West Indies

ON MAY 31 of this year a new nation, on the threshold of independence, the Federation of British West Indies, died by political suicide; and one of the most imaginative experiments in peaceful transference from colonial dependency into economically viable statehood has ended in untidy ruin. The initiative for dismemberment sprang from the islands themselves, caused by the inherent difficulties of remoteness of one from another and by the political misjudgments or selfish ambitions of a handful of West Indian political leaders.

Britain, wary of being pilloried again as it was in the case of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland — for allegedly enforcing political association on colonial peoples, however obvious the economic advantages to those concerned — made no attempt to impose West Indian unity. Instead it relied with early success on letting the facts speak for themselves and giving a certain amount of advice and discreet diplomatic prodding at opportune moments.

After all, it has long been apparent, and is so today, that if any progress toward independence in more than name is to be made for all the small and scattered British Caribbean dependencies, association in one form or another remains the sole long-term answer. Only Jamaica and Trinidad have the capacity to go it alone, and these two islands are chiefly responsible for the failure of the concept of overall unity.

The failure of a dozen scattered islands to form a single nation-state was driven home when Jamaica voted No last September to continued membership in the group on any conditions. What makes it ironical is that constitutionally there was no need for the referendum that produced this fatal rebuff. The decision to bring about the federation had already been lawfully taken at its inception in 1958. Instead of being a constitutional requirement, the decision to hold the referendum was the tactical maneuver of Norman W. Manley, then Prime Minister of Jamaica, who was pro-federation and was quietly confident of success, and who intended to use his expected, decisive victory to put an end to the constant hostile sniping of his chief political rival on the island, part-Irish, part-Negro Sir Alexander Bustamente.

Swashbuckling “Busta,” as he likes to be called, who can fairly claim to be the most colorful of political personalities in a part of the world where they are plentiful, had no deep-rooted objection to federation. It was enough for him that his cousin, who had wrested power from him at an earlier election, was in favor.

Mr. Manley, a much more restrained individual than his flamboyant opponent, gauged too highly his own personal popularity and that of his party. He rated too low his cousin’s capacity to mobilize all the selfish fears and suspicions of the man in the street that Jamaica’s visions of a better life would be endangered by association with her yet poorer, smaller island neighbors. Busta made use too of the feeling prevalent at all levels of society that since Jamaica possesses more than 50 percent of the total population of the proposed federation, the island should have been its acknowledged leader, politically and economically, instead of just a senior partner.

Jamaica versus Trinidad

This feeling, understandable though it may have been, took no account of the fact that any greater allocation of power to Jamaica would certainly never have been acceptable to Trinidad, which, despite the fact that its population is only half the size of Jamaica’s 1.6 million, never will be prepared to play second fiddle to Jamaica or any other Caribbean entity or grouping. It is this rivalry which makes one question whether the federation as originally planned could have been held together under present circumstances.

Trinidad, growing increasingly restive under the egotistical leadership of its nationalistic Premier, Dr. Eric Williams, had emphasized from the start that it would not share its comparatively rich resources with the impoverished Leeward and Windward Islands unless Jamaica paid a much bigger share of revenue to the central government for overall distribution than Mr. Manley and his colleagues were prepared to concede. Jamaican reluctance to impose fresh fiscal burdens on its new post-war sources of wealth can be readily understood. These came chiefly from tourism and foreign investment, which at long last brought about a substantial rise in the standard of living of people long inured to poverty.

Jamaica’s vote against federation gave Trinidad the excuse to back out that Eric Williams had been waiting for; and he took it, claiming with narrow justice that if Jamaica could go it alone, he, with a greater apparent economic potential, at least in mineral development, could do it still better. In this context, continued federation with the smaller islands was a hindrance which could reap neither economic nor political dividends.

As first conceived, the aim of federation was not only to include all Britain’s Caribbean island possessions but also to extend the federal umbrella to its mainland dependencies of British Guiana and British Honduras. However strong the arguments undoubtedly were, and are, for British Guiana, grossly underpopulated, with a huge undeveloped land area of 83,000 square miles and barely half a million inhabitants, to link up with other states bursting at the seams with people, the chances that it would do so were never very good. British Guiana alone, in the whole of the area, has a population in which East Indians manage just to outnumber those of Negro descent and all other smaller racial groups combined. While paying lip service to the ideals of association, the Indian political leaders of this colony have no intention of allowing themselves to be subordinated to a federal government in which Negroid peoples would predominate.

As for British Honduras, a small British enclave in Central America, only officials impelled by a sense of unrealistic tidiness could ever have thought that it would wish to become politically involved with a far-off archipelago of Caribbean islands with which it never has had and never could have any true kinship at all.

Picking up the pieces

British Guiana and British Honduras being nonstarters, and Jamaica and Trinidad having withdrawn, the problem besetting both the U.K. government and the local peoples concerned is whether a possible alternative to complete disintegration might be found in some sort of political and economic association. No one pretends it could be other than a second best, but there are no good alternatives.

The total breakup of these island states could only perpetuate their colonial status and exacerbate their already grave economic difficulties. The alternative of attachment to Canada on the pattern of Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States has been mooted locally, but has not evoked any favorable response in Ottawa.

One or two of the smaller islands nearest to Trinidad, notably Grenada, have been flirting with the idea of merger. Dr. Williams has seemed mildly interested, because this could gain him several thousand extra Negroid voters to offset the growing influence in his electorate of the large Asian community, which is inexorably moving toward numerical superiority, owing to its higher birth rate. However, the only price Dr. Williams seems prepared to pay is complete political submergence to Trinidad of any such smaller island dependencies, with not even the minimum degree of autonomy acceptable to them.

The Little Eight

In default of any better solution, the prospects are for a federal association between all the Leeward and Windward Islands, often referred to as the Little Eight, comprising Barbados, the largest (166 square miles; population 232,085), which it is intended should provide the federal capital, plus Dominica (305 square miles; population 59,479), St. Lucia (233 square miles; population 86,194), Antigua (171 square miles; population 54,354), St. Kitts-NevisAnguilla (152 square miles; population 56,644), St. Vincent (150 square miles; population 80,005), Grenada (133 square miles; population 88,617), and tiny Montserrat (32 square miles; population 12,000). These Eight may be small, but what they lack in size they certainly make up for in temperamental individuality and a blissful disregard for the economic facts of life.

So long have they been accustomed to grants-in-aid and other forms of financial underpinning from the United Kingdom that there is an understandable reluctance to accept the fact that economic viability is an essential concomitant of true political sovereignty. Thus each one of the Little Eight insists that it must have, in addition to its elected representatives to the federal parliament and government, its own separate assembly and cabinet as well. Surely, it is not undemocratic to suggest that nine premiers, nine cabinets, and nine legislative houses are a little excessive for three quarters of a million inhabitants of a total land area of 1342 square miles, with a net income of $31,326,400 a year and a chronic 20 percent annual deficit.

However, because of the lack of any true bond of unity, the sole course open to Britain has been to try to secure agreement on a sensible concentration of responsibilities federally and to prune as much as possible of the heavy political trappings, and hope that time will bring a local realization of the costly folly of such excessive parochial nationalism.

After all, it is not surprising that there should be such a tenuous sense of unity when one takes into account the hundreds of miles of sea separating the islands, which prevented any significant social contact between them until the advent of the airplane. History too has played a significant role in their strongly individualistic outlooks. Barbados and Antigua alone have always been under British influence. Actually the former island is often referred to as Little England and the whole population, black, white, and mixed, is devoted to cricket and other British institutions.

All the other islands indeed had a turbulent past between the time of their discovery by Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century and the imposition of unchallenged British supremacy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the intervening three hundred years, endless battles, invasions, and rebellions had to be endured, with the ebb and flow of French and British struggles for supremacy in the Caribbean.

All these events have left their mark in varying religious loyalties and racial compositions. Even some traces remain of the original Carib Indian indigenous inhabitants. To that stock, too, have been added — apart from those elements in each ethnologic group which have kept their separate racial strains almost pure—British, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Irish, East Indian, and Dutch mixtures. The result, with a preponderant Negro stock, deriving almost entirely from emancipated African slaves, is one of the most multiracial societies in the world.

Throughout these centuries of turmoil, one factor has been constant — the capacity of the islands to produce large crops of cotton, fruits, vegetables, spices and sugar, copra, and, of course, rum, for export. Until the advent of tourism these were their only commercial resources.

Outside the Little Eight, a few other island groups are left which, principally for geographical reasons, will probably have to remain indefinitely as British colonies, unless the Caribbean area as a whole can be induced to have a second try at overall collective unity. These others are the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Caymans, and the British Virgin Islands. The Caymans have traditionally had close links with Jamaica, and perhaps as time goes on these could be strengthened.

The Turks and Caicos Islands, on the other hand, could conceivably become linked again with the economically self-sufficient Bahamas, from which they were separated in 1848; particularly if current modification of the hitherto absolute white domination in Nassau proceeds, and thus makes easier an association with islets almost 100 percent colored in population. Lastly, the British Virgin Islands are all part of the same group as the Americanowned islands of the same name, and if ought not to be beyond the wit of man to think up some form of cooperative trusteeship between Britain and the United States.