By *Jomo Thomas
The news of Renwick Kamara Rose’s passing did not shock me. Many of us whose minds and thinking he helped mould, shape, sharpen, and correct knew his presence in the earthly realm was in sharp decline. We kept a vigil of sorts with visits to the hospital, his home or with constant inquiries as to his state — yet the death unnerved me. Though expected, the reality of it all unwound my mind. I got up from my work desk, walked to the bathroom for no pressing biological reason, slammed the door shut, only to immediately walk back to my office. The calls and texts started coming.
Engels, upon learning of the death of Karl Marx, wrote, “What a mind that ceases to reason. What a heart that ceases to beat.” More than a few of us who held Kamara Rose in reverence endorse Engels words. Kamara Rose, as someone said in another context, was not only “profoundly simple. He was simply profound.”
The current generation doesn’t know Kamara Rose well. Their best glimpse of him may have come from his weekly column, “The Eye of the Needle”. He was this nation’s longest-serving journalist, with a media career spanning more than 50 years. Some of us may have soured on his writings as he aged, but for decades, he was one of the sharpest political minds our nation produced.
His career was long and varied. He reinvented himself multiple times in the service of our people and nation. He was a titan of our people’s struggles for emancipation from colonial domination and for independence, a teacher, a humble revolutionary, a developmental economist, a fighter for fair trade in banana production and sale, and a stalwart in civil society activism. He spoke with conviction and had the uncanny ability to explain the most complex ideas, policies and concepts in ways that the least educated among us could understand.
He was the editor of Freedom, the mouthpiece of the Youlou United Liberation Movement (YULIMO), and of Justice, the paper of the United People’s Movement, two organisations in the 1970s and 80s that shaped the consciousness of many progressives and revolutionaries of the era. There were weeks when every single word published in those papers came from his pen. It was under his watchful, caring eyes and direction that I found myself and charted my course. Kamara Rose was my star to steer by. It was for these reasons that I dedicated my master’s thesis to him with these heartfelt words: “To Kamara Rose for teaching me how to think and for offering me the opportunity to write.”
He was the embodiment of discipline and self-sacrifice. He, more than any other Vincentian I knew, displayed what those of us in the People’s Movement for Change called “Country before self”. He pioneered people-to-people relations with socialist Cuba. We formed the St Vincent Cuba Friendship Society in 1976, the year an American-sponsored terrorist, financed and trained by the criminal Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), blew up a Cuban airline just after take off in Barbados, resulting in the death of 73 passengers. He was a true friend of revolutionary Cuba.
Kamara Rose was the brain behind the initiative to provide free university education for young Vincentians. Through Cuban scholarships, a cadre of young Vincentians was trained in medicine, economics, agronomy, computer science, dentistry, journalism and engineering. In the current period, when university training is more readily available, many may miss the significance of his effort, but make no mistake: those were the heady days of backwardness, the Cold War, and anti-communism.
Some of the young students who went to Cuba to study had to be spirited out of the country under the pretext that they were going to Barbados and Grenada. On graduation, in the mid-80s, they, like many of their fellow graduates across the region, were denied employment on the grounds that they were indoctrinated in Cuban communism and would subvert these islands if they were brought into the public service.
Vincentian farmers and civil society generally owe a debt of gratitude to this humble giant. He was small in stature, but huge in intellect and influence. When Bill Clinton’s regime conspired with the giant American corporations Dole and Chiquita to dismantle and eventually destroy our banana industry, Kamara Rose became a central organiser and executive in the Windward Island Farmers Association (WINFA) and did yeoman work to carve out a niche for our farmers demanding fair trade. These efforts ensure that banana farmers across the Windward Islands make a living long after the removal of the preferential treatment for our bananas in the United Kingdom.
In a country mired in partisan politics, some may criticise, assault and attempt to diminish Kamara Rose’s contribution to SVG. But, as ole people say, “Who nah kno, nah kno.” Those who criticise him may fault him for not speaking out about the numerous excesses of Ralph Gonsalves and his administration. But we all have our blind spots.
I remember going to his home and beseeching him to speak out against the sellout at Canouan. He never did, but I knew that so many of us are caught in the growth-and-development trap. Too many of us improperly believe that we have no way out. In one of his columns, he implores “progressives” to avoid criticism of the new Gonsalves government so as not to “give succour to the enemy”. In political terms, that might have meant the then-opposition NDP.
It is blind spots like these that prevented many so-called progressives from seeing the deep rut that had set into what we all called ULP’s progressive agenda. Towards the end, though, he brought himself to comment, however tepidly, on Gonsalves’ failure to seriously engage leadership transition in the ULP, as well as his vainglorious “World Boss” boast.
The Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh said, “Death is not real when one has done his life’s work well.” The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “We die twice, first, when our hearts stop beating and then when there is no one left to say our name.’”Say his name: Renwick Kamara Rose, a tireless working-class warrior. May we long remember and honour him.
*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
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