TRIBUTE TO SIR SHRIDATH RAMPHAL

By Dr. Livingston Smith

Sir Shridath Ramphal was one of the most impactful individuals to have emerged from the Caribbean. He died recently and was accorded an official funeral in Guyana, the country of his birth. He was one of the architects of the Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA), and also of CARICOM.  A former Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Sir Shridath became the second Commonwealth Secretary General in May 1975 and served in this capacity until 1990. He also helped in the creation of the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states which negotiated the first LOME Convention with the European Economic Community (EEC).

A master at regional negotiations, he was the region’s lead negotiator for several years especially as Director of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery. Sir Shridath, an extraordinary Caribbean, Global Citizen, gave the keynote address in 2011 at the UCCI’s Caribbean Conference. The theme of the conference was, ‘Leadership, Governance and Empowerment in the Caribbean.’ In tribute to Sir Shridath, I carry his speech in three parts. Readers will find his ideas as fresh now as when he delivered this provocative address.

Speech Presented by Sir Shridath Ramphal at UCCI’s Caribbean Conference, March 17, 2011.

I am in two minds whether it is better for a speaker to interrupt his audience’s conviviality, on to pre-empt  it.  However, the reality is that neither you nor I have a choice tonight. The Program ordains the former. So let me begin on home ground – here at UCCI.

Specifically, I bring  greetings and salutations from the University of the West Indies; your efforts and successes at the University College are part of the wider movement for tertiary education in the Caribbean region in which both institutions are engaged. We share a certain comradeship in meeting the challenges of these testing early years of a Century that also begins a new Millennium.

We  have - most of us here - emerged from  a  generation that  recognised  out  of harsh reality that  education  was  the essential  escape  from social,  economic and  political  handicap.  This was not, of course, a new insight peculiar to West  Indians.  Epictitus in his ‘discourses’ as early as the 1st century -  some 2000 years ago, at the start of the 1st Millennium -  had asserted that  ‘only the educated are free’. Our forebears had no need  to read  the  Greek classics to know how right he was.  It  was  for them the lesson of life.

Today as we look to the 21st Century we have to ask  ourselves:  has  this passion for education abated in the Caribbean  as  education itself  has  contributed to welfare?  Have the  freedoms  of  this Century  created  an illusion that we no longer have need  for  a passionate,  zealous, unwavering commitment to learning?  If  so, freedom  has sold us short, or we have mistaken for freedom  what is  merely  a transit stop on the way to it.  I  hope  there  is still among parents and young people alike in the Caribbean  a compulsion for education:  that  it still comes  first in their list of priorities - first among the  goals for  which  they  will  make  sacrifices – or by which Governments measure development. 

An  earlier generation  in  this Region read by kerosene lamps  and  street lights   on  the  way  to  learning.   Electricity  is  now   more widespread, but are we using it for learning or for distractions of one  kind or  another?   In our increasing appetite for electronics,  do  we pause to reflect that the satellites  perpetually spinning on the geosynchronous orbit over the Caribbean represent someone  else’s

learning,  someone else’s technology?  If we make ourselves  mere spectators  of  these  marvels,  allow  ourselves  simply  to  be entertained,  we  are accepting that we  shall  remain  dependent  illiterates,  we  are opting for another kind of bondage.

And, beyond  ourselves, is it not  true  that  if developing countries generally are not to remain on the margin of prosperity  and progress, ways have to be found of responding  to higher education needs.  If not a knowledge gap will surely open up as  big  or  bigger than the income  gap  by  which  we  have traditionally  measured levels of development.  And that is the most  serious  of all.  For human resource development is, after all, the very foundation of economic development.  In the world of  the Third Millennium that is at hand, the maxim of  Epictitus that  only the educated are free will have the more  contemporary meaning that only the educated are free to prosper.

This Conference invites reflection  on  our  own situation in the Caribbean; and, here in the company  of  graduates  and friends  of  the University College , which must be the repository of dispassionate truth, we must acknowledge that realisation of our full potential is in our own keeping.

Such outward reach has much relevance for the University College of the Cayman Islands - and, for that matter, for the University of the West Indies. What it amount to is the mandate that each must be a community of learning in which teaching in its highest form, and research in its broadest and most developed sense, are carried out in a context of freedom and creativity. It is a mandate I am sure you are pursuing here in Cayman, however young your institutional life. I wish the University College a great future. To ‘Connect, Share, Inspire’, in the rubric of this Conference, is a noble goal.

That freedom in turn implies responsibility, and relevant contribution. I was particularly pleased to know of the role UCCI is already playing through the very fact of this Conference and its themes: LEADERSHIP, GOVERNANCE AND EMPOWERENT IN THE CARIBBEAN - proof that UCCI is alive to its responsibilities for relevant contribution.

I will address the theme issues of ‘leadership, governance and empowerment’; but what do the words ’IN THE CARIBBEAN’  mean?

Do they mean ‘not in Cayman’, or ‘not in Cayman only’? Do they mean ‘not in the world; but only in our region of it’? I do not think such selectivity was intended; for ‘Leadership’, ‘Governance’, ‘Empowerment’ are simply not susceptible to such narrowing. They occupy a larger space in human affairs. They encompass humanity itself.

For all of us there are bits of writing capturing essential truths that remain half-remembered in our minds until recalled by some evocative moment. For me, tonight, one such are words written over forty years ago by Jean Paul Sartre in his Introduction to Frantz Fanon’s clarion book The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre wrote:

And when one day our humankind becomes full grown, it will not define itself as the sum total of the whole world’s inhabitants, but as the infinite unity of their mutual needs.

How incisively and with what conviction those words assert the oneness of our human condition!? How directly they invite the question: Has our human kind yet become full grown? What is the state of ‘leadership’, ‘governance’, ‘empowerment’ in our Caribbean region within global society?

Thirty years after Franz Fanon’s book  (in 1995)  global civil society in the form of the World Federalist Movement and the International Association of United Nations Associations  - a more internationalist pairing you could not want - came together in San Francisco to celebrate the signing of the United Nations Charter there in 1945.  For that ‘Charter Ceremony’, Maya Angelou composed a memorable poem that re-captured Sarte’s insight of human unity and asked the same question of our maturity. She wrote, as only she could, of a wonder that she likened to the great wonders of the world, the wonder of our capacity to acknowledge the eternal unity of humanity’s needs and what she felt was our generation’s potential to respond to those needs.  She longed for the day when we would reach that  point of fulfilment; that  moment, as she wrote, ‘when we come to it’. Maya Angelou was musing about humanity’s misused potential; she was musing about ‘leadership’ and ‘governance’ and ‘empowerment’ (among other things) at the global level: and so for me, at the level of a globalised Caribbean.