Toward an understanding of the Gonsalves years (Pt 2)

Beginnings, proximity, and the making of a political figure

By Marlon Bute

If we are to have an honest national conversation about the Gonsalves years, it makes sense to begin at the point where I first encountered the man behind the mythology. 

My proximity to Ralph E. Gonsalves was not accidental. It unfolded at a moment in his political life when he was shaping his ascent and positioning himself as a central figure in the national landscape. I happened to be close enough to observe the early outlines of that transformation.

I was then a young university student struggling to continue my studies, moving from office to office in search of help. At the time, avenues within the education and public service system were limited, and assistance was not readily available. It was against that backdrop that I encountered Gonsalves, who was then deputy leader of the newly merged Labour Party and the Movement for National Unity. He was not yet the towering national presence he would later become, but he already understood the value of alliances, narrative construction, and loyalty building.

When I asked him for help in finding work, he did not respond merely as a politician dispensing charity. He picked up his phone and began calling people: Joel Providence, Ken Boyea, Egerton “Uncle Metro” Richards. His patience, his persistence, and his insistence on being seen as someone who could make things happen were defining traits long before he took the oath of office.

One of those calls led to a meeting with Ken Boyea at ECGC in Campden Park. He dismissed me quickly, saying he had no position for someone with my training. The remark baffled me. I had not yet completed my degree and was not seeking a career placement. I was simply looking for temporary work so that I could earn enough to return to university and finish my studies. 

I would have done any work available — sweeping floors, packing sacks of flour, whatever was needed. When I related the encounter to Gonsalves, he pressed again. Soon after, I found employment at Coreas through Joel Providence, my former teacher at the St. Vincent Grammar School. It was the first time I saw what would later become a consistent pattern: Gonsalves positioning himself not just as a politician, but as a gatekeeper, someone through whom access flowed.

While working at Coreas, I encountered Armando Nano of New Bank Ltd. I was in the tiles department when an elderly white-haired Italian entered with a local contractor named Sinson. Communication between them was strained. When I intervened and spoke to Nano in French, his response was immediate. He offered me employment at New Bank Ltd. After completing my university studies, I worked for him, not at the bank, but as Caribbean Editor of The Daily Herald, which he owned. That marked my entry into journalism.

When I later shared this with Gonsalves, his reaction revealed another dimension of his character, a fascination with power, wealth, and influence.

“Comrade, I did some work for that man. And if you see zeros.”

The excitement was unmistakable. The champion of the working class was equally drawn to proximity to elite wealth, a duality that would come to define much of his political life.

As I became more involved in the Youth Strategy Committee, the youth arm he helped shape, I saw another side of him. The committee was filled with capable, educated young adults, yet our meetings were routinely chaired either by Gonsalves himself or, in his absence, by Julian Francis. This was not incidental. It reflected an insistence on control that left little room for the development of internal leadership or autonomy.

My objection was not to Julian Francis personally, but to the principle that we, as young professionals, were not permitted to chair our own meetings. One Saturday, when Gonsalves was absent and Julian moved to chair the session, I said plainly that we should be allowed to run our own meetings. I did not frame it as confrontation, but as a matter of legitimacy and growth.

After that intervention, neither Julian Francis nor Ralph Gonsalves ever chaired our meetings again. Julian continued to work nearby, often within earshot. Gonsalves, however, never returned to chair or attend any of our meetings thereafter. 

In hindsight, his withdrawal without comment was telling. It reflected how carefully he was treading in those early years, when many within Old Labour neither trusted him nor believed he would ever lead the party. Yet even then, he was calibrating power, knowing when to step back and when to advance elsewhere. 

One such arena was his relationship with Armando Nano, the white-haired Italian offshore banker who owned New Bank Ltd .and The Daily Herald, among other enterprises, a relationship that would prove far more significant than it appeared at the time.

On the campaign trail in 1997, he sent me to speak on a platform in Sandy Bay. When I said that Montgomery Daniel would become minister of agriculture, he cut his eyes at me. It was not that I was wrong, Daniel eventually did become minister, but that I had crossed into the realm of declaration. Gonsalves has always understood the power of narrative timing and who gets to pronounce the future.

During an interview I conducted with him for my thesis on Nelcia Robinson, I fumbled with my recorder. He laughed and said, “Ah boy, technology in the hands of peasants.” To him it was a joke. To me, a young Black student steeped in Fanon and Césaire, it revealed how race, class, and intellect intersected in his worldview in ways rarely acknowledged publicly.

Then came the Chili Village house-to-house walkabout around 2000 or 2001. As a group, including Gonsalves, we entered a tenement yard to spread the party’s message. As we left, a full-bodied dark-skinned woman, maternal, protective, and commanding, stood in the pathway with her arms open, either to detain us or to challenge us.

In sharp disapproval, Gonsalves snapped, “Move your f**king hand before you lose it.”

Later that night, Martin Bollers recounted the encounter with pride, pumping his fist and saying, “That’s my leader.”

But the moment revealed something else: the ease with which intimidation emerged, the instinctive assertion of dominance, and the performance of power. I could not help but think of the woman as someone who could have been my mother or aunt, someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother, and how quickly her posture shrank, how immediately her presence receded.

And then came 1 April 2001, the swearing in ceremony at Victoria Park, renamed Independence Park. Gonsalves declared it a glorious accomplishment that a man of Portuguese descent had become prime minister in a Black country. No one had raised race as an obstacle. He inserted it himself, enlarging the moment to fit a heroic narrative. It was an early indication of how he wished to be seen, not simply as a political victor, but as a historic figure.

Within a year of the ULP’s victory, I found myself navigating a period of personal challenge. I did what was necessary to survive, translating, teaching French, freelancing, driving cargo, even working on Pirates of the Caribbean. Those details matter only insofar as they mark the widening distance between my own circumstances and the steady expansion of his influence.

On 11 April 2003, I left St. Vincent and the Grenadines for Canada, stepping away from the immediate shadow of the man whose rise I had witnessed up close.

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