Selwyn D. Ryan: A Great Loss (1936-2022)

Selwyn D. Ryan:A Great Loss (1936-2022) Anthony P. Maingot (bio) [End Page 149] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 150] Selwyn D. Ryan, the most prolific and influential intellectual in post-colonial Trinidad, passed away on 12 March 2022. Put in the simplest terms: one cannot understand much of the modern political history of Trinidad and Tobago without studying and digesting the works of this political scientist, historian, and public pollster. Over his 52 years as an engaged researcher and publisher of academic works, Ryan produced a total of 24 books and hundreds of academic monographs and articles, virtually all produced in Trinidad and Tobago. It is a record unequalled anywhere else in the Caribbean. Indeed, it would have been a commendable performance anywhere else in the academic world. The fact that many of these publications first appeared in columns of the Trinidad Express newspaper says much about the good sense of that paper and reveals Ryan's admirable role as a conveyor of public education. Who ever said that you cannot grow where you are planted? It was, in his 81st year, that he brought forth what he called his final book Ryan Recalls: Selwyn Ryan: His Memoirs (Port of Spain: Paria Publishing Co., 2019). This was not a festschrift, neither was it an academic summary of his work. It is as the subtitle says, a Memoir. Like all memoires, it is a collection of pictures and anecdotes of the family's origins, his school years, and a multitude of celebratory messages, photos, and snippets of some of his works. A more complete review has yet to be done but given the publication of his memoirs, one way to approach such a weighty task is to use two of his major books as useful bookends to his massive scholarship. One has necessarily to begin with his Ph.D. thesis at Cornell in 1966, published as Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). Writing in 1967, he acknowledges (p. xi) something he would recognize though out his career: it was Eric Williams, "on whose pioneering studies I have relied heavily on." Williams was his enduring muse. Never uncritically, however. It was in this initial book that he spelled out one of his disagreements with Williams: according to Ryan, black nationalism was always more of a protest against the privileged white minority than it was against British rule as Williams consistently argued. That said, Ryan never converted this historical thesis into an attitude or principle of aggrieved personal relations. He enjoyed [End Page 151] good relations with all sectors of the island's multiethnic society, all well documented by the many pictures in his book of memories. There was always more of Locke than Hobbes in Ryan's world view in this early work. Even at this early stage of his career Ryan demonstrated his mastery of multiple interdisciplinary skills as an historian and sociologist. The other bookend, his 2009 Eric Williams: The Myth and the Man (Mona, Jamaica: UWI Press, 2009), was, again, the result of his life-long "interest in, and fascination with, Eric Williams" (p. 1). At 842 pages, it has to be considered the definitive book on Williams, by then the subject of a multitude of books. By Ryan's own telling, he was the "founder of the state," founder of the industrial basis of the erstwhile agricultural society, and crafter of a "liberal democratic society" without ever repressing or violating human rights. In short, according to Ryan, despite all Williams' recorded failures he delivered a performance "worthy of History's applause." Not surprisingly, this paradox engendered questions. In an exhaustive and well-informed review of Ryan's Eric Williams: The Myth and the Man (Caribbean Studies 40(1):171-186, 2012), Paul Sutton balances critiques with ample commendations and praise yet ends by saying that Ryan never resolved the riddles or enigmas of Williams. As such, says Sutton, his work is ultimately "unfinished business." One doubts very much, that Ryan would have taken issue with Sutton's assessment. After all, Ryan himself described the intractability of...

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