About the Book
Rosie Douglas, former prime minister of Dominica, had a life unlike any other modern politician. After leaving home to study agriculture in Canada, he became a member of the young Conservatives, under the Canadian prime minister’s guidance. However, after he moved to Montreal to study political science his politics started to shift. By the late sixties he was an active civil rights supporter and when Black students in Montreal began to protest racism in 1969, he helped lead the sit-in. He was identified as a protest ringleader after the peaceful protest turned into a police riot, and served 18 months in prison.
After his deportation from Canada in 1976, having been named a danger to national security, Douglas participated in political movements around the world building global solidarity. He became a leader of the Libyan-based revolutionary group World Mathaba and supported Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Once back home in Dominica, he led the movement for Dominica’s full political independence from Great Britain, then served as a senator in the post-independence government, an MP, party leader, and finally prime minister.
Relying on family sources, interviews, newspaper articles, government documents, and Douglas’ own articles, letters, and speeches, Irving Andre has drawn a rich and riveting record of this important Black revolutionary.
Table of Contents:
Foreword by David Austin
Preface and Acknowledgements
Part One 1. The Island of Dominica
2. Portsmouth Harbour
Part Two 3. The Heir Apparent Defects
4. A Gathering Storm
5. The Sir George Williams Incident
6. The Prosecution of Rosie Douglas
7. Incarceration
8. Black Radicalism in Toronto
9. Deportation
Part Three 10. Return to Dominica
11. Political Independence
12. Freedom Fighter
13. Domestic Politics
14. The Road to Victory
15. The January 2000 General Election
Part Four 16. Forming a Government
17. Internal Dissension
18. The Final Curtain
19. The Death of Rosie Douglas
20. Rosie’s Legacy
Appendices I. Statement from the Don Jail, Toronto, December 1971
II. Statement from the Leclerc Institution, January 3, 1974
III. Message of Greetings to the Socialist Party of France, Brest, November 21-23-1997
IV. Speech on the Swearing In of the Cabinet of the Government of Dominica, February 7, 2000
V. Statement at the 55th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 19, 2000
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Justice Irving Andre is the author of A Century of Dominican Cricket, Strangers in Suffisant: British West Indians in Curacao, and the biographies of Franklin Baron, Dominica’s first chief minister; Edward Oliver LeBlanc, Dominica’s first premier; and Dr. Desmond McIntyre, Dominica’s first surgeon. Between 1990 and 2002, Andre worked as a prosecutor for the Ontario Ministry of Labour, an assistant crown attorney in Brampton, Ontario, a criminal defence lawyer, and a vice-president of the Ontario Licence Appeals Tribunal. In 2002 he was appointed as a judge in the Ontario Court of Justice where he presided as the local administrative judge in the Region of Peel from 2010 to 2012. In 2012, Justice Andre was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice in Brampton, where he currently resides.
David Austin is the author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution and editor of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness and You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal is the 2014 winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize. His writing engages the work of C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Hannah Arendt, Walter Rodney, and Linton Kwesi Johnson in relation politics, poetry and social movements. A former youth worker and community organizer, he has also produced radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas on C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon. He currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College and in the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.
Review :
“An intimate portrait of one the most important but underappreciated Pan-Africanists of the post-war period whose intrepid activism linked African peoples throughout the Atlantic world. Andre’s penetrating biography of Rosie Douglas is a must-read account of the soul of African folk to vanquish imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of anti-Black exploitation and domination.” – Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, author of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America // “A long overdue assessment of the life and activism of the extraordinary Rosie Douglas, Andre’s book captures the complexities of the man and the breadth of his achievements, giving him his rightful place among the firmament of the greats who have struggled for Caribbean and Pan-African liberation.” – Kate Quinn, associate professor in Caribbean History, University College London
