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‘Community leaders’: Good bad men die young

In Never Dirty, Morvant, one night last week, anxieties over venturing into bloodstained, Laventillean badlands were stirred by the old friend I was giving a ride home.

Joseph Roach had suggested that I drop him off on the Lady Young Road walkover. I declined the gallantry of the 72-year-old former taxi-driver and seafarer, whose damaged spine now aches with every move.

Navigating from the passenger’s seat up and down slopes and around bends of the road, he counselled firmly me to keep the windows up and not drive too slowly on the way back.

Surely, I had visited the area more recently, but the trip that flashed back, and about which my archives preserve a yellow clipping, had been in July, 1970.

An Express reporter, I covered the Mon Repos Co-operative Youth Movement, whose members had “spent the last two weekends sweeping, scraping, shovelling and barrowing away much of the uncleared garbage and overgrown grass verges of Laventille Extension Road.”

The Wahid Baksh photos showed mostly black, but some Indian, young men wielding cutlasses, hoes, shovels, brooms, and pushing wheelbarrows.

My report said most in the group were unemployed, but the executive committee, average age 21, comprised a civil servant, an educational research officer, a male nurse, a tailor, a soldier, and an A-level student.

A 22-year-old “fluent insurance underwriter” was president.

The young activists wanted to “impress the older heads and the parliamentary representative.”

Long-standing complaints—no pipe water, no phone booths, unlit streets with uncleared garbage—had remained unaddressed.

The young people, however, were fired up with self-help enthusiasm to start classes, a provision stall, a poultry farm, build table tennis boards, and clean up the place.

The reporter, too, was young, impressionable, and receptive to 1970 doctrines heralding the revolutionary rise of can-do community leadership.

If I followed up the story, I kept no further clippings. After its day of centre-spread newspaper fame, the Mon Repos Co-operative Youth Movement, with its idealism and its energy, belongs in a little-remembered past of how some young lives once were lived.

Today, a new and contentious idea of “community leadership,” associated with black youths in the various Laventilles, is back in focus.

Narratives compete for recognition as the authorised version of community leadership. The Manning government, blithely unclued, as always, about unintended consequences, has conferred notoriety on one narrative.

“This government is prepared to use all measures within the law to reduce crime,” says National Security Minister Martin Joseph, “including meeting persons with significant influence in their communities.”

It’s why Mr Manning famously met at Crowne Plaza with men he accorded the status of “community leader,” as if it were a national award for meritorious service in the sphere of crime.

Mr Joseph summarised the rationale for deputising champions of crime to deter crime inside their home-base communities.

Gangleaders expected by the government to exert their “significant influence” have since themselves been killed; murders officially identified as “gang-related” unstoppably increase.

Following the murder, last month, of Mervyn Kojo Allamby, “community leader” was claimed by a rival narrative, newly ascendant.

In this version, expansive analysis supersedes any coming to judgment. An Express editorial explored how and why Kojo had come to be regarded as a “saviour, very popular activist, benefactor and provider,” who had received “the kind of send-off befitting a messiah.”

A full-dress version of the narrative was headlined Robin and the Hood in the T&T Review, where the authority derived from the references of the writer, Jamal Shabazz.

“Football coach” and “community activist” are the two references supplied by the Review. Not Mr Shabazz’ history-making as one of the 1990 Muslimeen coup-makers.

In the Shabazz of “analysis of life on the street,” Kojo and other murdered leaders had filled vacancies for leadership left by uncaring PNM MPs. Hence the loud grief at their passing.

Those leaders, Mr Shabazz argued, had supplied needs not only for leadership, but also for basic every-day goods and services:

“They dispensed justice and favours according to rules and requirements as they defined them.”

Such absolutist leaders ruling their own welfare mini-states within the state of T&T are worthy, he suggests, only of admiration and even reverence.

These are “men of real tragedy,” and not the “so-called criminal elements” as they are denounced by people “looking in from the outside,” from that other Trinidad.

Mr Shabazz thus achieves a heroic narrative, in which community leader figures act on the basis of a self-serving, situational reading of right and wrong.

This both-sided aspect of the ascendant narrative was insightfully captured by Guardian columnist Attillah Springer. Ruminating on the mourning flambeaux for Kojo on San Juan streets, she pictured “a good bad man who did terrible things to some people and saved others.”

Dying young at 41, Kojo hardly qualifies as a role model for a sustainable, community-leading lifestyle nor, in the PNM model, as a dependable, crime-stopping agent.

Like the other community leaders, and more and more of their followers, his life turned out to be nasty, brutish and short, but, in the Shabazz narrative, still worthy of celebration.

“To them I say, we miss you,” he wrote in the final whimper of his T&T Review eulogy.