In order to appreciate the cultural and political significance of Williams’s use of Classics, it is necessary to understand the status of Classics in the educational curriculum in the British Caribbean colonies in the decades prior to independence. In British Caribbean colonies in the 1950s, there was a tight equation between education and social mobility. Both fictional and historical works relating to this period reveal the paradox that, although education could change one’s situation in life, it was so closely associated with social status that for many people it was considered foolish to aspire to an education at odds with one’s position in society. This attitude had its origins in the society of the plantocracy where the education of slaves and, subsequently, indentured labourers was held to be counterproductive. In his historical and political works, Eric Williams describes the legacy of the plantation economy - and indeed the slave economy - in terms of a society that does not have the leisure for the arts or intellectual pursuits for their own sake (Williams 1964: 212-14, 247).
In the memoirs of his school days in Barbados at the intermediate school Combemere in the 1940s, the Bajan (Barbadian creole) author, journalist and sometime politician Austin Clarke describes the awe and alienation that greeted young black boys who broke established patterns by excelling in their studies. For the lower socio-economic classes Latin was generally considered off limits, and amongst the other classes it was regarded instrumentally, as the key to professions such as medicine, or law. Competence in abstruse academic subjects is referred to, paradoxically, in terms of ‘folly’. Clarke frequently uses the expressions ‘Latin fool’, ‘French fool’, and ‘Mathematics fool’ (Clarke 2003 [1980]: 66). The popular prejudice that education for its own sake is perverse recurs throughout the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean (fictional and historical), either published in or relating to this period.
The phrase ‘sociology of knowledge’ needs to be applied literally in this context; one cannot understand the significance of a classical education in Trinidad in the decade leading up to independence, without understanding the role of education in social mobility in islands such as Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, and St Lucia. This social hierarchy was reflected in a hierarchy of subjects with the most ‘useless’ subjects being the most elitist. Needless to say, in the period leading up to independence,
Classics was at the top of this educational hierarchy. In most schools Classics meant Latin, but in a few schools - most notably Harrison College in Barbados (see below) and Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad - Greek was also on the curriculum.
Austin Clarke recalls a conversation with one of his classmates about the lethal academic environment of Harrison College, the foremost secondary school in Barbados, if not the entire Anglophone Caribbean:
I hear that there’s a lotta fellows going to Harrison College who does go mad, because of the amount of work they have to study. I hear that for one night of homework they set a hundred lines o’ Latin, a hundred lines o’ Greek, five chapters o’ Ancient History, five chapters o’ Greek history, a distinction Latin prose, a distinction Greek prose, a pass Latin prose, and a pass Greek prose, plus Unseens, plus Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Ben Johnson.
The intellectual stature of the school is quantified by the amount of Latin and Greek that the students have to study, with Chaucer, Milton and the Elizabethan dramatists tacked on for good measure. This passage epitomizes the familiar image of the collegiate schools in the English colonies in the Caribbean, founded with the express purpose of providing a ‘classical education’ to colonials. In Barbados this school was Harrison College, while in Trinidad it was the Queen’s Royal College, inaugurated in 1859 (on the colonial philosophy behind the founding of this school, see Williams 1964: 202-3). Clarke himself was to enter the sixth form of Harrison College in 1950. The quantification of the sheer amount of Latin and Greek that pupils had to study at Harrison College illustrates the stamina that pupils in the colonies had for learning Latin and Greek, in competition with the students at the famed public schools in the mother colony (James 1994: 24-8; Williams 1969: 23; and Walcott in Rowell 1996: 12 5-6). Whereas English literature could always be claimed by the colonizing powers, Greek and Latin were as much the property of pupils in the Caribbean as they were of pupils in Britain and represented a greater degree of cultural exclusivity. It is in this context that we should make sense of C. L.R. James’s recollection that the first Bajan Prime Minister, Grantley Adams, claimed that his Greek was as good as his English by the time he left Harrison College (James 1996: 164). For these authors who were schooled in the classics, the traditions of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt represented parallel cultures with claims to antiquity and civilization that surpassed those of the colonial metropolis.
Another dimension of the focus on Latin in Austin Clarke’s memoirs of his school days is what may be termed the creolization of Classics, whereby the ancient Romans are translated into the Caribbean and given Caribbean identities. The play of affiliation involved is complicated and not always consistent. For example, in the following passage the Romans - as Italians - become co-opted into Caribbean male culture through their love of wine and drink.
We didn’t know at first that Mussolini was an Italian, a Roman. All the Italians we knew were in books, dead; speaking a dead language; and wearing togas, and eating while lying on their sides: grapes from a bunch and wine from an urn.
We in Barbados loved rum. We loved the Italians (and hated Mussolini) because they were like us, like the men in our village who loved rum and women more than work. And the Romans, like our own men, talked and sang hymns ancient and modern all drunklong.
And yet, the reader is also informed that Clarke and his peers championed Hannibal - Rome’s Carthaginian enemy - as a ‘black’ hero:
Hannibal, whom we loved (and no one told us he was black like us!) climbed mountains and was smart. Alas, he lost one eye: in occulo altero [sic]. But he had crossed the Alps, one of the highest mountain ranges in the whole whirl! We loved Hannibal.
It is surely significant that the European cultural affiliation being claimed via the Italians bypasses the British colonial power under which this schooling took place. Clarke’s nostalgic account glosses over the latent contradictions in these associations. We may wonder, for example, how the affiliation for the ‘black’ Hannibal sits alongside love of the Romans, or quite how the blurring of modern-day Italians with ancient Romans is supposed to work. The first we might attribute to the Eurafrican double consciousness that is a legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean, and the second as a subversive reflection of the ahistorical appropriations practised by European colonial regimes in claiming continuity between the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome and their own civilizational authority (see Stam and Shohat 2005: 297). The main point is the way in which Clarke and his Bajan contemporaries reinterpreted the cultural presuppositions that were latent in their colonial education.
Clarke’s emphasis on his classical education belongs to a tradition among the Caribbean intelligentsia of this period of rooting one’s intellectual credentials in the Classics. Eric Williams also wrote about his classical education in his autobiography (for comment see Greenwood 2005: 65-7). Not only does Williams politicize the Classics in his account, but he also represents his achievements as a classicist as a political qualification. This notion of a classical education as a political qualification is exemplified by the so-called ‘Aristotle debate’ - an episode that commentators widely regard as the making of Williams’s political career (Cudjoe 1993: 49; Oxaal 1968: 104; Rohlehr 1997: 851).
World History
