BETTER DAYS NOT COMING

IN his takedown of the authorities in Better Days Are Coming, Black Stalin agonised about the savagery of crime in Trinidad and Tobago. 

“My son shouldn’t have to fear no madman, 

Who would pick up a gun and cause destruction.” 

That was in 1983, when there were 97 murders in T&T. 

At Stalin’s death, 40 years later, the homicide rate is so abominable that the authorities are fudging the numbers in plain sight. 

His tongue-in-cheek song was one of many anti-establishment numbers over the course of a generation on the distressing condition of the small man. 

“Dey lying and dey lying and dey lying, 

Because we dying and we dying and we dying.” 

Stalin was calypso’s most relentless voice against oppression, influenced, as a southerner, by labour’s struggles in the oil belt and elsewhere and the general suffering of the masses, and by his convictions on ethnic unity. 

Early, he was impacted by the campaigns of Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler-led 1937 Fyzabad worker uprising, Gene Miles’ lone struggle against corruption, the bus strike of the 1960s, and Dr. Eric Williams’ anti-labour laws. 

Like George Weekes, he championed the energy sector – “the commanding height of the economy” – being owned and operated by locals. 

Instead, he died amid a four-year shutdown of the Pointe-a-Pierre installations, not far from his home, with thousands of industry and service workers jobless, and the sector in sharp decline. 

In Wait Dorothy, Wait, of 1985, Stalin reminded us of the continuing plight of the downtrodden. 

“Oil money come and oil money go 

And people remain in the pavement and ghetto.” 

In the stirring We Could Make It If We Try, he again advocated the cause of the working class.  

“When the treasury was full and happy times some was enjoying, 

Was in Morvant and Laventille poor people was living, 

Now the treasury black and the economy come back to square one, 

Poor people remain in the same ole’ ghetto in John John.” 

Stalin is being laid to rest with unemployment and poverty at 40-year highs, with an ever-climbing cost of living, rampant malnutrition, starvation and mental illness, according to official studies. 

Poor people’s pensions cannot match pharmaceutical costs or vegetable prices, the latter worsened by flood washouts.  

T&T now fits the World Bank depiction of “State capture,” with overwhelming influence and wealth in the hands of the “one per cent,” 

Stalin canvassed for decades for a more equitable share of the pie from national rulers, whom he branded as “Mr. Divider.”  

He was a working class crusader like Cipriani, Butler, Rienzi, Weekes and Panday, boosted by his lyrical genius and the rich musicality of Roy Cape, Errol Ince and others. 

Beginning with his tribute after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King (he mailed a copy of the record to widow Coretta Scott King), he was a soldier for racial unity and a fierce foe of Black exploitation in South Africa and elsewhere. 

His resolute 1995 tribute to chutney king Sundar Popo was rewarded with the calypso monarchy and the enduring appreciation of Indo-Trinis accustomed to being bashed by the art form. 

The Stalin-Popo dance and embrace at the Savannah calypso final remain a seminal moment in ethnic and cultural harmony. 

Black Stalin was the conscience of an emerging post-colonial region, singing inspirational songs of united purpose and achievement, of respect and determination. 

He was the ultimate patriot. 

“Our country facing its darkest hour  

And our people need us more than ever.” 

But, after 50 years of his soulful message, Stalin couldn’t be happy with the state of his beloved land.