Peter Josie
Peter Josie is an inactive Saint Lucia politician and trade unionist. He served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1974 to 1982 and again from 1987 to 1997. He served as President of the Seaman and Waterfront Workers Union, the National Farmers Union, the Technical and Allied Workers Union. He was leader of the St Lucia Labour Party and the Organisation for National Enlightenment.
Career
Peter Josie was born in Vieux-Fort, the southernmost town of Saint Lucia. He attended St. Mary's College, the all boys' elite secondary school in Castries. He earned a bachelor's degree in Agronomy from the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. Josie is the only surviving member of the St Lucia group of delegates which discussed and negotiated independence for St Lucia from the British Government.
The firebrand leftist Peter Josie was an attendee at the famous but secret meeting of leftist minds on the minuscule Rat Island in 1970, which included members of Grenada's future revolutionary leadership. At the time governments weresuspicious of the motives of these new entrants into the political fray. So fearful were they that they banned the revolutionaries from entering several territories. In one such case on April 16, 1970 S.R. Slater, the Minister of Home Affairs in St Vincent deemed Josie, together with other activists as Dave Darbeau, Geddes Granger (now Makandal Daaga) and Robert "Bobby" Clarke, to be a prohibited immigrant. Josie was the perfect foil for the suave Oxford educated Odlum. Whilst Odlum deployed his oratorical skills laced with a command of sometimes stuffy but entertaining English, Josie was more direct making effective use of the widely spoken French Creole to sometimes telling incendiary effect.
