IN SHORT:
UPRIGHT: An Honorable vision. Natural leader, and the gift of a discerning intellect. See through the smoke.
REVERSED: High expectations. Hasty judgements and decisions. Feelings of needing to rush towards a goal.
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IN DEPTH:
The King of Wands sits at his presidential desk behind a microphone from which he is able to address the people. He wears sunglasses indoors, and he listens with a hearing aid. He holds notes in one hand and his other hand seems to disappears behind the swirls of cigarette smoke. He is articulate, incisive, and yet intellectually accessible. His words drift through the smoke, through the air wave, and into the hearts of the many. The way he speaks of us, changes how we feel about ourselves.
The office is smartly decorated: the national flag of Trinidad and Tobago signal his accomplished commitment to independence, behind him a telephone (an invaluable tool in coalition building), and a framed photograph of a Public Square. The fading image gives us an insight to this man’s heart—it yearns to connect to common people. This is a place he carries deep in his heart, a memory of which he uses like a soap box. This image grounds him as he ascends to greater and greater stability in his position.
Our King of Wands shows the Honorable Dr. Eric Eustace Williams, the much celebrated Trinidadian scholar and politician. As a young person, Williams excelled in his studies, and for this reason he was given scholarships then sent away and abroad. He completed his phd in philosophy at Oxford, and his dissertation ‘The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery’, ran so contrary to the British rationalization of abolition that Eric Williams struggled to find scholarly work, advisors, and suffered many publication rejections including one marxist publisher who refused him by saying “such a book… would be contrary to the British tradition”. However, once it was finally published under the name “Capitalism and Slavery” it became a seminal text within Negritude and Black Marxism. As a scholar he was never was able to find a sense of intellectual belonging, not until, eventually landing back in Trinidad and Tobago and finding it at Woodford Square.
It was Dr.Eric Williams popular public lectures that launched his political career and inspired the renaming of this public square as ‘Woodford Square University for the Education of the Masses’.
To many he is seen as “The Father of the Nation” after having led the a once British colony to independence and following he carried out an unbroken string of electoral victories with his political party, of which his critics would use to accuse dictatorial consolidations of power. Despite his critics, he a heralded figure of the Caribbean, the subject of many calypso songs was known for his ‘pragmatic socialism’. Dr. Williams as our King of Wands is among the fiercest of political adversaries, he will speak, he will listen but he will not loose. This is because our King of Wands knows that his power does not come from office, rank, gift, or blood—it comes directly from the people, and the ability to be both their teacher as well as their student.
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“Slavery was not born of racism; racism was the consequence of slavery”
― Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery
“To earn tomorrow you have to learn today”
-Mighty Sparrow, from the Calypso song “Education is a Must”
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