lament, whine or moan but to use the lessons of the past as a guide to the present and the future. A few hours earlier, the Manager of the Trinity Guest House has asked me about the “gentleman” in room 31. “Who is he?” she asks. And when I explain, she says, “He has such presence. He walks across the room and you know that he is someone who is…, well, someone.”

If Lloyd himself had heard this story (which until now he has not), he would of course have quickly pointed out that everyone is “someone.” And yet, there is no doubt that he wears his own sense of authority with the assurance, the calm dignity, and inner reserve of one who has paid dearly to sustain the personal freedom and independence that have allowed him over the decades to remain a moral barometer of West Indian culture wherever it travels. Lloyd’s writings are concentrated in the media that reach the most people the quickest; his teaching spread not only among his own students but all those within the reach of the Review, The Trinidad Express and his other outlets. From interpreting the crisis of the Black Power Movement in Woodford Square in the early 1970s to sitting as if enthroned next to his mother on his own front porch awaiting tributes on his seventieth birthday from a host of Trinidad cultural icons, patiently lining the steps in expectation of the privilege, he has understood and accepted his role in the life of these islands and beyond.

And, in truth, the privilege is collectively ours. It has been generously spread to those whose path directly crosses through the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies, and those who do not. Where else could one find on the Board of an independent institute such an aggregation of professors and administrators and scholars as those from the University of the West Indies who so serve the Institute, at the behest of a man who left the University for the sake of independent education? To have established such a Board, which reaches broadly throughout the culture, is but one of the many ways in which Lloyd has kept the faith and enacted through turbulent times the promises he made to himself and others at the advent of Tapia House. As he now passes the direction of this work to his wife Sunity and others, you can be sure he will continue to monitor, advise, and guide. For the past five years, it has been our privilege at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, to engage both Lloyd and the Institute to work with the students who study under Tony Hall’s direction at the Trinity-in-Trinidad Global Learning Site. Slowly over these years we have evolved with Lloyd a plan for the possibilities of expanding this program, engaging students from other universities, and opening up this privilege to students within as well as outside of Trinidad. These plans are just beginning to be developed. Watching them grow, nurturing and supporting them, will be the task of those to whom Lloyd is on this occasion passing the torch of the Institute. But make no mistake about it: he won’t be far away. Hurdles that to others would have proven formidable if not fatal are to Lloyd but detours in his path. He knows how to treasure the small steps: When I asked him just last week how he was feeling, he replied, “Well, I’m not working yet, but I am walking.” Despite his consistent critiques, this is a man for whom the glass of life has always been at least half full. When I asked him about his own health on that front Porch on Tunapuna Road after one of his several miraculous restorations to vigor two years ago, he quietly replied “I know that everyone in the world has died, but I do not see why it should apply to me.’ When asked later to expand on this idea, this economist said, “What I meant was that, until it happens to you, death is only statistical. I’ll grant you that the statistics are high. But they are, after all, only numbers.”

Congratulations, Lloyd, on achieving this milestone in your journey. Those who must pick up the burden and carry it onward under your watchful eyes – both here at home and abroad – are ever mindful of the privilege and the responsibility you have accorded us all. Be well. Enjoy, and keep reminding us of our ethical and moral obligations, as well as our constitutional and legal rights. With luck, pan will enter the schools and the schools will enter pan, and your pandemic understanding of education will produce results for others as dramatic as they have for your own daughters. I am sorry not to be able to deliver this tribute to you personally, but within the larger reach of the spirit of the island, we are all with you today.