Best, the complete West Indian

By Sir Alister McIntyre

Today we begin the publication of the address delivered yesterday by Sir Alister McIntyre at the opening of the testimonial conference in honour of Lloyd Best. The conference, which ends today, is being hosted by the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies of the University of the West Indies (St Augustine). The second part of the address will be published on this page tomorrow.

I consider myself exceptionally privileged to be asked to begin the discourse at this conference in honour of Lloyd Best. Our friendship extends beyond 40 years. I do not recall the precise date when we met but it was during the closing months of 1958, when I was on a short research visit to Jamaica. I was staying with friends in Spanish Town, which was somewhat remote from the Mona Campus. In short order, Best introduced me to Dudley Huggins, then director of the ISER, who provided me with office accommodation. An introduction to Sydney Martin, then Warden of Taylor Hall, yielded a small flat. I was beginning to feel a part of the place.

Those early impressions were the deciding factor in my accepting a lectureship in economics at Mona in the academic year 1960/61. Best’s closeness and hospitality to students and young staff was already becoming legendary. Being not myself a hands-on person, I could not have settled down at Mona so quickly without his help with the nuts and bolts.

If my physical adjustment to Mona was smooth, my academic induction was not. The courses listed in the Academic Calendar held no terrors for me, at least the theory of them. What I had not sufficiently appreciated was the extent to which my students, quite properly, expected me to teach them in a Caribbean setting, with examples and applications.

Matters were not helped by the fact that I was the only West Indian in a department of 12. It was not really a question of nationality, it was rather one of intellectual interests. Most of my colleagues stayed within a small corner of the subject that they had identified for themselves, unwilling to venture into unfamiliar territory. The most senior of them had marked out some of the more arcane areas of micro-economics, while complaining to me that he was being pressured by the administration to pay attention to the problems of the area.

Fortunately, there were the sociologists and anthropologists at the ISER—the great Lloyd Braithwaite and the two Smiths—MG and RT—who were dealing with live intellectual issues from a breadth of scholarship.

Lloyd Braithwaite was the most complete academic that I have ever encountered. His knowledge of books was simply phenomenal. Although he was the easiest of persons with whom to interact, one could not help but feel inadequate in his presence. And then there was Lloyd Best, adding his own quota of intellectual enquiry, challenging the relevance of mainstream theory, opening up questions that I had never previously considered to be within the domain of economics. It is altogether true to say that Britain provided me with degrees, the two Lloyds, with an education.

Lloyd Best is, by any reckoning, no ordinary mortal. He has made several fundamental contributions to Caribbean thought, reflecting the sharpness of his mind and the diversity of his intellectual interests. He is always willing to dialogue with an extraordinary range of people, several of them with views diametrically opposed to his own. He is a complete West Indian. He does not have an obviously “Trini” accent. If you have not been introduced to him, you would be hard put to detect where is his island home. He has made his lifetime’s work the development of indigenous thought, practices, and relevant lifestyles.

He likes to say that he integrates his intellectual and social life, drawing on one to enrich the other. A keen lover of sport, he is capable of conversing about a number of sporting activities. Cricket is, I think, his first love, following the game with the intensity of Tantie Merle. I do not recall seeing him on a football field, but he is known to have lectured on the management of football teams.

If I may be permitted further levity, he is not an archetypal bon vivant, enjoying with relish wine, women and song. He consumes alcohol very sparingly; he claims to be at his best admiring beauty from a distance, with an immediate curiosity for the mind, differentiating himself from others with a tendency to give primacy to physical attributes. He has a great love for music, from the classics through a range of popular music to Sparrow. I could hear him as if it were yesterday, singing lustily a Sinatra song—“You make me feel so young”, continuing effortlessly into “Monica Do Do, no woman in the world sweeter than you”.

As I reflect back on the early 1960s, Wordsworth’s words come to mind: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

But it was not all heaven. By 1961, we were engulfed in the trauma of the referendum, one from ten leaves nought, the Agony of the Eight, A spectacle of British Ministers and officials anxious to dispense with their colonial charges in the Caribbean, on each occasion offering a golden handshake, less generous than the previous one. 

The realisation dawned that we hardly had any bargaining chips, or at least, perceived that to be the case. I was myself particularly irked by an editorial in the London Times that characterised us as a “Beggars Opera”, coming with outstretched hands to ask for alms in the form of a continuation of trade preferences and aid. Forty years on, the actors have changed but the script remains much the same.

There were very few voices then urging a consideration of options—a way forward that would draw upon our strengths, rather than parade our weaknesses. Some of this was foreshadowed in two pieces that Lloyd and I wrote together: “A first Appraisal of Monetary Management in Jamaica” and “The Political Economy of Federation”. But Lloyd elaborated on them in countless discussions and notes as he sought to widen the circle of staff and students committed to this line of thinking.

The group was then called “The Society for the Study of Social Issues”. We met at Lloyd’s home in College Common every Thursday evening, ending up in the early hours of the morning at Monty’s Restaurant, depending of the time of the month and the disposable income then available, for curried goat, patties, Red Stripe beer and more talk.

These were the seeds of what was to become New World.