Resisting the inner plantation : decolonisation and the practice of education in the work of Eric Williams

Abstract

The motif of the plantation is central to Caribbean scholarship. Its full explanatory power, however, is rarely found in contemporary understandings of education in the region, where globalised agendas and local aspirations for change seem to be conflating around normative and universalised language and practices. The central concern in this article is to explore the possibilities and challenges of understanding education as a practice in light of a postcolonial experience, particularly through Eric Williams’ book Education in the British West Indies (1946). The ideas and work of Eric Williams have been instrumental in shaping and creating anti-colonial thinking in the Caribbean and internationally at a time when nationalism and anti-colonial struggles were rife and the aspiration for independence for many colonies, an urgent agenda. Williams’ work, through his life as a scholar, teacher and politician, exemplified a counterpoint to the colonial experience by crafting a different set of images for Caribbean peoples. His was a decolonising vision for the education of Caribbean people to write their own histories and chart their own destinies on their own terms. For Williams, education as political action through public participation was central to this process of decolonisation. This important text, I will argue, can be read as a source of educational theorising that asserts a decolonising stance, modelling ‘post-colonial pedagogy’ (McCarthy and Sealey-Ruiz, 2010 p. 75) and drawing references to historical themes that come together to represent the persistent and urgent struggle to resist ‘the inner plantation’ (Brathwaite, 1973).