Crossing paths with Norman Girvan

Martin Henry

Jamaican Professor Norman Girvan succumbed to his injuries from a fall in Dominica months ago while undergoing specialist treatment in Cuba, not the United States or Canada. He was laid to rest two Saturdays ago with the service conducted in the University Chapel. A proper Caribbean man.

Girvan belonged to a school of Caribbean political and economic thinkers out of the University of the West (UWI) which include George Beckford, Don Robotham, Trevor Munroe, Walter Rodney, Barry Chevannes, Aggrey Brown, and the somewhat younger Brian Meeks. But not Rex Nettleford or Carl Stone. Since they have regarded and so labelled themselves as 'development' thinkers and activists, their impact upon Jamaican and Caribbean development, plus and minus, awaits frank scholarly analysis.

Norman also went beyond academia to be an outstanding public servant to craft and act upon development policy rather than simply to study it. He headed the National Planning Agency (NPA) (now the Planning Institute of Jamaica, PIOJ) in the last three years of the Michael Manley I regime and briefly at the start of the replacement Seaga regime (1977-1981). More recently, he headed the 25-member Association of Caribbean States which links CARICOM and several Latin American states. He was a champion of regional integration, pushing back against obstacles to the cherished dream.

Our paths crossed at two main intersections. Although I vaguely knew of Girvan's stint at the NPA and the ideological rifts that led to his early departure during the Seaga era, and of his work at the UWI, our first direct encounter came after Arnaldo Ventura, then special adviser to Prime Minister Michael, recruited me in 1991 to serve as national project coordinator for the Jamaican component of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) six-country project for Strengthening Endogenous Capacity in Science and Technology through Stakeholders Policy Dialogues. I spent a good deal of project time explaining what that long-winded title meant!

annoyed much

The UNDP bosses in New York kept urging me to involve Norman Girvan in the project. And I was more than a little annoyed over what appeared to be undue interference since the project already had one of those carefully balanced big boards with reps from every conceivable stakeholder sector and was, in any case, designed to dialogue with stakeholders. Then I discovered Norman Girvan's considerable body of work, social scientist though he was, on technology for development that had given him enormous standing with the UNDP.

One of his much-cited papers co-authored with Gillian Marcelle in 1990 was the case study, Overcoming Technological Dependency: The Case of Electric Arc (Jamaica) Ltd, a Small Firm in a Small Developing Country. Exactly UN stuff!

The celebrated paper married Girvan's sociological and economic scholarly and ideological development stance with hard technology. The Elarc story in brief: British Oxygen Limited had established the company here in 1972, but exited only three years later as the business, including the production of welding rods, was not doing well. The company was acquired by Jamaicans and later came to be majority-owned by George Swire.

Swire vigorously set out to re-engineer the flagging company with both innovative product improvement and work-flow and management improvement. Elarc's superior locally produced welding rods rapidly rose to dominate the market. I was pleasantly surprised to meet Girvan's case-study company, Elarc, again in a 2012 (July 4) Gleaner story, 'Elarc Welding: another Jamaica Manufacturers' Association success'.

dissapointing results

Unfortunately, neither Girvan's work on technology for development nor the strengthening endogenous capacity in S&T project has yielded the kind of sustained development results then sentimentally anticipated. And the railings against the despised transnationals like British Oxygen, of which Girvan's school of development thinking was famous, has not done much to achieve the New International Economic Order for which his political boss while he headed the NPA, Michael Manley, had pushed so hard for.

Nor has regional integration as a pathway to development, a cause to which Norman Girvan devoted so much of his life, made the sort of headway which he and other committed regionalists anticipated.

A dozen years after my project encounter with Norman Girvan, I was contracted by the cooperative company, Walkerswood Caribbean Foods to research and write the Story of Walkerswood Community Development. And I met Norman again, and his parents, who were central to that story. His father D.T.M. 'Thom' Girvan had been long dead, but I had the privilege of interviewing his mother, Miss Rita, in a home for the aged.

Girvan had painstakingly assembled his father's papers into a book, Working Together for Development, published by the Institute of Jamaica Press. The book became a most valuable secondary source for the research. And I understood why Norman was who he was, ever the social activist and optimist for human development.

When Norman Manley, the Fabian socialist, launched Jamaica Welfare Limited in 1937 (a year before the PNP) - with money from the powerful transnational banana company - United Fruit Company, the new development 'company' needed a bold, visionary young manager.

As recorded by Norman in his introduction to his compilation of his father's papers, "One day in April 1939, he [D.T.M.] came home with a surprise announcement for [his wife] Rita. 'Norman Manley asked me to come and see him. He wants me to join the staff of Jamaica Welfare - full time.'"

At the board meeting of May 2, 1939, Mr Manley informed the board of Jamaica Welfare that he had found the man to be cooperative development officer. The minutes of the meeting read: "(Mr Manley said that) he had an interview with Mr D.T. Girvan on the question of his joining the staff of Jamaica Welfare Limited for the purpose of training abroad in cooperative principles, and that he was impressed that Mr Girvan would be an excellent man for this purpose. He is about 36 years old and occupies a lucrative and trusted position in a large business house [head of sales staff at Lascelles de Mercado], but the proposal has a particular appeal to Mr. Girvan."

Manley felt that his hand-picked staff were involved in "a great, a glorious and creative job". And "a year spent in activities with a creative purpose is worth a lifetime spent in a routine job. All who serve have their compensations," he told staff. "The word 'sacrifice' is not a good word to use, for our people move as the spirit moves them."

Maas Thom's son, Norman, tells us that his father "was a deeply, but quietly religious man [who] was fond of St Paul's dictum: 'No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.' He had a strong consciousness of history, especially of the efforts of the Jamaican peasantry since Emancipation."

Norman Manley also needed a solid early success story for Jamaica Welfare. He found that opportunity in Walkerswood, St Ann.

Mrs Minnie Simson, of the then already prominent white Pringle family, had inherited Bromley Estate in Walkerswood from her father, John Pringle. Pringle was a Scottish doctor who had come to Jamaica in 1875 under advice to seek his fortune here. And find his fortune he did! Abandoning medicine and marrying a Levy whose father was custos of St Catherine (Jamaica Broilers family today), John Pringle became the largest landowner and banana producer in Jamaica and a knighted member of the Legislative Council!

similar views

His daughter, Minnie, shared Manley's Fabian socialist views and social activism, and had come under the influence of the Moral Rearmament movement through her daughter, Fiona, who had brought it back from England.

Norman Girvan and I had significant points of divergence about what the real world was like, how it worked, and how to make it work better as we tackle its problems of 'human development', particularly in our part of it, Jamaica and the Caribbean. But we have had pleasant meetings at interesting crossroads. And it would never have crossed the egalitarian mind of Maas Thom and Miss Rita's son that he was acclaimed professor and very senior public servant and I was a mere labourer in the trenches.

Martin Henry is a university administrator and public-affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.