The Maurice Bishop, NJM impact – 40 years on

Forty years after the New Jewel Movement (NJM) seized political office in Grenada and 36 years following the death of party leader, Maurice Bishop, Professor Brian Meeks has declared that both NJM and its deceased head continue to have an impact on Caribbean life.

In a recent address Meeks, Chair of Africana Studies, Brown University, Rhode Island, listed leadership, credibility, democracy and accountability as characteristics of the NJM 4 ½ years government, which also took the unusual step of arming the people instead of retaining that firepower for a select few as is the practice across the Caribbean.

Bishop and the NJM wrested power from a government led by Eric Gairy on 13 March 1979, rechristened the administration the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG), and led the people on that island along path-breaking changes until the party became fractious, splitting into factions, supporters for one of which executed him and some colleagues on 19, October 1983. Then followed a US-led invasion.

Meeks, a former Professor of Social and Political change and Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, said that the October tragedy represented a “turning back” of the Caribbean spirit.

“The most important thing that was turned back was the self-confidence of the Caribbean people in Grenada. That one little place,” he said while delivering the 34th Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture and the subsequent discussion last week.

“And that turning back of that self-confidence is why we are where we are today for the most part, which is catching as catch can, devil take the hindmost.”

He said lessons from that period of Grenada’s revolution could tell the region, “what we want to avoid and what we don’t want to avoid, what we want to embrace in future movements which may take entirely different forms within ordinary constitutional Westminster politics, or in new forms which are yet to manifest themselves”.

Meeks, who grew up in Jamaica, reflected on how the blow of Bishop’s death was felt all the way up in his norther Caribbean country of residence.

“Ironically the first time I understood the Caribbean as a nation was when Maurice Bishop was killed and I saw the response in Jamaica, which is typically seen as a kind of outlier in the Eastern Caribbean.

“Jamaica was in mourning, in grief. It struck me that in this moment of tragedy that there is a Caribbean nation of people … [and] underlying there is a substantial sense of commonality that this death was a death in the family. It was one of us who died, and it was wrong.”

Meeks recalled the contrast in tragedy to the headiness of revolution and the accompanying changes that marked most of the previous 4 ½ years.

“Specifically, to Grenada, something was going on … some level of a new beginning, of a new-found energy, a palpable sense of engagement was happening.” He described the sensation of a ‘Grenadianness’ or ‘feel goodness’.

He spoke of the PRG going against Caribbean tradition, “which led to the greatest consternation was the policy of arming the people”.

Meeks pointed all the way back to Caribbean slavery when arms were restricted to a few on the plantation, to present regional government practices of limiting arms distribution mainly to the police and army.

He said that for the Commonwealth Caribbean, “this notion of the state as holding a monopoly over force and the legal use of violence is considered sacrosanct”.

“This proscription was turned on its head in Grenada where the people were given arms to defend their revolution without the state apparently harbouring any fear as to whether this might endanger its own survival.”

He said among other lessons to be learned included, “the ability and willingness of the leadership to pivot bob and weave to exigencies of the global economy had yielded enormous benefits in the choice of the airport model in the first place and this flexibility augured well for the future”.

Then there was credibility of government, and Meeks spoke of the PRG’s honesty, no dismissals of workers, including ‘Gairyites’, many who converted to PRG because of its trustworthiness.

He said there was “no credible narrative of corruption in the leadership to be found in the archival records, or any of the many commentaries”.

In its thrust for democracy and accountability, the Professor said the PRG developed a system of feedback from parish and other special interest councils that saw, “the gradual erosion of the barrier between the expert and the ordinary people; between the producers and those assigned to manage them in ways that empowered both and began to lay the foundations for a different kind of economy”. (GA)