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Rex Lasalle, a leader of Trinidad & Tobago's 1970 army mutiny in support of the Black Power movement, has died [1]
['Janine Mendes-Franco']
Date: 2025-02-27
Towards the end of the 1960s, as Black Power branched off from the U.S. civil rights movement, the fundamental values it was fighting for — which went far beyond simply demanding equal rights to issues of economic empowerment, pride in Black identity, economic empowerment, political self-determination and the dismantling of racist systems that had kept Black people powerless — spread well beyond American borders, including to Trinidad and Tobago.
The twin island nation had only recently secured its independence from Britain, and a key figure in the Black Power movement, Trinidad-born Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Turé) was attracting a lot of attention as he sought to redistribute resources to marginalised Black communities in the U.S. In Trinidad, meanwhile, many people — university students, trade unionists, creatives — having had similar experiences of disenfranchisement under colonial rule, and fuelled by mounting dissatisfaction that the status quo wasn't changing quickly enough post-Independence, identified with the cause.
Reginald “Rex” Lassalle, who died this month at the age of 79 in Finland, where he had lived for some time, was one of them. Then a lieutenant in the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment – which was instructed to move against the protesting population – he refused and instead helped lead an army mutiny against the government of Eric Williams in April 1970, as part of the country's Black Power Revolution. It wasn't an off-the-cuff decision.
Born in the burgeoning Black middle-class neighbourhood of Belmont in 1945, Lasalle attended the well-regarded St. Mary's College, a Catholic boys’ secondary school in Port of Spain. In January 1965, his family sent him off to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which he attended until December 1966. Apart from the racism he experienced there, Lasalle also wrestled with what was being asked of him by the establishment, citing “a written military appreciation of how to wipe out a Mau Mau enclave” as a turning point for him.
Before returning home, Lassalle spent some time in New York visiting an aunt in Harlem. Malcolm X had already been assassinated, and the social climate, especially in Black American communities, was tense and charged with activism, reflection, and rising militancy. While there, Lasalle began reading the work of French Caribbean intellectual Frantz Fanon, by whom he was greatly influenced.
Two years before the mutiny, Lasalle would help lead members of the Guild of Undergraduates at the St. Augustine campus of The University of the West Indies, which had formed a political party called the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC). In 1969, it protested against the arrest of West Indian students at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Canada, which, coupled with the work of the trade unions, helped fuel the local Black Power movement.
By April 1970, a series of marches and strikes had forced Prime Minister Williams to declare a state of emergency, in which 15 Black Power leaders were arrested. In solidarity, an army faction led by Lassalle, Raffique Shah and Michael Bazie, who were all Sandhurst-trained, were collectively moved by the cause, and refused to take up arms against the citizenry. They staged a mutiny, taking 30 hostages at the army's Teteron Barracks situated on Trinidad's northwestern tip.
The location would contribute to the mutiny's downfall. With the Coast Guard remaining loyal to the state, the only access was a narrow road in and out of the barracks. The mutineers soon became isolated, surrendering after 10 days. Shah later revealed that he and Lasalle had agreed there would be no bloodshed once they could avoid it: “When the Coast Guard opened fire on our convoy, we did not return fire. Hundreds would have died. As stupid as this may sound, we were prepared to die for the revolution, but we could not kill for it.”
During the time that they held Teteron, Lasalle took the lead in negotiating the terms of their surrender with the government; among other things, there was to be a general amnesty, and he and Shah were to be promoted to the rank of captain. In the end, they were arrested under a slew of charges that included mutiny and treason. In March 1971, Lassalle was court-martialled and sentenced to 15 years. He appealed, winning his freedom in July 1972, having served 27 months in prison, nine of which were in solitary confinement.
Writing about Lasalle, Roger Toussaint — fellow St. Mary's alumnus, activist, and former president of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York City — described the uprising as “the single-most impactful development in that nation’s history since becoming independent in 1962 [as it] it directly forced the nationalization of critical sections of the national economy.”
Toussaint, who would have been a teenager at the time, also described the aftermath: “[T]he mutiny, the trial, and the jailing of these young patriotic officers transfixed the nation for the better part of two years. It sparked ‘Free Our Soldiers!’ mass protests supported by large sections of the population, especially gripping the nation’s secondary school students. [T]he court trials, the repression and protests that followed […] shaped the generation of Trinbagonians who either lived or followed it, but unbeknownst to whom, history was being forged.”
During that tumultuous time, Toussaint remained most impressed by Lasalle and Shah, explaining, “The disciplined defiance shown by the soldiers was refreshing at a time when indiscipline and lumpen behavior were sometimes used to confuse and misdirect youth.”
That deep-seated belief in the greater good was evident throughout Lasalle's statement at his court-martial. He put forward the concept of a “People's Army” – one “relevant to the people and the needs of this nation [whose] essential work, outside of military duties, in peacetime, is working with the people of the country [in things like] agriculture, construction works, fishing, dairy and livestock farming, physical education, and minor medical aid to the people. In other words, an army [that] earns its upkeep in peacetime.” He saw this as “inevitable in the Third World” since people “want a relationship based on respect, unity, and moral authority.”
“The Caribbean people were brought here,” he continued, “due to the Colonial World’s need for sugar and no other reason. Up to today, our existence has been tied to satisfying the needs of metropolitan countries. In the seventies, this is changing. People look forward to finding meaning in their lives by meeting their needs. […] The people of this country want to bury the images of colonialism anywhere they see it.”
As Lasalle predicted more than half a century ago, in Trinidad and Tobago, and indeed, the wider Caribbean region, the discussion surrounding the continuing effects of holding on to the vestiges of colonialism has not ceased.
As Toussaint put it, riffing off of Trinidad and Tobago's national watchwords, “The impact of the choices made in 1962, after, and around 1970 still reverberate to this day, ironically with the lack of ‘discipline’ (order), ‘production’ (or lack thereof) detached from the needs of the nation from our agriculture and local manufacturing to our social, and ‘(in)tolerance’ including with respect to gender relations, the crime plague, crises gripping our children and youth and racial divisions and tensions. All these were on the line in 1970 and before. Choices made then came with consequences […] Rex Lasalle provided his thoughts about a different T&T that was possible and available to us.”
After securing his freedom, Lasalle returned to the UK to study osteopathy, qualifying in 1974. He also studied acupuncture and homeopathy and practised martial arts, where he learned breath techniques that he applied to his formal homeopathic training to develop his own style of Shiatsu. By the mid-1980s, he founded Hara Shiatsu International, responsible for training the first generation of Shiatsu teachers in the UK. He also authored several books.
Online, he was remembered as “a man who stood up for his principles,” “a genuine, courageous patriot who fought an uphill battle against the neo-colonialist system,” and “an outstanding son of the soil” who “lived a deeply impassioned life.”
High Court judge and poet James Aboud added, “This man, like the other regiment mutineers, were intellectuals with a heart. I don’t know about the legality of their actions. I suspect that they were supposed to blindly follow orders. Sophocles’ play ‘Antigone’ is a classic example of the conflict between the written law and natural justice.”
LGBTQ+ activist Jason Jones, who was Lasalle's stepson, thanked him for being an inspiring influence: “[Y]ou cannot be the son of Rex Lassalle and NOT want to work at creating a better world for us all to live in. […] He was complex, highly intelligent, funny, overly sensitive, scared, impressionable, funny and incredibly loving when he loved you.”
Perhaps that is how Lasalle, who did not define himself solely through the lens of 1970, would most want to be remembered. Having recorded an audiobook about his life, he noted very clearly in a March 2021 Facebook update, “Lots of people have wanted me to talk about my Army experience and prison. […] I am not going to be writing or talking much about it in the future [as] my life and what I have done is much larger and richer than those times and I am not stuck with defining who I am from that experience.”
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https://globalvoices.org/2025/02/27/rex-lasalle-a-leader-of-trinidad-tobagos-1970-army-mutiny-in-support-of-the-black-power-movement-has-died/
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