It never fails: live outside your own country for any length of time and you begin forgetting certain things. And the most debilitating of these is the felt texture of life there, the sensibility and way-of-seeing of 'the man in the street' back home.

Wayne Brown

But, inexorably, it happens. That's why when, early last week, a Jamaican friend called with the galvanic news that the Afro-Trinidadian director of public prosecutions had had Mr Panday, leader of the mainly-Indian Opposition, and his wife, arrested on charges of corruption, and Mr Panday had declined bail and let himself be jailed, for the time being (four days later, he paid the bail and emerged), I had an alarmed vision of an impending racial explosion: one of those abrupt eruptions of violence to which 'fun-loving' Trinidadians have on occasion been prone.

My alarm derived in part from an assessment that, though not 'a bad man', Prime Minister Manning (who long ago started speaking, infuriatingly, in capital letters) was, alas, a pompous and complacent ass - someone quite capable of piously and unwittingly tripping that racially tense country into bloodshed and rioting.

And the other part was the assumption that, in such a matter as the arrest and incarceration of the leader of the opposition, the supposedly independent DPP wouldn't have acted without being prompted to it by Mr Manning and his PNM.

In both assumptions I was being 'mainstream': I doubt there's one in 10 Trinidadians, Indian and African alike, who doesn't share the above view of Mr Manning. (That doesn't mean, of course, that we're right. Or wrong.) And, as my Jamaican informant pointed out, my view of the DPP was a Trinidadian assumption, since most Jamaicans assume that the DPP here does in fact act independently of the political directorate.

Yet when I went online or picked up the phone to enquire of friends and family in Trinidad what the hell was going on, their responses took me aback.

My daughter, busy with filming a new television series, said she hadn't paid the whole thing much attention, but that it was hardly a topic of conversation 'in Port-of-Spain'; and that while the size of the UNC motorcade that had driven in support past the jail where Mr Panday was being held had surprised her, she'd heard it was made up of 'hard-core UNC supporters' and didn't think anything, really, was going to come of it.

PANDAY. described as a crafty politician who may yet create a focus point for the gelling of opposition forces

A journalist said in effect that Mr Manning was an ass; that the perception of political victimisation could only help the UNC; and that while he expected a certain amount of Indian indignation, he didn't think the country was 'getting ready to blow'.

A Lebanese lawyer replied: 'As for Panday, I think that the PNM swallowed an unintended mouthful that may cause indigestion. A groundswell is building, not for Panday, but against PNM incompetence, so long as he remains incarcerated.

He is a crafty politician who may yet create a focus point for the gelling of opposition forces. My own view is that he does not plan to lead such a movement, but such a movement needs to be created to save us from Patrick Manbling [sic!] and his delusions of grandeur.'

Finally, a dear friend, part-Indian, part-African, expressed a general disgust at the whole affair. The country was 'just disgusted', she said. Disgusted with Manning, disgusted with Panday, disgusted with 'alladem'. As she herself was. Trinidad was 'a mess'.

Now, the Jamaican reader should understand: none of my informants suggested Mr Panday wasn't guilty as charged. Yet most saw his arrest as one more sign of 'PNM incompetence'. That was their focus (and none were Indian). And none expected the racial explosion I'd feared.

Nor should I have. Just three years ago, in a column entitled 'Understanding Trinidadian Politics' (June 16, 2002), dealing with the arrests - on charges of corruption - of several UNC bigwigs, ex-government ministers and financiers, I'd remarked that such wide-scale and high-profiled arrests, 'had they occurred in Jamaica (I am repeatedly told), would have triggered a partisan bloodbath.' And I'd gone on to explain Trinidadians' 'restraint' in that situation as deriving in large part from my compatriots' 'promiscuous scorn of politics and politicians'.

'The notorious, the flagrant, the downright hilarious disrespect with which Trinidadians treat their high-and-mighty' - I wrote at the time - 'is an attitude so foreign to the Jamaican sensibility that, almost every single time I've written about Trinidad in this space, I have had to try to calm down my scandalised ex-Sunday Observer editor.' (And I suspect my current Sunday editor is likewise flinching now.)

That same column described Mr Panday as 'a man now greatly imperiled by a state probe - read, 'an investigation instigated by Mr Manning's PNM Government - into the extraordinary well-being of his, Mr Panday's, finances'.

And it went on to report: 'Two matters in particular have been engaging investigators. One is a luxury apartment in Kensington, London, where Mr Panday's two daughters have been living, and the ownership of which remains obscure, since it lies at the end of what appears to be an ever-lengthening paper trail.

The other is a £1-million British bank account jointly held by Mr Panday and his wife Oma, though administered only by the latter: money which (quite apart from the question of how it was amassed) Mr Panday was required under Trinidad's integrity legislation to declare, but didn't.'
So last week's matter has been going on for some time; and perhaps the end of that paper trail has been reached.

Yet my fear of a racial Armageddon was quite misplaced: most Trinidadians, it seems, both assume that Mr Panday is guilty and are disgusted with 'the PNM' for arresting him. As the Dark Lady said on the phone last week, 'Never underrated Mr Manning's ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.' And she laughed, without humour.
Clearly I've been away too long.not to have known that would be Trinidad's response!

The Second Foundation

In Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation Trilogy - set 20,000 years in the future - the Galactic Empire is collapsing. It's an unwieldy, slow fall, spanning several generations, and not many of the galaxy's X trillion human inhabitants realise it's happening. But Asimov's protagonist, the psycho-historian Hari Seldon, does.

Seldon concludes it's too late to stop the collapse. The best he and others of his profession can work for is to curtail the duration of the barbarous Dark Age which he sees erupting as the Empire weakens and across the galaxy an uproar of murder and superstition, churches and guns, becomes the order of the day.

To this end, Seldon and his helpers establish two quite different Foundations 'at opposite ends of the galaxy'. The First Foundation comprises physicists, chemists, biologists, etc. Their first job is to preserve the scientific knowledge of the galaxy, which would otherwise largely be lost.

And their second is, by working at the leading edge of the natural sciences, to become a fountainhead of technological know-how which, irresistibly encroaching on the bellicose darkness sprung up all around it, would in a comparatively short time develop into the kernel of a new civilisation.

The Second Foundation, by contrast, is a world of 'mentalists'. Their first duty is to preserve the muscle of Mind, so to speak - for, in the individual or the collective, Mind may be likened to a muscle, which atrophies with disuse, so that as a Dark Age progresses it ineluctably breeds stupidity, terror and violence.

And their second challenge is to so strengthen their mental powers that in time they will be able to influence events anywhere in the galaxy by concentration alone.

Seldon establishes the First Foundation in the glare of publicity; but he keeps the Second Foundation - not only its location but its very existence - hidden. In the minds of the galaxy's increasingly desperate inhabitants, it exists as a mere rumour: something this one tells that one somebody told him about.

The Foundation Trilogy relates the rise to eminence of the First Foundation; its defeat of the remnants of the moribund Empire; its own unexpected and shattering defeat by an adversary Seldon had not foreseen, a mutant warlord with psychic powers ('The Mule'); and the terrible ultimate battle between the Mule and the minds of the Second Foundation (forced in that last-ditch struggle to reveal their existence).

I cannot imagine a fable more relevant to our own time, both here in fundamentalist, homophobic Jamaica and in Mr Bush's scarily regressive America.

In fact, without recalling Asimov, I've often similarly exhorted participants in the Observer Creative Writing Workshops, saying in effect: 'In these islands, which have been losing language at an ever-increasing rate - and with that loss, the ability to think - you should never forget a writer's first duty, which is to be the custodian of the language. In that, you're carrying a torch. Don't expect it to illuminate too much of the darkness in your time.

But pass it on when you get old to the new crop of young writers - because there'll always be talented young writers - and they in turn will pass it on; and so on.

One day, when the time is right, it will start attracting more and more kindred spirits, more fellow-torch bearers; and this Dark Age won't last as long as it otherwise would.'

Re-reading The Foundation Trilogy last week, I thought of imprecating the minister of education to make it required reading for high school seniors across the land.
But that won't happen, of course; and even if it did, who'd take Asimov seriously? The darkness is here.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World