Something unusual—and potentially very important- is happening in Saint Lucia. We appear to be looking backward, not in the sense of retreating into the past or because we have exhausted our ideas for the future, but in the manner of a traveller who occasionally stops, turns around, and studies the road already travelled in order to understand how he arrived at his present destination. For a young nation still defining itself, there may be considerable wisdom in doing so. Before deciding confidently where we ought to go next, perhaps we should occasionally ask two deceptively simple questions: How did we get here, and what can those who travelled before us teach us about where we should go from here?
Recently, I wrote a commentary asking another apparently simple question: Who Was Saint Lucia’s Best Prime Minister? The discussion it generated has been fascinating. People have disagreed, defended their choices, recalled accomplishments, challenged conclusions and, inevitably, viewed some of the arguments through the familiar lenses of political loyalty. Yet beneath those disagreements, I believe something far more valuable has been taking place. Saint Lucians are not merely arguing about personalities; consciously or otherwise, we are beginning to examine the meaning, quality, and consequences of leadership. That is a discussion worth encouraging, because a country cannot properly evaluate where it is going without occasionally examining those who helped bring it there.
At almost the same moment, author Dr. Anderson Reynolds has been conducting his own excavation of our political past. Having previously turned his attention to George Odlum—that extraordinary, complicated and intellectually formidable Saint Lucian whose voice influenced political consciousness both here and throughout the Caribbean—Reynolds has now examined Sir John Compton in John Compton: Power, Struggle and the Making of a Nation. Poet and writer Modeste Downes, in his recent review of the book, presents Compton in several dimensions: the private man, the politician, the visionary and the nation builder. Taken separately, these books, reviews and newspaper commentaries might appear simply to be individual contributions to our literature. Taken together, however, they suggest something more significant: perhaps Saint Lucia is entering a period of national reflection, and perhaps that reflection has arrived at precisely the right time.
WHEN POLITICIANS BECOME HISTORY
There is a strange transformation that eventually overtakes political leaders. While they are alive and active, we tend to see them through party colours. They are Labour or Workers, government or opposition, friend or enemy, hero or villain. Their successes are celebrated by one side and minimized by another; their failures are magnified by opponents and rationalized by supporters. But eventually the rallies end, the loudspeakers become silent, the campaign posters disappear, and the crowds go home. Time then begins the slow process of separating political emotion from historical consequence, and history becomes considerably less interested in the colour of the shirt a politician wore than in the condition of the country that politician helped to shape.
That is why this renewed interest in our former leaders should be welcomed, but only on one important condition: we must have the courage to examine them all honestly. We should neither canonize those whom we admired nor erase the contributions of those whom we opposed. We must examine them as human beings who were entrusted, for a time, with the destiny of a small, developing nation. Their achievements deserve recognition, their mistakes deserve scrutiny, their ideas deserve examination, and their records deserve comparison. Anything less simply replaces history with political mythology.
COMPTON AND ODLUM: DIFFERENT MEN, DIFFERENT WEAPONS
Consider the fascinating contrast between John Compton and George Odlum. They were profoundly different personalities whose influence was exercised through very different instruments. Compton was the builder, administrator, strategist, and extraordinary political survivor. His fingerprints can be found across the institutional, constitutional, infrastructural and economic development of modern Saint Lucia. Odlum possessed a different kind of power: the ability to make people question the world they had accepted. He challenged colonial assumptions, economic inequality, regional relationships and the meaning of Caribbean independence itself. His principal instrument was not the machinery of government but the power of ideas, language and political consciousness.
If Compton helped build much of the physical and institutional architecture of modern Saint Lucia, Odlum helped disturb and reshape the political mind of Saint Lucia. One was principally a builder; the other, a provocateur of thought. One became masterful at using the machinery of government; the other demonstrated the extraordinary capacity of ideas to unsettle governments and awaken populations. Yet there is a truth we sometimes forget when discussing figures of this stature: both men belong to Saint Lucia. Compton does not belong exclusively to the United Workers Party, just as Odlum cannot be confined to the Saint Lucia Labor Party or any particular ideological movement. Sir George Charles does not belong to one political tribe either. Nor, ultimately, do Allan Louisy, Winston Cenac, Michael Pilgrim, Vaughan Lewis, Kenny Anthony, Stephenson King, Allen Chastanet or Philip J. Pierre. Their records belong to history, and our history belongs to the people.
PERHAPS WE HAVE BEEN ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION
This brings me back to the question that generated so much discussion: Who was Saint Lucia’s best Prime Minister? Perhaps there can never be a universally accepted answer because, before answering it, we must decide what greatness in national leadership actually means. Is it measured by roads and bridges, schools and hospitals, economic growth and employment? Is it the reduction of poverty, creation of institutions, defence of democracy, protection of the vulnerable, regional influence, fiscal discipline, or the ability to unite a divided population? Should we measure a leader by what was constructed during his tenure, or by whether the institutions and policies he created continued serving the country long after he left office?
Perhaps the ultimate test is simpler and yet much harder: Did you leave the country better than you found it? Once that becomes our standard, the discussion immediately becomes more serious. It also becomes uncomfortable, because standards cannot fairly be applied only to the dead. If we establish principles by which yesterday’s leaders are to be judged, intellectual honesty requires that we apply those same principles to today’s leaders and, eventually, to those who will seek to lead us tomorrow. History should therefore not merely satisfy our curiosity about the past; it should improve the standards by which we judge leadership in the present.
To be continued in the weekend issue…….