INTRODUCTION

Law, Governance and Society in CARICOM

CARICOM, the Caribbean Community, is an assembly of

states, mainly English-speaking, come together for
furthering integration among themselves, coordinating
foreign policy inter alia. It grew out of CARIFTA, a free
trade assembly of a smaller number of the same states to
ensure the continuation of trade that had existed during
colonial times, and after an effort at federating ten of the
English-speaking states of the region had failed. Soon
after the inception of CARICOM in 1973, there were two
anomalies. First, an Associate state of the United
Kingdom, Montserrat, was accepted as a full member.
Additionally, the Bahamas was accepted as a member
without signing on to the trade and tariff harmonisation of
the other members. These two anomalies have meant that
Montserrat can agree to coordinated matters of Foreign
Policy, for instance by silent consent, since it cannot
commit the United Kingdom- in charge of its foreign
affairs and security- to any such agreement. The Bahamas
has also too often ignored the foreign policy coordination
effort when their relations with the USA have been seen
to suggest that the former country do other than join with
its CARICOM fellow states.
Suriname and Haiti are the two non-English-speaking
states. Suriname was accepted as a full member and has

1
behaved diligently as such since 1995, after it was clear
that that country’s military rule had ended and democracy
had been restored. It had been agreed by CARICOM that
only states with democratically elected governments
could become members. For this reason, the Dominican
Republic never became a member, even though they now
have democratic elections. They decided even after
qualifying and becoming part of the ACP family and
CARIFORUM that they did not need to become members
of a body that was not doing that well. Haiti became a
member in 2000, even though there had been clear
infractions of the voting principle in the elections
concluded in that year. CARICOM had clearly stated that
it would not allow any non-democratic state within its
membership. Sympathy for President Aristide and Haiti
won over principle.
Belize, in Central America, and Suriname, in South
America, lie at opposite ends of the Community. In
between lie Jamaica, Haiti, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua
and Barbuda, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Lucia, St.
Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad
and Tobago and Guyana.
The British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos and
Anguilla are associate members of CARICOM. There are
also observers to CARICOM, like the Cayman Islands.

MORE TO BE ADDED

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Students should visit the CARICOM website (CARICOM.ORG) for more details on CARICOM and the Caribbean Court of Justice.

CHAPTER 1 : The Early Caribbean inhabitants.

There is an African proverb that the story of the hunt will

always favour the hunter until the lion can tell his own
story. Much of what we know of the early Caribbean is from
European settler writing and needs to be interpreted in a
less Eurocentric manner. It should be realised that
Africans had come to the Caribbean area long before
Colombus, brought very advanced written technologies in
areas like medicine, architecture, the making of alloys and
astronomy and calendar making. It should also be
recognised that there were several other earlier peoples
who had settled in the region beside the Lokono (or Taino)
and the Kali’na, as the original Kalina in the Guyanas still
call themselves.
The data on the earliest inhabitants of the region is
incomplete. It is known that in the island Caribbean as well
as the Guyanas and Brazil were for the most part either
Lokono, commonly called Arawaks1 and the Kalina 2
(masculine Kalinago and Feminine Kalipunam), commonly
called Caribs 3. However, there were numerous other
Amerindian groups that occupied even islands like Trinidad
and Haiti 4. Africans were also present both in the Yucatan
Peninsula and in some of the islands. Columbus was
informed that Africans had come to Haiti from the South,

3
with an alloy of gold, silver and copper which they called
Gua na. These Africans would have become mixed with the
local groups. They would have in large measure come from
the Mande-speaking area of Northern West Africa 5. By
some estimates, the Xi, later called the Olmec (Rubber
people), may have arrived in the Yucatan by 3013 BCE 6,
the beginning date in one of the Mayan calendars. They
had brought with them advanced technologies which have
been traced back by scholars like Ivan Van Sertima to
ancient Egypt. More recent studies have shown that while
the immigrants may have had contact with or been part of
pre-pharaonic Egypt, they came with a script that can be
traced back to Mande-speaking West Africa. They mixed
with the local groups, and it is now generally accepted that
the Olmec were the civilisation from which the Maya, Aztec
and Toltec sprang.

The Lokono/Taino.
The Lokono are thought to have originated in the Amazon
Basin, probably even further East than in Suriname, where
both they and the Kalina were to be found by the earliest
European invaders, and to have migrated first to the Lesser
Antilles and then on to the Greater Antilles and the
Bahamas. There were other peoples in this area and it
seems that the Lokono and the Kalina often fought to bring
more of the ethnic groups within their fold to make their
control over parts of the Guyanas more forceful. They were
therefore in the entire CARICOM space outside Belize. The
Kalina came from the same area, as some groups like the
Surinen of Suriname are classified as Kalina, while there
is still a thriving Kali’na settlement in French Guyana 7.
The theory is that they followed the Lokono, pushing them
further and further North. Although these two groups
seemed often at war (mainly it seems to capture women or

4
to enlarge their territory) it would nonetheless seem that
they settled together along with some Africans in Barbados
and jointly named it Ichirouganaim, Ichi being Lokono, Rou
Kalina and Ganaim West African. Indeed it is unlikely that
the Portuguese who named the Island os Barbados,
meaning the bearded ones would have done so as a result
of the bearded fig trees as the British historian Richard
Ligon tentatively suggests, since tree is feminine in
Portuguese. It is far more likely that they were referring to
a group of bearded men they found on the island. Since
Amerindians are remarkably short of facial hair, the men
seen must have been a mix of African and Amerindian.
Barbuda is more likely to have been so named for its trees.
Three Lokono features also suggest that they may have
been in contact with West Africans. They were, unlike other
Amerindian groupings in the area, matrilineal; their leaders
sat on a wooden stool to indicate their rank; they buried
their royalty with a few of their servants and their
treasured possessions; and they practised a form of
ancestral worship very similar to that of West Africans in
general..
The Lokono were a sedentary group who relied on their
farming for sustenance. They also ate small animals and
some fish, but their main search for food led them to a few
of the tubers and fruit we still eat today, like cassava, the
sweet potato {batata} and the vast range of fruit called
apple that are not apples- pineapple, mammy apple 8 or
sugar apple,
They lived in simple straw houses (caney) which were
circular and therefore resistant to high winds. The chief or
cacique however lived in a bigger, four-sided house (bohio),
built on the side of the central town square where they
played the game batey or did ceremonial or festive dancing.
He also had several wives, again a privilege in traditional

5
African society of someone capable of maintaining them.
His office was hereditary in the matrilineal fashion 9. He
could be succeeded by either a man or a woman. Beneath
him was a sub-chief, at the village level, responsible for
hunting, fishing, food distribution in times of scarcity and
ensuring public order.
There were also priests who performed the various
ceremonies to the variety of deities, representing their God,
the Creator, and there were healers (shamans) who tended
to the sick. What we know of the early indigenous people of
the region comes largely from Columbus and the early
Spanish settlers/priests. They painted the Lokono or Taino
as passive, largely because they were very welcoming when
the Spaniards arrived and were prepared to trade food and
slaves with the newcomers for metal implements like hoes.
However, when once the Spaniards in their quest for gold
decided forcibly to enslave the Lokono to work in the
mines, there was some notable Lokono resistance. Names
like Hatuey, Guama in Cuba, Enrique and the Ciguayan
are still known in the story of resistance 10. While Hatuey
when caught and asked to repent indicated that he would
rather go to hell than any heaven that might be inhabited
by Spaniards, El Ciguayo got hold of a Spanish steel lance
and together with twelve other Amerindians spread panic
among the Spanish miners by ambushing them almost at
every turn.
But this was all too late. By then, harsh Spanish treatment
in the same mines or the diseases the Europeans had
brought with them had virtually wiped out the local
population. As Gonzalo de Oviedo y Valdez opined at the
time: “I feel they (the Lokono/Taino) are more than
peaceful; they are destroyed”. The young Catholic priest,
Bartolomeo de las Casas, provided an even more horrifying
picture. He told of enslavement, rape and the most brutal

6
of murders perpetrated in the name of Christiaanity.
Xaragua was supposed to have been the most sophisticated
of Lokono settlements in what was renamed by the
Spaniards Hispaniola. On the gentlest of invitations, the
Governor of the island went to Xaragua and put the
cacique and other leaders into a straw hut and set it afire.
Soldiers rummaged through the villages killing women and
children in the most savage manner. Occasionally, they
would tie a group of them together and burn them over a
slow fire. Interestingly too, when Las Casas reported the
laughter of some 7000 innocents in this manner to an
agent of the Spanish king, the agent is reported to have
said “What is the death of 7000 Taino to me?” Whever
remained alive were captured and became slaves working
in the fields to produce food or in the mines to dig up
gold11.
The Lokono continued to live, as they had always done in
the Guyanas and were known to have traded with Sir
Walter Raleigh on his visit to the area in 1596, a point at
which European struggles for control of the trade was
alredy in full force.

1. The title Aruacan was used by the Spaniards, but the name
Arawak was first used by a Swedish anthropologist, Sven Loven in
1935!
2 Father Raymond Breton who lived with the Kalina in Dominica
between 1641 and 1655.
3 Columbus first called them Canima or Cariban. the word from
which cannibal is derived.
4 In Trinidad alone there were the Nepoio (related linguistically
to the Kalina), the Shebao, and the Chaguanes etc. In Haiti-initially
the entire island was called Ayiti- were also the Gaunini, who
were of African descent and who tipped their spears with an alloy

7
 that evidently had gold, copper and silver in it in the same
proportions as the same alloy –gua na -found among the Mande
(Van Sertima). These Africans were said to have come from the
South.
5. The Mande word for writing is still the same word Mayans
use. The many distinctly African heads which they left along with
other similar artefacts indicate an undoubted West African
connection that tallies with the Mayan ancestry tree.
6. Throughout the text CE (the Common Era) and BCE (before the
Common Era) are used instead of the more dated form BC and AD.
7. The Kalina did not eat the mammy apple as they believed it to be
the fruit of the dead.
8. This means that he would be succeeded not by his own
offspring, but by the son or daughter of his sister.
9. “Taino” is said to mean gentle in the Lokono language. Lokono
simply means people, as
does Xi or Bantu.
10. See article by Kim Johnson: Race and History. Much of the detail
in this story are from Kim Johnson.

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The KALINA
In dealing with the Kalina, it must be remembered that the
view of them left by the Spaniards was not only
Eurocentric, but based on their self-inteest. The same
Kalina who were reportedly so fierce and unfriendly were
among the Amerindian peoples who traded with Sir Walter
Raleigh when he came to South America in 1596 1. Both
Kalina and Lokono traded with him then. The Kalina were
feared by the Spaniards as well as later Europeans in the
Lesser Antilles. They were not cannibals, as Columbus
suggested in order to circumvent Queen Isabella’s order not
to harm her Indians. He therefore determined that the
Kalina were savage cannibals and were not protected.
No evidence has however surfaced of their cannibalism.
What perhaps triggered this accusation or was simply the
base for it may have been the Kalina festival, called
Epekotono. This was a gathering of Kalina families from far
and wide for a ceremony practised by the Kaliona two or
three years after the burial of a dead relative. The bones
would be dug up for the ceremony.This was so that the
spirit of the dead person could be liberated from this world
and go to the spirit world2. The placing of the bones in a
household was not a cannibalistic ceremony, but one of
respect for the ancestor. Interestingly too, the Kalina, like
the Lokono, both then and now, held their lands in
common and thus, it was the usufruct of the land to which
the user was entitled.
The Kalina were undoubtedly less gentle than the Lokono
had been as the Spaniards discovered when, after they had
exhausted what gold was to be found in Haiti3, they turned

9
to the pearl fisheries of Trinidad and Margarita. When in
the process, the Spaniards tried to capture some Kalina as
slaves, they met a fierce resistance. This was probably the
point at which the Kalina were deemed fierce. They were,
however, fiercely protective of their homeland as they still
are today.

The island Kalina, as distinct from the Kalina of the

Guyanas, were a semi-nomadic group who relied more on
the sea and hunting for their food than the Lokono did.
They also traded with other groups in the Region. They
were primarily warriors. Their system of socialisation was
so geared. In their original homes in the Guyanas, the
Kalina and the Lokono struggled for control of the other
local peoples to expand their sphere of influence. To this
end, the Kalina, for instance would raid the Awala and
snatch their women, since more women meant a larger
Kalina population. The many captured Kalipunam among
the Kalinago in the Kalina people was one reason why
initially there was some confusion about the linguistic
origin of the Kalina. The women (kalipunam) brought with
them their language of origin. While some of the Kalinago
became priests (boyez), the majority were trained to be
warriors. This is to some extent displayed in the difference
between the bracelet women wore, the rassada, made of
amber, seeds etc and the necklace men wore, the caracoli,
made of small bones and victims’ teeth. Boys and girls were
separated early, with the girls being trained to farm, bear
children, make hammocks and do other domestic chores;
the boys were trained to be warriors or priests. Each Kalina
family was separate and more or less administered their
own laws. They would, however, be joined by the
Epekotono.

10
 Interestingly the the Kalina were patrilineal. The military
leader or Oboutu was chosen on the basis of his military
skill, not on the basis of his blood line. His civilian
alternative or tiubutuli hauthe had as his main job to
protect the Kalina population from attack. He made laws
and supervised activities like fishing, hunting etc. He also
had responsibility for making decisions at the village level
along with the elders and retired warriors. The priests
(boyez) or shamans dealt with religious duties as well as
with illnesses. They used herbs as well as incantations to
heal. Like the Maya who had a more advanced knowledge
of medicine, they believed that illnesses were also spiritual
matters.
The Spaniards did not have an easy task defeating the
Kalina. With the more settled and traditional Lokono, when
once the cacique was captured, subdued or killed, the
society virtually fell apart. However, with the Kalina, when
the Oboutu died in battle, a replacement immediately took
over the military leadership. Perhaps for this reason, the
Kalina still exist to this day in Dominica, where they have
long held sway. They also mixed with rebelling Africans in
St. Vincent and the Grenadines to form the Garifuna, who
in turn resisted the British until the late nineteenth
century4. They were then driven onto a barren island and
after some 50% of the population had starved to death, the
remainder of the more African-looking Garifuna were later
deported to what was then British Honduras, now Belize.
They have continued to thrive in contemporary Belize. The
African element of that mixture brought with it advanced
farming techniques as well as some of the battle skills the
Kalina themselves clearly possessed and used to even
enslave some of the Europeans.
The Kalina had held sway in St. Vincent and Dominica for
quite a while, even when other Europeans had come to the

11
Region. They even held several Europeans as slaves 5. None
of these captives was recorded to have been eaten. They
were however traded between the Europeans.
Unfortunately, whenever the Kalina made an alliance with
a European power, it did not work to their advantage. They
were subsequently betrayed.
Both the Kalina and Lokono had very developed religious
ideas. One reason why they went to their ancestors for
guidance was that, as in Africa, the concept was that all
land and property belonged not only to the living, but also
to those not yet born and those who had passed on. They
also believed in heaven and hell, although their hell was
most unlike the Christian concept of hell. Bravery was
rewarded by a special heaven. The brave who died in battle
went to an island of plenty, where they were served by
captive slaves. The cowardly went to a desertified place
where they were the servants of the Lokono.
They also believed in an evil spirit called the Mabouya, for
whom they had to make special sacrifices. The Lokono on
the other hand kept zemis or little images in their homes.
They too prayed through these or through the ancestors to
the Creator God most people believe in.
What the Kalina and Lokono left us was a great variety of
food, fruit and prepared dishes. Their main food crop was
the cassava. They dried it, removing the poison in one form
of the tuber; they made flour and bread from it and they
also prepared casareep, the vital ingredient in pepperpot.
They also left us the word barbeque. Because of their belief
in deities whom they consider in control of, inter alia, the
weather, they have left us the word hurricane, after their
thunder deity. Since the Kalina did not sleep on the floor,
but on woven mats strung between two poles, they also left
us the word hammock. They also left us a long list of place
names like Cuba, Haiti, Quisqueya, Guyana, Suriname6,

12
and the names of all the islands between Antigua and
Trinidad. Interestingly too, they left us with the name of a
small islet off Carriacou, Mabuya, the Kalina evil spirit.
Columbus stumbled on to several small nations believing
that he had discovered India. He and his men wreaked
havoc on the indigenous people, virtually wiping out the
island Lokono by cruel treatment. The Spaniards also
started the chattel slavery which was to dominate the
Caribbean for centuries. Bartolomede de las Casas was
soon to recommend that Africans be used as slaves instead
of the Lokono. He later regretted this recommendation.

13
1 Gerard Collomb and Felix Tiouka: “Na’na Kali’na”.
The Spaniards needed slaves here too, but when they decided to
kidnap some Kalina in Trinidad, they discovered that they now had a
fierce new enemy.
2.Gerard Collomb
3. Van Sertima
4 The French and British were now competing with the Spaniards for
control of the islands
5. Frere Breton
6. Suriname is supposed to have been named after the Surinen found
there.

Students should read Kim Johnson’s article in Race and History: Caribs
and Arawaks
And Irving Rouse’s: The Taino.

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The MAYA
Although the Olmec civilisation, replete with a script and a
high level of technical knowledge, settled in the Northern
Yucatan, its successors, the Aztec and the Maya chose to
move in opposite directions. The Aztec moved to Central
Mexico, while the bulk of the Maya settled as far south as
Guatemala and Honduras in Central America. At its height,
the Mayan city states stretched from what are now the
southern states of Mexico1, through Belize and Guatemala,
Honduras and El Salvaddor. The Mayan Empire was
surprisingly built mainly in the forests of Central America.
It was not a conventional Empire, but more of a collection
of city states, each with replete with its own ruler, class
system and technology. Most of the monuments that
remain in Mexico, Belize and Guatemala are in ruin and
several have been recovered only in modern times. One of
the latest discovered was Mirador, arguably the largest of
all the pyramids. Some of the step pyramids may have been
Olmec structuresa built over. Why did they concentrate
their settlements in the forests of Central America? We do

15
not exactly know. Could it be that they were pushed
southward by one or other groups, like the Toltec? Again
we do not know. It could even have been one of the periods
of drought which evidently brought the great Maya
civilisation to a crashing halt just before the arrival of the
Spanish.
The Maya were very highly advanced. They had the
concept of zero and they studied the Venus star system as
well as the movement of the Sun in great detail. They had
five different calendars which allowed them to be able to
predict solar eclipses and the like with unerring accuracy.
Their combined calendars lose only one day in 6000 years,
which is considerably better than the one we use today.
They also observed the poitions of other stars and the
Moon and Sun to help them determine when to plant and
when to reap. This science may have originated in the need
of their African forbears to know exactly when to plant their
crops. Much, if not most, of this knowledge had been
brought to the area by the Olmec.
It seems that the bulk of Maya populations lived outside
the city in thatched roof houses, usually of one room only
and with no windows. These houses were for sleeping. Most
of their other activities took place in communal areas. The
city centres still dominate the landscape in this segment of
the Caribbean. The ruling class of the halach uinic2, the
nobility and the priests tended to live in the city. Peasants
and slaves brought the food they cultivated into the city to
provide for this class. The main crop was maize, a crop
possibly first planted by the Maya,3 which must have
grown in great quantities to support what was before the
Spanish invasion a large population. In the forest they
practised slash and burn cultivation techniques (mizpa),
felling and burning trees and using the ash as fertiliser.
This method was as little used as possible and replaced by

16
more sophisticated farming techniques.However, there is
evidence that they may have arrived at concocting a
fertiliser, which made even the unsuitable forest soil
produce for longer periods. They also terraced hillsides and
filled in swamp areas, providing fish from the remaining
water and corn, squash and beans from the created land.
On land that they had cultivated, they used fallow farming
techniques, so that the land would always be productive.
Food was often traded between city states. The currency
normally used was cacao beans.
They were also known to have used aqueducts to bring
water down to the needed areas as well as creating dams
for water storage. In periods of great drought, however, the
water in such dams became too highly loaded with nitrates
making that water unpotable and possibly not very suitable
for irrigation. One such dam still exists outside Chichen
Itza, in the province of Quintano Roo.
The Maya wrote thousands of manuscripts and books, few
of which remain today. They wrote on tree bark and bound
this in leather. The Spaniards in their religious zeal and
ignorance burnt most of this material. What remains are
generally preserved in museums in Europe. The
exceptional remaining book was their Popul Vuh, their
book of origins, sometimes referred to as the Mayan Bible.
Copies of this are now available in English.
The Maya built roads between the various city states. City
states were entitities in themselves with their own rulers,
temples, pyramids and more than one Mayan dialect.
Today in Belize with a population of about 30,000, for
instance, there are three dialects, Yucatec, Mopan and
Keche. Belize is said to have been inhabited by some one
million Maya at the height of their civilisation. The Maya
were great architects. They built step pyramids, on top of
which were temples. They also built palaces, ball parks

17
and observatories to determine when the equinoxes fell and
to calculate when an eclispse of Venus, the Moon or the
Sun would occur. The pyramids were awe-inspirng works
of art. They are said to have used no metal tools while
working with local limestone and stucco. They sometimes
built corbelled arches, which are difficult even in modern
architecture. At Chichen Itza, the pyramid was so built that
at the equinox, a shadow would appear down the steps of
the pyramid to make it look like a slithering serpent. This
was art of a religious symbolism.
The temples were the domain of the priests, who like
ancient Egypian priests, were not only religious performers,
but also scientists and mathematicians, inter alia. The
Mayan pantheon consisted of many dieties. The Maya were
panthesits. They believed that God existed in all living
phenomena in the form of the various dieties. They believed
that it was necessary to perform sacrifices to these dieties.
They used animal sacrifices as well as human ones. Priests
also pricked the vein of their penises to produce blood for
sacrifice. Two other areas of sacrifice were of captured
rulers of a neighbouring city state or ball players in a game,
where the players had to get a rubber ball through a hoop
without using their hands or feet. All sacificed victims had
their hearts surgically removed after being anaesthecised .
Such sacrificial persons would go to Heaven and not to the
Underworld.
Mayan mathematics are often the focus of the study of this
people. They operated on a basis of twenty (vigesimal)
unlike our decimal system of today. They used a simple dot
for one, a line for 5 and a shell for zero. It should be noted
that the concept of zero was not readily kown in Europe at
the time. It thus was never the dividing line between the
negative (like BCE) and the positive (CE). Thus even today,
we move directly from BCE to CE. The Maya were able to

18
mutiply and divide as well as add in the millions by
manipulating the position of their three symbols. This
system made it possible for even simple traders to calculate
their costs, prices and profits. This mathematical genius
was also responsible for their calculations involving the
stars, their calendars and even the dosage administered in
their medicines.
Mayan medicine was far ahead of European medicine at
the time. They performed evidently successful brain
operations, they had listed a number of diseases and
determined which herbs were to be used for which
ailments. Cacao was one of their healing plants as well as
being their currency. They were good at fixing teeth. Here
they used jade to repace lost teeth,and iron pyrite to fill
them. They were even better at replacing limbs, where they
used both jade and wood. Their surgery was perfomed with
sharp obsidian blades, a practice which still exists among
modern surgeons since obsidian cuts are cleaner and heal
more readily. Partly as a result of Mayam medical skills,
the life expectancy of a Maya was about 54 years as
compared to a French person of 900CE. (Cf a Barbadian
life expectancy in 1930 CE.
Some researchers credit the Maya with the spread of maize
throughout North America. It is interesting that maize
cannot proliferate on its own. The seeds cling too firmly to
the cob for this to happen. How the Maya knew to dislodge
the grain from what was probably a wild maize plant, one
does not now know; but what was clear is that the act of
planting the maize was deliberate, since a small amount of
fertiliser was placed in the hole along with the maize
grains. The deity associated with maize was also one of the
more important Mayan deities.
It is not certain how the Mayan civilisation disintegrated.
One assumption was that there was an extended period of

19
drought, which made food scarce and the various city
states fought each other to the death. At this point, there
seems to have been a migration to southern Yucatan, with
Chichen Itza becoming the focal point of what was left of
Mayan aristocracy. However, by the time the Spaniards
arrived, Mayan civilisation was in decline.

1.The best preserved of Mayan sites is probably

Chichen Itza in Mexico, but Palenque, Tikal and
Mirador were probably more important in their day.
Mirador, recently uncovered is said to be possiblly
larger than the Great Pyramid at Giza.
2. The halac uinic was their ruler.
3. Maize eventually became the main crop of North
America. Toay many of the original species have
disappeared with the creation of cheaper GM strains
from Monsanto.

20
GOVERNANCE
Governance, in so far as it is different from government, is
the process or manner of governing. Thus we can say that
Government is the machinery- Parliament, the Public
Service etc- and governance is the process. In more modern
times, there is talk of good governance and poor
governance. Good governance implies good use of national
resources, fairness and a concern in the process for the
entire population. Poor governance is usually a buzz word
for corrupt and inept governing. Governance may apply
equally to governments, corporations or NGOs. Indeed, in
modern times, each one of these groups along with what is
called civil society plays a pivotal role in governance.

From the beginnings of European society, the matter of

governance was an issue of philosophical thought. This
does not mean that there was no philosophical thought
before1; It has been reasonably argued that what was
considered Greek philosophy was in fact learned in Egypt
2. The reality is that much of our own contemporary
thinking is based on what these earlier thinkers
postulated. It is not the intention of this book to deal in
detail with all the so-called early philosophers, but to give
an overview which it is hoped the student will supplement
by further study. Thus among the Greeks, we will look
briefly at Plato and Aristotle, even though mathematical
philosophers like Pythagoras, who like Plato had studied in
Egypt were considered of near equal importance.
With respect to later European philosophers, we will look at
Machiavelli, Locke, Montesquieu and Marx. One should
also look at other philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau

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and possibly one of the greatest exponents on democracy,
Karl Popper.

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