Dr Winford James
trinicenter.com

This Dependence on Outside

By Dr. Winford James
April 03, 2005


In cricket, Australian Bennett King, British Cable and Wireless, and British Digicel. In football, Dutchman Leo Beenhakker. In education, an unending stream of experts from somewhere else for the consultancies. In politics and economics, the British colonial master, alive in the systems we perpetuate. In areas of our lives that are critical to our sense of self both locally and abroad, we allow - indeed, continue to allow - outsiders to have a disproportionately central influence. And the justifications come easily to our mouths, themselves put there by outsiders as well.

How can we build local and regional integrity and international respect if we continue this dependence on the outside Other?

If you think I am against the involvement of extra-regional outsiders in the affairs of the Caribbean in general and Trinidad and Tobago in particular, you are one of the easy justifiers. And you are probably bolstering your thoughtlessness with the argument that we must avail ourselves of talent, skill, intelligence, experience, and capacity wherever they may be found, especially in a globalised world.

Nonsense! That kind of thinking has been killing us in the arenas of competition in the world and will continue to do its damage. If you are building something, like excellence in cricket or education, it is far better to be in charge - philosophically, ideologically, administratively - than to put someone else whose sociopolitical circumstances have made them superior in your eyes, whether in subjective perception or objective fact. It is far better to build in yourself the conditions you value in others.

Which means you have to draw lines, make errors (sometimes, execrable ones), and make a religion out of patience with yourself.

In the Caribbean, we are good at importing and overvaluing the goods and services of The Other, which is to say, their knowledge and ideas. In the great ineluctable exchange of peoples and societies, we must import, but if we are to grow and win respect in the trade, we must be careful to draw lines. We must value our creativity and train it to work for us efficiently in this regard. To do so, we must reserve areas of operation from outside dominance, no matter how discouraging our circumstances on the ground or how attractive the buyable alternatives. We must keep the long view of self-integrity firmly in mind.

So our cricket was seeing hard times under local control; but it has enjoyed beautiful times - also under local control. Keep people like Gus Logie and encourage their competitive development. So, under Bertille St. Clair, the Soca Warriors have stumbled badly in the lead-up to the World Cup; but they have won more matches than they have lost and have been building discipline in a context made especially difficult by the wasted years under Porterfield, the continuing incoherence of foreign and local players, and public frustration at the failure to make clearly good local talent win on the extra-regional stage. But bear with people like St. Clair; they are homegrown with a creativity rooted in our ideological space.

And Caribbean businesses must do their part to preserve the integrity of our social institutions - like Clico belatedly tried to in the siege by Digicel and Cable and Wireless. While I appreciate the value of commercial sponsorship to keeping our cricket alive in the globalised world, I do not appreciate at all the situation where businesses, and outside ones to boot, dictate selection of my team, even if indirectly. I expect our local businesses, who take every opportunity to persuade us that they have a social conscience, to be proactive if only to prevent outside predators like Digicel and Cable and Wireless, with no homegrown appreciation for our stakes in the game, to do their damage under the shameless pretext that they are helping West Indian cricket.

With our own wits and with resources available in our physical and cultural space, we have created beautiful things in the Caribbean - like Creole English and Creole cricket. But we must come quickly to see the integrity of our creations and, more importantly, that it is we, and not others, who have done these good things and can best improve them.



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