Afro-Greeks by Emily Greenwood;

Author:Emily Greenwood;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Athens of the Caribbean

Trinidadian Models of Athenian Democracy

The previous chapter concluded with the suggestion that Clarke, Naipaul, and Walcott have developed their own distinctive receptions of the Graeco-Roman past, which all turn on the rejection of the elision of empire implied by translatio studii et imperii). However, in the present chapter we shall see the elision of empire—specifically the Athenian empire—being put to work by C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, in an attempt to appropriate ancient Athenian democracy as an argument for Trinidadian democracy and as an enabling analogy in the formation of a national identity. James and Williams approached this task in different ways, but they shared the realization that they had to take back Classics from the colonial archive through which it had been transmitted.

The title of this chapter alludes to a remark that Harold Macmillan made to Eric Williams about popular participation in politics in pre-Independence Trinidad. Through his involvement in the People’s Education Movement (PEM), and subsequently the People’s National Movement (PNM),1 Williams had been instrumental in starting a programme for the education of the masses with a view to Independence. Under the PNM the locus of this mass education movement was Woodford Square in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, which was duly christened ‘the University of Woodford Square’.2 On learning about this institution of open-access education, which Williams referred to as ‘free university education for the masses’ (1969: 133), Harold Macmillan is alleged to have remarked that Trinidad and Tobago was ‘the Athens of the Caribbean)’ (ibid. 136).

As related by Williams, Macmillan’s remark affirms the parallel that Williams laboured to construct in his lectures on the PEM circuit—that in their version of direct democracy and mass education for all held in public venues, the Trinidadians were the natural inheritors of Athenian democracy. However, the role of Macmillan as metropolitan witness complicates the picture. Should we understand the topos of Trinidad as the ‘Athens of the Caribbean’ as just another facet of the imitative, colonial complex that some critics have discerned in Caribbean intellectuals of Williams’s generation? Or, is all this intellectual effort to align the Trinidadian experience with the society and culture of ancient Athens a way of putting one over on British colonial culture? By inserting Trinidad into the equation linking civilization with ancient Athens, were James and Williams anticipating the critique of the ‘Athens-to-Albion’ conception of Europe that has since been exploded by Bernal?3 Moreover, given that the crux of James’s and Williams’s very public falling-out was James’s criticism that as leader of the PNM, Williams was not prepared to implement direct, participatory democracy, it is also important to consider how seriously Williams took the model of Athenian direct democracy in his appeals to Athens.

In exploring the significance of the analogy between Athens and Trinidad and Tobago in the works of C. L. R. James and Eric Williams in the 1950s and 1960s, I will suggest that it is important to differentiate between the ways in which each man appealed to Athens.

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