Judging Lloyd Best: An Intellectual's Intellectual

• Author: Carey Fraser
• Pages: 202-213

202 CARICOM: Appropriate Adaptation to a Changing Global Environment

The essays in this volume were presented at a conference in honour of

Lloyd Best at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, in September

2002. The conference attracted Best’s collaborators, colleagues, and students

from across the region and further afield – testimony to his influence across

the generations and the breadth of his intellectual interests. Best’s work has

been seminal, provocative, iconoclastic, and profoundly radical – a reflection

of his free-thinking sensibility and his belief that knowledge is the key to

transformation and to liberation, as both individual and social processes. He

has established himself as one of the region’s most important intellectuals of

the 20th century, and his writings continue to reflect his effort to grapple

with, and overcome, the barriers to the expression of the enormous human

potential that lies at the heart of Caribbean life and culture in the new

millennium. Best’s theoretical sophistication as a social scientist, his mastery

of language, and his rhetorical skill, accented by that quintessential

Trinidadian art form picong, have been honed by way of his intellectual

engagement with the writers and poets of the region. It is this eclecticism of

thought and style that has unsettled many, particularly the new elites that

emerged with the accession to political independence in the Caribbean. It is

perhaps testimony to the significance of Best’s influence that his capacity to

unsettle the likes of Norman Manley, Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, and

Eric Williams, has neither diminished with the passage of time nor with the

emergence of their political offspring.

Best’s capacity to unsettle is reflected in the following paragraph from

his 1967 essay which was republished in, and, which also serves as the title

of this volume - Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom:

JUDGING LLOYD BEST:

An Intellectual’s Intellectual

Carey Fraser

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