17 to 24: So what?

By Bukka Rennie
November 12, 2003

When will we get the message? When will we come to comprehend that 12 and 14-year-old African males created the steelband? Do we understand what that means?

A 10-year-old boy on his way home from school initiated the burning of the Red House during the Water Riots of 1903!

Wasn't it African males of the very age group 17 to 24 that virtually took T&T apart in 1970, questioning everything from religion, to education, to the mode of governance, to the system of economic relationships that obtained and continue to obtain?

Wasn't it the same age group that felt so bitter about their oppression by the coercive forces of the State that, in the period 1973-76, elements, from among them, took to the hills, so to speak, and confronted the State in suicidal battles?

And again in 1990, the very said age group 17-24 proved to be the bulk of the insurgents who were prepared to follow Abu Bakr in open confrontation with the powers that be.

And do you know when and how Abu Bakr gained this following? It all began that fateful day when a group of people was protesting outside the Queen's Park Oval against the presence of a cricketer who had disregarded the rules of the ICC and had played in apartheid South Africa.

The police attacked the protesters and had them on the run. The police were beating protesters mercilessly until a group of Muslims led by Abu Bakr intervened and formed a human wall of protection for the protesters, and the police in turn beat a hasty retreat.

That was the moment! The folklore took over. The Muslims took on an image of fierce invincibility. The 17-24s joined in droves as they would any group who "make the police run."

The point is that this age group of African males will again and again rip this society apart until and unless society addresses their fundamental concerns such as the lack of relevance of the education system to everyday existence; the seeming partiality of the judiciary and coercive arms of the State to the big shots and their offspring; and the lack of equality in the distribution of the wealth of the nation.

We will ignore these concerns at our own peril and continue our merry way as the world's most "constipated" society according to Dennis Solomon.

Daily the heap of bunk and trite nonsense, that is being pontificated as analyses and prescriptions, has been growing by geometric proportions. I do not think that in the past 30-40 years more "b-s" has been foisted on this population than is the case today.

All over one hears the cry "...young African males 17 to 24 are underachieving" and immediately the literati and cognoscenti have a field day with their instant "high-falutin" prognoses about downright laziness, cultural inferiority and dependency syndrome that derived from State handouts via Special Works and URP.

Are these people serious? Laziness? Yet when there is menial, cheap, back-breaking work to be done around our yards or on our construction sites, such as digging foundations or throwing up buckets of cement, invariably it's done by a young Afro-Trinidadian. Nevertheless, the laziness talk abounds. Ah wonder why?

One person even goes as far as to assert that, though it is difficult to prove, there is circumstantial evidence that political party patronage served to destroy the independence of Afro-Trinidadians and deterred them from passing on their skills of craft as legacy to the present generation, or some such subjective stupidness.

In other words that political independence of 1962 and the development of party politics destroyed the economic independence of Afro-Trinidadians largely because of political patronage. Such the like is what passes as scholarly analysis in T&T today.

Three years ago, in my columns titled the "Quan Soon replies", I had cause to rebut similar silliness. I said then:

"...all the reports on the economy of T&T indicate that after Independence all the sectors, save agriculture, expanded. And that was possible because people shifted capital investments out of agriculture, ie cocoa, coffee, citrus, etc, into manufacturing and the screwdriver industries.

"Large capital investments now emanated from the USA and elsewhere rather then from Britain which was no longer the economic leader it once was. There was no depression associated with Independence, instead there was a boom as potential investors competed to come into T&T.

"Texaco of the US took over from the smaller British concerns of KTO, UBOT, APEX, etc, consolidated and centralised the oil industry and trained and developed many under the apprenticeship system as required by the then government.

"As in all economic boom periods, those who could no longer compete fell by the wayside. The small African businesses such as those involving the artisan trades, eg shoemakers, tailors, seamstresses, joiners, etc, could not compete with Bata, Standard Distributors, one-stop commercial stores such as Woolworth, Huggins, etc.

"Many of these artisans ended up as salaried personnel employed by the large commercial houses. That is natural to capitalist expansion. The shop-floor production system had taken over from, and impoverished, the masters of hand-craft..."

Extending the logic, I said further:

Salary and wage do not by necessity generate wealth accumulation. Salary and wage are prices of labour which in quantum are socially necessary requirement for the basic upkeep of the people who sell that labour. It keeps you barely alive and ticking to continue working. And inflation keeps eating away at the power of purchase and at whatever savings the better salaried people may prove able to set aside over and beyond the maintenance of their standard of living.

"Not so with a person who is the owner or renter of land, or has access to a piece of land, or the owner of any means that can be utilised for trade or be exchanged or invested with labour to generate profit. Such a person can accumulate for the future and buffet himself from the ravages of inflation...

"It is the inability of large numbers of Afro-Trinidadians to accomplish the latter that is the basic cause of their predicament..."

If "float and accra" and tanty-teashops have been superseded by "doubles carts and roti shops" - roti being a most ingenious version of a cheap meal - then whose children are more likely to be the lawyers and doctors of tomorrow, especially since it takes a doctor some seven years after graduation to pay off his/her student debts?

The point is this: nobody who is solely dependent on the wage relationship can accumulate wealth, it is the total dependency on wage and salary that has impoverished Afro-Trinidadians. Political patronage for Afro-Trinidadians is a job, dependent on a wage, while for others political patronage is about big and small government contracts.

No other commentator makes that point. They all seem to talk as though "gimme, gimme" dependency is only about make-work jobs, CEPEP and URP, and not about government contracts.

Yet where there is a will, there is a way. Education, particularly tertiary education, is very expensive. Most workers cannot afford this expense, particularly those who are committed to 25 and 30-year house mortgages, something that most Indo-Trinidadians have astutely rejected.

Afro-Trinidadian youths have opted as a result to take the American SAT and gain scholarships to US universities. Others, both male and female, have gone for football scholarships.

Nobody can seriously talk about "17-24 under-achieving" without first imputing figures to represent the hundreds that have been forced to choose these different routes to personal development.

Afro-Trinidadians 17-24 are not to be blamed. It is this society in which the system of socio-economic relations has become so anachronistic that it marginalises and pigeon-holes people, whether economically or culturally, and needs to be freed of its constipated stasis.