At an event held in honour of Malcolm X in 1982, Audre Lorde delivered an address titled Learning from the 60s, during which she proclaimed, Revolution is not a one-time event. By this, Lorde meant that revolution belongs to everyone and no one simultaneously; if it is to proceed, it must cease to be the sole and particular province of anyone particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class. Revolutions reoccur: they follow each other, making circles of time and all the political demands that push them forward.Lordes statement makes clear the purview of the black feminist tradition; nothing must be allowed to remain. We must be prepared for the multi-purpose, multi-layered revolution, in which political ideologies and mantras will, and must, collide.

The word abolition, most commonly understood to describe efforts that sought a legal end to chattel slavery, has a complex history. Many white advocates who deployed the term in the height of the abolitionist movements of the 18th and 19th century were not actually interested in the material emancipation of black life. Aphra Behns 1688 novel Oroonoko, for example, intended to awaken the English middle-class to the horrors of slavery, while employing a number of deeply racist and dehumanising tropes to do so.

But abolition as we know it now, developed through the black feminist tradition, owes everything to imaginative potential. It is a belief in emancipatory forms of social organisation and an end to all forms of violence, expropriation and exploitation. As prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, abolition is about presence, not absence; prison abolition, as one example, is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems. Prison abolitionists argue that carceral systems like prison, policing and detention are dangerous and wholly inadequate responses to crime that merely perpetuate the harm they claim to end. They are critical of ways of thinking that root wrongdoing in the individual, arguing instead that the social causes of crime require social solutions, beginning with an improvement of the conditions of life for all - free education, housing provision, healthcare and investing in community self-governance. Abolitionists believe that racist systems of police and prison do not keep us safe and that they should not simply be reformed in an attempt to improve them, but abolished altogether.

The desire to abolish police and prisons can be traced in grassroots black feminist traditions across the world. In the 1970s and 80s in the UK, organisations such as the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and the Brixton Black Womens Group, home to coalitions between black women and women of colour, campaigned against flagrant police violence and abuses of stop and search powers. Nicknamed SUS laws, these clauses enabled police officers to justify arrest solely on the basis of suspected intent to commit a crime. It is near impossible to ignore the legacy of such a law in the disproportionate searching, brutality and imprisonment of black people in the UK. In Heart of the Race, Black Womens Lives in Britain, authors Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe write: Even when our children were at school, we could expect the police to be called into the playground to break up fights it was as a result of these experiences of racist police force that black women began to organise against specific incidents of abuse and against legislation.

Kinship and community is how we keep each other safe when the state and racist institutions fail us

The actions of these feminist groups were prototypes for networks of mutual aid, like those that have emerged since the onset of the pandemic; they modelled what community power that sought to render the police irrelevant could look like. These women knew, as Stuart Hall writes, that race is the modality through which class is lived and their experiences as members of the working class were constituted and compounded by the systemic racism that locked them out of state protection and limited their access to resources.

The killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police propelled abolition into the mainstream. Those of us who remember the eruption of protests, demonstrations, and organising around Black Lives Matter that took place in the UK in 2015, and who know the names of Joy Gardener, Cynthia Jarrett, Rashan Charles, Christopher Alder and so many more victims of racist police violence, feel the need to challenge the reductive view that this is only a US problem. SoRevolution is not a one-time event, a programme convened by Che Gossett, Sarah Shin and myself in collaboration with Arika and hosted by Silver Press, will attempt to understand and amplify abolitionist demands in this moment by bringing artists, organisers and academics together, and provide a space for reflection and political animus.

Our event The Masters Tools Can Never Dismantle the Masters House: Abolitionist Feminist Futures, to be chaired by academic and organiser Akwugo Emejulu and featuring academic Gail Lewis, critic Hortense Spillers, writer Zoe Samudzi and trans activist Miss Major, will explore abolitionist futures. In her work analysing black womens presence and absence in public discourse, Lewis calls to Sarah Reed, a black woman with complex mental health issues who died in Holloway Prison in 2015 after being failed by mental health professionals and prison staff. But if she is present, how is she here? / Only as: brutalised black woman... / Only as: a mentally unwell black woman? Understanding Lordes idea that the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house means recognising that the system that locked Reed away will never set others like her free. This is the first step in dismantling ideas that a broken system can be fixed via law, police and prison reform.

The intimate realm is an extension of the social world so to create other networks of love and affiliation is to be involved in the work of challenging and remaking the terms of sociality writes Saidiya Hartman, a participant of the second panel, Poetry is not a Luxury: The Poetics of Abolition. In 1985, Lorde wrote, Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom. If poetics is the study of the creation, production and art of making meaning, then we must understand its role in revolution. Hartmans work directs the readers eye to the anarchic posture of black life and community, to the power of revolution lived at the register of the everyday. Her fellow panelist Christina Sharpe continues this tradition in her book In The Wake, in which she refuses to treat images as static archival memorabilia. She analyses black persistence and survival in the face of the processes that render black people outside subjects.

What does abolition mean in the age of the internet? Using coding, hacking and other means of online sabotage to make it harder for the police to target vulnerable people. Glitch is a necessary erratum, a site of positive departure, writes Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism and chair of the panel System Errors: Abolitionist Technologies and Aesthetics. Through cyberfeminism, we can make ourselves unknowable in order to outsmart the logics of surveillance capital. Currently, law enforcement is using all manner of digital practice including photography and Instagram posts to track down and charge protesters. Technology must be harnessed to both liberate and obscure blackness; to strip the digital image of its power. British artist and panellist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley does this in their work, building a video game-like space online that visitors must navigate to evade the threats that black trans people face everyday. This panel will explore how the current matrix of violent governance takes place through physical and digital forms of dispossession and must be fought on both grounds.

The last panel in this programme, Happy Birthday, Marsha! held on the birthday of black trans campaigner Marsha P Johnson centres on care. Abolitionist modes of thinking encourage us to discover new forms of intimacy, speculation and kinship by encouraging community building with those outside our immediate family. That is how we keep each other safe when the state and racist institutions fail us. Despite its complexity, at its most basic, abolition is about enacting the future we want now and refusing to let anyone tell us it is impossible.

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'We can enact the future we want now': a black feminist history of abolition - The Guardian

On August 1, Anglophone Caribbean nations commemorateEmancipation Day, marking the 1834 abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the 1838 abolition ofapprenticeship, a system which forced formerly enslaved people to continue to work uncompensated for their former masters. Emancipation wasnot a gift. The Slavery Abolition Act, which banned slavery in the British colonies, followed a shift in the British Empires economic interests and sustained resistance by enslaved people through massive slave revolts, likeBussas Rebellionin Barbados, andguerilla warfare, as in the case ofJamaicas Maroons.

While resistance helped pave the way for emancipation in the 1800s, the Caribbean was not free from British colonial rulefor another century. For centuries, Caribbean people fought for liberation from slavery and colonization. Today, amid new calls for the UK to tackle systemic racism and reckon with the crimes of the British Empire, Caribbean people are still fighting for justice and repair.

On July 6, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commissionreignited calls for reparationsfor slavery and colonization, emphasizing the impact of the legacy of British colonialism on life and legislation in the Caribbean today. The Commission, established in 2013 to prepare the legal and ethical case for reparations payments for CARICOM member states, lays out a 10 point plan for European former colonial powers to provide reparatory justice for slavery and colonization. The first step in the Commissions plan is a formal apology for slavery. To date, the UK has expressed deep regret for its role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but has never formally apologized. A full apology is an important step, not only for atonement, but also because it is an opportunity to acknowledge and examine the contemporary effects of the British Empires abusive practices in the Caribbean.

British slave traders kidnapped an estimated3.1 million peoplealong the west coast of Africa,trafficked them across the Atlantic Ocean, and subjected them toforced labor and tortureon the colonialplantationsthatenriched the British crown. British colonial legislation codified racial difference between the white planter class and enslaved Africans, and regulated slaves behavior through harsh slave codes. Slaves were denied access to land, education, or any means of social and economic advancement. CARICOM Reparations Committee chair Professor Hilary Beckles has noted how severe neglect by British colonial authorities of the human development of Black populations in the Caribbean led to rampant illiteracy and serious health issues across the region, which continued after emancipation.

Black populations in the Caribbean were also denied political and economic autonomy. Under British colonial law (as in the United Kingdom until the early twentieth century), the right to vote was predicated on a mans wealth and land ownership. In the Caribbean this effectively excluded the poorer, landless Black majority from voting for more than a century after emancipation. Without the right to vote in elections, Black populations were subjected to the legislative whims of the white upper classes and denied representation in government without the ability to hold political authorities accountable. Universal Adult Suffrage in the Caribbean was not achieved until 1944, first in Jamaica, and then spreading to other Caribbean islands between then and 1962.

Colonial legislation safeguarding the wealth of the white British planter class, through the control and violent exploitation of Black African labor, cemented the deep racial and economic inequality that persists across the Caribbean today. In Barbados, for example, formerly enslaved people and their descendants were excluded from purchasing land under the colonial Contract Law. The effects of the law continued after independence and by 1970, an estimated 77% of land in Barbados rested in the hands of the wealthiest 10% of the countrys landowners.

Some British firms that were enriched by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade have apologized, and some, like insurance company Lloyds of London, have agreed to make financial contributions to organizations supporting Black and ethnic minority communities. The British government, however, has previously dismissed and derailed calls for reparations for slavery and colonization. In 2001, the British delegation to the Durban Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance blocked an outright apology for slavery by the European Union, despite support for the apology from some other European delegates.

During a 2015 visit to Jamaica, former UK Prime Minister David Cameron rebuffedcalls by the Jamaica National Commission on Reparationsfor the UK to pay Jamaica reparations, stating the country should move on. Instead of reparations, Cameron announced that the UK would spend25million pounds to build Jamaica a new prison. Camerons offer was particularly pernicious considering the history ofunlawful detentionandexcessive use of force by the Jamaica Constabulary Force, which isheavily influencedby colonial lawsdesigned to enforcea racist and exploitative colonial social order.

The British empires brutal trafficking and abuse of enslaved Africans throughout the Caribbean, and the continued exploitation of their descendants during colonialism, helped form thebasis for the mercantile wealth that built modern British society. Despite this, Caribbean people have been routinely denied remedy for past injustices, and continue to feel the effects of colonization as well assuffer abuses at the hands of the British government in the United Kingdom today.

As we commemorate the end of slavery in the Caribbean, we must not forget that the region is still in need of justice and repair. If we are truly to move on, the British government should acknowledge the extent of abuses committed during slavery and colonization and begin the conversation on the contemporary ramifications of past harms by the British Empire.

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Emancipation Day A Reminder That Caribbean Still Needs Justice, Repair - Human Rights Watch

FFI staff & volunteers with friends from J.M. Kaplan Fund.

While finance to many might conjure a boring system of transactions or a dangerous game of capitalist exploitation to financial activists, investment vehicles are fair game for creative and exciting innovations toward liberation. One area of continuous advocacy is the abolition of bail, which forces countless individuals to remain in jail simply because they cannot afford their own release. Often, the over-incarcerated and their loved ones have to turn to bail bonds companies that exploit the vulnerability of their financial situations, charge exorbitant interest, and require collateral in exchange for the funds needed for bail. According to the Prison Policy Institute, over 465,000 people are held in local jails every day without being convicted of a crime, simply because they cant afford their bail.

Bail isnt just part of the criminal justice system you might be surprised to hear that it exists in the immigrant detention system, too. Except that in this context, its referred to as immigration bond. Thats right, take a second to wrap your head around this: despite committing what should be a civil, not criminal, infraction, immigrants who cross the border seeking a better life are asked to pay bond. Tens of thousands of children and adults are in this position on any given day, stuck in immigrant prisons and jails for years. With the costs of bonds ranging from $1,500 to $250,000, immigrants and their families often cannot afford to pay bond.

Numerous bail funds like the Bail Project, New Yorks Free Them All for Public Health, and LAs Peoples City Council Freedom Fund have historically helped address the criminalization of poverty in the U.S. and advocates have been working to end cash bail entirely. In the wake of mass arrests of protestors around the country in support of the Movement for Black Lives, many bail funds have experienced an unprecedented surge in financial support. But there has been less attention on immigrant detention. Thats where Freedom for Immigrants has stepped in. Since 2010, they have supported both bond funding and critical post-release wraparound services for immigrants nationwide. Their National Hotline, the nations largest for immigrants in detention, receives between 600 and 14,500 calls per month. They are part of a growing network of bail and immigration bond funds across the country, hosted by Community Justice Exchange.

Freedom for Immigrants is a national nonprofit that has grown from monitoring the human rights abuses faced by immigrants detained by ICE through their national hotline and network of volunteer detention visitors to also include actionable approaches for dignity, not detention. These approaches call for divestment from for-profit incarceration and investment in community-based organizations and tools like bond funds to welcome immigrants into the social fabric of the United States. The organization is now partnering with Mission Driven Finance an impact investment firm and certified B Corporation dedicated to using finance as a tool for change, expanding access to capital, and closing opportunity gaps to launch the Freedom100 Fund. This new pilot fund aims to release 100 individuals from immigration prison, support them with their cases and prove that its time for the bail and bond system to go.

I talked with Lauren Grattan, Co-Founder and Chief Community Officer of Mission Driven Finance, and Christina Mansfield, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Freedom for Immigrants, to learn more about this bond fund, how it works, and why its an important development for investors and activists committed to immigrant freedom.

For those who may be new to this world, whats the current problem with immigration bonds and the criminalization of poverty in the United States that you're trying to address? How has COVID-19 added another layer to this?

Gretta Soto Moreno, member of FFI Leadership Council.

CM: On any given day, thousands of immigrants are locked up in prisons and jails as part of the U.S. immigration detention system. The system is composed largely of people who are either newly arrived, such as asylum seekers, or those individuals who have longstanding ties to their communities here in the U.S.

Individuals who flee their home countries to seek refuge in the U.S. and claim asylum at a port of entry have been subject to mandatory immigration detention since at least 1996 as a result of harsh policies signed into law by President Clinton. Those same laws expanded the list of aggravated felonies for which people like Legal Permanent Residents and others could be detained and made subject to deportation, including many non-violent offenses. Around that same time period, a series of tough on crime laws were passed that further criminalized communities of color. As a result, since 1996, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people who have been sent to ICE detention.

Its also important to recognize that throughout this period of time the federal government has increased its use of criminal prosecutions for people migrating. The federal government considers illegal entry a misdemeanor while illegal re-entry is considered a felony. The family separation crisis grew out of these policies, forcing families to be split up needlessly and inhumanely.

COVID-19 has added another layer of complexity and urgency to the situation. Freedom for Immigrants and other partners are focused on helping to bond out people who are immunocompromised and medically vulnerable. We are also submitting parole requests for the release of people without paying cash bonds, but the federal government is only granting a small number of these requests. In addition, Freedom for Immigrants is tracking abuses related to the pandemic and the organized responses of people inside on this real-time map.

How did Freedom for Immigrants and Mission Driven Finance decide to collaborate on this new initiative, using money as a tool for social change rather than a weapon for exploitation?

LG: When we met Freedom for Immigrants and grasped the size and severity of the issue of immigrant detention, we knew we wanted to support their incredible work rehumanizing a cruel system. Immigration is part of our daily lives in our hometown of San Diego, where we have the most active land border crossing in the country and one in four San Diegans are born outside the U.S.

CM: At Freedom for Immigrants, we know human rights and immigration policy really well, but innovative finance is not our strength. It was critical to find our partners at Mission Driven Finance as they fully believe in our vision and worked within our ethical framework to co-create this fund expanding our national detention bond program.

LG: We partnered with Freedom for Immigrants to develop the Freedom100 Fund a first-of-its-kind opportunity to finance bonds and release 100 people from immigration detention across California and Louisiana at no cost to the individual. Once bonded out, individuals are eight times more likely to win their immigration cases. But without the ability to pay a bond, many individuals are forced to languish in immigration detention and away from their loved ones and communities and forced to navigate complex legal proceedings on their ownoften in a language that is not their first.

As more people have been detained and the costs of immigration bonds have skyrocketed (the median bond in California and Louisiana is $8,500), families and community groups that previously donated money to bond out their loved ones are now strapped for cash. This is a perfect space for impact investing: Amplifying limited philanthropic dollars.

CM: We chose California and Louisiana because they represent some of the best and worst jurisdictions for immigrants to win their cases, respectively. In Louisiana, 87.8% of all immigration detention cases are denied, whereas only 52.2% of cases in California are denied. By bonding out individuals in these two states, connecting them to supportive resources, and helping them make all their court appearances, we can demonstrate that the practice of detention isnt just inhumane and wildly subject to political bias its unnecessary.

So how does this fund actually work and what is the ultimate goal?

LG: The Freedom100 Fund is designed to extend the impact of donated dollars. In a nutshell, instead of making donations directly to post bonds, donors make grants into a reserve account that absorbs some of the risk to make the opportunity more attractive for private investors who might not have financed immigration bonds otherwise. The fund is structured to leverage $500,000 in the philanthropic reserve account at least four times, unlocking $2M of investor capital and ultimately expand the availability of rapid, free immigration bond financing.

The fund lends to Freedom for Immigrants to have the money to post bond directly at ICE field offices on behalf of 100 individuals. As individuals go to their immigration court appearances and get their cases resolved (positively or negatively), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repays Freedom for Immigrants which would then repay the fund.

We need every tool in the toolbox, including finance, to make a more just world. Our hope is that the Freedom100 Fund can provide dignity and care for 100 individuals immediately and hopefully scale to serve thousands. We also want the fund to serve as a model for how innovative finance can move the needle on some of our most difficult social and environmental challenges and quickly. The first capital from the fund flowed to Freedom For Immigrants earlier in July and theyve already bonded out eight individuals.

Why is this bond fund an impact investing fund instead of just a philanthropic effort?

LG: As an investment firm, we like to right-size the tool to the problem. Philanthropy makes a lot of sense for proving early on that a program can work, for subsidizing programs that dont have a functional market, and for taking on riskier financial positions to unlock other capital. But to fully address problems of this size, we have to mobilize more than just philanthropy.

Thanks to their donors, Freedom for Immigrants has built a successful detention bond program and critical case management support. And now donors are committing to that third scenario of unlocking other capital because they need more money in this fight than donations alone.

We always look for repayment pathways to see if impact investing is possible. As strange as it is, the fact that DHS repays bonds at the conclusion of immigration trials gave us the opportunity to explore an investment strategy with Freedom for Immigrants. Because of this fact, we were able to build this structure without burdening immigrants or their families, unlike most other bond financing. Its a highly unusual revenue source, but it is a revenue source!

If this system is so wrong how do we end it, as opposed to financing it? Clearly the Freedom100 Fund can help get people out of detention centers now a critical outcome but is it also enabling the system?

CM: This is a critical question we must continually ask ourselves as abolitionists. Freedom for Immigrants combines direct services to people in immigrant prisons and jails with policy and advocacy to end the system completely. When we decide on the scope of our work, we always ask ourselves whether what we are doing could lead to the perpetuation of the system. The Freedom100 Fund is a great example of this calculus.

Our goal of the fund is twofold:

1) Secure the freedom of 100 individuals currently incarcerated only because they cannot afford to pay a bond; and

2) Leverage the model to advocate that the incarceration of immigrants in our detention system is entirely unnecessary and should be abolished.

Paying the federal government bond is working within an unjust system to alleviate the suffering of people now. But our goal is to prevent anyone from ever having to suffer incarceration. The government justifies the system by assuming that if immigrants are not imprisoned, they will abscond and risk becoming a public charge. The truth is, the immigration detention system itself is the biggest charge on the American public.

Our taxpayer dollars fund this profit-driven system, enriching local governments and private prison corporations at the expense of us all. This fund will demonstrate that people are imprisoned solely because they cannot afford to pay an immigration bond, but when we are able to finance their freedom they are able to concentrate on winning their immigration cases and comply with what the government is asking of them. We are advocating for divestment from inhumane systems of incarceration and investment in community organizations that support and welcome immigrants.

Finally, how can people get involved? Who can be an investor?

LG: Anyone can donate to Freedom for Immigrants, or consult with your financial advisor about whether it's appropriate for you to invest in the fund through a charitable vehicle like a donor advised fund at your favorite community foundation. While only accredited investors are eligible to consider a direct investment in the Freedom100 Fund, we encourage everyone to learn more about collectively ending immigration detention by visiting Freedom for Immigrants site.

Thanks to Jasmine Rashid for her contributions to this piece. Full disclosures related to my work available here. This post does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice, and the author is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided herein.

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Blended Capital For Immigration Bonds: Introducing The Freedom100 Fund - Forbes

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BSc (Econ) UWI: the sixth former in Kingston had scribbled this on the inside cover of his economics textbook, Intermediate Economics by J Harvey, in about 1977. This was an aspirational note. In the UWI system, after three years of post-sixth form studies, the degree could be his.

Naipaul's Primer

The aspiration was perhaps more practical and reachable than that scribbled by VS Naipaul at Queen's Royal College on his fourth form Latin primer to leave Trinidad in five years. Naipaul fell short by a year on his ambition, but he eventually assumed his cosmopolitan mantle. From under this mantle he elaborated on his schizophrenic relationship with his homelands, starting with the comic atmosphere of Miguel Street and The Mystic Masseur, but graduating to bitter ridicule and scorn in later years.

BSc (Econ) UWI circa 1978 was to be a passport not to lucre, but to learning, knowledge and, with good luck, probably to wisdom. And so, those embarking on the Mona experience did so armed with the view that studies in economics would be an avenue for both personal and professional advancement.

First year (1978)

In the first year of BSc (Econ) UWI, with classes frequently held in N1 of the Arts block (now the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre), the economics neophytes shared ideas with management students (in superior numbers), future sociologists, and budding political scientists.

The lecturers included the highly rated Ramjeesingh, in economics and in statistics, Dr Roach in mathematics, the thoughtful Rupert Lewis for politics, the perceptive Bernard Marshall for history on Mondays and Fridays at 5:00 pm, and two leading sociologists, Barry Chevannes and Don Robotham.

The first-year lecturers exposed students to dialectical materialism, The Labour Theory of Value, The State in theory and practice, Durkheim , The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Schumpeter and other ways of seeing. These other ways of seeing were, almost literally, new methods of understanding social and economic phenomena; for, at the high school level, neoclassical demand and supply curves, Keynesian macroeconomic principles and production possibility frontiers had been predominant on the Cambridge A' Level syllabus. Now, the student was challenged to put other instruments in the toolbox of socio-economic analysis.

Eurocentric?

Was the new toolbox too Eurocentric? In the first year there was steady exposure to Marx and other (mainly) 19th century writers in economics, politics and sociology; but there was also significant exposure to Caribbean scholarship of quality. Question 1 on the tutorial sheet for Introduction to Politics in 1978 was about Marcus Garvey: Garvey preached racial pride but the main point of his work was anti-imperialism. Discuss.

This was promptly followed by a question which required students to consider the role of the media in the Commonwealth Caribbean, with readings from Caribbean Quarterly and other regional sources. In addition to Caribbean Quarterly, the book Essays on Power and Change in Jamaica (edited by the illustrious pair of Carl Stone and Aggrey Brown) proved to be particularly stimulating. Especially stimulating too were politics tutorials under the experienced hand of Ann Spackman, who challenged all shortcuts European or otherwise and was said to be doctrinally opposed to giving 'A' grades, a characteristic rumoured to be shared with some senior denizens of the UWI History Department of the time.

It may have been in the Introduction to Politics final examination for 1978-79 that students were called upon to assess how, and to what extent, poor countries owe their underdevelopment to developed countries. This question, of course, was built on a premise constructed in part by Walter Rodney, the highly rated Mona historian who had been declared persona non grata by the Hugh Shearer Administration a decade earlier. The question, too, could have been connected to Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere who, on a celebrated, rain-bearing, visit to Jamaica in 1974 eloquently maintained that in international relations the poor remain poor because they are poor.

IMF bank?

For the following year, Question 1 on the Introduction to Politics final examination was, I think: Is the IMF a bank? The background to this question may have been a statement by Andrew Young, then the US ambassador to the United Nations. Ambassador Young, on a visit to Jamaica in 1977, argued that the International Monetary Fund, as a bank, had the right to impose conditionalities on Jamaica in return for their loans to the country in the same way that a bank would do to its debtors. Against a background in which BSc (Econ) students were reading Cheryl Payer's The Debt Trap: The IMF and the Third World, Young's analysis was the subject of much contention on the campus and presumably on the examination paper.

Eric Williams

Our history exposure in the first year was fundamentally and unapologetically Caribbean. Eric Williams' From Columbus to Castro and Capitalism and Slavery were on the top bookshelf. The former was rated for its broad view of developments in Caribbean history, readable style and its unexpected witticisms (Columbus fell on his knees and then on the Aborigines). And the latter, based in large part on Williams' doctoral thesis at Oxford, brought home to the sceptical, postcolonial reader the fact that humanitarianism and the work of the Saints were not the only factors in the abolition of the British Caribbean slave system.

Other history items on the top shelf were photocopied essays that included Roy Augier's path-breaking Before and After 1865, Elsa Goveia's New Shibboleths for Old, and Douglas Hall's presentation on the apprenticeship system in Jamaica (with planters 'squeezing the last ounce of juice' from the enslaved).

From the first year it was clear that the Caribbean authorities would not always agree with each other: New Shibboleths, for example, was a surgical critique of some aspects of Williams' work that must, at very least, have put the original prince of Port of Spain on the back foot for a few weeks. These and other offerings were consumed with pleasure, with students engaging in long arguments about how history should inform praxis.

Mathematics

BSc (Econ) in the second year took on a specialist tone and mathematics sat upon its throne. The student grapevine spoke unequivocally: Basic Mathematics for Economists was a misnomer. To begin with, basic maths involved differentiation and integration in calculus at a considerably more complex level than was required for mathematics and statistics.

So, in much the same way that the Jamaican Supreme Court is not really supreme, basic maths was not really basic. When the lecturer, Dr Roach, informed the class that the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test would not be appearing on our final examination paper, there was a loud chorus of relief throughout the lecture room (SR 4, Social Sciences).

Dr Roach was a methodical and quiet mathematician who never seemed perturbed by challenging questions. He was based full-time at the then College of Arts, Science and Technology (CAST) but offered his considerable skills to Mona students; in a small, developing society, sensible people are prepared to share knowledge and to acknowledge needs.

Statistical method

The realm of king mathematics also extended to Economic Statistics, Statistical Method, and Elementary Econometrics. Economic Statistics was taught by John Gafar from Guyana. Gafar lived for cricket, pointing out in his first class of the year that if Test cricket was being played at Sabina Park, students would not see him at Mona. This hypothesis was not tested. In the statistics courses, however, several economic hypotheses were subject to testing, at given degrees of freedom.

Students were also asked whether certain estimators were sufficient, unbiased or consistent; invited to reach precise, technical conclusions about variance, normal distribution and to evaluate probability using Chebychev's inequality, and other methods. A part question on the Statistical Method final examination for June 1981, in the pre-COVID-19 era, captures the flavour of the lecturers' expectations. Question 4 (a) read:

The probability that a person who is exposed to a certain contagious disease will catch it is 0.20. Find the probability that the 20th person exposed to this disease is the fifth one to catch it.

This was in all probability a question from the pen of the aforementioned Dr Roach.

In the book

For years before and after 1981, Professor Al Francis was responsible for guiding students through the pleasures and pains of Elementary Econometrics. As was the case with Basic Mathematics, there may have been a structural error in the naming of the course, for while econometrics was much in evidence, the adjective elementary was distinctly misleading. Prof was, however, a born teacher who gave us the intellectual tools to take on concepts such as ordinary least squares estimators, multicollinearity, dummy variables, and the Koyck transformation with confidence.

Prof Francis also gave students the will and the skill to guide themselves through difficult, technical material. If a student asked a question about an item not covered in lectures, Prof's first line of response with a smile was apt to be, But it is in Johnston read it and let me know how you get along, withJohnson being Econometric Methods, the assigned textbook. Prof, who had taken his doctorate at MIT, ensured that his econometric students were prepared to match the best in the world.

Al Francis

On top of Prof's expertise and pedagogical skills were layers of determination and modesty. It is reported that the young Al Francis opened the batting for Kingston College in his time playing Sunlight Cup cricket. His opening partner was Easton Bull McMorris who went on to captain Jamaica and open for the West Indies (as highlighted in recent editions of the Sunday Observer). And at one down on the KC side was Collie Smith, the legendary West Indian star batsman who left us early.

At very least, then, Prof batted with the stars and could make his own claim to cricketing greatness. He also represented the school at football, and his academic achievements took him to some of the most renowned institutions in the world.

And yet, Prof studiously avoided autobiographical comment to those within his charge. He was more inclined to talk about a book he had just finished reading, to discuss the mathematical principles behind autocorrelation, or to reflect on the need for better basic schools in Jamaica, than to elaborate on his life achievements.

The early 1980s saw Prof Francis leave the Department of Economics to go, for a time, to a senior position at the International Bauxite Association. There, he noted, the view from his office in New Kingston directed to the hills of St Andrew and further north was more impressive than that from his ground floor office on the corridor at Mona. But his heart was at Mona, and so, he returned home.

Coming next: Other lecturers and the times.

Ambassador Stephen Vasciannie is Professor of International Law, UWI, Mona.

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UWI economics from the 1970s (Part 1) - Jamaica Observer