“The launch of African Studies at the St. Augustine Campus occurred against the backdrop of widespread protests against the Jamaican government’s ban on Walter Rodney after just one year at the Mona Campus as the UWI’s first lecturer in African Studies. Unlike Rodney, Fitz was destined to spend his entire life at the UWI. As the UWI’s First Vice-Chancellor and Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Eric Williams conceptualised an African and Asian Studies Unit or Institute at the St. Augustine Campus. In 1968 he personally invited Fitz Baptiste to Trinidad to set up the African component of this Unit, which was then located within the Department of Sociology and Politics. Thus Baptiste began his teaching career as Assistant Lecturer in African Studies, lecturing in anthropology and culture history. Williams himself was a seminal scholar who understood the value of history to the decolonisation process. But the late 1960s were turbulent times and Williams would have second thoughts about the Unit he spawned, causing him to withdraw his support even before it became fully established. Detractors did not only challenge the validity of African history as a discipline but were equally concerned over its potential as a medium of radical politics. As Baptiste recounted, he and Rodney “pioneered a tradition of outreach into the community … in the field of African History and African Studies.” Yet, there was a marked ideological difference between them. Whereas Rodney was a political activist-cum-scholar and a major player in the Black Power movement, Fitz Baptiste became a scholar-activist, consciously taking the “middle ground” in national politics. Notwithstanding, revisionist African history was too revolutionary and inviting to remain outside the pail of political intrigues of the Black Power generation, since many of Baptiste’s students were leaders of the local arm of the movement and the ensuing Black Power Uprising of 1970. Fitz recalled his uneasiness in “the crazy political atmosphere of Trinidad and Tobago in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.” Not long after his arrival in the coun- try, he became the target of government intelligence agencies. Two of his “best friends”, Patrick Emmanuel and William “Bill” Riviere were picked up in the government’s Counter-revolutionary State of Emergency and imprisoned on Nelson Island; many of his students and associates were also imprisoned, including Geddes Granger and Kaffra Kambon, key personalities in the Black Power Uprising. A military officer allegedly involved in the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment’s mutiny—which paralleled the Black Power Uprising—was also a member of his African Studies class.”
Claudius Fergus - IN MEMORIAM. DR. FITZROY ANDRÉ BAPTISTE [Caribbean Studies Vol. 35, No. 2 (July - December 2007), 176-179]
