Geddes Granger

Geddes Granger led the Black Power movement that nearly ended Trinidad's post-independence government in 1970. He was a student leader at the University of the West Indies and became chairman of the National Joint Action Committee, formed after Caribbean students were arrested in Montreal over a protest against a racist lecturer at Sir George Williams University. What began as solidarity marches in February 1970 grew into something much larger: tens of thousands walking through Port of Spain, a march into the sugar belt at Caroni that attempted the thing Trinidadian politics had never managed by joining African and Indian workers in one movement, and demands aimed at foreign ownership of the banks and the oil, at unemployment, and at a black government the marchers said had inherited the colonial order without changing it. Eric Williams declared a state of emergency in April and arrested the leadership. A portion of the army mutinied at Teteron barracks in support and was contained by the coast guard shelling the road out. Granger was detained, tried for sedition and acquitted. He renamed himself Makandal Daaga, after the Haitian maroon leader, and remained a political figure for the rest of his life without ever winning office of consequence. The state that suppressed the movement then adopted much of its economic programme, nationalising the banks and the sugar and taking a controlling share of the oil, which is the usual shape of these things. The state of emergency lasted into 1971 and the mutineers were court-martialled, with death sentences later overturned on appeal. He stood for election several times without success and was eventually made a member of the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago in 2013. February is now marked in Trinidad as the anniversary of the movement. He died in 2016.

• Lived: 1935 CE – 2016 CE
• Nationality: Trinidadian
• Roles: activist