Prof Samaroo’s muse

IN ONE OF the last books he published during his lifetime, Prof Brinsley Samaroo sought to shift the historical record when it came to this country’s first prime minister, Dr Eric Williams.

Dr Williams, according to Prof Samaroo, was an admirer of politicians who were more than just administrators. The leader had a fondness for, and was inspired by, philosophers who were also activists; politicians who stood for causes.

The final years of this country’s first premier, in which he retreated from public view as he worked on an ambitious manuscript, could thus be seen as reflective of Dr Williams’s desire to focus on ideas.

Whatever one’s views of the merits of Dr Williams’s last book, The Blackest Thing in Slavery Was Not the Black Man, which was ably edited by Prof Samaroo and finally published last year, Prof Samaroo added an important coda to the life story of a seminal figure in world history and, in the process, forever tied himself to that story.

In a career spanning decades, Prof Samaroo, who has died at the age of 84, was interested in figures who stood for something, publishing work on Dr Williams and Adrian "Cola" Rienzi last year alone. Perhaps this was because Samaroo was himself cut from the same cloth: straddling the worlds of the academy and politics.

After obtaining his MA in history from Delhi University and his PhD from the University of London, he joined the University of the West Indies, where he became head of the History Department and dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education.

However, in 1981 he became an opposition senator, as a member of the ULF, and went on to serve in the NAR administration as Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister, Minister of Food Production and, finally, Minister of Local Government and Decentralisation.

In the latter capacity he was put in charge of an effort to resolve a land dispute before the events of July 1990, events in which he is said to have played a key role, supplying what former government minister Winston Dookeran described as “a balanced and sober view.”

But Clio, the muse of history, called.

Prof Samaroo went on to burnish his status as being among the ranks of TT historians who, through their rigour, insight and tireless research, have illuminated key aspects of our complex multi-racial identity, joining figures such as Prof Bridget Brereton, Dr Rita Pemberton and the late Prof Selwyn Ryan.

If there is a common thread in Prof Samaroo’s multifaceted career, it was an ability to transcend politics and to give voice, loudly, to a vision of this country as a united one, untouched by race division, a dream which he held dear right to the very end.