Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (4 page)

Bradshaw sees himself as a father
to his people, a stern and knowing and loving father who knows best for his
children. The violent aspects of paternalism are strong in him; when St. Kitts
became semi-independent in 1967, he reintroduced flogging for criminal
offenses.

There is nothing a father likes less
than being rejected by one of his children, and Robert Bradshaw has felt like a
spurned father in re Anguilla ever since 1956. "I will not rest," he
was quoted as saying, shortly after the election, "until I have reduced
that place to a desert." He said this at a speech in
Basseterre
's
Pall Mall Square
, at one
time the largest slave market in the
West Indies
. He
always makes this sort of remark in public, either in speeches at open meetings
or over St. Kitts's Government-controlled radio station ZIZ; but then
afterward, when he's feeling calmer, he denies he said any such thing. His
political opposition on St. Kitts has taken to tape-recording his
announcements—but that's all right, he denies them anyway.

He denies, for instance, that he
ever said of the Anguillans, "I will put salt in their coffee, bones in
their rice and sand in their sugar." Or that he varied the formula
slightly on another occasion by saying, "I will put bones in their rice
and pepper in their soup." Or that his suggestion for
Anguilla
's
future development was that "they will have to suck each other's
bones."

None of these statements, despite
the subsequent denials, encouraged the Anguillans much. The
London
Sunday Times
remarked in 1969, "The culmination of Bradsliaw's
increasingly idiosyncratic rule has been his boast that he is the spiritual
descendant of Henri Christophe, the 19th century dictator of
Haiti
.
Since Christophe achieved, even in that country's bloodstained annals, a unique
notoriety for his cruelty, he is not perhaps the most reassuring hero."

How did it affect the Anguillans,
over the years, having Robert Bradshaw as their Premier? Well, for example, the
British had installed a telephone system on
Anguilla
shortly after the First World War—fourteen phones, hand-cranked. When Hurricane
Donna flattened the island in 1960, all the poles were knocked down. The St.
Kitts Government sent up some repairmen, but instead of fixing the poles they
took away the central-office equipment.
Anguilla
went
without telephones for twelve years.

Then there was the pier. Anguilla
has never had a cargo pier where seagoing vessels could be off-loaded;
everything delivered to the island—and everything except weeds has to be
delivered—had to be brought in by small boat from ships anchored offshore. As
the Anguillans tell it, they asked
Canada
for aid money to build a pier. The money was sent to the central Government on
St. Kitts, and the pier was built— on St. Kitts. It was named Anguilla Pier.

While on St. Kitts in 1970, I
visited Anguilla Pier, which wasn't all that easy to do. It's at
Sandy
Point
, on the opposite side of the
island from the capital of
Basseterre
and all the shipping. There are no storage sheds, there is no industry in the
area, there isn't even a town there. I couldn't swear to it, but the crane
didn't look operable; my impression was that it had rusted into place. Some
young boys were playing around the pier and the ocean was empty as far as the
eye could see.

Pier, phones; the list goes on. No
general electricity. Three hundred and fifty children in a one-room
schoolhouse. Less than a mile and a half of paved road. Medical facilities that
frequently had operations performed by the light of a hurricane lamp, and that
gave funds to transport a maximum of two emergency patients a year to an
off-island hospital.

The Anguillans could complain, but
all communication with
Britain
had to go through the St Kitts Government and complaints seemed to lose their
force and urgency in transition.

But even though the Anguillans
couldn't officially speak directly to
Great
Britain
, they were soothed somewhat by the
knowledge that at least
Great Britain
was there. Bradshaw might stick his thumb in Anguilla's eye every once in a
while, but so long as St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla was a part of the British
colonial structure, Bradshaw had to be at least somewhat restrained.

Then came independence.

"Hurrah! hurrah!
we bring the Jubilee! Hurrah! hurrah! the flag that makes you free!"

—Henry Clay Work, "Marching Through
Georgia
"

As of 1966 the British had, for the
moment, given up the idea of a federation in the
West Indies
.
But only for the moment. Dr. Eric
Williams, Prime
Minister of Trinidad-Tobago, was quoted as recently as 1969 as hoping to see a
new West Indies Federation in effect by 1975; it is known he has British
support in his dream. But back in 1966 the British were temporarily weary of
West Indies Federations, and as a result they began to cast about for some new
way to cast off all those islands.

The new idea they came up with was
something they dubbed an
Associated
State
.

Generally speaking, the idea of an
Associated
State
is that the nations internal
affairs are to be handled by itself, while its external affairs are handled by
Great
Britain
. Financial aid for development
schemes also continues to flow to the
Associated
State
from
Britain
,
and the plan is that Associated Statehood is a temporary way station on the
road to complete independence.

Associated Statehood was offered to
all the flotsam still floating after the capsize of the West Indies Federation,
and six of the seven survivors agreed to it, only Montserrat choosing to remain
a colony.

An
Associated
State
bears one ominous similarity
to a federation; it is preceded by a conference. In
London
in May of 1966, a Constitutional Conference took place to consider the
Associated State of St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla.
February 27, 1967
, was the target date for
Statehood Day, so there wasn't very much time to make sure the suit fit. The
conference delegates included Robert Bradshaw, Paul Southwell and Basil Dias
from
St.
Kitts,
Eugene
Walwytt from
Nevis
and Peter Adams from
Anguilla
.
Walwyn was one of the two Nevi-sian members of the Legislative Council on St.
Kitts, and
Adams
was the Anguillan member of the
Legislative Council. Remember the hurricane, the drought, the gale and the
famine back in 1822? Remember the politicians' response to it all? They'd
established an Anguillan representative in the St. Kitts assembly. As of 1966
that Anguillan representative was Peter Adams.

The conference produced proposals
for a constitution and all the delegates agreed the proposals were good and
thereby signed the report, including Peter Adams. Later on, the British and
Kittitians were to claim that Peter Adams, speaking for all Anguillans
everywhere, had agreed to anything Robert Bradshaw might think up, but Adams
himself insisted that he had merely signed a Conference Report that said that
such-and-such proposals were worth looking into. And in fact, the Anguillans
asked for direct administration from
Great
Britain
twice
in 1966, in June and
October; they were ignored.

The conference was followed by an
election. In St. Kitts there are two political parties: the Labour Party, which
Bradshaw leads and which is supported mainly by the black work force, and the
People's Action Movement (PAM), which is supported mainly by the merchant
middle class, the professional class and the fifteen or so rich white families
who own almost all the land on the island. (For the most part, the natives live
around the fringe of the island, in the narrow border between the road and the
sea; nearly everything else is owned by the whites and is mostly given over to
sugar.)

On
Nevis
,
there is no Labour Party, but there is the United National Movement, led by
Eugene Walwyn, one of the
London
conference delegates, who declared after the election that he would support
Bradshaw and the Labour Party in the Legislative Council. PAM put up a man to
oppose him, and the division of support for UNM and PAM on
Nevis
was about the same as for Labour and PAM on St. Kitts.

If St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla
were really the unitary state it's supposed to be, the same general political
breakdown should exist on
Anguilla
as on the other two.
There should be something, like PAM for the middle and upper classes and
something like the Labour Party for the workers. But it doesn't work that way.
Anguilla
has never had any political parties at all; everybody runs for everything as an
independent. That's
Anguilla
all over, that absolutely
sums up the place. Everybody runs for everything as an independent. Shortly
before the 1966 election Peter Adams did declare he'd joined PAM, but that
meant very little on
Anguilla
.

The elections didn't change much.
The Labour Party had St. Kitts's seven seats on the Legislative Council before
the election and still had them after. Eugene Walwyn was reelected to one of
the two Nevisian seats, and a PAM candidate, Fred Parris, won the other. And
Peter Adams beat out two independents (two
other
independents, that is)
for the
Anguilla
seat.

Now we have something strange. PAM
is primarily a Kit-titian political party, led by a Kittitian named Dr. William
Herbert. But Dr. Herbert didn't win a seat on the Legislative Council, nor did
any other PAM candidate from St. Kitts, so by default the position of Leader of
the Opposition fell to Peter Adams, the man from Anguilla, who had joined the
party about two months before, had always been an independent, and had aligned
himself with PAM only because of short-range considerations concerning the
proposed constitution and independence. Still, it gave the British a reassuring
feeling of familiarity to know that the St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla
Legislative Council had a Leader of the Opposition; it showed that the concept
of British democracy and parliamentary rule had taken root in this exotic soil.

The Anguillans had been unhappy for
144 years about being governed from St. Kitts, and the Nevisians were
themselves a little leery of the Kittitians' concern for their future.
Therefore they were pleased that one of the proposals from the Constitutional
Conference had been the establishment of some sort of local-government Councils
for both
Anguilla
and
Nevis
, to
operate in addition to the Legislative Council and the central Government on
St. Kitts.

The British had promised to send to
the islands a "local government expert" to help set up the two new
Councils. Since the British were going to send this man all the way across the
Atlantic
the St. Kitts Government decided he ought to have somebody to talk to, so on
October 22, 1966
, five months after
the conference, a committee was appointed to talk to him. *

The 1970 Report of the Commission
of Inquiry into the problem of
Anguilla
(called the
Wooding Report) gives the most succinct description of what did and did not
happen next:

No
meeting of the committee having been convened for some time, Mr. Adams enquired
of the Chief Minister (Robert Bradshaw) about the establishment of local
government in
Nevis
and
Anguilla
. Later, when it became known that the local
government expert would be arriving in January the committee was summoned to
meet on
23 December, 1966
. We were told in evidence that the meeting was called
at short notice and, because Mr. Adams was then in
Anguilla
, he was not notified.

On
January 7, 1967
, fifteen days after that meeting, the*
committee sent Peter Adams a copy of the minutes, along with a letter
explaining why he hadn't been invited.
Adams
had copies
of the minutes made up and circulated around
Anguilla
,
the people took a look at the token suggestions for local government they
contained, and at that point the smoothly running railroad began to break down.
A group of Anguillans went to PAM headquarters on St. Kitts and warned Dr.
Herbert and the other PAM executives that if local government didn't become a
hell of a lot more local than this committee had in mind,
Anguilla
would quit its association with St. Kitts and that would be the end of it. The
people from PAM said they would see what they could do.

PAM's role in all this is just slightly
murky. The party was started by Dr. Herbert, a tall young man with a narrow
beard who looks and moves like a professional basketball player and -who talks
faster than an encyclopedia salesman. Everybody who knows him at all calls him
Billy, and the Dr. in front of his name simply means he has a university
education complete with doctorate, not that he's a medical doctor. Billy
Herbert is a lawyer, officially Dr. William V. Herbert, LL.B., Ph.D., a
graduate of
London
University
and the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies. His father, owner but not editor
of St. Kitts's only opposition newspaper, was a prominent union mediator for
years, which on an island like St. Kitts means that he carried the white folks'
words to the black folks. Since the man carrying the black folks' words to the
white folks was for many years the labor leader Robert Bradshaw, it's no
surprise that a certain antipathy developed between Bradshaw and Herbert
pere.
Given the personality of Bradshaw, it is also no surprise that he would
carry that antipathy into the next generation. When Billy Herbert came back
from
London
and offered his
services to Bradshaw and the Labour Government, Bradshaw in effect told him to
go jump in
Po-tatoe
Bay
.
Instead of which, Herbert started PAM.

Some other members of PAM are, like
Billy Herbert, "people who have been frozen out of politics by personal
whims of Bradshaw and who want to see a governmental structure a little less
autocratic and more diverse. Some middle-class members of PAM would like to see
participatory democracy in which more than the sugar workers participate. And
the rich whites want PAM in because it's the only alternative to the Labour
Party, and they want the Labour Party out because —Bradshaw's idiosyncrasies
aside—it is a
Labour
Party; that is, socialist. Creeping socialism
threatens the landed class throughout the
Caribbean
,
particularly when combined with local independence (a total parallel with the
situation several years ago throughout
Africa
).

But if PAM itself is slightly
ambiguous, there has been nothing ambiguous about Robert Bradshaw's reaction to
his Opposition's existence. The only radio station in St. Kitts is ZIZ, which
is owned and operated by the Government; PAM has not been permitted use of the
station. (There was no television station on St. Kitts, but the islanders could
pick up three channels from other islands if they had television sets;
unfortunately, the Government prohibited them from having television sets.) PAM
was forbidden to hold public meetings without first getting the approval of
Bradshaw's chief of police, which wasn't all that easy to do.

If Bradshaw was determined to
reduce
Anguilla
to a desert, he seemed determined to
reduce PAM to something less than a desert; possibly because it drew 35 per cent
of the vote its first time out, in the 1966 election, as opposed to Bradshaw's
Labour Party vote of 44 per cent. Bradshaw was operating with less than a
majority and resented it.

Few Anguillan events directly
affect any of the goals desired by the St. Kitts political party called PAM.
But indirectly they can have quite an effect. That is, if disturbances on
Anguilla
were eventually to sour
Great Britain
on Robert Bradshaw personally, and if they were sufficiently to embarrass his
Labour Party among its own rank and file, it just might do PAM some good in the
next elections. And in any event, if Bradshaw could be kept distracted by
Anguilla
,
it might be possible to delay a bit longer some of that creeping socialism.

Which is not to say that PAM is
anti-socialist, though some of its supporters certainly are. Nor is it to say
that PAM cynically fanned the flames of discontent on
Anguilla
,
though it's unlikely that PAM or any other political party on earth doesn't
contain at least a few cynics. Besides, whether PAM fanned the flames or not is
essentially irrelevant. PAM's existence had nothing to do with the fact of
Anguilla
's
rebellion;
Anguilla
had had enough no matter what
interior squabbling went on in St. Kitts. PAM's leaders could have made
agitative speeches nonstop for a month and it wouldn't have had as much
influence on the Anguillans as Robert Bradshaw saying, just once, "I will
not rest until I have reduced that place to a desert."

Anyway, by the time the
local-government expert arrived from
England
,
the third week in January 1967, it was a little too late to discuss the issue.
The trouble in the air wasn't something that could be straightened out by
adjusting some phrases in a constitution.

The expert, a man named Peter
Johnston, was scheduled to visit
Anguilla
on January 27.
The day before, the Anguillans had some public meetings to talk things over,
and to decide they didn't like any of the options offered to them. Peter Adams
was off with the local-government committee, and two of the leaders of these
meetings on
Anguilla
were men who would become
increasingly prominent in the affair: Ronald Webster and Atlin Harrigan.