The Ghost We Never Buried
Sixty-seven years after the late Ebenezer Joshua stood before the poor of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and told them that their vote mattered; we are still waiting for another leader who genuinely believed this.
Look at what followed independences.
Milton Cato inherited the keys to the house and for the most part, kept the furniture exactly where he found it. Closer ties to Trinidad, Closer ties to Barbados. The same regional elite handshake that colonial administrators had perfected over two centuries. Even the paperwork tells the story. The man who oversaw the transition from colonial governor to independent governor-general was the same man, sitting in the same position, before and after the flag went up.
We didn’t really decolonize. We rebranded.
And, in one form or another, every government since has worked within that same template. Independence gave Vincentians a national anthem, a flag and a seat at the United Nations. Those things mattered. But independence did not necessarily give the banana cutter in Mount Wynne or the fisherman in Barrouallie a government that saw them as anything more than a vote to be counted and managed every five years.
That is the uncomfortable part of our history. The machinery of colonial rule, a small class governing over poor people rather than governing alongside them never truly disappeared. The faces changed, The language changed, The flag changed, But the relationship between those who held power and those who were expected to live under it remained remarkably familiar.
Joshua was different.
His politics did not come out of a merchant class deciding to do the poor a favour. They came out of the labour movement itself. That distinction matters more than we sometimes admit. He didn’t have to be convinced that plantation workers and dockhands mattered. Those people were the foundation of his political life. Their struggles weren’t an issue he discovered once he entered politics. They were the reason he was there in the first place.
And then something telling happened.
When a “more conservative black middle class” began to find its footing, it turned against him. That wasn’t simply a political disagreement. It revealed something deeper, what happens when a political movement built from below begins to threaten people who have managed to move closer to the top.
The ruling class recognised the threat, and the course was corrected.
None of this means Ebenezer Joshua was a saint. He wasn’t. Cutting the sugar subsidy in 1962 and gutting the Mt. Bentinck factory hurt the very cane workers he claimed to represent. Those decisions had consequences, and history remembered them. In the end, he got a folk song for an epitaph rather than a monument.
But even his failures tell us something important. He failed while trying to govern for the poor.
That is very different from never trying to govern for them at all. And perhaps that is the distinction we have never properly confronted. For all the ceremony surrounding independence, St. Vincent did not suddenly inherit freedom. What it inherited was a new form of management. The flag changed, The anthem changed, The people in charge changed, But the distance between government and the poor remained.
And sixty-seven years later, perhaps that is the ghost we never buried. The poor are still waiting for someone to notice the difference.
