The Road to Independence
Self-government was gradually increased between 1946 and 1961. The elections of those years served as dress rehearsals for independence. From 1946 to 1955, East Indians were the best organized group in Trinidad and Tobago. Comprising only 35 percent of the population in 1946, East Indians united under the leadership of Bhadese S. Maraj and won almost half of the elected seats in the Legislative Council that year. They used their votes to finally secure the legal right to marry and bury their dead according to Hindu and Muslim rites. Since their arrival in Trinidad more than a century earlier, many East Indians had been classified as illegitimate because no unregistered marriage was considered legal for inheritance purposes.
Political parties remained fragmented in the 1950 elections, often united, as one historian has put it, by nothing more than a "common passion for the spoils of office." One hundred forty-one candidates contested the eighteen elected seats; the single largest bloc of seats on the Legislative Council, eight out of twenty-six, was captured by an alliance between the "Butler party" and East Indian leaders. The British and the non-East Indians disliked the idea of having Butler and his supporters come to power.
After the 1950 elections, none of Butler's party was chosen to sit on the Executive Council, the result being that Gomes practically ran the government. Within the restrictions of his semiautonomous government, Gomes tried to function as a mediator between capital and labor and to placate both Britain and Trinidad and Tobago. He had limited success, however, and constitutional reform was postponed until 1955, with elections scheduled for the following year.
The election of 1956 was a watershed in the political history of Trinidad and Tobago because it determined the cuurse of the country for the next thirty years. Gomes was defeated, and a new party, the PNM, captured power and held it until 1986. PNM founder and leader Eric Williams dominated the political scene from 1956 until his death in 1981.
In 1956 the PNM captured a slim majority of the elected seats on the Legislative Council, receiving 39.8 percent of the vote. Butler's party and the TLP split the other elected seats. The British governor, who controlled five appointed seats and two ex officio seats, filled all of these with men acceptable to the PNM, thus giving the party a majority of two-thirds of the seats on the Legislative Council. Because the British were hoping to form a Caribbean federation or, as a second choice, to launch viable independent countries, it was in their interest to support Williams, a charismatic black leader who had founded a strong political party, who had international education and experience, and who believed in private domestic and foreign investment. Between 1956 and 1962, Williams consolidated his political base and resolved two very important issues: federation and the presence of United States bases on Trinidad.
The British created the West Indies Federation in 1958. During the next four years, ten island nations, including Trinidad and Tobago, struggled without success to make the federation into a government. The two largest nations, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, had opposing viewpoints; the former advocated a strong federal government, whereas the latter preferred a weak one. Trinidad and Tobago, with its higher revenues, preferred representation according to financial contribution, but Jamaica, with its larger population, wanted representation on the basis of population. After Jamaica decided in September 1961 not to remain in the federation, Trinidad and Tobago also decided to withdraw, not wishing to be tied to eight small, poor islands for which it would be financially responsible.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
