Darcus Howe

A Political Biography

Robin Bunce, Paul Field

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781849666510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Darcus Howe: a Political Biography examines the struggle for racial justice in Britain, through the lens of one of Britain's most prominent and controversial black journalists and campaigners. Born in Trinidad during the dying days of British colonialism, Howe became an uncompromising champion of racial justice. The book examines how Howe's unique political outlook was inspired by the example of his friend and mentor C.L.R. James, and forged in the heat of the American civil rights movement, as well as Trinidad's Black Power Revolution. The book sheds new light on Howe's leading role in the defining struggles in Britain against institutional racism in the police, the courts and the media. It focuses on his part as a defendant in the trial of the Mangrove Nine, the high point of Black Power in Britain; his role in conceiving and organizing the Black People's Day of Action, the largest ever demonstration by the black community in Britain; and his later work as one of a prominent journalist and political commentator.

1

Son of a Preacher Man

We know nothing, nothing at all, of the results of what we do to children. My father had given me a bat and ball, I had learnt to play and at eighteen was a good cricketer. What a fiction! In reality my life up to ten had laid the powder for a war that lasted without respite for eight years, and intermittently for some time afterwards – a war between English Puritanism, English literature and cricket, and the realism of West Indian life. On one side was my father, my mother (no mean pair), my two aunts and my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, all the family friends (which included a number of headmasters from all over the island), some eight or nine Englishmen who taught at the Queen’s Royal College, all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, the Director of Education and the Board of Education, which directed the educational system of the whole island. On the other side was me, just ten years old when it began.

(James 1963: 39)

These words, particular as they are to their author Cyril Lionel Robert James, also carry profound significance for his nephew Darcus Howe. It is no overstatement to say that James’ description of his childhood conveys the pattern of Howe’s early life. For James, the balance of forces in this formative struggle were overwhelming and his triumph against them extraordinary:

. . . they had on their side parental, scholastic, governmental, and many other kinds of authority and, less tangible but perhaps more powerful, the prevailing sentiment that, in as much as the coloured people on the island, and in fact all over the world, had such limited opportunities, it was my duty, my moral and religious duty, to make the best use of the opportunities which all these good people and the Trinidad Government had provided for me. I had nothing to start with but my pile of clippings about W. G. Grace and Ranjitsinhji, my Vanity Fair and my Puritan instincts, though as yet these were undeveloped. I fought and won.

(Ibid.)

The course set out for Howe was almost identical: he was told early on in his childhood ‘You will win an Exhibition to Queen’s Royal College like CLR James, your uncle,¹ and then you will become somebody.’ These were not just the hopes of parents ambitious for their son to use education as a means to ascend the ossified class structure of colonial Trinidad, but also the expectations of a mother and father who were, respectively, Howe’s first teacher and headmaster at his primary school in Eckels village, Williamsville. The resources which the young Howe drew upon to resist and ultimately repel this adult onslaught were in some respects just as curious as his uncle’s. Instead of James’ infatuation with William Makepeace Thackeray’s Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair, the first character to become Howe’s close friend was Dickens’ Philip Pirrup. In the place of James’ Puritan instincts, Howe was imbued by his father with the values of Christianity and a love of reason, an incendiary mix which Howe would ultimately employ to ruthlessly question the injustices and myths of race, class and religion itself. Whereas James’ youthful rebellion was symbolized by his skipping his duties to illicitly play cricket, Howe rejected the social elitism of Queen’s Royal College (QRC) and the middle-class aspirations of his parents by befriending and becoming a Renegade, the street gang of hustlers, street fighters and urban youth who coalesced around the steelband of the same name in East Dry River, Port-of-Spain.

Rhett Radford Leighton Howe was born in 1943 and raised for the first 10 years of his life in Eckels village, a small rural hamlet located 3 kilometres from Williamsville in southern Trinidad. The village folk consisted then, as now, of agricultural labourers, who were the descendants of the indentured Indian sugar cane workers, and a smaller number of black Trinidadians, most of whom worked in the nearby oil refinery at Point-à-Pierre or in the city of San Fernando to its south. Howe’s father, Cipriani, had qualified as a teacher at a young age and had gone on to become head teacher of Eckles Village School: English Catholic (EC). It was his second headship, his first Moruga EC. Cipriani transferred to Eckles Village EC when Howe was 3 years old. The family lived in a cottage beside the village school. The house was surrounded by acres of cane plantations owned by Tate & Lyle, and local farmers, and had a clear view of the oil refinery. Howe’s father liked to boast that the oil produced in the village kept British warships fighting during World War II. Cipriani’s drive to succeed as a teacher owes much to Howe’s paternal grandfather who had worked hard as a stevedore and barge driver in Port-of-Spain in order to give his son an education so that he might become a teacher and escape a life of drudgery. He named his son, Cipriani, after Captain Arthur Cipriani, founder of the Trinidad Labour Party, who used his support among black dock workers in Port-of-Spain and working-class East Indians to lead a mass movement for self-government and against British rule in the 1930s. An immigrant from St Vincent, who was vulnerable to arrest and deportation, Howe’s grandfather knew to always carry a wallet full of money with which to bribe the police if he was stopped and questioned about his presence in Trinidad. Stevedores were not paid cash; they paid themselves with the goods they brought ashore from cargo ships which could not negotiate Port-of-Spain’s shallow waters. Howe recalls that his grandfather’s home was an Aladdin’s cave of sweets, clothes and jewels.

Figure 1 Howe, aged 5, standing outside his grandmother’s house in Princes Town, southern Trinidad. Young and innocent? ‘I know that fellow very well – he was never innocent!’, comments Howe.

Howe’s parents stressed the transformative power of education, making their expectations clear from an early age. Unlike his literary friend Pip, it was not the generosity of a mysterious benefactor that would ‘raise up’ the young Howe, but his own hard work and appetite to learn. On a visit to Howe’s primary school in Eckels village during the summer of 2011, one of the authors of this book chanced upon Claudine Forbes-Valdez, who attended school at the same time as ‘Radford’ and his older sister Carolyn 60 years earlier. She remembered that although strict, Howe’s mother was like a mother to all the children she taught. She cared about their well-being and would always make sure that the poorest children in the village would go on the school trip, even if she had to use her own money to pay for them. Howe’s father, she said, was an excellent teacher, ‘but we were fearful of his belt if he thought we hadn’t tried hard enough’. On the strength of her early education, Forbes-Valdez had herself gone on to teacher training college where she qualified as a teacher, before returning to Eckels Village School where she taught for 40 years (Forbes-Valdez 2011).

Howe’s parents did not tolerate prejudice against the Indian pupils they taught despite enmity between Creoles and Indians being common in Trinidad at the time. Use of the term ‘coolie’ to describe Indians, a racial pejorative which Howe’s father likened to the word ‘nigger’, was regarded as an abomination and a ‘sin’ by Howe’s father. Such sentiments between black African Trinidadians and Asians were in large part the legacy of imperial strategies of divide and rule and of British attempts to break the economic power of black small holders following their emancipation by encouraging the large-scale migration of indentured Indians to the Caribbean where they were treated as little better than slaves themselves. Racist attitudes and cultural misunderstandings towards East Indians are often satirized in the Trinidadian literature of the time, from the racial insults of the headstrong Masie aimed at the Indian maid Philomen in James’ Minty Alley to the tensions over food and living space which emerge between the black couple Joe and Rita and their Indian friends Tiger and Urmilla in Sam Selvon’s A Brighter Sun. Cipriani Howe, at the time a lay Anglican preacher, made no distinction on the grounds of race. Indeed, he visited the Indian labourers in the village to persuade them to allow their children to stay at school as long as they could afford before joining their older siblings in the sugar cane fields. Howe remembers that busloads of his father’s former East Indian students attended his funeral to pay their respects. Darcus Howe’s rejection of narrow ethnic nationalism has its progenitor in his childhood growing up in the mainly Indian community of Eckels village.

Being the headmaster’s son did not spare Howe from the physical chastisement which Forbes-Valdez had feared as a schoolgirl; if anything it marked him out for more severe punishment. Unlike his fictional friend Pip, who, Dickens informs us, was the victim of random violence on account of being ‘brought up by hand’ by his older sister, the young Howe seems to have received just one particularly violent beating from his father at the age of 8 when he first sat and failed to win an Exhibition scholarship to the country’s top school, Queen’s Royal College. The use of corporal punishment was not unusual in Trinidad in the 1950s; Howe’s school friend from his Queen’s Royal College (QRC) days, David Waddell, describes Trinidad as having ‘a teaching culture based around the strap’ and remembers the son of a teacher receiving some ‘licks’ on the hand for being lazy during the Exhibition class he attended at Tranquillity Boys (Waddell 2011).

The beating Howe received at 8 was, however, sustained. He remembers how at that age he could not even write for the 3 hours required to sit the exam. By the time his father had finished beating him with his blacksmith’s belt, which he had perversely named ‘Betsy’, Howe was left with red welts all over his back and buttocks. When Howe’s maternal grandmother saw the injuries on her grandson’s body, she threatened to report her son-in-law to the police. This traumatic early experience was never forgotten. Howe had a complex relationship with his father. Certainly he loved and admired him on many levels, but he would not excuse this violence, or the injustice it represented visited as it was on someone who was vulnerable and defenceless. Paradoxically, the beating instilled a degree of physical courage that meant Howe never flinched when confronted by violence in later life. When Cipriani was on his deathbed, Howe told him ‘so much of what I am is due to you’. His father responded with an apology. ‘Is that so? I am sorry I beat you so much when you were a boy.’ Howe responded in kind: ‘Is that so?’. Looking back he says ‘I wasn’t going to tell him it was alright, even if that is what he wanted to hear, because it wasn’t alright’ (Howe 2011a).

Howe’s earliest understanding of the world came from the Book of Common Prayer. In the hands of his father, whose services drew a large congregation to the Church of Ascension every Sunday, the message of the scriptures was one of egalitarianism and social justice. Howe recalls that ‘in our church Christ was a revolutionary’. He was also the Son of God, the creator of Heaven and Earth. Strangely, Howe’s father played a significant role in Howe’s rejection of the metaphysical foundations of religion and his ‘journey into the world of reason’. Cricket also played a role. One Christmas, Howe was given a bat and ball. He invited Reynold Allahar, an Indian boy from the village, to try them out, but rain stopped play. Howe asked his friend, ‘Did you do something bad? Did you steal from your parents or forget to say your prayers, because God is punishing us for something?’. His father overheard the conversation through the bungalow’s thin walls and addressed Howe’s misunderstanding the next day in school. Drawing a map of South America and arrows from its South East to indicate the trade winds, he said, ‘now wind’ and blew outwards: ‘this wind, blows across South America and hits the Andes. Air rises, condensation and saturation take place and eventually rain.’ Howe’s conversion to reason and science was completed a fortnight later in a class on English grammar. When a discussion occurred about poetic license and how it allowed exceptions to the usual rules of grammar, Howe asked if the scientific explanation of rainfall was an exception to divine rule. His father replied, ‘no it is the rule’. The scientific explanation shattered Howe’s faith.

This was a revelation which had both a devastating and liberating effect on Howe’s way of looking at the world; it was as if when he pulled at one thread of his religious belief system, the whole thing began to unravel and ‘reason became non-negotiable’. In a similar fashion, Howe began to chip away at all the old legends and superstitions which surrounded him in a village permeated with folklore disguised as truth. Here in its embryonic form were the first stirrings of what Linton Kwesi Johnson would, decades later, come to describe as the ‘merciless realism’ which characterized Howe’s analysis of the world. In time, Howe would use the same uncompromising intellectual framework to directly challenge the more poisonous myths on which institutionalized hierarchies of race and class were based in Trinidad, the United States and Britain. Without having read Karl Marx, Howe had instinctively embraced his dictum to engage in ‘the ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless in the sense of not being afraid at the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be’ (Marx 1844).

Howe’s thirst for knowledge about the world beyond Eckels village was unquenchable. He would wait for the broadsheet newspaper to be delivered every day on the truck which brought the ice, and when his parents were finished, he would read it avidly. Howe always turned first to a column called ‘In the Courts Today’ in which a writer called McGee would gently mock the judiciary in his detailed accounts of the trials that went on for weeks in Port-of-Spain’s Criminal Court.

He re-sat and won an Exhibition to QRC when he was 10 years old, becoming 1 of only 70 young men in Trinidad to win the prestigious scholarship. By the time the 11-year-old Howe took up his place as an Exhibitioner at QRC in 1954, his family had moved from Eckels village to the suburb of Belmont at the foot of the Laventille Hills in north-east Port-of-Spain. The move represented a new start for the family and a new house which Cipriani Howe had commissioned to be built on Gloucester Lodge Road.

Queen’s Royal College

David Waddell remembers his first meeting with Howe vividly. They joined QRC on the same day and both joined the top class 1A, reserved for Exhibition winners. ‘Darcus was from Eckels Village and I was from Port of Spain. If a kid from the countryside did come to a city like Port of Spain he would usually get made fun of a bit, what we call “give him a little fatigue”. You know the fellow from the country is coming with reservations and is a bit nervous. But Darcus was never nervous. He took it in his stride’ (Waddell 2011).

In French class, on their second day, the French master, one Mr Arundel, went around the class asking students their Christian name. When it came to his turn, Waddell replied ‘David’, whereupon Howe, who was sat at the back of the class, called out ‘Splavid’ to everyone’s amusement. Waddell remembers that within an hour or two of the lesson, the suffix was removed and he was known as ‘Splav’, a nickname which stuck and by which he is still known by his friends, family, children and grandchildren half a century later.

Howe, Splav and another Royalian Roderick Lewis, who was known by the nickname ‘Cheesy’, soon established a reputation for being the class rebels. Former West Indies vice-captain and wicketkeeper Deryck Murray also started QRC on the same day as Howe. He had passed an entrance exam but had not won an Exhibition so he took his place in the academic hierarchy below Howe in class 1B. Murray went on to captain Howe in the QRC under-16 cricket team. He remembers Howe as a good friend and talented sportsman but also as someone whose intelligence led him to being rebellious at school. Howe was popular with his classmates because he often got into trouble with teachers, but ‘when a particular teacher caught Darcus’s imagination and treated him with respect, Darcus excelled’ (Murray 2011). One such teacher was their history tutor Mr Rice, a white Cambridge-educated Englishman who was always immaculately attired in white shirt and khaki shorts. Waddell recalls that his friendship with Howe got off to an unlikely start when Rice addressed him in Latin one day as ‘piger niger pure’ or ‘black lazy boy’. In another context, Rice would have become Howe’s sworn enemy for such a remark, but the comment concealed the fact that Howe was his favourite student; if he wasn’t present on any day, Rice wanted to know where he was and at the end of every lesson, Howe was at his side. Howe recalls striking up a similar bond with his Indian English-language teacher Ralph Laltoo, who, in their first lesson together, told Howe ‘your problem is give a dog a bad name and hang him’. Howe took this as a declaration of peace and reciprocated by writing the finest piece of prose he had ever written entitled ‘Sunlight in the Morning of Port of Spain’, a composition which, Laltoo told the class, was not a school essay but was ‘literature’ (Howe 2011a).

For every teacher who recognized Howe’s potential, there appeared to have been several more who regarded him as a troublemaker. The black schoolmaster Hugo Gunning was one such. Splav had nicknamed him ‘pow pow’ after the sound of a gun. On one occasion, Gunning overheard the sound of imitation gunfire in the corridor and confronted a group of boys; when no one would own up to having mocked him, Gunning concluded that Howe was the most likely culprit and sent him to the headmaster’s study to be thrashed. TV Haynes, or the Sheriff, as he was known by the boys, asked Howe: ‘aren’t you fed up to keep coming here?’. Howe immediately replied with a Shakespearian flourish, ‘Sir, Twas not I.’ This clearly amused Haynes who said ‘Oh go back to your class and tell them I beat you.’ Howe’s quick-fire responses were not always so successful. The mathematics teacher Mr Jones was another who singled out Howe, Splav and Cheesy and insisted that whenever he entered the room, they should stand behind their desks. Every time he came into the class and they remained sitting, he would tell them to write 50 lines of ‘The way of the transgressor is exceedingly difficult.’ If they protested, Jones would double the number of lines. In the end, Howe and his friends refused to do the lines on the grounds that it would leave them no time to do their homework and were promptly sent to the headmaster to be flogged.

Carl Smith joined QRC as Howe moved into its sixth form, and went on to become captain and goalkeeper of its football team before later forging a career associated with professional soccer in the United States. He remembers that Howe had a reputation for know...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Authors’ Preface
• Introduction – ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian’
• 1 Son of a Preacher Man
• 2 ‘Dabbling with Revolution’: Black Power Comes to Britain
• 3 Know Yourself
• 4 Cause for Concern
• 5 ‘Darcus Howe is not a Comedian’
• 6 Revolution in Trinidad: ‘Seize Power and Send for James’
• 7 A Resting Place in Babylon: Frank Crichlow and the Mangrove
• 8 Demonstration
• 9 Clampdown
• 10 55 Days at the Old Bailey
• 11 Towards Racial Justice
• 12 Race Today: ‘Come What May we are Here to Stay’
• 13 Ten Years on Bail: ‘Darcus Outta Jail’
• 14 ‘Thirteen Dead and Nothing Said’
• 15 Insurrection
• 16 Carnival: Revolutionaries Don’t Wear Glitter
• 17 Playing Devil’s Advocate
• 18 Slave Nation
• 19 Fight to the Finish
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright