C.L.R.

James as a Creole Nationalist:

Reconsidering The Case for West-Indian
Self-Government
F.S.J. Ledgister
Clark Atlanta University
The usual description of C.L.R. James’s political theory locates him at the
intersection of Marxism and pan-Africanism, generally more towards the
former than the latter. The bulk of James’s work bears this out. Nonetheless,
James’s earliest political monograph aligns him more with Creole
nationalists such as J.J. Thomas, Eric Williams, or Norman Manley, than
with Walter Rodney or the New World Group. In this study , I analyze that
work and delineate the ways that the ideas he expressed at that time
connect to a West Indian Creole nationalism that stressed the need for an
end to colonial trusteeship and that saw West Indians as peoples (or a
people) shaped by the colonial experience and ready and able to govern
themselves. James’s earliest work, then, points towards such nationalist
intellectual activists as Norman Manley of Jamaica or Eric Williams of
Trinidad who articulated a clearly defined Caribbean version of European
liberal nationalism.

T he usual description of C.L.R. James’s political theory locates him at

the intersection of Marxism and pan-Africanism, generally more towards the
former than the latter. The bulk of James’s work bears this out. For example,
in The Black Jacobins he defines the rebels of Saint Domingue as proletarian
without forgetting their blackness. James unambiguously defined himself as
in the tradition of Marx and Lenin (Bogues 1997, 1).
Nonetheless, James’s earliest political monograph aligns him more with
Creole nationalists such as J.J. Thomas, Eric Williams, or Norman Manley
than with Walter Rodney or the New World Group. In this study, I analyze
that work and delineate the ways that the ideas he expressed at that time
connect to a West Indian Creole nationalism that stressed the need for an end
to colonial trusteeship and that saw West Indians as peoples (or a people)
shaped by the colonial experience and ready and able to govern themselves.
The Case for West-Indian Self-Government, originally part of the Life
of Captain Cipriani, published in 1933 not long after James moved to England,
provides at first glance no indication of James’s later radicalism. It critiques
British rule very much in the tradition of Thomas’s Froudacity, with a Millian,

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C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist, F.S.J. Ledgister 2

not a Marxist, assertion that the West Indian people—projecting from James’s
own experience and knowledge of Trinidad, but with references to other
colonies—had been sufficiently prepared by British rule to take control of
their own destinies (Richards 1995, 318).
James argues for West Indian autonomy, as we shall see, in terms little
different from those of the Creole nationalists who were to dominate the
politics of the region from the 1940s until the 1970s; but he is not normally
considered among their number. His thoughts on the subject of political
autonomy nevertheless make him a forerunner of the Creole nationalism that
became normative at the end of the colonial period; they contain both seeds
of a more radical political future and signs of James’s own limitations in seeing
the colonial Caribbean as a Creole region. The Case for West-Indian Self-
Government is, not altogether surprisingly, a work often mentioned but rarely
cited, largely, one suspects, because it does not fit well into the categories in
which James is normally placed.

The Setting

The Case for West-Indian Self-Government emerged from James’s

support for Trinidad’s first serious political movement, the Trinidad
Workingmen’s Association (TWA), initially established in 1897 and revived
after World War I under the leadership of a white planter, Alfred Cipriani,
who as a captain in the West India Regiment during the war had protested
the racism that caused the regiment to mutiny shortly after the war (Ledgister
1998, 98; Robinson 1995, 245).
Cipriani became a member of the Legislative Council, the colonial
legislature, when seven elective seats were added in 1925 (Ledgister 1998,
98).1 Hitherto, the Council had been purely an appointive body. The 1925
reform effectively enfranchised only six percent of the population, and only
five of the seven constituencies were contested. Although Cipriani was
nominally the leader of a bloc of four members, the other TWA members of
the Legislative Council only sporadically supported him, leaving him to carry
out the task of opposition to the colonial regime alone (Ledgister 1998, 99).
Although not very effective, Cipriani was the first voice to speak for the
Trinidadian worker, both black and East Indian, in the legislature. That was
his political role when James departed Trinidad for England in 1932.
James had not been deeply involved in the labour movement or in the
conventional politics of the island after 1925. Rather, he entered public life as

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C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist, F.S.J. Ledgister 3

a writer. He contributed fiction and criticism to the literary journal, The Beacon,
established by Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes (Bogues 1997, 19). Before
leaving for London in 1932, he completed the novel Minty Alley, which contains
a fresh and lively description of working class life in the barrack-yards of the
Port of Spain of James’s youth, which he was decades later to describe as
about “the fundamental antagonism . . . between the educated black and the
mass of plebeians” (Bogues 1997, 24-25).
James, as a Trinidadian intellectual of the 1920s, was in a line dating to
the mid-nineteenth century of black Trinidadians who, with the tools of Western
culture, asserted an identity that colonial rule would have denied them. James
was aware of this, as Selwyn Cudjoe (1991, 43-46) notes, given his praise of
Maxwell Philip (1829-1888), the first black Solicitor-General and the first
black writer of creative prose in Trinidad’s history.
James was also influenced by J.J. Thomas, the schoolteacher whose
rebuttal to J.A. Froude’s The English in the West Indies was the first assertion
that West Indian people had a legitimate claim to govern themselves, and by
A.R.F. Webber, a novelist and pioneer socialist, who Cudjoe sees as
“anticipating” James in some respects (Cudjoe 1991, 46-50).
Like Phillips, Thomas, and Webber before him, James was largely self-
educated and determined to promote the development of his own people. His
early intellectual development was very much oriented towards Western
civilization and its cultural products, for all that he instinctively rebelled against
them (Grimshaw 1992, 3). Cudjoe makes the point that James’s real political
awakening only began when, in discussions with the cricketer Learie
Constantine in England shortly after arriving there in 1932, he developed the
idea of working for self-government of the West Indies.2 Even so, James had
considered the issue and begun to take a position on it earlier (Nielsen 1997,
xiv).
Nonetheless, his primary intellectual activity in the Trinidad of the 1920s
was self-education. Asked by Paul Buhle in 1987 what he did between the
ages of twenty and thirty, James replied, “Reading books, that’s what I was
doing. Literature and history. And I not only read as the ordinary West Indian
read, but I went to the library and found all sorts of books on history and
classical studies” (Buhle 1992, 58). In his regular job, as a teacher at Queen’s
Royal College, James pioneered the teaching of West Indian history, a political
act of great importance, and mentored the young Eric Williams (Buhle 1992,
58).3 He also, as he told Buhle, had a relationship with Cipriani, though limited
by the fact that as a teacher at a government school he was a public employee.

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He wrote on sports for Cipriani’s paper, The Labour Leader, and spoke
occasionally on behalf of the TWA; nevertheless, speaking of himself in the
third person, he said to Buhle, “James was part of the movement, he didn’t
put himself forward, but he was part. Cipriani would come to me and ask me
what about this and so on. I would speak on behalf of the movement” (Buhle
1992, 60).
Nor was James’s youthful political activity limited to support of the TWA
and Cipriani. He also engaged in debate over the question of black intelligence
in The Beacon, rebutting the arguments of Dr. Sidney Harland, a lecturer at
the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, adjacent to James’s home town
of Tunapuna about the inherent abilities of black people (Nielsen 1997, 8-12).
The thirty-one year-old who arrived in England in 1932 with the manuscripts
of The Life of Captain Cipriani and Minty Alley in his trunk was about to
start a new life, a life that would carry him from Britain to the United States
and back to Britain and the West Indies.4 It is interesting, and perhaps
instructive, that he began his long sojourn outside the West Indies by looking
back to his homeland and speaking of its needs. As Grimshaw (1992, 5)
notes, the essay is rooted in his early life.

“A People Like Ours Should Be Free”

In The Case for West-Indian Self-Government—a 32-page pamphlet,

of which 27 pages are devoted to the main text—James lays out his first
sustained political argument. Before doing that, however, he dedicates the
work to Arthur Cipriani, T.A. Marryshow, J. Elmore Edwards, and C.D. Rawle,
all activists in Trinidad, Grenada, and Dominica, whom he salutes as “leaders
of the democratic movement of the West Indies” (James 1933, 4).5 The
pamphlet was one of a series on political issues published by Leonard and
Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press that included pieces by C.E.M. Joad,
J.M. Keynes, and Harold Laski; James began his career as a political theorist
in some very distinguished company.
His first move is to provide a context for the pamphlet: a Colonial Office
Commission’s investigating the possibility of federating some or all of Britain’s
Eastern Caribbean colonies. James asserts that while the Commission was
taking evidence “on the constitutional question” such a question required an
understanding of the social context of government.6 That context, James,
contends is obvious. Over eighty percent of the population of the islands
being investigated “consists of Negroes or persons of Negroid origin”

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(James 1933, 5) who, albeit of African origin, had become a distinct people:

Cut off from all contact with Africa for a century and a quarter,
they present to-day the extraordinary spectacle of a people who,
in language and social customs, religion, education and outlook,
are essentially Western and, indeed, far more advanced in Western
culture than many a European community. (5-6)

The nature of the argument that James is to make in the remainder of the
pamphlet is thus clearly laid out: West Indians, as a westernized people, are in
a position to govern themselves and should be allowed the opportunity.
James (1933) immediately contrasts this picture of the westernized West
Indian with the view of “the advocates of Colonial Office trusteeship” who
dismiss the black West Indian as a “savage” who “beneath the veneer of
civilisation” (6) is still a vicious creature who will long need white tutelage
before being allowed an approach to self-government. James marshals
quotations from Sydney, Lord Olivier, a former colonial administrator and
Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Sir Charles Bruce, a former colonial
governor, that speak highly of the qualities of black West Indians, and black
people in general, to rebut the argument for black inferiority (1933, 6-7).
“Men of colour” are ready and able to take high office in the West Indies.
The “West Indian Negro is ungracious enough to be far from perfect,”
sharing the vices of all those who live in the tropics “not excluding people of
European blood,” but has a “magnificent vitality” that “overcomes the
enervating influences of the climate” (James 1933, 7). They lack “the thrift,
the care, and the almost equine docility” of Europeans whose harsher climate
and industrial economy have imposed a discipline on them. But they also, as
a young people, lack the cramping traditions which inhibit the European (James
1933, 7).
James then looks at the divisions of caste within the “Negroid” population,
noting that it is composed of a majority “of actually black people” and a
minority of fifteen to twenty percent of people of mixed black and white
ancestry (James 1933, 8). This minority had from the days of slavery on
asserted a claim of superiority to the “ordinary black.” Between the brown
and black people a distrust exists which has been “skillfully played on” by the
whites and which “poisons the life” of a community made up of a variety of
racial mixtures and in which relations within families can be made tense by
differences in shade between close kindred (James 1933, 8).

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Possession of wealth, however, matters: “It is not too much to say that in
a West Indian colony the surest sign of a man’s having arrived is the fact that
he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself” (James
1933, 9). Status concerns on the part of the middle class make it hard for
them to unite, and this is “the gravest drawback of the coloured population”
(James 1933, 9) as it should, naturally, take leadership but is instead divided
by distinctions of color.
The most important of other groups, writes James, are the white creoles.
However, he footnotes this assertion with a statement that bears quoting in
full:

Many of the West Indian Islands are cosmopolitan, and East

Indians form about twelve per cent of the total population, though
concentrated in Trinidad. But there is no need to give them
special treatment, for economically and educationally they
are superior to the corresponding class in India; and get on
admirably with the Negroes. (James 1933, 9fn, emphasis mine)

We will return to this point later, as it is crucial for any analysis of James’s
understanding of his own society in the early 1930s.
Whites, James asserts, face two disadvantages: they cannot stand the
climate for more than three generations, and being white automatically makes
them people of consequence. Yet this is power without more than personal
responsibility since the white people who govern are not West Indian but
English (James 1933, 9-10).
James then proceeds to give us a portrait of the English colonial
administrator who arrives in the West Indies with experience “in dealing with
primitive peoples” in Africa and who in the West Indies is confronted by “a
thoroughly civilized community” whose members are his intellectual equals.
In response, the Englishman has to fall back on claims of inherent Anglo-
Saxon ability, and on a claim that the crown colony system needs to be
maintained (James 1933, 10-11).
In reaction to the claims of West Indians, the colonial bureaucrat takes
up a hyperpatriotic celebration of Englishness and reinforces his inherent
snobbishness with an unearned aristocracy which is ever vigilant for insults
(James 1933, 11). English liberalism—the celebration of a history that includes
the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights—disappears in the colonies, as the
colonial administrator defines anyone who exhibits a local patriotism as

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“a dangerous person, a wild revolutionary, a man with no respect for law and
order, a self-seeker actuated by the lowest motives, a reptile to be crushed at
the first opportunity. What at home is the greatest virtue becomes in the
colonies the greatest crime” (James 1933, 12).
Turning from the psychology of the colonizer to the administration of the
colonies, James gives us a description of the “Governor-in-Executive-Council”
(James 1933, 13).7 While the governor was advised by an executive council
which included senior government officials and prominent locals, the latter
“selected by himself,” he did not need to follow that advice (James 1933, 13).
James lays out as an example of the arbitrary behavior of colonial
administrations the relationship among the colonial government; the Trinidad
Electric Company, which both supplied electricity to the island and operated
Port of Spain’s municipal trams; and the Port of Spain city council, in which
the government acted to promote the profits of the company and its officials
and to “defeat the legitimate aspirations of the citizens of Port-of-Spain”
(James 1933, 17).
While the Executive Council met in secret, the Legislative Council
attracted public interest. The Council was divided into three parts: the first
consisted of twelve government officials chosen by the governor; the second
consisted of thirteen unofficial members, six appointed by the governor and
seven elected “by the people”; and the third was the governor himself as
presiding officer (James 1933, 18-19).
James (1933) notes that some official members serve in the Council for
years without saying a word, and that

[t]here is a further unreality, because whenever the Governor

wishes he can instruct the officials all to vote in the same way.
And the Council becomes farcical when two members of a
committee appointed by the Governor receive instructions to vote
against their own recommendations. (18-19)

The officials, who are “a solid block of Englishmen with a few white creoles,
generally from some other colony” work in solidarity with wealthy white
creoles “against the political advancement of the coloured people” (James
1933, 18-19). The government and the Chamber of Commerce constitute a
single political bloc. It had become government policy, however, to appoint “a
few Negroes” to unofficial positions on the Legislative Council. These persons
were “Negroes of fair and not of dark skin” notes James, who goes on to say

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that such people are frequently more hostile to “the masses of the people
than the Europeans themselves”(James 1933, 19).8 This hostility James
attributes to a lack of self-respect. When “light-skinned Negroes” recognize
that they will receive respect only when they respect themselves, then the
racial power of whites will be ended (James 1933, 23).
The Europeans who exercise power are intellectually shallow and
provincial, but they have power and can thus maintain a degree of exclusivity.
This, “for the fair-skinned Negro who does not seek much” is a paradise
(James 1933, 20). At the same time, any white talent will be clustered around
the governor. Non-whites with “powers above the average” will seek to
penetrate such groups even though they are dominated by Englishmen who
are “constitutionally incapable of admitting into their society on equal terms
persons of colour” (James 1933, 21).
The “man of colour” could only hope for a position at the fringe of polite
society. Those who were unwilling to accept “place-at-any-price” remained
in splendid isolation distrusting each other and united only in jealousy at each
other’s ability to stand well with the government (James 1933, 21-22). That
government, while pointing to the number of colored men appointed to the
Council as a sign of its non-racialism, “rarely appoints black men” (James
1933, 22).
The result is that while the Colonial Office is congratulating itself on
ensuring that “the coloured people” are represented in government, the colonial
administration and the local white population know that these “representatives”
are in fact “more royalist than the King” and far from being in solidarity with
the black majority “are at one with [the English] in their common antipathy to
the black” (James 1933, 22).
The third part of the Legislative Council is the governor himself. James
(1933) wittily states that

The Governor of a Crown Colony is three things. He is the

representative of His Majesty the King, and as such must have
all the homage and respect customary to that position . . . In
Trinidad the Governor is Governor General and Prime Minister
in one. But that makes only two. When the Governor sits in the
Legislative Council he is Chairman of that body. The unfortunate
result is that when a member of the Council rises to speak he is
addressing at one and the same time an incomprehensible
personage, three in one and one in three. (23-24)

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James’s allusion to the Athanasian Creed serves to introduce the point that in
this way the governors avoid taking responsibility for their actions while
members of the Legislative Council are always eager to jump to the defense
of the Crown’s representative and the president of the Council while being
“quite neglectful of the responsibility of the head of the administration” (24).
The governor’s power gives him disproportionate influence on the legislative
process and his presence in the Council inhibits freedom of speech (James
1933, 25-26).
The result is that the government faces no “effective criticism or check,”
and since it is administered by bureaucrats rather than politicians with vision
it becomes “slack and regardless.” The members of the Legislative Council,
far from being vigilant on behalf of the public, are no more than sycophants,
and the function of government appears to be no more than a favor granted
to the people rather than a responsibility for the common good and general
welfare. James illustrates this by considering a debate on racial discrimination
at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in which biracial members of
the council had insisted that there was no discrimination against Trinidadians
of color attending the College even though one of them knew that there was.
Attempts by Cipriani, a white Creole, to deal with the matter were stymied by
the Colonial Office being able to point to these statements in response to
Cipriani’s complaints (James 1933, 27-29).
For all that English officials would want to underplay or deny racial
discrimination, James reserves his greatest contempt for the “so-called
representatives of the people” who are caught between fear that speaking up
about racial discrimination would deny them the opportunity for advancement
and fear that they would have to confront publicly “the perfectly obvious but
nevertheless dreadful fact that they are not white men” (James 1933, 29).
James (1993, 30) notes that in smaller, more racially homogeneous,
colonies such as Grenada and Dominica the government has managed to
unite nominated and elected members in opposition to itself. In this way, the
British are preparing unwittingly for the destruction of their empire.
For James (1933, 30), the only way forward is a democratic constitution,
perhaps modelled on Malta or on Ceylon. High income qualifications to hold
office or to vote would have to be abolished and the legislature should be
made up exclusively of elected representatives (James 1933, 31).9 James
does not see democratization as a panacea. He sees it as necessary in order
that the concerns and needs of the people are regularly and consistently taken
into account by the government:

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No one expects that these Islands will, on assuming responsibility

for themselves, immediately shed racial prejudice and economic
depression. No one expects that by a change of constitutions the
constitution of politicians will be changed. But though they will,
when the occasions arise, disappoint the people, and deceive the
people and even, in so-called rises, betray the people, yet there is
one thing they will never be able to do—and that is, neglect the
people. As long as society is constituted as it is at present that is
the best that modern wage-slaves can ever hope to achieve.
(James 1933, 31)

Crown colony government has run its course. It is based on the fraudulent
assumption of superior ability by the English and is wicked because it permits
a small number of privileged Englishmen to control “hundreds of thousands of
defenceless people.” In using “England’s overflow” to prevent the people
from achieving their natural aspirations to personal advancement and self-
government it is, in fact, actually criminal (James 1933, 31). The colonial
administrators are “itinerant demi-gods” ever eager to hear of opportunities
for advancement elsewhere in the empire “while men often better than they
stand outside rejected and despised” (James 1933, 32).
Britain can control the West Indies as long as it desires. It has the naval
and air power to do so. Nevertheless, James asserts, “a people like ours
should be free to make its own failures and successes” (James 1933, 32).
Without that freedom, West Indians “remain without credit abroad and without
self-respect at home, a bastard, feckless conglomeration of individuals, inspired
by no common purpose, moving to no common end” (James 1933, 32). Britain
has promised its colonial subjects “self-government when fit for it.” It would
lose little by keeping its word.

Evaluating the Argument

In a very small compass, James has presented a liberal nationalist argument

for self-government. By that, James does not necessarily mean independence.
At the time he wrote, no colony run by non-white subjects had achieved
independence. Only in 1931 had the full autonomy of Australia, Canada,
Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa been recognized by the Statute
of Westminster, and all of these, except South Africa, were territories with
white settler majorities. South Africa’s white settler minority was large enough

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to dominate the non-white majority and deny it political power.

The British West Indies was not a collection of colonies of exploitation,
as were most colonies in Africa and Asia, nor were they colonies of settlement
in the sense of having a large segment of the population deriving from the
“mother country.” It was a region of colonies somewhere in between containing
a population that was Westernized rather than Western, and imported for the
purposes of exploitation rather than exploited in their aboriginal homeland.
The Caribbean Sea is a lot further distant from Europe than the west coast of
Africa, but it was under European rule—as opposed to a marginal presence—
for much longer.
It is for this reason that James begins his essay by asserting that the
population of the British West Indies is both black and Western, and why he
makes a point of the historic distance between the people of the West Indies
and their African roots. West Indians are blacks, but they are not Africans as
James states both explicitly and implicitly.10 Rather, as Bogues (1997, 23)
notes, they are a distinct people. James is asserting that the people of the
Caribbean, certainly of the British West Indies, constitute a nation formed by
a shared history. That history, it must be noted, is one that involves British
colonial rule and the imposition of British political ideas as normative. The
lens through which James sees the British West Indies has been shaped by
the thought of people like J.S. Mill, for whom black West Indians, as the
descendants of slaves, had to be taught freedom; freedom, that is to say, in a
British mode. James, thus, declares that West Indians no longer need British
tutelage and are ready to govern themselves.
This declaration requires that he confront the question of the East Indian
segment of population, which was clearly not Afro-Western. He thus has to
state that many islands are “cosmopolitan” because they have East Indian
residents. But he then dismisses them in two curt phrases: they are better off
than in India, and they “get on admirably with the Negroes.” These apodeictic
claims sweep a significant issue—that of ethnic difference—under the carpet.
The politics of Trinidad and Tobago and of Guyana since World War II has
been dominated by the ethnic division between Creoles and East Indians in a
way that indicates that neither group gets on admirably with the other. Or, in
other words, that the latter does not find the culture of the former normative.
Since James’s argument rests on asserting that West Indians have
developed enough to be able to govern themselves according to Western
norms, he has to assume that the East Indian section of the populace is aligned
with those norms, but he can present no evidence for this. Even worse, he

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ignores the middleman minorities—the Chinese, Portuguese, and Levantine

Arabs—who were and are highly visible even though their numbers are small.
The story of the West Indies, from James’s perspective, is entirely black and
white.
Race relations, relations between white, black, and biracial West Indians,
are central to James’s account of the condition of the West Indian colonies
and to his argument for self-government. The “brown-skinned middle class”
which ought to provide leadership to the black mass of the population is so
divided by squabbles over fine distinctions of color that it cannot take up that
role. The whites, meantime, are enervated by the climate and by the automatic
deference accorded to their race. Clearly, it is the job of black West Indians
to govern themselves. Glen Richards (1995, 318) sees this, correctly, as the
means by which James believed that they would be able to overcome the
burden of racism.
It is racism that makes the English assume that West Indians cannot
govern themselves without the supervision of their betters. Racism makes
the English blind to the difference between Westernized Caribbean people
and “primitive Africans” (James 1933, 10).The latter, in his eyes, require the
trusteeship which the former no longer need. Where a black nationalist like
Marcus Garvey would have emphasized racial solidarity and rejected divisions
between blacks in Africa and in the Diaspora, James embraces that distinction.
That same racism is what leads to the bickering over differences in color
and the arbitrary inclusion or exclusion of talented people. Yet, racial prejudice
in the West Indies is not accompanied by racial antagonism, and, free of
crown colony rule, West Indians will be able to live in peace under the rule of
their elected representatives. James has come to a conclusion which would
have surprised Edward Wilmot Blyden or Marcus Garvey, both of them
Caribbean people themselves. Indeed, while Garvey would probably have
nodded at James’s description between brown and black West Indians as
support for his contention that the former were inimical to the latter, James
has no such intention. Rather, he wants us to see that continued British
domination through the crown colony system divorces status from ability,
makes lightness of color the sign of the former, and ignores possession of the
latter by those who lack the fortune to have begun life with some European
ancestry.
We have to see James as taking a very different stance from some earlier
black political activists. Though figures like Blyden and Garvey had their
limitations, they were critics of the trusteeship doctrine which James is invoking.

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James’s critique of British rule comes after both black nationalists, such as
Blyden and Garvey, and pan-Africanists, such as W.E.B. DuBois had
presented critiques of both imperialism and racial domination of which the
young James could not have been unaware. Yet his argument, in 1933, stays
firmly within the boundaries of British liberalism. Interestingly, James’s turn
towards Marxism parallels that of DuBois, and his own introduction of Marxist
analysis to Caribbean history occurs shortly after DuBois’s own unorthodox
application of Marxist thought to the understanding of the history of black
Americans (Bogues 2003, 69-94).
Democracy would make wealth and ability, rather than race, the markers
of status and would remove the barriers confronted by talented West Indians
of wholly or partly African descent. It would not remove racial prejudice, but
in the absence of racial antagonism that does not for him seem an insuperable
difficulty. The problem is, of course, that “race antagonism” was hardly absent
in the colonial Caribbean. The reactive racial philosophies of Blyden and
Garvey could not have come into existence had they not believed in a racial
hostility directed at persons like them from the white authorities and believed
that it was necessary to reciprocate. James’s own depiction of the racial
prejudice of brown to black indicates more than mere prejudice; James
recognizes that mixed-race West Indians were possessed of a racial fear.
Equally, James the Marxist a few years later would not have assumed
that bourgeois democracy was the best alternative available, even if it was
corruptible. Yet that is what James the liberal does. Little wonder that
Trinidadian political scientist John LaGuerre could dismiss the early James as
“a nationalist without a political theory” (quoted in Bogues 1997, 25). While
Bogues rejects this as too superficial an approach, he also disagrees with
LaGuerre’s saying that James when he arrived in England was “at best a
liberal” (Bogues 1997, 25).
But this is what James was at the time. Although Bogues turns to James’s
fiction for evidence of a deeper understanding of the situation of black working-
class Trinidadians of the 1920s and contends that James did not yet understand
the implications of his thinking for that class, the reality is that James, in
The Case for West-Indian Self-Government is arguing entirely within the
framework of the liberal imperialist idea of trusteeship. His argument is that
this trusteeship has achieved its end and is no longer necessary. A few years
later, in The Black Jacobins, he was to articulate a very different kind of
argument, but in 1932 and 1933 he was not yet either a Marxist or a pan-
Africanist. For James in 1933, West Indians constituted a nation whose

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aspirations were being frustrated by the continuation of crown colony

government. He does not see them as part of an international proletariat
created by and antagonistic to capitalism. Nor does he seem them as part of
a larger African community.
James’s argument with respect to the crown colony system echoes the
Canadian political scientist Hume Wrong (1923) writing a decade earlier:

Crown Colony government is a political blind alley. It is, and must

be, paternal, and it gives no chance for education in political
responsibility. To regard it as a permanent institution is to give up
all hope for the political development of the inhabitants of the
colonies in which it prevails. All these colonies are far from being
ready to control their own affairs, but some of them may be
sufficiently advanced to make a start on the long road which
may ultimately lead to responsible government. (144)

While James would obviously have disagreed that the West Indies was not
yet ready to govern itself, he would have considered Wrong’s assertion that
the crown colony system was a blind alley to be correct. James would have
agreed with Wrong’s statement that “the negro in the West Indies is a very
different person from his racial kin in Africa” (1923, 171). Indeed, this is the
very claim that James makes in asserting that the West Indian is ready for
self-government. Wrong, like James, places the link with Africa securely in
the past and sees the West Indian black as Westernized (1923, 171). And, like
James, Wrong sees the absence of “open racial hostility” as a hopeful sign
for the political development of the West Indies (1923, 179).
While there are many points of disagreement between James and Wrong,
not the least of which is Wrong’s assessment that the West Indies was still
far from ready for self-government, what should concern us here is the similarity
of their approach. Both see the West Indies as a backward part of the West
and crown colony government as contributing to that backwardness. They
occupy different points on the spectrum of liberalism, James being far more
radical than Wrong, but they share the basic assumptions of Western liberalism.
It is instructive in this regard to consider that at the same time that James
was articulating a liberal argument for West Indian independence, his childhood
friend Malcolm Nurse, using the nom de guerre of “George Padmore,” was
already a major voice in the anti-imperialist counsels of the Third
International.11 Padmore, who was later to reject Marxism-Leninism for pan-

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C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist, F.S.J. Ledgister 15

Africanism, had left Trinidad several years before James and thus had an
earlier exposure to more radical ideas than were current in the West Indian
colonies at the time.

Creole Nationalism

While James was writing The Case for West-Indian Self-Government

time was not standing still in the West Indies. The Great Depression was
biting the poorest West Indians, and they were not accepting it stoically. Starting
in the early 1930s, workers in the colonial Caribbean began to protest their
continuing immiseration, and their demands for justice, work, and bread were
gradually joined by middle-class West Indians who awakened to their racial
and/or cultural solidarity with the poor.12 Labor uprisings in 1937 in Trinidad
and in 1938 in Jamaica were especially important in this regard because they
reinforced and expanded existing political movements, as was the case in
Trinidad, or generated new movements with middle-class leadership—as was
the case in Jamaica.
That leadership took the language of British imperial liberalism and the
imperialist attitude to the colonial Caribbean and gave it a new twist:

There are those who love our thatched huts and the
picturesqueness of Back-O-Wall, and those who look at smiles
on people’s faces and believe that all is well because people will
smile, nature is bountiful and one season follows another. I have
lived in that feeling myself, I have felt those sentiments. If you
live in a place long enough you become complacent. What you
see every day you regard after a time as belonging to the order
of things. (Manley [1938] 1971a, 15)

Thus spoke Norman Manley in September 1938, announcing that self-

government had become a central political demand for middle-class West
Indians such as himself. In another text that year, Manley ([1938] 1971b)
was to echo James even more directly:

The dead hand of imperialism is made manifest in the dearth of

our culture, in the paucity and poverty of our arts, in the drying
up of the sources of charity, in the decay of faith and the
licentiousness of morals, in the dishonesty of our escapism, in the

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C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist, F.S.J. Ledgister 16

malice of our leaders, in the cowardice of government, in the

narrow mean circumscription of all our horizons. One touch of
creative intensity and a veritable desert would quicken into
life with rank weeds jostling the flower shoots striving for
living room. There would be life and trouble, blossom and fruit,
but the dead hand, quietly with blind efficiency, closes on it all.
(385, emphasis in the original)

This is a vision of political freedom from which racial and class differences
are absent. It rests on the assumption that expanded political liberty will unleash
the creative potential that the crown colony system has suppressed. Manley,
speaking as the leader of a political party dedicated to the achievement of
self-government and eventual independence for the West Indies, shares with
James the desire to see his people have the freedom to achieve their own
successes and experience their own failures.
That people is not cast in terms of black and white, but as a West Indian
people who have emerged from the particular historical experience of the
Caribbean, that is to say as a creolized people. Creolization involves the
“inescapable mixing of peoples and cultures as an undeniable facet of the
modern world” (King 2001, 143).
Hence James’s odd treatment of the East Indian: He defines them as
creolized, and therefore part of a political community which also contains
brown people, black people, and white people. West Indians are a creolized
people, and the nation that James and Manley envision is a Creole nation.
White, black, brown, East Indian, all are brought together in a single Creole
pepperpot in which the flavors of Africa, Asia, and Europe achieve a new,
fierce harmony. This is, a generation later, to be echoed by James’s pupil
Eric Williams (see Williams 1962, vii). Williams, however, was to go a step
further proclaiming the end of imperial rule, not simply calling for it: “You are
nobody’s boss, and nobody is your boss” (Williams [1961] 1982b, 266). It was
the end of what Williams called “Massa day,” the rule of a backward,
obscurantist class, but not every white was a massa, and “not all Massas
were white” (Williams [1961] 1982a, 238-46).
Creole nationalism, so defined, is a Caribbean form of European liberal
nationalism. Trusteeship is seen as having played its role as midwife of the
new nation, which henceforth must achieve its successes and failures on its
own. Thus far, Burke and Mill. Equally, continued crown colony rule, with its
sidelining of ability and creativity, was a noisome nuisance to be condemned

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by all. Thus far, Machiavelli.

Conclusion

If we can see James as participating in a tradition that has its roots in

sixteenth century European republicanism and nineteenth century European
liberalism, then The Case for West-Indian Self-Government represents a
direction that he was not to take in his own intellectual and political
development. It is not a precursor to a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist analysis
of the impact of imperialism, nor is it part of a pan-African resistance to that
imperialism. These were to be the major themes of James’s career as a
political activist and thinker in the United States and Britain from the mid-
1930s on. They were to lead to James meeting with Leon Trotsky to discuss
the struggle of black Americans as part of the worldwide revolutionary
movement. In 1933, however, James had not yet moved in that direction.13
Nonetheless, The Case for West-Indian Self-Government is focused
on James’s own people, their history, and their political plight. It is, therefore,
very much in tune with his later concerns—socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-
racism.
How, then, should we see this pamphlet? I would venture to suggest that
we see it in two ways. One is as a precursor of the Creole nationalism that
was shortly to emerge full-blown in the colonial Caribbean. It is no large step
from James in 1933 to Manley in 1938, nor to Williams in 1961. This is James
as he might have become had he never left the West Indies and had not
become involved in the international Marxist movement. And this is the
approach that has motivated this study.
The other is as a first, untutored effort at developing a coherent political
vision of the Caribbean in the modern world, a true work of theory informed
by the normative values which James accepted at the time. It contains themes,
such as imperialism and racism, which he was to explore in great depth
throughout his career, and regarding which he was shortly to acquire and to
develop new analytic tools.
The Case for West-Indian Self-Government then can be seen as a
liminal work. It sits at the boundary between James’s youth and his adult life,
between his early liberalism and his later Marxism, between Creole nationalism
and pan-Africanism. That James was to go beyond those boundaries does
not mean that it is not a work of significance both for an understanding of
who James was and for understanding the world in which he came to his first

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maturity.
It is, finally, a work of tremendous importance for Caribbean political
thought. Like J.J. Thomas before him, James was not content to accept
subordination or the disvaluing of his abilities and the abilities of those around
him. He felt himself part of a nation, and spoke on its behalf. As a people,
West Indians were entitled to take their chances in the world, and in doing so
to develop their own self-respect, their own common identity, and their own
common purpose. That is a message that still needs to be heard.

Notes

1
Prior to that date, Trinidad and Tobago had been an example of what Hume
Wrong called a “pure” crown colony. The addition of an elective element,
albeit elected on a limited suffrage turned Trinidad into a “semi-representative”
crown colony. See Wrong (1923, 113 and 136).

2
James ([1963] 1993, 53) attributed his late political development in part to
the decision to join the Maple Cricket Club, with a predominantly biracial and
middle-class membership, rather than the working-class predominantly black
Shannon Cricket Club: “Faced with the fundamental divisions in the island, I
had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed
my political development for years.”

3
The references to Williams’s relationship with James are legion, including
Williams’s own in Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1969).

4
James went to Britain with the encouragement of Learie Constatine who
promised to see him through if he had financial difficulties. See James (1993,
110).

5
The pamphlet was excerpted from The Life of Captain Cipriani while
James was living in Lancashire in 1932. (See King 2001, 75).

6
The “constitutional question” was the question of whether some form of
representative government should be introduced in a reformed constitution.

7
The phrase alludes to the constitutional term “the King-in-Parliament,” which

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C.L.R. James as a Creole Nationalist, F.S.J. Ledgister 19

refers to the Crown in its legislative role operating in conjunction with the
House of Commons and House of Lords.

8
In a later work, James (1993, 106-07) describes the official treatment of the
great cricketer Learie Constantine who was unable to get any regular
employment other than acting positions in government because of his race.

9
Malta at the time had a bicameral legislature. Universal suffrage was
introduced in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1931.

10
James makes the point that the oil companies operating in Trinidad would
as soon appoint a Zulu chief as “a local man of colour” to a position of
responsibility, the implication being that there is a real difference between the
Zulu and the Trinidadian Creole that the oil company is not recognizing.

11
James was to work with Padmore and other pan-Africanists such as
Amy Ashwood-Garvey and Jomo Kenyatta after becoming a Marxist in 1934
(Bogues 2003, 72).

12
The “and/or” is necessary because some of the middle class activists who
emerged in the 1930s, such as Albert Gomes in Trinidad or Richard Hart in
Jamaica, were unambiguously white.

13
James’s move to Marxism seems to have occurred only a year after the
publication of the pamphlet (Bogues 2003, 88).

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