By Kennedy Earle Clarke — 16 February 2022
“When an enslaved race of people is unaware of their true history, they tend to adopt the lifestyle of those who enslaved them. How can any conscientious leader who really and truly wants to liberate his people turn around and use an economic system which enslaved him, and now use that same system to really and truly liberate his race socially, politically and economically? The same exploitation, oppression, degradation that that leader suffered under the capitalist system as a slave, is the same degradation that will be imposed upon his people, were he to adopt that same economic system.”
Dear reader, when PAM came into being in 1965, it was supported by those who owned the sugar estates and the big business places in Basseterre. When the Union negotiated a 5% or 10% increase for the workers prior to the commencement of the crop, everything in the business places downtown went up by the same amount. They took back that increase because they despised the working class making any financial advancement. PAM came into existence in 1965 and decided to contest the 1966 General Elections. Prior to the elections, Dr. William Billy Herbert called a meeting of the Taxi Drivers and, although I had left PAM three months after it was formed, I attended that meeting. He said: “I have made the necessary contacts and as long as you live, you will never see any Fort Thomas Hotel built, for it will hamper us in our electioneering campaign.” I was shocked that taxi drivers clapped. I said: “I am a Taxi Driver; I depend upon visitors coming to the island. You stop a hotel from being built here and they clapping?”
This is why the leaders of the new Labour Movement became their number one enemy: vilified, demonised and — more importantly — impossible to be bought or sold. It is the same hatred they had stored in their hearts for Mr. Thomas Manchester in 1932 for forming the Workers’ League. The working-class must never be defended; they must always be at the mercy of their former enslavers. The education continues next week, God willing!