Preface: The Disquieting Decency of Richard Hart

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Between October 1977 and June 1980, I was an undergraduate in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Mona. It was an extraordinary time to be at Mona, to me, then as now, not merely an academic institution but an ambiguous landscape of hope and disappointment. There was a pervading atmosphere of radical change, of real, concrete transformative possibility, but also a creeping sense of worry and uncertainty, as though, maybe, it was all already too late. On a platform of democratic socialism, Michael Manley and the People's National Party (PNP) had been returned to power by a landslide victory in the 1976 general election. Some friends and I had been involved in a small political education organization, calling ourselves the 15 December Movement (for the date of the 1976 election), basically working for the PNP Left. By early 1977, however, even before I'd formally arrived at UWI, it was unclear whether the socialist project could in fact be sustained. Not unpredictably, Manley was wavering. The right wing within the party was regaining the initiative. Would there be an agreement with the International Monetary Fund, or would there be a People's Plan? Manley, perhaps, had already decided—the former over the latter. These were crucial years for my own intellectual evolution, away from experiments with Rastafari toward experiments with Marxism, in many ways made possible by a remarkable teacher at Jamaica College, Wesley Van Riel, who taught economics to sixth formers and, after school, led discussions on modern African history, African liberation movements, and Pan-Africanism. I would often visit Van Riel to borrow books and talk politics.

Not surprisingly, three of my teachers at UWI—Trevor Munroe, Rupert Lewis, and Don Robotham—were ranking members of the Marxist Workers Liberation League, founded in 1974, and which, in 1978, was to become a formal communist party, the Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ). Munroe, Lewis, and Robotham together authoritatively framed the field of Marxist debate on campus. It was more than once suggested to me that I could be considered for membership in the party. But I was then too close to another Marxist intellectual, Michael Witter, to be seriously attracted to the "scientific socialism" to which the WPJ adhered. Witter was an intellectual of a freethinking sensibility, more interpretive than legislative in cast of mind, closely attuned to the idioms of Jamaican popular cultural life. He and I would attend the public session of the first congress of the WPJ, held at the (then) Regal Theatre in 1978, and we would wonder out loud at a Marxist project so ensnared by middle-class cultural conformism. It was through Witter that I met George Beckford, easily one of the most original Jamaican intellectuals ever. I vividly remember Beckford walking into the UWI lecture hall in October 1977 to begin his course Caribbean Political Economy, looking out at us naïve youngsters with that inimitable grin and saying, "I am one of the most dangerous men in Jamaica!" He was, I now, belatedly, recognize—but, fragile and frequently unwell, he never returned to class.¹ Like Beckford, Louis Lindsay was scarce, but unlike Beckford Lindsay seemed austere, gloomy, obscure. His essay on the "myth" of Jamaican independence had a huge impact on me.² I'd met him in passing before UWI, when I worked at the short-lived Ministry of National Mobilization, where he was an advisor to the minister, D. K. Duncan.

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Memorably, someone who visited UWI to speak during my three years as a student was Richard Hart (Dick Hart, to those who knew him), the legendary figure of the 1940s and 1950s Jamaican Marxist Left who, along with Arthur Henry and the Hill brothers, Ken and Frank (the 4 H's, as they were called), had famously been expelled from the PNP in March 1952. Hart visited UWI more than once in those years, if my memory still serves me. He was always introduced by Trevor Munroe, the WPJ's general secretary. Curiously, though, or maybe not so curiously, Hart never spoke publicly about the then contemporary...