Emergence of an Institution

In a way, the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies was created in a fit of absence of mind. It has therefore come to embrace a multitude of sins, including the Trinidad and Tobago Review and the Tapia Open College. It is only in this, our 25 th year, that we're launching a formal programme of research and publications. What that means is that such activities will from now be systematically funded and staffed mostly in-house.

Of course, we've been occupied with little else, though on a guerrilla basis. We were once fond of referring to the integral character of our operations through our repeated references to the party, the poetry, the politics, the paper and the printing. The truth is that no one of them could have survived on its own, unless each was somehow fertilised by the others.

We were too green and too poor. However, the poverty was not especially material. We received not a little counsel: borrow the money and set up as professional printers, publishers, researchers or consultants. We refused that option, without at first quite knowing why. We sensed that something else was needed other than high technical expertise and reliable human commitment.

What we were in search of was not academic or business viability. It was a fresh interpretation. That dictated different methods of observation and enquiry. It pointed to new ways of reporting and of communicating results through media familiar to the whole country. It required a new language and a family of new concepts. It implied trial and error and testing over and over in the crucible of opinion about ongoing events. It necessarily involved judgment of the historical record and projection of what was likely to happen, before it did.

We later realised that some such method would, at one and the same time, select those able and willing to carry it forward while also giving to those who fell by the wayside a real interest in monitoring ongoing activities, judging results and learning from experience. Many dismissed us as talkers afraid of action.

We can see now that what was everywhere taken for action was merely the futility of operating without plans or ideas of any relevant kind. The WI way has been to rely on luck, magic or God; or to count on capturing the ethnic vote to turn office into power. In the highest places even now, not only in politics, improvement of education is thought to need mostly spending power on school places or on the expansion of plant.

For our part, we've preferred to grope and to learn in the hope it was the best strategy for both the individual and the collective, thereby inviting a culture to evolve and a community to expand. It cannot be said that that even when persons considered their reasons joining – rather than simply settling for an ethnic bond, it would result in a continuous and active participation. What it nevertheless generated was an increasing dedication, one that was neither primal nor ethnic but deliberate, if not entirely reasoned.

In many ways, Tapia people found one another out of instinct though not by that route only. Our people seldom abandon the movement; they keep coming back. We have developed a richer insight into the reason so many of our contemporaries have not been able to carry on with their parties and movements but keep chasing entirely new illusions. It is certainly not that their ideals have been any less compelling; or that they've been especially short of commitment or competence.

It is simply that they were not as lucky as we were, to have escaped from the shibboleths of the radicals such as those we left behind in the New World Group and, that we left, too besides, taking with us the central idea of that Group still fully intact. We were wary: change could not be decreed or orchestrated to some given specification. It had to be played for, allowing for accidents, interventions unanticipated and unplanned. Precisely because it could not be programmed, you had to be as ready as you could. You had to give due place to thought as the essence of action.

Once you're committed to challenging without first having acquired a modicum of resources for truly democratic and participatory intercourse, there was no way of obliging the great multitude of collaborators and supporters to take responsibility for results. Matters not what the outcome might be. After all the anguish over failure and the momentary temptation to attribute all negatives to the leaders alone, people must see clear.

The more the rank and file desert, the more the leaders are required to play god and to deliver. With support structures collapsing, the option is to take the beaten track of central control, personal power, maximum leadership and authorised vision. Very similar compromises are required as in the case of outfits we know that have come to office and to grief without effective means of community engagement. To deliver, they have little choice but to draw on an oligarchy of professional investors in search of rewards and in exchange for a consideration. Corruption or worse becomes the stock in trade.

These were the ugly choices involved in becoming a major player by taking the low road. Some commentators saw Hamlet hesitation. By opting to play for change and to proceed without having either captured office or assembled material resources, Tapia had no choice but for its own efforts and endeavours to fertilise one another. Other than the contributions from our own people, we never sought or received any grants or subventions. We simply groped but we gained insight in the process, mainly self-knowledge.

The constant was the paper. From early we'd acquired the press and print shop. The Review and Tapia served two purposes. First, they've been media of effective and constant communication and communion with our natural constituency, at home and abroad. Second, they were the fulcrum around which revolved day-to-day collaboration. Through such business and economics, we eked out a precarious if independent (and joyful) existence. Cadre such as Lloyd Taylor, Allan Harris, Vanus James and Lincoln Myers spent years or whole careers in the office. Ann Hernandez spent her whole life.

We also took jobs printing books, mostly for the UWI. Some failures were spectacular and hilarious. On occasions, we simply did not have the combination of expertise and experience; but we did print the odd title (including Braithwaite's Social Stratification , The Dynamics of Caribbean Economic Integration by Brewster and Thomas, the Essays in Caribbean Economy by Girvan and Jefferson, and others). As one of the little papers that emerged in the 1970s threatening to burn the establishment down, we also played a wider role. We printed papers for all kinds of groups and voices. Perhaps the most important was the Manjak out of Barbados, the counterpart in that island to Abeng (Jamaica), Ratoon (Guyana), Forum (Dominica) and, of course, Moko and Tapia here.

Of equal significance were our attempts to help the teachers and lawyers, respectively, to become more articulate in the ways of an emerging democracy that could no longer risk the kind of impotent and mindless adulation of leadership that some rely on, even now.

The strategy took the form of a peculiar type of underwriting of the professional journal. That support was not at all financial; nor was it political, in any sense. The lawyers involved were Ewart Thorne, Rolston Nelson, Dan Martineau, Selby Wooding and Claude Denbow. Nobody could ever hope to convert such quality persons into party people or put words in their mouths. Our underwriting took the form of producing, and even editing, The Lawyer as required, more than a commercial responsibility. The only reward we could expect was a Bar Association that had a real capacity for conversation, a result we'd have found more than congenial.

Even though he was our party Treasurer, we had much the same arms length relationship with Arthur Atwell, the animateur principal of the Education Forum . It was hard to imagine anyone in T&T with Arthur's passion for reform of schooling and insight into the possibilities of the Senior and Junior Secondary. Perhaps fortunately, our links to these two journals did not last, not in the way we were first excited about. The journals acquired their own dynamic. The road to civil mobilisation was not so simple.

It has taken us almost a generation to see the first fruit. Suddenly at the turn to the 21 st century, the professions as well as the communities are growing up, repudiating the Voice of One. No one knows where it will lead but we feel vindicated for having helped to put down foundations. Above all, the basis for a different type of Republic has surfaced in amenities for formal but mostly informal education, training and schooling in the provision of which our people seem to have become almost automatically engaged.

There have been breaks; but the Tapia House Group has never abandoned its heritage of Monday or Thursday night meetings, either at the House, in homes, or in public places indoor. These have never been sustained as campaign activities linked to elections. We've kept a real faith in exchange and crosstalk. It has never wavered. In the second half of the 1970s, we held the Symposia on the Construction Industry and the National Future. The Institute currently runs the Seminar for Professionals.

The evidence that clinches this method of community involvement lies in projects spawned on a wholly spontaneous basis by members with no prompting whatsoever. From the beginning, the Blackpool Youth and Sports Club of Upper Tunapuna Road chose to make the Tapia House on St Vincent Street their Better Village Headquarters. Seeing the perils of a genuine popular development, PNM soon bought premises up the road and gave the Club an offer some simply could not refuse. It was a brutal lesson in grassroots theory. We saw the true power of the incumbent.

The experience only redoubles the value of initiatives taken on their own account by such compulsive entrepreneurs as Anna Maria Mora, Cynthia and Michael Billy-Montague and Arnold Hood. In fields as varied as parenting, garment construction and modelling as well as accounting, respectively, schools have emerged.

It was Mary King and Fitz Baptiste who persevered to make our first Open College operational. Fitz was absolutely the first person ever to put on an organised course of lectures at the Tapia House. That was in 1970. It described how research and enquiry into African history was being developed with little aid from documentation or records.

We are only now realising that these impulses have contained elements that have been steadily accumulating. Suddenly we have a culture more than 30 years in the making. Tapia has reached a new juncture. We've achieved institution as well as organisation. We're thankful that the Institute and the Review can now be well and truly set up as clearly a milestone.