TRINIDAD and Tobago owes Erica Williams Connell a profound debt of gratitude for the comprehensive range of items that record the life and contribution of her late distinguished father, Eric Eustace Williams. Perhaps in no other emerging society has a leader left such an overwhelming legacy of social and political progress as the scholar-politician who led our country from colonialism to independence and who, after his untimely death in 1981, was unanimously acclaimed "the father of the nation."
From 1956 when the party he founded, the People's National Movement, won its first general election to his eventual passing, Dr Williams presided over the most momentous period of TT's history, forging a nation out of a colonial people, laying its democratic foundations and setting out the principles byw hich it should be guided.
But the country has reason to cherish the life of Dr Williams not only for his contribution to the political development of TT and the Caribbean but also for the depth of his scholarship and the significant part he played in the struggle of black people for equality and justice across the globe.
In addressing the opening ceremony of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection at UWI yesterday, General Colin Powell paid tribute to those who had led that struggle before him, paving the way for his rise to the top of the United States Armed Services. Among those fighters, he said, there was none greater than Dr Williams.
Speaking about the collection, Gen Powell said it would provide generations to come with a clear and definitive proof of what Dr Williams stood for.
"In this treasured collection which we open today to which Erica has devoted so much of her time, here in a plance that he called home, generations to come will find a clear and definitive proof of all that his man stood for, all that he believed in, all that he tried to set down in paper, so that others could learn, others could grow, others could come to understand the experience of the West Indies family and to understand most vividly the experience of slavery.
"It was in 1938 at Oxford University that he completed his doctoral thesis which, six years later, would become his seminal work, Capitalism and Slavery. From that point on the words flowed from his prolific pen. His theories, his reasoning, his keen and perceptive views came over time to dominate discussions over slavery and about its ugly byproduct, racism.
"In America we had W.E.B. DuBois, in the West Indies we had Dr Eric Eustace Williams. Now both men, too large for a nationality or single region, truly, truly belong to the world. And the world will have access through this collection to all that is so important about the man that we honour today. To the writings, the speeches, the photographs, the video tapes, the calypsoes and the memorabilia of a long and successful life of service and caring."
A nation must have pride in its great leaders. The Eric Williams Memorial Collection will remain as a permanent institution where future generations will come to know in a more intimate way not only the life and contribution of the Father of the Nation but also the decisive and defining period of TT history over which he presided.
It seems important that every young person, every school child should have an opportunity to tour this collection and digest the significance of its wide-ranging contents. It is good that they should know about Dr Williams who, as Gen Powell said, now belongs to the world. It should be the stuff of national pride, but who knows what a source of inspiration that could also be.