National Union of Freedom Fighters
The group drew disaffected members of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), the country's leading Black Power organisation, and established a training camp in south Trinidad.
Trinidad and Tobago became independent from the United Kingdom in 1962[1]: 98 under the leadership of Eric Williams and the People's National Movement (PNM), whose political agenda was primarily nationalist and progressive.
[5]: 155 Independence moved Black and mixed-race people into the government and the public service, but much of the economy remained in the hands of British and North American corporations.
[7] The power that these corporations exercised over the local economy was seen by the Afro–Trinidadians and Tobagonian working class as standing in the way of the economic, social and political advancement they had expected from a PNM government.
The resulting arrests and trial of a group of students was a catalyst in the formation of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago.
When the mutiny occurred Brian Jeffers and other members of WOLF "took up arms" and headed into the hills above Port of Spain to connect with the mutineers who were stationed west of the city.
Inspired by the foco theory guerrilla warfare developed by Che Guevara and French philosopher Régis Debray,[11]: 469–472 Jeffers, Kernahan, and others organised a new group along revolutionary lines.
In the oilfields of south Trinidad, with its history of militant trade unionism, Kernahan found people receptive to the idea of engaging in guerrilla insurgency.
Believing revolution to be imminent, they embraced the foco theory advanced by Debray and Guevara which suggested the idea that a small, mobile guerrilla force living off the land could trigger a popular uprising.
[3]: 295 Writing from death row where he awaited execution for the murder of Police Constable Austin Sankar, Kirkland Paul wrote "our just struggle seeks to pull down from their cradle of totalitarian power and authority that despotic ruling class".
[12] On 31 May 1972 Kernahan's group, newly named the National Union of Freedom Fighters, attacked an estate police station belonging to American oil company Texaco, seized six guns and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
The following day, armed NUFF members in north Trinidad robbed the Barclays Bank branch at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies.
[8]: 54 On 23 February 1973 the Barclays Bank on Tragarete Road in Port of Spain was robbed by five men and a woman—later identified as Andrea Jacob—who stole TT$100,000 (equivalent to £20,800 at the time)[13] and a security guard's revolver.
[3]: 294 Acting on a tip, the police, led by Assistant Superintendent Randolph Burroughs, ambushed a group of NUFF members at a safe house in Laventille later that day.
[8]: 54 [3]: 294 [fn 2] Jamaican sociologist Brian Meeks described Beddoe's death to be "a major blow to the movement as he is one of the people with genuine organizational capability and the leading advocate of the line for greater propaganda, education and consolidation".
[8]: 54 On 1 June NUFF guerrillas used gelignite to destroy a transformer at the Textel Earth Station, Trinidad and Tobago's international satellite link,[14] and left a message for Burroughs "that if he wanted [them] to come in the bush for [them]".
[8]: 55 The offer of rewards for the capture of NUFF's leaders, coupled with the use of "increasingly repressive measures" to obtain information from suspects, allowed the police to ambush the northern group at their camp in Valencia on 28 August.
Protests organised at the Trinidad and Tobago High Commission in London included members of the British Black Panthers, whose leader was Altheia Jones-LeCointe, the elder sister of Jennifer and Beverly.
[1]: 104 [16]: 70 [fn 3] NUFF was only the second group in the modern English-speaking Caribbean to attempt a serious guerrilla uprising (the first being Henry's rebellion in Jamaica in 1960), and the only one able to create an insurgent campaign that was sustained over time.
[3]: 294 Journalist Owen Baptiste described them as "the sons and daughters of the very population [Williams] had so lavishly praised in 1959", people who wanted to end the oppressive economic system that the PNM government had permitted to continue despite condemning it.
[1]: 103 Meeks, similarly, wrote that NUFF attracted people who were unhappy with NJAC's ineffectiveness after the arrest of its leadership and its transition to a cultural nationalist ideology.
[25]: 28–29 Historian Matthew Quest compares NUFF's activities of "robbing banks and striking back at brutal police" to those of the Black Liberation Army in the United States.
NUFF's use of violence in challenging the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy was seen by political scientist John La Guerre as an inspiration for the Jamaat al Muslimeen.
[29][30] Jennifer Jones-Kernahan (née Jones) went on to serve as a United National Congress senator, government minister and ambassador to Cuba,[31] while her husband Jai Kernahan contested the Laventille West constituency for the People's Partnership in the 2015 Trinidad and Tobago general election.
