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... He was such a useful
man
Caldwell Taylor
Alister Hughes, the Grenadian journalist,
broadcaster, historian and environmentalist who
died on February 28 at the age of 86, wants to
be remembered for having been
" a useful man". It is well worth telling how
Hughes came to this laconic and recklessly
modest assessment of his long and eventful life.
It was the afternoon of October 19 , 1983, and
the executions had been carried out on the
orders of the Central Committee, or most
certainly with its tacit approval. The stout
walls of an ancient fortress bore a stoic
testimony to the cold-blooded savagery. Alister
Hughes was somewhere in Town and his wife was
extremely worried.
Suddenly , a women came along to report the news
of the carnage at the Fort. Dead bodies were
strewn everywhere and Alister Hughes was among
the dead, reported the woman. "Mr.Hughes was
shot right in front of me", she continued. The
news
sent Alister's wife into a state of inconsolable
grief. The reporter offered her deepest
sympathies and as she turned to move away she
mumbled to no one in particular: "Ah dunno why
dey killed 'im; he was such a useful man".
Miraculously, Alister turned up a few minutes
later to the great relief of his family. He was
told the story of the woman who reported his
death and her comment about how useful a man he
had been . Alister immediately laid claim to the
woman's epitaph:
"He was such a useful man"
Alister Earl Hewiston Hughes was born on January
21,1919;his remarkable life spanned the major
watersheds of modern Grenadian history.
Alister was a toddler when a rash of fires hit
St Georges , the Grenadian capital, in 1920. The
Grenadian authorities blamed the fires on
disaffected ex-soldiers and other hotheads, who
had come into contact with the inflammatory
ideas of Marcus
Garvey on the one hand, and the 1917 Russian
(Bolshevik) Revolution , on the other. In the
wake of these incendiary fires, many official
fingers got pointed in the direction of a young
ex-soldier from the Williamson Road ( St
George's) area. The young ex-soldier packed up
and left Grenada in January 1921, perhaps to
escape the accusatory gazes of the colonial
constabulary. He went down to Trinidad where he
would become a champion of the working class.
Tubal Uriah Butler was his name.
In the 1920s, Grenada was a racially stratified
and viciously colour-coded society dominated by
a white plantocracy and a brown merchant class.
More than eighty years into post-Emancipation,
Grenadian society remained the perfect pyramid
of the slave era: a handful of whites (
expatriates and creoles) at the apex; browns in
the middle and blacks and indentured Indians at
the base. Hughes was a scion of the brown
merchant class, but his decency allowed him to
talk openly about the privileges he enjoyed for
being brown. Talking to an interviewer in 1997
about the scholarship he won to the GBSS in
1931,Hughes said:
In those days, I had an unfair advantage. While
my father could pay for lessons
for me and I could go home and study, most of
those I was competing with didn't have
that privilege.
Alister was six year old in 1925, when Grenada
's crown colony government was "modified" to
give Grenadians a measure of elected
representation on the island's Legislative
Council Actually, this modification was a sop
that was meant
to buy-off local agitation for some kind of
self-rule. In the decades following on Jamaica's
epochal Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) ,which ,
according to Eric Williams,
originated "in the desire for land", the British
embarked on a propaganda offensive to douse the
revolutionary appeal of Morant Bay and to remind
us of our racial inferiorities and our
biological unfitness for home-rule:
Such important reminders came from Professor
James Anthony Froude, who visited the West
Indies in 1887 and one year later published his
observations in a book entitled "The English in
the West Indies, or the Bow of Ulysses".
Froude's five- hour stay in Grenada resulted in
this racist calumny on the Grenadian and West
Indian people:
"Black the island was and black it will remain.
The conditions were never likely to rise which
would bring back a European population; but a
governor who was a sensible man, who reside and
use his natural influence , could manage it with
perfect ease. The island belonged to England; we
were responsible for what we made of it and for
the blacks' own sakes we ought not to try
experiments on them. They knew their own
deficiencies and would infinitely prefer a wise
English ruler to any constitution which could be
offered them. If left entirely to themselves,
they would in a generation or
two relapse into savages; there were but two
alternatives before not Grenada only, but all
the English West Indies- either an English
administration pure and simple, like the East
Indian or falling eventually into a state like
that of Hayti, where they eat their
babies, and no white man can own a yard of
land".
Professor Froude's views were echoed by others,
including Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of
European imperialism. Kipling published in 1899
a poem- "The White Man's Burden"- which called
on the United States to join the white races in
a crusade to civilize the "half devils" of the
world.
Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed-
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught sullen peoples
Half-devil and half child
Take up the White Man's burden
Alister was 17 years- old and a student at the
Grenada Boys' Secondary School ( then a place to
potty-train Grenadian Englishmen) when Grenada
was awarded another
constitutional touch up in 1936.
In 1944 Alister was one of 4,000 Grenadians who
were allowed to vote : twenty-five thousand
adult Grenadians were denied that vote as they
did not have the necessary property
qualifications.
More constitutional change came to Grenada on
August 1, 1951 with the introduction of
Universal Adult Suffrage. By this time Hughes
was immersed in local politics. Indeed, he
joined the Grenada National Party (GNP) at its
founding in 1955 and served as its general
secretary for more than ten years.
There was more constitutional change in 1958,
when Grenada became a member of the West Indies
Federation (1958-1962). Hughes, a
self-confessed West Indian nationalist , was a
huge supporter of the federal experiment which,
sadly, ended in a
babel of recriminations.
Following on the collapse of the Federation,
Hughes's GNP sought unitary statehood with
Trinidad and Tobago. Eric Gairy's Grenada United
Labour Party, the other major electoral outfit
in Grenada, flirted with the idea of a "Little
Eight" federation. The GULP also pined for
absorption into Canada.
Meanwhile, the British and the Americans were
quietly plotting the future of the islands. The
two countries settled the matter in the course
of an October 1965 meeting between Britain's
colonial secretary Anthony Greenwood and the US
secretary of state Dean Rusk. The Greenwood-Rusk
package was conveyed to the islands some eight
weeks later.
Greenwood told the islands that they were going
to be the recipients of a brand new
constitutional dispensation named "Associated
Statehood". The details concerning this new
constitutional animal were codified in the 1967
West Indies Act, which devolved full and
complete internal self-government on the
respective island legislatures .Grenada
celebrated its Statehood Day on March 3,1967.
"Statehood" brought the island within easy reach
of total independence. In fact," Independence"
came to Grenada in 1974 in the face of three
months of protest demonstrations. Alister Hughes
was attacked by government - backed goons while
covering one of these protests on January 21
,1974- "Bloody Monday in Grenadian history.
Eric M.Gairy (1922-1997) was the Grenadian prime
minister at the time of Independence. The Gairy
Government was overthrown in 1979 and was
replaced by the Maurice Bishop (1944-1983)-led
People's Revolutionary Government (PRG); Alister
Hughes faced severe restrictions for his
opposition to the policies of the PRG. He was
locked -up in October 1983, when the PRG was
replaced by the Revolutionary Military Council (
RMC) . The RMC was disloged by the US forces
which invaded the island on October 25, 1983.
Alister Hughes, who became a journalist at the
age of fifty, won many awards for his
outstanding reportage. Among these awards were
the Columbia University Maria Moors Cabot Award
"for distinguished journalistic service" and the
Caribbean Publishers and Broadcasters
Association's prize "for outstanding coverage of
Grenada's pre-Independence "disturbances". In
1994 the University of the West Indies
conferred on Hughes a Doctor of Laws degree.
It is worth telling that Hughes turned down the
offer of a British award, the Commander of the
British Empire , CBE, on the grounds that "it
undermined all that he stood for. "If I
accepted it", he told a reporter, "I am not
centering myself in the Caribbean, I am
centering myself in Britain, which is now a
foreign country". He might also have added that,
something is very wrong with the 'post-
colonial' government that hands out such
trinkets to their "outstanding citizens".
Imagine rewarding Ajamu's
made-in -Grenada genius with this imported
British bauble!
Alister Hughes was for more than five decades
our leading public historian . He had a keen
understanding of the organic relationship that
obtains between memory and individual and group
behaviour. Besides, he knew that self- knowledge
is an indispensable pre-condition for any
meaningful self-government.
He was such a useful man .
March 2, 2005 |
