The early years of CARIFESTA were captured from the Newspaper clippings collection sourced from The National Library of Guyana. The CARIFESTA collection currently covers information emanating from all the CARIFESTAs held to date. The Collection is supplemented by contributions from the Directorate of Human and Social Development through its Culture desk which liaises with the various Directors of Culture in the region and with the Secretariats of the Host Country.
The Collection includes consultants’ and country reports, articles extracted from magazines, correspondence, press releases, information leaflets, presentations at Symposia, programmes, various CARIFESTA themes; posters, photographs and newspaper clippings.
]]>These goals serve as a guideline for developing appropriate programme interventions and resource allocations, both at the regional and national level. Goals and targets should be reviewed from time to time to ensure they adequately and effectively respond to the needs and challenges of target populations. Importantly, while achieving the goals and targets of the CYAP, CYAs can help young people achieve their goals through matching the programmes implemented and the policies with their needs.
Sir John Compton’s political evolution from Chief Minister, Premier and Prime Minister of Saint Lucia symbolises the interconnectedness of the comity of Caribbean nations and the benefits of free inter territorial movement.
Like so many of his political cohorts, Sir John’s political career built on a solid base in the legal profession having studied law and being called to the Bar in England. His entry into politics formally was as a member of the Saint Lucia Labour Party.
In 1954, he became a member of the Legislative Council and an avid and vocal champion of the cause of the impoverished working class, particularly sugar plantation labour. His political reputation emerged as an anti-colonialist.
Disillusioned over the outcome of efforts to secure the promise of a better life for workers under the Labour Party, Sir John Compton disconnected and formed a new political alliance, the United Workers’ Party under whose banner he campaigned and won the 1964 elections to become Saint Lucia’s Chief Minister.
From this point, he progressed to the position of Premier and finally Prime Minister. He was perceived as the liberator of his nation, propelling it into modernity with major reconstruction of its social and economic base.
Modernisation of Saint Lucia’s utilities, reform of the social sector and a radical programme for rural development, were the hallmarks of his political career.
Sir John’s deep and unswerving commitment to regional unity was a constant of his tenure on the Region’s political stage. He was a pillar of the regional integration movement and participated in many of the institutions that gave birth to and shaped the current form of the Caribbean Community.
His enthusiasm for a system of regional unity was evident by his support for and involvement in the West Indies Federation and the creation of the Caribbean Free Trade Areas (CARIFTA).
Sir John’s legacy to the Region’s development is marked by the role he played in the establishment of key Caribbean institutions, including CARICOM, the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), the West Indies Association States Council of Ministers (WISA), the Eastern Caribbean Common Market (ECCM), and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS).
The citation for his OCC Award says of him “To his regional colleagues and senior technocrats, he had become the quintessential Caribbean man; ready to dependably support any feasible initiative towards deepening or widening the Caribbean integration movement.”
]]>Sir Arthur, educated at the University of London, won the Nobel Prize with Theodore Schultz. He joined Princeton’s faculty in 1963 and retired 20 yean later. At Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in economic development and modern economic history. In 1963, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
Sir Arthur Lewis: In His Own Words
I was born in St. Lucia on January 23, 1915. My parents, who were both school teachers, had immigrated there from Antigua about a dozen years before. The islands were dissimilar in religion and culture, so our family had some slight characteristics of immigrant minorities.
My progress through the public schools was accelerated. When I was seven I had to stay home for several weeks because of some ailment, whereupon my father elected to teach me so that I should not fall behind. In fact, he taught me in three months as much as the school taught in two years, so, on returning to school, I was shifted from grade 4 to grade 6. So, the rest of my school life and early working life, up to age 18, was spent with fellow students or workers two or three years older than I. This gave me a terrible sense of physical inferiority, as well as an understanding, which has remained with me ever since, that high marks are not everything.
My father died when I was seven, leaving a widow and five sons, ranging in age from five to seventeen. My mother was the most highly-disciplined and hardest working person I have ever known, and this, combined with her love and gentleness, enabled her to make a success of each of her children.
I left school at 14, having completed the curriculum, and went to work as a clerk in the civil service. My next step would be to sit the examination for a St. Lucia government scholarship to a British university, but I would be too young for this until 1932. This job was not wasted on me since it taught me to write, to type, to file and to be orderly. But this was at the expense of not reading enough history and literature, for which these years of one’s life are the most appropriate.
In 1932 I sat the examination and won the scholarship. At this point I did not know what to do with my life. The British government imposed a colour bar in its colonies, so young blacks went in only for law or medicine where they could make a living without government support. I did not want to be a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted to be an engineer, but this seemed pointless since neither the government nor the white firms would employ a black engineer. Eventually I decided to study business administration, planning to return to St. Lucia for a job in the municipal service or in private trade. I would simultaneously study law to fall back on if nothing administrative turned up. So I went to the London School of Economics to do the Bachelor of Commerce degree which offered accounting, business management, commercial law and a little economics and statistics. This training has been very helpful in the various administrative jobs I have had to do, its weakness from the standpoint of my subsequent career (which was then inconceivable) was that it lacked mathematics.
I had no idea in 1933 what economics was but I did well in the subject from the start, and when I graduated in 1937 with first class honours, LSE gave me a scholarship to do a Ph.D. in Industrial Economics.
In 1938, I was given a one-year teaching appointment which was sensational for British universities. This was converted into the usual four-year contract for an Assistant Lecturer in 1939. My foot was now on the ladder, and the rest was up to me. My luck held, and I rose rapidly. In 1948, at 33, I was made a full professor at the University of Manchester.
Until I went to Manchester, my field of study was industrial economics, and I published a series of articles on the subject culminating in a book in 1949. The leading practitioner of this art at LSE was Professor Sir Arnold Plant, and though he was a laissez-faire liberal and I a social democrat, I am indebted to him both for his incisive no-nonsense criticism and also for supporting me at crucial moments in the Appointments Committee.
My research work has been in three areas: in industrial economics, which I dropped after 1948; in the history of the world economy since 1870, which I started in 1944 and still pursue; and in development economics, which I did not begin systematically until about 1950.
I got into the history of the world economy because Frederick Hayek, then Acting Chairman of the LSE Department of Economics suggested that I teach a course on “what happened between the wars” to give concreteness to the massive doses of trade cycle theory which then dominated the curriculum. I replied to Hayek that I did not know what happened between the wars; to which he replied that the best way of learning a subject was to teach it.
So I lectured on this subject for some years, and published a book on it in 1949. Among the questions that the book did not answer was whether the great depression of 1929 was sui generis, or one of a cycle stretching back into the nineteenth century. This I was determined to find out. However, data for the years before 1914 were sparse and unreliable, and I could not proceed faster than additions to the data and revisions would permit. I spent a lot of time with the data, and, between 1952 and 1957, published a stream of articles on world production, prices and trade from 1870 to 1914. However, I could never get the book done. In 1957, just as I was ready to start, I went off into administration for six years, never touching the subject. I returned to it in 1963, in my new professorship at Princeton University, to find that the four or five researchers of 1952 had now multiplied into a crowd of writers on this subject. I returned to improvement of the data and was just about ready to write my book when I went off to Barbados for four years setting up the Caribbean Development Bank. Returning to Princeton in 1974, I finally published in 1978 my account of growth and fluctuations in the world economy between 1870 and 1914. My Nobel Lecture derives from this sector of my intellectual interests.
Now for development economics. From the middle of the 1930s, I had spent time in the Colonial Office Library reading reports from the colonial territories on agricultural problems, mining, currency questions and the like, and by comparing different territories, had learnt something about the efficacy of different policies. I did some lecturing on this to colonial students at LSE in the 40s, but it was the throng of Asian and African students at Manchester that set me lecturing systematically on development economics from about 1950, following Hayek’s rule that the way to learn is to teach.
Half my interest was in policy questions, and here, my knowledge broadened in the 50s and 60s as a result of numerous visits to, and work stints in, African and Asian countries. This half led to my book on development planning published in 1966.
The other half of my interest was in the fundamental forces determining the rate of economic growth. This was the subject of my so-called classic book of 1955, and also the origin of the model to which the Nobel citation refers.
From my undergraduate days, I had sought a solution to the question of what determines the relative prices of steel and coffee. The approach through marginal utility made no sense to me. And the Heckscher-Ohlin framework could not be used, since that assumes that trading partners have the same production functions, whereas coffee cannot be grown in most of the steel producing countries.
Another problem that troubled me was historical. Apparently, during the first fifty years of the industrial revolution, real wages in Britain remained more or less constant while profits and savings soared. This could not be squared with the neoclassical framework, in which a rise in investment should raise wages and depress the rate of return on capital.
One day in August, 1952, walking down the road in Bangkok, it came to me suddenly that both problems have the same solution. Throw away the neoclassical assumption that the quantity of labour is fixed. An “unlimited supply of labour” will keep wages down, producing cheap coffee in the first case and high profits in the second case. The result is a dual (national or world) economy, where one part is a reservoir of cheap labour for the other. The unlimited supply of labour derives ultimately from population pressure, so it is a phase in the demographic cycle.
The publication of my article on this subject in 1954 was greeted equally with applause and with cries of outrage. In the succeeding 25 years, other scholars have written five books and numerous articles arguing the merits of the thesis, assessing contradictory data, or applying it to solving other problems. The debate continues.
Since 1957, I have spent nearly as many years in administration as in academic scholarship. First, a group of six years, 1957-1963, in which I was in turn UN Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister of Ghana, Deputy Managing Director of the UN Special Fund, and Vice-Chancellor (= President) of the University of the West Indies. Then, from 1970 to 1974, I set up the Caribbean Development Bank. These experiences broadened my understanding of development problems, without doing much to deepen it in the scholarly sense.
My wife Gladys was born in Grenada. Her father, who was an Antiguan, and my parents had known each other all their lives. She went to England in 1937 and trained as a teacher. We married in 1947 and have two daughters, Elizabeth and Barbara. My travels have meant much separation, but mutual love has supported the family in all its endeavours.
]]>A literary laureate of high acclaim, Dr. Walcott received the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 generating much pride among his fellow Caribbean citizens.
His contribution to the cultural development of Caribbean society, and the creation of a unique Caribbean identity, emerged from his involvement in the theatre and literary movements. He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and created a unique reputation as a distinguished internationally acclaimed Caribbean poet and playwright. His literary works are well known and read internationally.
He was conferred several awards for Poetry and Literature, including the Guinness Award for Poetry, the Royal Society of Literature Award and Britain’s W. H. Smith Literary Prize.
His plays have been performed on many an international stage attracting rave reviews.
Dr. Walcott was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Boston and continues to be a model of excellence and inspiration for the Caribbean’s literary and theatrical world.
]]>Date of Membership in CARICOM: 1 May 1974 – Learn more about membership in CARICOM
Also Known as:Helen of the West
Status of Independence:Independent 1979/02/22
Area: 616 sq km; 238Mi
Capital City: Castries
Population: 172,034 (2009)
Currency: Eastern Caribbean Dollar (EC$)
Highest National Award: Grand Cross of St. Lucia
GDP Growth: -0.2% p.a. 2009–13
GNI: US$1.3bn
GNI PC: US$7,090
1520 Vatican Globe marks island as ‘ Santa Lucia’ suggesting claim by Spain. Amerindians first called
Island ‘louanalao’ (where iguana is found) then ‘Hiwanarau’ and later ‘Hewanoora’
1639 First recorded European settlement (by Britain)
1642 Ceded to French West Indies company by King of France who claimed sovereignty
1814 Island changed hands fourteen times between Britain and France, finally becoming a British
Colony
1838 Incorporated into Windward Islands Federation
1951 Universal Adult Suffrage, George F.L. Charles, first Chief Minister
1958 Joined the West Indies Federation
1967 Associated Statehood with Britain (full internal self-government) within WISA
1979 Independence achieved, John Compton, first Prime Minister