What is the place of October 1935 in our history?

AS WE GEAR UP for the celebration of our 45th anniversary of our National Independence, engaging in various activities leading up to the Big Day, there remains a serious anomaly in our historical recollections.

It is widely acknowledged that the process of decolonization which led up to independence was not driven by the magnanimity of the colonial powers. The resistance of our people to colonial conquest, slavery and colonial rule was an important part of the road to independence, not just here but throughout the Caribbean.

The turbulent years of the 1930s played an important role in that process of reclaiming the independence of what were then, “the West Indian colonies”. In a number of countries in the region there were labour rebellions, political, and social uprisings over the deplorable living conditions of the mass of people, and even open confrontations with the police along with the armed plantation and merchant class which caused the colonial government to call in British troops and impose repressive measures.

Little St Vincent was one of the islands where this social explosion occurred earliest, on October 21, 1935. It was a spontaneous rebellion, not as organized as later ones in the larger colonies of Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana and Jamaica, but was of equal significance. The outstanding late Jamaican political activist, author and intellectual, Richard Hart, writing about the “Labour rebellions of the 1930s” wrote that “what concurred in the 1930s was a series of spontaneous uncoordinated actions with no advance planning. Neither the leaders nor the participants had any premeditated conscious objectives”.

Our own Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, in his book, “The political economy of the Labour Movement in St.Vincent and the Grenadines”, commented on the positive outcome of the uprising. On Page 66, he wrote, “The 1935 uprising in St.Vincent and similar uprisings across the West Indies in the 1930s succeeded in lifting working people’s consciousness of the possibilities of a different, better way… the anti-colonial uprisings in concert with global events caused colonialism to rethink its over-rule and timetable for decolonisation”.

In spite of all this acknowledgement, we proceeded to independence as though the 1935 rebellion was a blot on our history, not a significant contributor to this achievement. Nearly a half-century later we are yet to correct this historical wrong. Why is this so? Of what are we seemingly ashamed? It is now accepted that the uprisings of the 1930s directly forced the British government to send out a Royal Commission, which recommended some mild, reforms including land settlement initiatives and above all, triggered the biggest advance, the introduction of Adult Suffrage in 1951. The persons jailed, brutalised, even shot, during the rebellion, helped to give poor and working people here the right to vote.

Is it not time to make that acknowledgement public and put October 21 in its correct historical perspective?