The West Indies Federation launches and Mona fills with argument

The West Indies Federation was launched in January 1958. Lloyd Best reached the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies in the same month and remembered the season as one of great anticipation and almost unbridled hope. Mona had opened ten years before, in 1948. What followed there was years of mostly informal debate, fuelled first by the university programme of open lectures. C. L. R. James came in 1960. Best names the stretch from 1958 to 1961 as a threshold comparable to 1935 to 1938 and to 1944 to 1946, two earlier periods which between them had settled the question of self determination and responsible government in the British Caribbean and left only the question of form: federation, a single state, or separate independence island by island. Best would later propose a regional graduate university reaching for Haiti, Santo Domingo and Cuba, with French creole first among the languages it would require.