Jerome Teelucksingh, Caribbean-Flavoured Presbyterianism: Education as a Prescription for Socio-Political Development, 1868-2008
(St. Augustine: UWI School of Continuing Studies, 2008), 244 pages.
In June of 1923 the recently arrived catechist for the area of Woodbrook and St. James, (on the outskirts of Port of Spain) John Neehall, father of the late well-known Rev. Dr. Roy Neehall penned a plaintive letter to the Secretary of the Canadian Mission Council in Trinidad. Writing from his home at 25 Pole Carew St in Woodbrook, Neehall recounted the good work which he had started among the population which came from barracks in Bombay St, Nipal St, Cawnpore St, Mooneram St, Benares St and many other streets whereto the Indians had brought their ancestral names and fragments of their ancient civilisation. Under Neehall’s leadership there had developed a vibrant Sunday school , active Hindi and Bible classes as well as Sunday and mid-week services. The nearby Woodbrook Canadian Mission School was close to overcrowding, having already taken in just over 300 pupils and a complement of teachers. In view of this progress, Neehall saw all the “signs of a bright future”. Despite this promise, however, Neehall went on to tell of the tremendous inconvenience which he and his family of ten had to face. This is how he described his catechist’s residence:
The house we live in is a small, low roofed house
covered with galvanize, dark and hot like an oven in the day.
When working out I often picture to find on return home, a
baked wife instead of a baked roti… We have no privacy.
No bathing place. The only way for my wife and grown-up
daughters to get a wash, they must get up at 3 or 4 o’clock
in the morning and get under the pipe. We will soon forget
how to bathe.
Demonstrating a good sense of humour despite these appalling conditions Neehall wrote of “having to rough it like steerage passengers on the deck of a miserable ship” and of experiencing what life was like in a “perfect narak” (hell). Another catechist in the Sangre Grande area told of his having to carry the Canadian missionaries on his back as they forded the streams of Cunaripo and Fishing Pond. Very few of these early pioneer Presbyterians lived to see any personal rewards in their lifetime but as the products of a high civilization, they had all been intellectually prepared to invest in the present so that future generations could prosper. And how well has that investment paid off!
This in a nutshell, is the story of which Jerome Teelucksingh has attempted to unravel. The book is 244 pages long and it covers wide panoply of the work of the Canadian Missionaries in Trinidad and their further movement from here to British Guiana, Grenada, Jamaica and St. Lucia. In this sense it is the first work to deal with the Presbyterian conversion and education campaign in the circum-Caribbean area. And there are rare pictures of the early churches in Essequibo and Berbice. Let us now look briefly at some of the themes which stand out in the text. Perhaps the most important has been the fact that the Canadian Missionaries provided a bridge between the West and the East, enabling a few hundred thousands to enter the dominant Western culture into which they had come from India. Enabling this process in a relatively short space of time, was the softer Imperialism of the Canadians. Unlike the British or the French imperials, the Canadians did not attempt to wipe out the transported cultures from Asia but sought rather to learn more about these cultures and armed with this knowledge, they sought to use Orientalism as the vehicle for the transference of Western, Christian civilisation which the missionaries genuinely believed to be superior to all other cultures. The missionaries therefore kept close contact with the Scottish Presbyterians in India from whom they received regular supplies of books and less regular supplies of Canadians who had worked in the India missions. The Canadians in Trinidad established their Hindi press at Aram Alya in Tunapuna where they produced Geet Mala (a garland of songs) and Ratna Mala (a garland of jewels). They learnt Hindi so that they could meet the Indians on their own terms and they encouraged the use of Hindi words to express Christian meanings. In this way the communion bread becomes Jewan ki Roti (the bread of life) and the Good News of Christianity became Su Samachar Presbyterian Church. The novelist V.S Naipaul makes great fun of the Presbyterian converts and this text is rich with those excerpts as well as the creative accounts of this process in the novels of Sam Selvon, Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo. In its outreach to the Indo-Caribbean society the Canadian missionaries went into then uncharted territory in far-off rural areas to which the Indians, as rural people themselves, had gone after the end of their indentureship. In this way they opened forest settlements in Biche, Coromandel, Siparia Old Road and Inner Mafeking. In these areas they opened up churches and schools enabling many thousands to rise from the plantations to the professions. For those young Presbyterians who wished to join the teaching service but could not afford the expense of a secondary education, the Canadians offered the Monitor system (first tried in India) whereby young people could ascend the scale through teachers’ exams and end up for final qualification at the Naparima Teachers’ Training College. In this way a large cadre of very competent teachers were produced by teaching whilst they learnt to be better teachers. Today we call that on-the-job-training. Dr. Teelucksingh spent time in interviewing many such educators in an excellent demonstration of the techniques of oral history!
This book gives constant evidence of the then and present on-going dialectic regarding the purpose of the Canadian mission and later, the Trinidad Presbyterian Church. On the one hand there was the Evangel school led by John Morton, the first missionary, who was of the firm view that the mission’s purpose was conversion to Christianity and the destruction of all vestiges of Hinduism and Islam. Equally powerful was the emphasis on education rather than conversion, led by Kenneth Grant, the second missionary, who came in 1870. Whilst Morton subsequently encouraged the recruitment of the preacher types, Grant emphasized the teacher types and there was always conflict between the two schools of thought. The Indians, as eager lookers-on, were staunchly in favour of Grant and his pedagogues, which explains the long tours of very eminent scholars such as Dr. Coffin, Dr. Kemp, Rev. Swann, Rev. Weldon Grant and Dr. Arthur Dayfoot. The predominance of the educational thrust was also evidenced in the founding of carefully constructed institutions like Naparima College, the Teachers’ Training College, Hillview College, St. Augustine Girls High School and Iere High School. Iere was the first co-educational high-school in Trinidad (1955) and its success under Weldon Grant provided the model for the establishment of co-educational schools in Trinidad and Tobago.
In similar fashion when the Hindu and Muslim faiths were belatedly allowed to build their own schools from 1948, the majority of the educators there were people who had been trained in the Presbyterian schools. Most of these persons took with them the discipline and the love for learning which their religions enjoin, traits shared in full measure by the Scottish Canadian educators who formed the vanguard of the missionaries’ educational thrust. At the same time, the book’s author points out there was the presence of the moral education advocated by Morton and his school of thought. This was the logic behind the formation of the Presbyterian Theological College in 1897, now St Andrews Theological College. Through the operation of this dialectic, moral education was made to accompany the academic so that a healthy value system, nurtured through religion, became the hallmark of the graduate of these institutions. As Dr. Teelucksingh clearly demonstrates, this combination of academic and moral education has been exemplified in the rich harvest of academic excellence from the Presbyterian institutions and from other denominational schools which mix moral education with reading, writing ad arithmetic.
But the book is not without its faults. The author is so full of praise for the Canadians and for Presbyterians, that like most Presbyterians, he pays insufficient attention to some other aspects of the Canadian presence. There is only a passing reference to Morton’s other work as agent for the Cadbury chain of chocolate producers. We need to know more about “Morton forest” in Balandra where the reverend gentleman had a large cocoa plantation. We need to know more about the manner in which the Grant family became heavily involved in acquiring lands with oil rights in South Trinidad or of the rise of firms like T. Geddes Grant as one of Trinidad’s major importers/exporters, insurance brokers and bankers. These were the missionary children who brought us Canadian pianos, Brunswick sardines, smoked herrings and salt-fish. For them God was good but trade was better. Was there any truth to Rev. Scrimgeour’s claim that some of the young Canadian men were setting a bad example in their ways with young East Indian women? We have also to consider the disappointment of hundreds of young Hindus or Muslims who despite their show of much academic promise had to revert to the cane-field because they refused to convert to Presbyterianism if they were to gain employment. Presbyterian history is littered with these examples and we must record these too if the story is to be complete. Jerome has done his bit, others must now take up the story. And these other studies should more fully document the work of the Hindu and Muslim organisations.
What then, can be said of this Caribbean-Flavoured Presbyterianism? Here is a good example of identity history, where a person tries to find his own and his community’s place in the development of this Caribbean space. One would have expected the author to prepare for publication his Ph.D thesis which traced the development of the trade union movement in Trinbago. That is a thorough piece of work. But this was more urgent; the Presbyterian personality had to be explored firstly and all other things would be added later. The book is also contemporary history, chronicling a Church’s past but equally, bringing the story right down to the present. There are educational statistics for as recently as 2005 and charts explain the Church’s structure as they currently exist.
Dr. Teelucksingh has garnered information from sages who are still with us: Foster Bissessar, Stephen and Birla Seepersad, Dorinda Sampath, Zalayhar Hassanali and Canadian pioneers such as Dr. Art Dayfoot and Rev. Geraldine Reid to name a few. Others like Ralph Laltoo and Roy Mootoo he caught just in time but their testimonies remain. In the case of those who are alive, it is good that, in the evening of their fruitful service, they be reminded of the crucial roles they played. We must learn to recognise achievers whilst they are still amongst us to respond to this type of scholarship. For those of us who teach and guide research, this book is a god-send on the Presbyterian experience, filled with information culled from a wide variety of sources here and abroad as well as an accurate and exhaustive bibliography. The photographs are a rare mixture of Canadian, Guyanese and Trinidad depictions, giving flesh to the detailed narration. The conclusions to which the author frequently arrives will no doubt give rise to further contention but it is in such contention- the dialectic once again- that new ideas are created for the continuing forward movement of society. The UWI School of Continuing Studies must be congratulated for the high-quality technical production of the work and for their persistence in bringing new work to the fore; it is high time that we learn to paddle our own canoes.
Professor Brinsley Samaroo,
Senior Research Fellow,
University of Trinidad and Tobago.
