By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 05, 2024

It may seem an exaggeration, but the Leader of Our Grief is the most obnoxious leader we have had in our 62 years of independent rule. He has revealed himself as an unsophisticated bully who is unaware of his social and political responsibilities to the nation.

His latest display of incivility was wrapped up in a perfumed package of royal pomp and circumstance. He boasted that after having had dinner with King Charles III, Mia Mottley of Barbados, King Mswati of Eswatini, and President Irfaan Ali of Guyana he discovered that the UNC and its leaders had criticised the person he had selected to turn our economy around. He called his critics “the most destructive, unpatriotic louts among us”.

Whether one is in a king’s castle or in a lowly ghetto community, the essence of one’s character always bursts forth to betray the baseness of one’s soul.

In 2009, Patrick Manning detected this personality flaw in the Leader’s character; he said: “The minute you oppose my good friend, he gets very, very angry. And if you oppose him strongly, he becomes a raging bull.” That astute psychological analysis captured the torment in the latter’s soul.

The Express tried to be charitable, when it declared: “Rather than changing his behaviour to avoid giving such openings, Dr Rowley has repeatedly lived up to the late Manning’s description.” (Express, October 27.)

The Express should have mentioned that a leopard never changes its spots.

The Leader penned his repulsive statement while he was in the company of King Charles, the heir of a regime that controlled the British Empire since 1558. Elizabeth I participated in the slave trade and slavery. She gave “a large royal ship to the slave trader John Hawkins in 1564 in exchange for a share in the profits of voyage”. (London Guardian, April 6, 2023.)

Around 1612, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, his most trenchant play on colonialism. Roberto Fernandez Retamar, a Caribbean scholar, explains: “In The Tempest, the deformed Caliban—enslaved, robbed of his island, and trained to speak by Prospero—rebukes Prospero thus: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language.’” (“Caliban”, Casa de Las Americas, 1971.)

Prior to publication of The Tempest, Europeans used the word “anthropophagus” to describe people who ate human flesh. Shakespeare, however, introduced the word “cannibal” into the English language “to speak of the bestial nature of colonised people”.

Octave Manoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonialism (1950) first identified “Caliban” with colonial people. Aime Cesaire (Martinique) and Edward Brathwaite (Barbados) also explored this topic. This denigrating use of the term Caliban to refer to colonial people allowed Retamar to conclude: “What is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban?” (14.)

Our history is not that of only politicians who sit in golden rooms and make disparaging statements about their fellow citizens. It’s made primarily by revolutionaries such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Simon Bolivar, Julien Fedon, Paul Bogle, Antonio Maceo, Marcus Garvey, Fidel Castro, Maurice Bishop and Bob Marley.

I have visited all the countries to which the Leader referred when he disparaged the Leader of the Opposition. The people who live there are ordinary people trying to make ends meet. They are far removed from the officiousness of these “colonial leaders” who think they are being sophisticated when they malign their own people.

Although the coloniser gave us language, progressive leaders always used that very language to shape new societies. They have always rejected Miranda’s (Prospero’s daughter) absurd claim: “Abhorred slave, I pitied thee / Took pains to make thee speak, /…When thou did’st not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but would gabble like / A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known.” Caliban’s heirs must always use language to raise up one another rather than to pull other people down.

Every communique or speech of the Leader of Our Grief is filled with derogatory and insulting remarks about his people. It’s important that Kamla Persad-Bissessar follow Anita Hill’s advice to Kamala Harris: “Never let the people who despise you define you.” (The New York Times, October 28.) Hill was also assailed by racist and misogynist people who hated her because she was a black woman who spoke against a black man.

In addressing the Commonwealth Heads of Government, Samoa PM Fiame Naomi Mata’afa told delegates: “The reality insists that we are dependent on each other. We work together, or we suffer in isolation. It is in this togetherness that the real strength and value of the Commonwealth can be found.”

I wish the Leader of Our Grief should extend similar courtesies to those who disagree with him on social, economic and political matters.