Caribbean Cold War: It's Jihad, Then
- cepmurphywrites
- Jun 10
- 11 min read
By Gary Oswald.
The history of most of the formerly British-ruled Caribbean islands are, in broad strokes, largely similar. They were conquered by Europeans in the 17th century, with their indigenous populations largely exterminated. Thousands of African slaves were then bought to the islands to farm sugar, coffee, and cocoa in appalling conditions. In this way, the islands became valuable and were bitterly contested between various European states during the late 18th Century but by the 1780s, the British had firmly established themselves in control. The slaves were freed in 1838, but the political structure of the Islands did not change: a small rich white elite remained in control and the black majority remained poor agricultural workers. As a result, radicals emerged in the trade union movement of the 1930s preaching pan-Africanism and the desire for an independent unified West Indies, a dream that never happened. Despite that, the leaders of trade unions mostly became the first independent rulers of the islands in the 1960s and 70s when they became independent.
Trinidad, the largest island in the modern-day country of Trinidad and Tobago, has a history that differs from that outline in several significant ways. First, the European conquest was much slower and less complete than that of the other islands, with Amerindians still making up the majority of the population as late as 1777, shortly before the arrival of numerous new slave owners and slaves from the French Caribbean. Relatedly, British control was only established in 1797, only 20 years before the slave trade was banned. Because of this, while it was a sugar island colony reliant on the Atlantic Slave Trade, it was never as cultivated as neighbouring colonies and so had less slaves than a lot of them. Jamaica had 310,000 slaves at emancipation, Guyana 84,000, Barbados 83,000, and Trinidad only 20,600, a figure smaller than that of much smaller colonies like Antigua and Barbuda. As a result, the main importation of labour came after the slave trade, with Trinidad gaining large numbers of indentured servants from Syria, China, Portugal, Brazil, and particularly India.
This meant that Trinidad went into the 20th century with a much more racially and religiously diverse population than the other islands in the West Indies. They still had a white minority which dominated private businesses but they didn’t have an Afro-Caribbean majority, thanks to an equally large Indian-Caribbean population, which (much like in neighbouring Guyana) was disproportionately unrepresented in the police force and public sector.
Another difference was that while the trade union leaders were indeed dominant within 1950s Trinidad and Tobago politics, the man who would actually drive the country towards independence was from a different background entirely.
Eric Williams is the dominant figure in the modern history of the nation. He was an historian and academic by trade, criticising the empire primarily from the perspective of its triumphalist narratives, pushing back against the idea of the Empire as a civilising force and arguing that there were economic as well as moral reasons for abolitionism. His dismissal from a position in the Caribbean Commission became a radicalising moment, with him openly criticising the white and Asian dominated council for perpetuating the old hierarchies, saying that for him the modern Caribbean must be one with 'no more Massas'.
Williams formed the People's National Movement (PNM) and won the 1956 general election, dominating the Afro-Caribbean vote but also surprisingly winning the Muslim Asian vote from people who felt the Asian-Caribbean People's Democratic Party (PDP) was Hindu dominated. Williams himself denounced such ethnic voting, saying you should not be Arab or African or Indian or Chinese but merely Trinidadian, but critics argued what he meant was he expected the non-Afro-Creole Trinidadians to adapt the island's dominant Afro-Creole culture. Certainly, he routinely spoke about a shared history of being ex-slaves that simply wasn't true for the other ethnicities on the Island.
There was also the suspicion that Williams felt more West Indian than Trinidadian, as he was a huge supporter of the West Indies Federation and took it badly when that proved unsustainable. Guyana had refused to join an Afro-Caribbean dominated Federation and Jamaica pulled out after a referendum, leading to Trinidad being essentially shackled only to a number of very small, very poor islands. Without the other two larger populations, Trinidad would have to put up around 80% of the federation's budget but only get 9 out of 29 seats in the Parliament. As Williams put it after Jamaica withdrew, “one from ten leaves nought”, and so Trinidad also withdrew, leading to the British to abandon the idea entirely as the point was to join the smaller islands to the larger ones. There were some talks about Trinidad and Grenada joining together but it was never likely to go anywhere, as Williams viewed it as a money sink.
Williams increased his majority in the 1961 election, helped by the Catholic party (Party of Political Progress Groups) not standing, leading their votes to go to their fellow Christians in the PNM rather than the Hindu dominated PDP. The country became independent in the following year. Williams attempted to remain neutral in the Cold War but had little freedom to do so, being surrounded by NATO members. In the years leading up to independence he challenged the British right to allow a US Naval Base to be based on Trinidad but, being motivated far more by nationalism than anti-Americanism, agreed on their right to do so once the US made a deal with him directly (paying 30 million dollars for the use of the base until 1967, when they would leave). Even personally he started leaning towards NATO in the mid to late 60s due to being challenged by the more left wing of his party, which he blamed, probably incorrectly, Fidel Castro for funding.
This summed up the struggles that Williams faced as he entered the 1970s: far from the anti-colonial radical he had been in the 40s and 50s, he looked conservative and middle class and was increasingly challenged from the left. An example of that would be his 1962 dispute with the UK over the financial terms of independence. Williams made a stand for his country by initially refusing their offer of a development grant when going independent, declaring it far too little given the damage done by British imperialism, but he ultimately was forced to back down and accept it due to lack of money. This, much like the deal with the US for their naval base, gave him the impression of a man full of bluster but who would bow to capital in the end.
As a keen observer of the troubles of Guyana, where he repeatedly tried to intervene with little success, Williams probably suspected his major challenge would come from the non-black residents of Trinidad. Indeed, he made several frankly racist speeches criticising the Indian-Trinidadian ethnicity for not being loyal to the nation, though the PNM would still have a multiethnic makeup in terms of its MPs if not its voter base. But instead, events elsewhere in the Commonwealth would see an increasing radicalisation of the Afro-Trinidadian community against him.
In 1968, there was the Rodney Riots, a result of the socialist Guyanese Professor Walter Rodney (later killed by Forbes Burnham) being barred by the Jamaican government from returning to his teaching position at the University of the West Indies. Rodney had openly challenged the imperialist line in his lectures (arguing that Africa had been deliberately held back by the colonial empires) and his banning led to riots by left-wing Jamaicans who felt their government was selling out. The following year, there was the Sir George Williams affair wherein West Indian students in Montreal, Canada organised a student occupation, which became a riot, after biology teacher Perry Anderson was cleared for charges of being racist against the black students in his class.
These incidents, combined with the civil rights movement in the USA and the rise of the Rastafari movement, and the resulting increase in state violence against the Rastafari in Grenada, Dominica, and Jamaica, led to increasing discontent among the black underclass who felt that independence had done little to solve their problems. Even in independent Trinidad and Tobago more than 50% of business owners were white, and while the economy was growing it was still reliant on foreign capital to do so. Foreign businesses grew in power while many residents remained in poverty.
In 1966, George Weeks of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union, said that the true government of Trinidad and Tobago was not the one ran by Eric Williams but the one in the Chambers of Commerce of the West. Having a black government was not enough if you did not have control of your own resources, if you did not have black businesses too. This was what Black Power meant in the Caribbean. And Eric Williams, who'd accepted money from the UK and US in replace for signing agreements with them, was no longer a representative of that. This led to the formation of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), a black radical party which aimed to attack Williams from that direction.
In 1970, there came the Black Power Revolution, something used by the governments in Grenada and Dominica to justify harsher treatment of their own protesters – though the revolution had only started because of that harsh treatment. A relatively peaceful protest, organised by trade unions to protest the arrest of the students in the Sir George Williams affair, was followed by arrests for disturbing the peace, which led to bigger demonstrations against that.
Williams tried to get them to back down by making speeches that he was all for Black Power, but he wasn't believed. Meanwhile, despite attempts by the NJAC to try and make common causes with the poor Indian ethnicity underclass, there was a racial tone to the protests and riots that prevented it gaining much support among non-black Trinidadians. There were sporadic arson attacks on businesses owned by Chinese, Indian and Syrian Trinidadians despite them also not being foreign capital. As protests continued to grow the police killed a protestor, Basil Davis, which further inflamed the situation and led to various left-wing members of the PNM such as A.N.R. Robinson to resign from parliament. Williams declared a state of emergency, arrested multiple NJAC leaders, and proposed bills to reduce civil liberties.
It looked from the outside like the first step that led a lot of post-colonial leaders down the path of dictatorship. And as a result, there was open calls for a complete general strike, and even more worryingly to Williams, a mutiny of the armed forces. Led by the Indo-Trinidadian Raffique Shah, they mutinied to prevent Williams asking them to break the strike. But this proved a step too far for those who feared the Black Power rebels. The Coast Guard blockaded Raffique Shah in his barracks and Williams publicly asked his allies from Nigeria to Venezuela to send troops to the islands to prevent from him being overthrown. Faced with the prospect of an invasion, Shah surrendered to prevent that, and the Black Power leaders backed down.
But in the eyes of many, Williams had proven himself untrustworthy, a black puppet to white influences. In 1971, the NJAC, alongside the Democratic Labour Party (DLP, an Indo-Guyanese party) and Robinson's new Action Committee of Democratic Citizens (ACDC), boycotted the next election to protesting the introduction of voting machines. The PNM won all 31 seats, but it was a hollow victory and Williams quickly reintroduced the old voting system.
Williams would remain in power through until his death in 1981, breaking multiple promises to step down, largely due to an inability of the opposition to unite around a single party. There was more strikes against him in 1975, which led to the unions forming the United Labour Front, but this was too left wing for most voters and never became the multi-ethnic party it wanted to be, instead only really getting voters from the Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity who worked the sugar plantations and not the Afro-Trinidadian workers in the oil industry.
Upon Williams’ death, the PNM would remain in power under George Chambers, but an oil bust (following a long oil boom) saw a recession and unemployment rates jump to 22%. The PNM lost a landslide election in 1986 to Robinson, who had finally united all the opposition parties into the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR). The NAR government, at the behest of the IMF and World Bank, implemented an austerity programme of spending cuts and tax increases in an attempt to reverse the country's economic decline. This was not popular among the remnants of the Black Power movement and there were many marches and strikes against the new government.
It is important at this point to note there had been a religious legacy of the Black Power movement. Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago had normally been either Indian or Arab and mostly voted for William's PNM. However, the Black Power movement encouraged the growth of Islam among the black community for the same reasons that the Nation of Islam in the USA grew.
Yasin Abu Bakr, a former policeman who had converted in the late 1960s, became the centre of this new religious grouping. He founded the Islamic Missionaries Guild and sought permission to open a compound in the capital city Port of Spain in 1969. That permission was given by William's central government, not eager to further alienate the Black Power movement, but was not given by the city. The Port of Spain government then tried to have Abu Bakr evicted due to them not letting him stay there and he refused. Throughout the 1980s he clashed with the police and government, whether PNM or NAR, and served multiple jail sentences. By 1990 it had reached the point where Abu Bakr's movement was likely to be turfed out of their compound unless something changed quickly.
Abu Bakr's movement had also increasingly began stepping into replace government resources removed by austerity. They helped the unemployed and homeless by providing food and medical support. And when the crack cocaine epidemic spread to Trinidad they began a vigilante campaign against the illegal drug trade, wherein armed members would attack drug dealers operating in their neighbourhoods. As a result, the movement was increasingly armed and increasingly experienced in violence.
In July 1990, almost inevitably, Abu Bakr would launch an attempted coup.
Around 42 men broke into Parliament and took the government hostage, shooting Prime Minister Robinson in the leg when he objected. Another 74 men, led by Abu Bakr himself, seized control of the television station and announced that he had taken control of the country. As he said "We could no longer stand by while our country reach the abyss of no return. Amidst all the poverty and the destitution where people can't find jobs, where there is no work, where children are reduced to crime in order to live, where there is no jobs in the hospitals." Around 90 more of his supporters than took to the streets to attack the police and loot and burn businesses, with hundreds of shops looted.
But the majority of the population, including the army, the police, and the politicians, rejected any attempt by a Libyan-funded militant Islamic group to take control of the country. Of the 1.3 million people in the country, less than 10% were Muslims and most of them, including then-President Noor Hassanali, the first Islamic state leader in the New World, were of Indian heritage, only a few hundred were Black Muslims. And Abu Bakr simply did not win support on either ethnic or religious lines. Both Black Christians and Asian Muslims were largely put off by him. Abu Bakr was relying on a popular uprising to legitimise his coup, an uprising on the level of the Black Power Revolution, but it simply didn't come. Most of the population were outraged by his attempt. They didn't like Robinson's government, which they would vote out in a landslide in 1991, but they liked this Islamic radical even less. He had only around 200 men with him when he attempted the coup and, it turned out, that figure was all the support he had across the entire nation.
With the army loyal, Abu Bakr soon surrendered and was jailed. His coup is a footnote in Caribbean history. While Trinidad and Tobago has continued to suffer Islamic violence, with an independent senator assassinated by Jihadists in 2014, 1990 was very much the high point of the movement.
So could it have turned out differently, could we have had an Islamic government formed in 1990 in Trinidad and Tobago?
Honestly, it feels incredibly difficult to get. Abu Bakr's violent actions were his only chance to avoid the government shutting down his entire movement, but they also lost him any chance of popular support. The PNM losing the 1986 election did much to reassure the Trinidadian people that they were in an actual working democracy where unpopular governments can be voted out and so they knew that violence wasn't needed. That wasn't there during the Black Power Revolution of 1970, especially once emergency powers were used by the government, and would be tested further by the boycotted election of 1971.
Arguably Bakr would have had better luck had he launched his coup against Eric Williams, who had those questions marks over him – but the problem with that is, the oil boom was still happening. You need a combination of the economic downturn of the 1980s with the political one-party domination of the 1970s for a coup to be accepted by the population. That requires far more than just minor changes.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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