/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/BOOKS-CARIBBEAN: Story Unmasks ‘Father’ of Trinidad and Tobago

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Howard Campbell

KINGSTON, Jamaica, Apr 23 2002 (IPS) - When Ken Boodhoo was a teenager growing up in the San Fernando region of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams was preparing his People’s National Movement (PNM) to take charge of a country on the verge of independence from Britain.

It should come as little surprise that Williams’ revolutionary politics had a great influence on Boodhoo and his peers. The author’s sensational book, ‘The Elusive Eric Williams’ was released earlier this year, the 40th anniversary of Trinidad and Tobago’s independence.

Williams, the introverted man with the hearing aid and dark glasses, is unmasked in this book, which tracks the life of the twin-island republic’s first prime minister as the eldest of 12 children in a poverty-stricken family to his rise as one of the Caribbean’s most respected statesmen.

But Williams’ politics take a backseat here to his human side. Boodhoo gives glimpses of his intellect but shows how his genius impeded his ability to communicate with colleagues and family. So much so that when he went into a diabetic coma, cabinet members argued whether to seek medical attention, fearing Williams would have their heads once he recovered.

“I humanised him, I talked about a side of his personality that society did not know about,” said Boodhoo, 63, an associate professor at Florida International University. “He was a warm, decent person but on the other hand he was a human being who had faults.”

What most Trinidadians did not know was that Williams abandoned his first wife, Elsie, and their two children while he was a lecturer at Howard University in 1950. He then began an affair with Suilan Soy, a Trinidadian of Chinese origin who would eventually become his second wife.

Williams married Soy shortly after he gained a divorce in Reno, Nevada the following year. The couple had one child, a daughter named Erica, who assisted Boodhoo during his research for the book.

Soy died three years after her marriage. Williams married a third time, in 1956, to a Guyanese of Chinese extraction, but the two lived in separate homes until his death in 1981 at age 69.

These revelations, Boodhoo says, have opened up a new dimension to the life of Eric Williams in the country he led out of colonialism and where he is still revered as father of the nation.

“People find it very revealing because I fill in all his marriages and life at home. They feel they now that have a fuller story of the man,” Boodhoo explained.

Raoul Pantin, writing in the daily Trinidad Express, agrees with Boodhoo. “The book goes a long way in filling a gap that has existed since Dr. Williams’ death. Two decades later, there is still little information about the life of a man whose public persona was charismatic yet aloof, imperious and always enigmatic.”

Born to a father who was a postal worker and a French Creole mother, Williams’ path to glory was paved early on. He won a scholarship to attend the prestigious Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad and went on to Oxford, where he read history. While still in his twenties, Williams became a lecturer at Howard.

During his years in England and the United States, Williams befriended Caribbean thinkers like his countrymen George Padmore and C. L. R. James and Jamaican Norman Manley. After returning to Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1950s, Williams championed the independence movement that was sweeping the Caribbean and became a pillar of the short-lived Federation.

At home, he promised a better day for embattled blacks if he was elected to power. Yet, Boodhoo points out that the pledge didn’t materialise when the PNM formed the country’s first independent government.

“His close friends were only French Creole, Chinese and Indians, so that was a case of contradiction,” Boodhoo pointed out.

‘The Elusive Eric Williams’ delves into this aspect of the prime minister’s persona in detail. Hostile black students came out against what they perceived as his bias towards Europeans in the infamous Black Power demonstrations of 1970.

This book is Boodhoo’s second literary effort on Eric Williams, the first being 1985’s ‘Eric Williams: The Man and the Leader’, which examined his political policies.

The author does not believe the recent revealing book will tarnish the reputation of Trinidad and Tobago’s most acclaimed son. “I did step on a few toes but you have to do that to bring out the truth,” he said.