The long sunset of Ralph Gonsalves

Nov 29, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – The writing, as they say in the easy idiom of politics, was on the wall. It had been there for some time—faint at first, then steadily darkening until it acquired the heavy permanence of ink. And yet, even with its inevitability, the defeat of Ralph Gonsalves—perhaps the last committed anti-imperialist of stature in the English-speaking Caribbean—arrives with a kind of historical shock.

It is not merely the end of a government. It is the end of a certain idea of Caribbean leadership, one rooted in memory, ideology, and the stubborn integrity of small states resisting the designs of large powers.

But one must begin with the simple explanation, for history is often simpler than its romantic tellers suppose: incumbency fatigue. The man had been in office for twenty-five consecutive years.

This was long enough for a generation to be born, schooled, and come of age under his watch. Long enough for gratitude to curdle into impatience, and impatience into restlessness.

In small societies, the intimacy of power becomes its own burden. Every pothole becomes an indictment, every unreturned greeting a symbol of tyranny. After a quarter-century, even the most accomplished of leaders becomes, in the eyes of the voter, an over-familiar piece of furniture: sturdy, dependable, but tiring to look at.

And so, on Thursday, the people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines chose change. They did so not necessarily because the new promised anything radical, but because the old had become too known, too constant. There is something in the Caribbean temperament that occasionally rebels against constancy. Perhaps it is the echo of plantation history, perhaps simply the restlessness of island life. But the verdict is clear: they wanted something new, even if they could not quite define what that newness should contain.

Yet it would be intellectually lazy and morally evasive to reduce Ralph Gonsalves to a man felled by time. For he was more than an officeholder overstaying his welcome. He was, as the record shows, the last great Caribbean voice who dared to speak openly of imperialism. He did so not in the stale slogans of the 1970s, but in the contemporary recognition that small states still negotiate their sovereignty under the shadow of larger appetites.

Gonsalves had always possessed this ideological seriousness, long before office softened its edges. He had been a friend of Dr. Walter Rodney. At the University of the West Indies, he condemned Rodney’s expulsion from Jamaica, an early demonstration of moral clarity that would follow him throughout his career.

But it was in his mature years as Prime Minister that Gonsalves shaped himself into the region’s most consistent critic of Western hegemony. The evidence is scattered across decades. In the 1990s, he warned the Caribbean against a new imperialism, a subtle but predatory force capable of picking off small nations one by one. At home in 2022, he admonished his party faithful about “imperialism and its agents,” insisting, correctly, that sovereignty in small states can be weakened not through invasion but through influence, through NGOs whose benefactors are rarely disinterested.

On the international stage, he was even more outspoken. In Havana, he declared the central conflict of our era to be that between imperialism and its victims, urging solidarity with Cuba and Venezuela. At the United Nations, he condemned “global centres of imperialism,” cautioning that hegemonic powers still sought to subvert elected governments that refused to bend. And only this year, reacting to the carnage in Gaza, he dared to describe American policy as imperialist, something many Caribbean leaders mutter privately but cannot bring themselves to articulate on a public platform. “Small states,” he said, “are not appendages to any other nation.” It was a line worthy of the region’s early independence warriors.

One understands, therefore, why powerful actors outside the Caribbean might have quietly welcomed his departure. Here was a man who defended Venezuela’s sovereignty, who resisted the partitioning of the Caribbean into obedient satellites, who saw clearly the role of powerful states in sustaining the Guyana-Venezuela border dispute. The United States would not have found him convenient.

But here lies the irony: his defeat may have had little to do with Washington. Nor with the economy, which—second only to Guyana’s—had been one of the region’s fastest growing. The country’s debt burden, though real, could not have produced the electoral earthquake that swept his party from office. No foreign hand was needed. The Vincentian electorate did it themselves, by that most ordinary of democratic impulses: fatigue.

Now the region must contemplate the emptiness left behind. Ralph Gonsalves was the last of a particular type of Caribbean leader: charismatic, principled, defiantly anti-imperialist. His departure creates a vacuum not easily filled. For while political parties change, and governments rise and fall, the loss of a figure who understood the Caribbean’s precarious position in the world is something history itself will feel.

Whether the Vincentian people will one day regret their choice is for the future to reveal. But the region already knows what it has lost: a voice that spoke without fear, a mind shaped by ideological seriousness, and a leader who believed that even small islands have the right to stand upright in a world of giants.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

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• Caribbean, Peeping Tom, Ralph Gonsalves, sunset

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