“Essential things such as typewriters”: Development discourse, trade union expertise, and the dialogues of decolonization between the Caribbean and West Africa

Abstract

This article examines how the liberatory ideals of transnational projects could become codified in particular processes of thought, deed, and expression. During his term of service in Nigeria between 1960 and 1962 the Trinidadian union leader McDonald Moses mobilized a number of phenomena central to the transformative projects of the mid-twentieth century: the paramountcy of psychology to “true” transformation and change; the embrace of programmatic action; and the belief that both psychological transformation and programmatic action could be articulated through new and enlightened forms of expression. While histories that embrace a “cultural turn” tend to look for this expression in creative forms and artistic production, this article looks to daily administrivia as part of an explicitly political project that aimed to improve the lives of workers by changing their modes of organizing and, consequently, the culture of politics and labor.