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Busboy Nations. Against the romantic notion that West Indians can solve their present problems by rooting about in their past, Trinidad and Tobago's Eric Williams protests: "There can be no Mother Africa, no Mother England, no Mother China. The only mother we recognize is Mother Trinidad and Tobago." Even more vehemently, Barbados' Prime Minister Errol Barrow dismisses Black Power militants as a "collection of misfits and dropouts" who are "against anybody who is successful."
To some extent, of course, Barrow is right. But he overlooks the fact that the militants have a politically potent point —that relatively few of the Caribbean's blacks have managed to reap the benefits of nationhood or industrial development, and instead have seen their newly free countries being turned into what some refer to as "nations of busboys."
In a more elliptical manner, a Barbadian calypso singer named Lord Radio manages in a single stanza to deride both Whitey and the Black Power advocates as symbolized by Stokely Carmichael. After hearing one of Stokely's sulfurous speeches advocating immediate apocalypse, Lord Radio wrote in Black Power Situation:
Everybody telling Stokely to go,
Martin Luther King was my lie-ro.
I may be a bum,
But I am not dumb.
So you try your cocktail,
I'll drink my rum.