To those who do not know or may have forgotten, Dr Winston Mahabir was one of three people that Dr Eric Williams invited to his home, on being dismissed from the Caribbean Commission, to "discuss his future and the way forward." Winston Mahabir was also one of three Trinidad island scholars being marketed on the PNM platform as high-quality candidates for the coming general election. Besides this, Williams had wooed Winston as the "Indo-Trini poster boy" of stature to boost the "inter-racial solidarity" image that was one of the party's major platform pranks.
Dr Mahabir was also a dynamic orator whose nickname (which he loved) was "Silver-tongue." One recalls him claiming that the political fare being served from the PNM platform was "intellectual chicken and champagne." However, the taunt coming from some sections of the community he was intended to appeal to was the cryptic "right man, wrong party." However, after an "exciting experience" in PNM's first Cabinet, he quietly, some say mysteriously, "left politics to further my studies in sociology and psychiatry partly with a view of discovering why I had entered politics in the first place. And partly, too, "because I was intent on analysing-from a distance and away from the immediate zone of his mesmeric presence-the nature of Eric Williams."
In Dr Mahabir's In and Out of Politics (political biography), he suggests that Eric Williams has been the subject of widespread deification and vilification. He further suggests that Williams's apostles have a duty to mortalise him, to write about the man they knew, even if they themselves are destined to be regarded by posterity as noteless blots on a remembered name. Williams himself seemed to think that he was "a bridge over troubled waters." As we recall, when Williams passed on he was sent off in a blaze of glory, like a fallen Titan, whereas many a political stalwart who has made a sizeable contribution has disappeared, like a pebble in a pond, "unwept, unhonoured and unsung," and in some cases barely unhung.
Following his own advice, Dr Mahabir tells us that Dr Williams-whom he describes as "a friend and colleague"-has been the least understood leader in Caribbean politics for more than 20 years. He is a durable amalgam of energy and enigma. Wrote Mahabir, "I have no hesitation in admitting that he has constituted a major influence in my adult life. His brilliance inspired me when I was a university student, his charismatic appeal fascinated me in his campaign for power; his imbalance perturbed me after his achievement of power, and I felt insecure in the shifting sands of his political attitudes."Interestingly, Winston Mahabir acknowledged that he had only one major intellectual godfather whom he loved and hated with equal passion through many years and that man was Eric Williams, whom he first met in Canada.
I recall Michael Manley saying that he was an internationalist or integrationist by choice but a Jamaican by accident. Winston Mahabir averred that it was at McGill that he established his identity as a West Indian as distinct from a Trinidadian, and even more distinct from a Trinidadian Indian. For the record, he found little in common with the Indian students from India. Mahabir admitted that he read Williams's Capitalism and Slavery avidly and with critical respect and recognised, "Here for the first time was a top West Indian scholar taking as his theme the history of the West Indies. Here was a black man concealing the dagger of his raw rage beneath a cloak of selective research directed against the white man's outrageous version of history."
Winston Mahabir treasured Williams's friendship and claimed that Williams's three best friends in South were himself, Dr Hasley McShine and Dr Mosaheb. They satisfied his "inward hunger" to the best of their ability and whenever he travelled abroad, he wrote them jointly, which, Dr Mahabir claimed, could amount to a treasury of letters for a generation of would-be biographers and aspiring PhDs. As I heretofore mentioned, Winston Mahabir was to fill the absence of an Indian of his stature to lend some semblance of genuine multiracial solidarity, one of the most loudly proclaimed precepts of the PNM. Cometh the moment, cometh the man. According to Winston, the time was ripe for such a man. Despite his personal faults and personality aberrations, he soon drove order into chaos, gave guidance and direction to vague impulses, synthesised the secret longings for lesser men, and finally brought a tremendous party organisation into the 1956 election campaign, the exhilaration of which its participants can never forget.
To cut a long story short, Dr Mahabir had a rude awakening and was shaken to the core when, PNM having lost the Federal election and with Williams's public political enemy number one, Berti Gomes, getting into the Federal Parliament, Williams literally went berserk at Woodford Square and launched a strident unbecoming attack on the Indo-Trinidadian community, thereby embarrassing the Indo-Trinis on his platform with his "hostile and recalcitrant" aspersions, and rendering redundant any further political usefulness of the likes of Winston Mahabir. Dr Mahabir removed himself from further fallout, but, like Trinidad itself, continued to hope that Williams's essential greatness would prevail over his manifest weaknesses.
THOUGHTS
• I recall Michael Manley saying that he was an internationalist or integrationist by choice but a Jamaican by accident.
• Winston Mahabir averred that it was at McGill that he established his identity as a West Indian as distinct from a Trinidadian, and even more distinct from a Trinidadian Indian.
• For the record, he found little in common with the Indian students from India.
