Constitution Reform - My Take Pt I

By Bukka Rennie
September 10, 2003

I was asked recently to address a village council on the East-West Corridor on the issue of community empowerment. Basically, the gist of what I said emanated from the following historic point of view.

Caribbean civilisation, as we know it today, came to be established as a direct result of the necessity for economic expansion driven by the then major European States of Spain, France, Holland (Netherlands) and Britain.

The growth of the Ottoman Empire, ie the penetration of Central Europe by the Muslim world, and not "brigands and thieves" as we were taught in school, blocked the over-land trade routes to the East and brought the need to find sea routes, resulting in the Caribbean coming into the picture.

The purpose in settling the Caribbean islands, and in the process, decimating the First Peoples whom they met here, was first of all to seek the extraction and mining of new mineral (eg gold, silver) and later the production of new and exotic raw materials (eg tobacco, sugar, etc) that could serve to expand and deepen their respective economies.

We, the people, who were brought here in chains or by guile or deception or empty promises, were to provide labour.

There could never arise any question of rights and privileges for slaves, the "slave" being property per se, and even the indentured servants could not be seen in this scenario as having any other right outside of what was stipulated in the contract that bounded them to the estates.

But the colonists, the British and European settlers, who came with letters of sanction from the Crown, were, from the very beginning, quite eager and aggressive in their efforts to establish their rights and privileges as citizens. Why was this so?

The point has to be made that since June 1215, King John of England had put his official seal of authority on a document called the Magna Carta - Great Letter or Charter - that granted certain rights and privileges to noblemen who had rebelled. The Magna Carta assured the nobles of three basic rights:

No taxation or legislation without consent or representation.
The right to pursue and enjoy the returns from property.
Trial by jury and guarantees against being ever punished or imprisoned arbitrarily.

The Magna Carta did not benefit the masses of people, the serfs or peasantry working lands owned by the king and his nobility. Nevertheless it was a break on the absolute power that the Crown previously wielded and in a way could be deemed a historical forerunner of what is now called the Constitution or social contract between people in a society.

In time, all groups in Britain began to interpret the Magna Carta to suit their own needs and interests, helping thereby to hasten further developments that would eventually crystallise into what is now known as parliamentary democracy in the early 17th century (1601-1650). The Magna Carta served to influence the entire world then.

The point is that the British settlers who first came to the Caribbean came with a certain mindset about community empowerment, they brought with them a concept of local government with which they had become quite familiar.

From the moment they settled islands such as Barbados, Jamaica, St Kitts/Nevis and Antigua, they immediately divided the islands into parishes and vested these parishes with trustees authorised to levy taxes to cover three basis items of public expenditure: (i) poor relief, (ii) upkeep of religious administrators, (iii) road maintenance.

Taxes obviously were levied on the basis of value of property, ie so much sheep, so much goats, so much land, so much slaves. What is interesting, though, for our current discussion is that the parishes elected planters to sit in a House of Assembly (yes, it is from this that Tobago derived the name) which functioned like a lower chamber of the central government, while the upper chamber comprised the governor, who represented the Crown with his nominated council of 12 to advise him and perform the duties of a Court of Appeal in civil matters.

This lower chamber or House of Assembly, elected by the planters in the parishes, controlled the public funds and used this aspect to put pressure on the governor and his council. They did not vote money for any particular measure if they disagreed with the policy from which it emanated. This led to constant tension and deadlock between the governor and the Assembly.

What is clear is that the House of Assembly, based on its empowerment from the parishes, wielded significant power in the Caribbean setting, to the extent that on some occasions the Assemblies of Barbados and Jamaica got central government to pass laws that were eventually rejected by the Privy Council in Britain.

The Assemblies were on a path of divergence from the interests of the governor and the British Government and if such a development had been allowed to follow its natural course, the planters may have been led to take a similar stand as their counterparts in America, who went on to confront and wage war against the British Crown and to declare their independence in 1776, having started with the slogan derived from the Magna Carta: no taxation without representation.

How different would our Carib-bean history have been if the planters in their Houses of Assembly had followed the Americans, or followed the French Intelligentsia and working people who by 1789 were to destroy monarchism with their rallying concepts of "liberty, fraternity and equality".

How much different Haiti would have fared if it had been embraced by the Assemblies after 1791-1804 when it became the first and only slave society to have liberated itself and so greatly needed not to be isolated within its own Caribbean region.

The point is that humanity all over came to be seized of the idea of greater democracy and the spinal need to break out of the limitations of the then outdated but dominant political and the socio-economic structures. The only branch of humanity who did not make the grade were the planters of the Caribbean islands who chose to betray their class interests because of race considerations.

Where do we want to look for answers to the question of constitutional reform? Everywhere it seems, except right at home. We first of all must know all that has been done right here, by whom and for what purpose. Everything done here, by whosoever, is all part of our legacy and belongs to all of us.

What the planter class, the slaves and the indentured servants all did and created here, stand for us. Moreover how they organised themselves to engage the issues that arose out of their existence must by necessity feed and inform our struggle for constitutional reform.

Pt I | Pt 2 | Pt 4 | Pt 5 | Pt 6