Peeling iron fretwork and painted shut jalousies harken back to a time when craftsmanship was valued.
The craftsmen themselves, more often than not, were black labourers who lived in barrack yards to the east of the city and moved through the streets on their way to work, along with stevedores, street traders and hired help for the wealthy. Some were able to access the limited education available and find employment as clerks in businesses and the lower ranks of the public service. Higher administrative positions went to the coloured scion of old plantation families. Beyond St James, the Indian presence had barely penetrated the capital.
Business owners were the white British and French creole elite. Everyone had a place and knew it.
It was here that a young Syrian immigrant would attempt to make his mark. Given the accolades and homage paid to Dr Anthony N Sabga since his death last week, he more than succeeded.
From a cramped 12 by 20-foot haberdashery on 73 Queen Street, to a conglomerate of over 70 companies with interests across the Caribbean and Latin America, in more ways than one, Sabga ushered in a new kind, and a new way of doing business in TT.
For many Trinbagonians, the Sabga name and by extension, the Syrian community, is “big business”.
This is perhaps Sabga’s most important legacy, this shift away from the economic dominance of Scottish trading interests such as Geddes Grant and Alstons, to what was this small and relatively powerless immigrant community.
Gerry Besson, historian and publisher, said that Sabga’s almost intuitive ability to “read the times” was a critical attribute to his success.
No less important was his ability to also ride the wave of them.
The first wave, said Besson, came in the early 1900s, when Syrians and Lebanese began arriving in TT. Cocoa was still profitable and the money “trickled down” through the society. It was this prosperity that allowed the first of the immigrants to set up as traders.
Among them was Sabga’s father, who ran N S Sabga. Anthony found himself having to take over the business at 14, when his father returned to Syria. It was this business that would provide the seed capital for him to go off on his own eventually in his early 20s.
This was right after World War II and the country was experiencing another period of prosperity. Sugar cane was still profitable and oil production was steadily increasing.
Raymond Ramcharitar, historian and columnist, who collaborated with Sabga on his autobiography, A Will and A Way, recounted that Sabga, on the advice of a salesman named Richard Brathwaite, became an importer. He travelled to Europe and earned several contracts to distribute brands in TT.
Here again was the Sabga intuition at work. He sensed that people would be hungry to spend on items that made them seem more modern.
Ramcharitar said he took refrigerators around the country on the back of a Volkswagen truck and left them in the homes of those who ordinarily would not have been able to afford such luxuries.
When he came to collect them some time later, the householders were sold on the idea of owning it.
Apart from this innovative marketing method, Sabga was one of the first pioneers of hire-purchase as a business model on a mass scale in TT. According to Besson, Sabga had grown up on Nelson Street among blacks and knew them.
Based on his interactions, he was one of the first to give them credit to purchase items at his Standard stores, where few were doing it at the time, always confident that they would repay.
He was again ahead of the curve in the 1960s when then prime minister Eric Williams called for diversification of the economy away from export of primary goods to export of manufactured items. While several of his compatriots continued to sell cloth, Sabga started Ansa Industries, and through the next decade and a half entered light manufacturing, the garment and construction industries, agriculture and food processing.
Along the way though, he engendered the resentment of the white creole business community, who watched as he entered areas previously marked off as their exclusive enclaves.
The recessionary 1980s, though, would cement the shift as one of the largest and oldest of the white concerns, McEnearny Alstons was threatened with closure.
Ramcharitar said while many business interests were folding and leaving TT, Sabga stayed. Ramcharitar credits his purchase of the McEnearny Alstons group for reducing potential negative effects of its closure on the economy.
“Could you imagine what would have happened if the economy had lost those 3,000 jobs as represented by McEnearny Alstons? The country would have taken much longer to recover,” said Ramcharitar.
“He kept those 21 companies going, factories running. If you are talking legacy, then to me, these would be the preservation of Ansa McAl, the growing of it, the acquisition of trans-national businesses and the establishment of the Ansa Merchant Bank.” Ramcharitar also counted the establishment of the Ansa Psychological Research Centre and funding for the Anthony N Sabga School for Entrepreneurship and the Guardian Media School of Journalism as key achievements of the business magnate.
But Besson and Ramcharitar both recognise the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence as Sabga’s seminal achievement.
Ramcharitar said the award scheme created a network of scientists, artistes and entrepreneurs, all smart and talented people, who now know each other and can act as catalysts for Caribbean development.
““It shines a light on bright, young people,” said Besson, giving them the funding to develop opportunities that they could not before.
And this Besson said, is perhaps where the true genius of the man who is now gone lay, the fact that he came full circle.
Sabga, a poor Syrian immigrant, he said, understood his time and the country, created wealth and opportunities for himself, grew and learned from them, and then gave back to the community.
