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By , , migrants had left the French Antilles for France and about , Dutch Antilleans had left for the Netherlands Premdas, A number equivalent to well over two-fifths of the home population of Puerto Rico, Suriname, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Jamaica are now located in the traditional metropolitan centres of the USA, the Netherlands, France and Britain Grosfoguel, Premdas suggests that this extensive migration requires nothing less than a reconceptualisation of the role of the State. However, at the same time many people in Commonwealth Caribbean states rely on remittances from migrants abroad as essential private economic supplements.
However, despite problems of re-engagement, returnees exercise sufficient influence for island governments like those of Jamaica and Barbados to woo them with periodic island association meetings in the Caribbean and to offer financial inducement packages on their return. For a small number of seasonal migrants sports people, retired grandparents with diasporic offspring, seasonal agricultural workers who divide their time between homeland and metropole, the official boundaries are a minor inconvenience. Another area where social boundaries shift and may be crossed and recrossed according to practice and belief is that of various forms of herb usage and consumption.
During this time the drug has acquired a long history of use as a spiritual herb among the Rastafarian religious sect and in more recent years its use has spread across the range of social classes. Possession of 2 oz or less in Jamaica, as noted below, has recently been legalised. These unofficial spiritual and health-related practices represent alternative belief systems. Some belief systems in the past — for example the practice of obeah — have been interpreted as a direct challenge to authority and have drawn a charge of sedition Chevannes, The religious practice of the Shakers, or Spiritual Baptists, was banned in both St Vincent and Trinidad before being first tolerated and then welcomed.
The issue here is that considerable areas of the unofficial social world of Caribbean belief and practice have continuously existed parallel with, or at times crossing, the boundary between legal and illegal, official and unofficial, wild and civilised worlds. Certain forms of religious adherence have, in contrast, triggered a quietist social withdrawal. For an increasing number of people in the Caribbean charismatic churches, involvement, in terms of belief system and practical support, has led to a supplanting of the State and secular politics.
The Pentecostal churches are the sole exception to the decline in church attendance and claimed denominational adherence in each ten-year census for the past thirty years. By , the Pentecostals had almost doubled this percentage. Furthermore, the Church offers a retirement plan for ministers, funeral assistance and life insurance programmes.
Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St Vincent's
International links enable Church members from the Caribbean to obtain access to congregations in other countries, particularly Britain and the USA, where the parent churches originated. The ideological basis on which the world of Pentecostalism is constructed leads to the avoidance of involvement with the State. While adherents recognise the role of the secular State and its politics, they view them as peripheral. In the seventeenth century, Caribbean islands seized by Britain quickly became a combination of frontier settlements for soldiers who expropriated them.
When Jamaica, for example, was founded as a colony, the social historian Richard Pares noted that: This time-honoured piratical tradition has not completely disappeared. The London-based International Maritime Bureau identified eight attacks on merchant ships in the Caribbean Sea in the first three months of International Maritime Organization, The history of plantation slavery has cast a long shadow of uncontrolled privatisation in the region.
In the case of plantation slavery in Jamaica, Orlando Patterson has noted that: The laissez-faire philosophy and harsh conditions of labour threatened the scope for a natural increase in population. He demonstrates that once supplies of slaves from West Africa were reduced, the population declined to such an extent that it was threatened with extinction. For the period — he points out: After the s and the collapse of the second boom in the price of sugar, the fear of increasing costs resulting from the abolition of slavery, and growing difficulties in obtaining property sales of plantations encumbered by high mortgages and with the abandonment of certain estates, a dramatic change occurred, in perceptions of both the fabulously wealthy West Indian and the value of a close colonial relationship.
The change leads once again to a less flattering view of the region: One reason for increasing British suspicion was the worsening relationship between absentee landowners and their colonial dependants. Although this suspicion can be traced as far back as the seventeenth century, it intensified in times of economic decline.
Whenever absentee landlords tried to make claims on their estates in the West Indian colonies, Richard Pares notes that: As already marginal Caribbean economies took a downturn in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, a form of minimum welfare ideology became established. The first locally initiated land settlement policy in the British West Indies, aiming to provide land for the landless, was put into effect in St Vincent in Among many such reports, the Report of the Moyne Commission , compiled in the s but embargoed till because of fear of social unrest, was the most well known.
With the economic collapse of sugar and the decline of the West Indies as a region of strategic importance during the nineteenth century, a fundamental change can be identified in the underlying economic structure of the society as well as in the way the region and its population were perceived. The private business sector, which for a long time relied on metropolitan protection of its export produce, became increasingly oligopolistic, with core sets of families in each territory moving out of agriculture into merchandising, controlling significant directorships and operating to influence the agenda of the State Brown and Stone, ; Reid, With political independence in the s this reliance on the State continued, taking the form of exclusive Government contracts and import licences to prop up domestic markets Henke and Marshall, Public sector spending increased dramatically, both in manufacturing and in government service provision.
For a while relatively high rates of economic growth were achieved, enabling island governments to remain politically independent in spite of an increasingly globalised economic system. The rise and decline of the status of marijuana as an illegal crop provides another illustration of both the continued dominance of the private sphere and the marginalised role of the State. The pattern of economic expansion and contraction in the traditional cash-crop sector of Caribbean economies bananas, sugar, spices, cotton appears to have been duplicated in marijuana growing.
Agricultural production for export has dominated the region from the outset, with small economies shifting over the centuries from one export cash crop to another, as they are overtaken by higher marginal costs because of their smaller scale of production than producers elsewhere. One important cause of the demise of sugar production in the nineteenth century, for example, was the onset of cheap mass production of sugar beet in Europe.
In the eastern Caribbean, typical island products, such as finely woven sea-island cotton, cocoa and arrowroot, were each in turn threatened and then overtaken by more economical Egyptian cotton, West African cocoa and Egyptian arrowroot. In the context of this pattern of early exploitation of a cash crop followed by its demise as larger producers enter the market, the recently attractive marijuana crop may become the latest casualty of this cycle of expansion and decline.
Marijuana production appears to have reached a peak in the s and is reported to have been in decline for the past two decades. By , Caribbean marijuana was being replaced in its traditional export markets — the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom — by high-quality Mexican or Moroccan product.
The — UNODC report argues that, in real terms, the value of Caribbean marijuana exports had plummeted by 80 per cent since the early s. Its provenance today is essentially in intra-regional trade. It would be misleading to suggest that after fifty or more years of political independence Commonwealth Caribbean states have become passive in areas of public policy such as social welfare provision, public sector education, health care and national insurance provision. By , a handful had achieved high ranking i.
Welfare ideologies promoting the legitimacy of the State are, however, over-shadowed by shifting boundaries, violence and the fear of violence, and social withdrawal, as well as a number of privatised traditions and institutions that centre on the individual. Furthermore, with political independence local State intervention policy has been at best variable and at worst ineffective, its capacity for regulation weaker and more circumscribed than official paradigms of illegality would suggest.
In the absence of close attention to popular and alternative structures, beliefs and practices, the gap between State exhortation and concrete action widens, and some paths to earning a living gain a liminal status where illegality is tolerated and, in some instances, respectability may eventually be achieved. In other frontier situations the process of imposing regulation itself becomes a minefield. Both instances suggest that frontier retentions remain common throughout the anglophone Caribbean.
One of the most recent examples of the latter — comprising variable regulatory practices and shifting boundaries of regulation — is afforded by the development of the off-shore services industry, whereby Caribbean jurisdictions offer their services to the global financial community. This sector has become second to tourism in its importance to Caribbean economies and in accounted for 17 per cent of regional GDP.
In more specialised international financial centres in the region Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands the value of this sector is estimated to be larger than 25 per cent, in value estimated to be a proportionate size larger than that maintained in Luxembourg.
These jurisdictions provide a range of off-shore banking services: Western governments, which have over time imposed more and more global rules on smaller Caribbean regimens, claim that alongside the legitimate users of these services weak regulations in Caribbean jurisdictions have facilitated a range of illegal practices that are invariably secret. As the Caribbean now represents the fourth largest world banking sector, and the financial services sector is a major income earner for smaller territories in the region, the jurisdictions have considered it necessary to comply to ensure that they are recognised as respectable service providers in the global financial world.
The frontier element of such services derives from the fact that regulatory processes continue to be negotiated and are in constant flux. Some analysts suggest that even among the metropolitan countries attempting to impose their version of order, there is an element of the wild. Secondly, information is limited about the size of the sector and how it operates.
The experience of St Vincent, one of the smaller jurisdictions offering these services, illustrates a particular form that the frontier nature of this world has taken. Its pugnacious style in attracting international customers appeared to take on the world. It may, of course, be a coincidence, but in St Vincent amended its Banking Act, tightening the regulatory regime for banks in St Vincent, and repatriated control over international banks to the International Financial Services Authority. Soon after there was a sharp drop in the number of off-shore banks operating in the jurisdiction: The fairness or otherwise of costly metropolitan-imposed global requirements on small countries remains a hotly disputed topic.
For the most part Caribbean countries have responded to many of these regulatory demands to enable them to remain globally respectable. However, complicating the frontier issue, the metropolitan centres that make and seek to enforce the global rules of good international financial centre practice have themselves been indicted for having a worse record than small state international financial centres, particularly in the establishment of shell companies.
But we should not be too spiritual. There seems to be a place for identifying a continuum of wildness or frontier in this sector, whether in the Caribbean or worldwide. Jurisdictions will find themselves at different points along that continuum depending on the situation. Piracy is very close to Antiguan history.
They have been coming and hiding money and stealing for hundreds of years. I have noticed calmness and order alongside violence and mayhem. I have noticed that V. In the context of Caribbean history, real politics and political economy the word slips and slides: But enough of the apologia: In the chapters that follow we will use that small but complex star, the nation state of St Vincent and the Grenadines, as our touchstone and guide in exploring more precisely the many features of Caribbean frontiers, old and new. Locating the frontier in St Vincent and the Grenadines.
A pirogue slices the morning sea, bouncing from wave to wave. A fisherman sits in the stern, one hand on the tiller. The pirogue is powered by an outboard engine. The man leans forward, crouching against wind and sea-spray, gauging each oncoming swell. His partner sits facing him. They wear rough, well-used trousers, old shirts under bright yellow plastic jackets.
Hats are jammed low on their heads. They do not speak. The man nearest the bow stares inland. He sees the curve of the bay. It snuggles below towering headlands to east and west. Behind the bay lie a range of folded hills. If he had binoculars trained inland, the fisherman would see to the west a fort looming above the bay, black cannon rusting in their embrasures trained seaward.
He knows that just as many cannon face inwards, away from the sea. Below, under their protection, red-roofed houses and shops made from wood or concrete with blue, yellow and pink walls, and a few churches, are packed together.
Open gutters carry a thin stream of grey waste-water through the narrow lanes. Where the gutters are blocked the waste forms a stagnant trail of off-white scum. More houses dot the deeper green hills behind the town.
Account of the Black Charaibs in the Island of St Vincent's : Sir William Young :
Cooking smoke curls from a few chimneys. Some of the streets and pavements of the town are made from cobblestones and some from concrete or asphalt. They are all roughly constructed. There are gaps between each cobblestone from years of use and poor maintenance. The asphalt has thick patches that form low mounds, and in places it undulates unevenly. Many houses over-hang the pavements, supported by stone arches. The arches are a practical load-bearing solution to upper storeys. They provide shade from a fierce sun that will soon be overhead. A drunk lies in a disused shop doorway surrounded by the acrid smell of piss and alcohol.
There is probably a law against this sleeping-it-off in public. There are no shortages of laws. Their implementation is always capricious. He wears a loose, torn shirt that has seen better days. His trousers are encrusted with dirt. The thick white soles of his feet are without shoes. His head is wrapped in an old jute sack sandwiched between two thin pieces of cardboard. Cars begin to fill the streets and by mid-morning parking in the capital will be impossible. In the covered market, traders set up their tables to display their produce. Emaciated mongrel dogs play-fight near the vegetable market while they wait for scraps of food.
Conventional frontier analysis takes the frontier as an aspect of the past, associated traditionally with disputed boundary lines and zones of conflict. It is either specifically identified or, if understood as a zone, of limited duration. The frontier is either open or it is closed — though closure may take a while.
The implication for St Vincent then is that once British hegemony was established the frontier was closed. Caribbean historians appear to agree with this perspective and have mostly consigned frontier analysis to the past. Frontiers are, for historians it seems, either open or closed. One reason for this is that their essential understanding of frontiers appears to be driven by an ideological commitment that is region- or nation-state-focused. More specifically, the brevity of the frontier period in the Caribbean, according to Lewis, is a result of the imposition of slavery in these societies.
Lewis recognises frontier traits of rough democratic forms of government, hard drinking and rudimentary political structures as applicable to such locations as Yucatan logwood settlements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, these forms, he argues, had disappeared by the late eighteenth century, overwhelmed by repressive and authoritarian slave society. This perspective also implies that the social arrangements around the frontier in the Caribbean context have received little attention.
In his The Frontier in Latin American History Hennessy recognises in frontier studies scope for, among other things, understanding a rich diversity of material when available , an explanation of peripheral capitalism as well as insularity. Frontier study also offers a useful foil to the nationalist representation of history. This notion of frontier can encompass an American sense of open-endedness as well as the more European idea of fortified boundary lines.
This definition is useful to my exploration of the specificity of the frontier in a relatively under-explored Caribbean context, the eastern Caribbean island state of SVG. On the face of it, a society like SVG, one that develops from a traditional plantation base, has little reason to develop or extend a frontier analysis. It was a late-colonised, enclave economy comprising a hilly tropical island with a main port, dependent on foreign capital and in many ways pursuing economic activities unrelated to its locality. However, as Hennessy points out, to establish plantation institutions required traditional frontier expansion that was characterised by physical displacement and cultural deprivation, including physical uprooting.
The plantation was also associated with maroon opposition as well as later labour resistance and rebellion. As St Vincent, like many British Caribbean societies, became a combination of welfare-dependent and service-industry enclaves, did the frontier simply disappear? Far from disappearing, I am suggesting that the frontier remains very much present, if an under-recognised element of Caribbean island culture. Its traits are located in the restless and adventurous coastal wanderings of the Caribbean fisherman, sailor or sea-port smuggler. They can be found inland in the island-wandering woodcutter; those who squat on Government land; the urban dame school-teacher; or more recently, the innovative doctor, the mountainside ganja grower and in the financial services sector.
The purpose of this book, then, is to challenge the suggestion that the Caribbean frontier had a brief life and then was over. The concept of the frontier that is generally associated with the era of colonial conquest has continuing, and under-explored, analytical purchase in the context of the Caribbean region. Important traces continue to be found and new aspects to be identified. I will suggest also that social movements challenge attempts to establish firm boundaries between notions of wilderness and civilisation.
I argue, on the contrary, that the two are symbiotic: It is therefore important to attempt a definition of the terms. The anglophone Caribbean is a region located in the Americas, but for the most part manifesting Western European ways of thinking. The region has experienced a long history of globalised enslavement, indentured and free labour, and raw-material exploitation since the fifteenth century European arrival. As a result, the Caribbean was probably the first agriculturally industrialised region of the globalised, capitalist western world, and through this incorporation combined colonialism with modernity.
Over the long term it has undergone a gradual evolution in political systems, from various degrees of colonial dependency to territorial sovereignty. The result for the past sixty years has been the bequeathing of state management to a predominantly black and particularly in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana East Indian political class controlling a host of individual islands and smaller island groupings of various sizes: From the perspective of those who hold power, who mobilise the label of civilisation or who are sufficiently dazzled by that power, the notion represents the best model of the present and the future.
Thus, as Robert Frazer Nash observes, wilderness is not only a physical location, but also a state of mind. Wilderness represents the untameable that always encroaches and may take a variety of forms. At the micro level I use certain details of individual biography and monologue to draw attention to the ways in which the relationship between wilderness and civilisation is far from static but ever present and continually shifting. I am suggesting, then, that frontier may be read both as a process at the collective level and as a site of individual self-determination.
But the frontier has historically been and remains very much a part of global production. All of these developments I connect to notions of the civilised and the wild. The frontier, then, can be read as a form of moral landscape, an important element of which implies some form of boundary, where notions of civilisation and wilderness meet and regularly clash.
In this sense, the frontier is a liminal space holding the other two structures in balance. The following section examines how, historically, this lacuna has come about and I will go on to illustrate collective and individual frontier retentions as well as new directions for the concept of the frontier in the region. Yet, simultaneously, the term is inflected by a regional tradition of European-influenced thinking.
The European burden of meaning has traditionally rested on the notion of fixed borders between states.
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The North American tradition suggests broad regions of interaction involving more than one culture. Chapter 1 has demonstrated the appeal of redrawing these mini-state lines. At the other extreme, beyond the demarcation of state sovereignty, the multi-island mini-state of SVG affords a heady mixture of land and sea that further complicates and even confuses notions of boundary line and terrain zone.
He captures the other-worldness of the Grenadines archipelago in exalted, empathetic prose when he takes an aeroplane ride over the area, observing:. Alongside these, he notes: Various stretches of sea water divide the so-called mainland island, St Vincent, from the Grenadines — the latter comprising inhabited and uninhabited islands and, as Leigh-Fermor suggests, mere rocks that lie just below or jut out of the sea.
In contrast, while the island state of Grenada to the south of SVG includes two island dependencies — Petit Martinique and Carriacou — their existence is not acknowledged in the naming of that state. Beyond these administrative, territorial and cultural island-to-island distinctions, the concept of frontier as zone is further complicated when combined with the ambiguous concept of islandness. Chris Bonjie captures this ambiguity well in his observation that: Furthermore, every island with a beach — and most have several — harbours a liminal space.
Adam Nicholson, in his study The Mighty Dead: He points out how symbolically potent is the departure of a vessel from a beach in Homer, and how often it occurs. Here the notion of frontier is also an intellectual and collective space that, as Nash suggests, exists in the imagination. The frontier here describes more a cultural and spatial zone that need not necessarily be fixed geographically. Of course, the temptation for island-discoverers, colonists and island nation-state managers politicians and bureaucrats to close the frontier is strong.
These actions are, as Rebecca Weaver points out, the characteristic behaviour of anyone who finds themselves stranded on an island. As she observes about imperial islands: This involves building huts, pens, bridges, gardens, as well as performing various other rituals of possession to make the place feel familiar.
That is, a process whereby a cultural zone not only reflects modernity but is also critical of modernity. From my local analysis of SVG it is unlikely that the grander rupture to the world system will be traced to Vincentian subaltern practices, 7 though cracks at the St Vincent level are not to be excluded. As I will demonstrate in the SVG case, the cracks or threats to the system that appear at the local level have, in these modern, populist times, invariably led to State strategies of incorporation, or a leaning in that direction.
This challenge is issued through direct or indirect criticism of those, whether local or international, who presume to navigate the society and define the frontier. How these zonal frontier-challenge processes happen and how they work themselves out in the SVG context are the meat and drink of the chapters that follow. The attractiveness of the frontier concept in an island situation like SVG is precisely this double-edged potential for ambiguity.
It can be envisaged as liminal, closed and open at the same time. This complexity is what I see as constituting a frontier process , in which each element is constantly being made while challenging the other, but each remains always incomplete. Civilisation and wilderness, then, function alongside a notion of islandness as both a sense of completeness, and, conversely, of openness to whatever might wash up on its shores — and thus incompleteness. But to return to the particular. My study employs three modes of enquiry — historical, sociological and literary. The last of these three comprises monologues, poetic voice and literary criticism.
In ranging across these genres I read the frontier from the perspective of the Caribbean island colony with its various geographical and cultural specificities, its hierarchies based on intimidation and imposed by a dominant capitalist world system.
I argue that the concept of the frontier is essential both to Caribbean colonial history and to the Caribbean present. More recent developments — long-term colonial consolidation, political independence and globalisation processes — should not be allowed to obscure the frontier process in the Caribbean, which has never completely disappeared, and of which individual and collective traces remain.
In Chapter 4 I will examine at the micro and individual level three sketches of modern individual frontier lives in SVG. In Chapters 5 and 6 respectively I will discuss how this frontier collection of islands has been written about and how some of its internal cultural and social boundaries have shifted. The final chapter will examine the utility of frontier analysis for the study of islands in general, and implications for the study of the Caribbean and SVG in particular. Barrouallie to leeward and Calliaqua further to the south. Sandwiched between them, the Kings town embodies its frontier status, backed by hills, looking out to sea and facing down these Carib settlements.
In , durable fortifications for Kingstown began to be built. Fort Charlotte contained barracks for men and 34 pieces of artillery of different descriptions. The fort was garrisoned till when troops were finally withdrawn from the island. On Dorsetshire Hill, to the north above the town, there stood a further garrison. The town also operated a militia of all freemen aged between 18 and 55, comprising men ranging in rank from 2 Colonels to rank-and-file members Martin, As the town slowly expanded from east to west around the bay the intention to provide security was clear. Meanwhile, the port offered a link by sea to the outside world.
Time for a song. Thus, in the late eighteenth century, the port of Kingstown was a colonial out-station where settler wagons could be circled, metaphorically, for protection. The capture or sacking of the town was an important goal of their guerrilla struggle. Though occasionally approached during the warfare this goal was never achieved.
Along with the need for fortification, because of its remoteness and fear of Garifuna attack from land and French naval attack from the sea, other characteristics of Kingstown associated with the frontier include a rough and ready style of urban living — a kind of urban dereliction — as well as regular bouts of violent social unrest. There were three main streets parallel to the sea.
They were given the descriptively simple but practical names of Bay, Middle and Back Street. The rough and ready names of Middle and Bay Streets have persisted. Officially Back Street was later renamed Glenville Street in its eastern section and Halifax Street to the west, however its more informal name of Back Street persists. The main streets were intersected by six others. The early town pattern, laid out by the French during their occupation, has remained the basis of its street system, though where the French designated cobble-stoned Middle Street as the main street, the British preferred Back Street.
Three streams flowed through the town, with its red-roofed houses painted blue, yellow and pink. Arrival at Kingstown port in involved few formalities. Frederick Bayley, a British travel writer who spent part of that year on the island, observed: Once ashore things hardly improved, since human pedestrians had to contend with untended pigs roaming freely in the heart of the town. It was one of their jobs to destroy every pig that they met: An immediate reason for this lack of interest in urban public affairs was the limited commitment felt by white planter settlers to Kingstown beyond its function as a place of business and for protection.
Throughout the nineteenth century colonial administrators continuously complained in their dispatches to the regional governor and to London about the maladministration of the governing planter elite in the House of Assembly. Assembly meetings were often poorly attended or simply not held. It was on their plantation houses that planters chose to focus their attention, rather than public affairs or the town. Along with the centrality of the estate, Mrs Carmichael also observed the lavish entertaining that was on offer at one plantation house. She described in detail part of one spread for a dinner party for between thirty and forty guests: Unlike the inhabitants of the French colonies, they look upon the island in which they reside as a place to which they are, as it were, exiled for a certain period … very few of them expect to die on those properties.
Those who can afford it are in the habit of making trips every three or four years to the United Kingdom; and nearly all look forward to spending their last days in the land of their birth. Commemorating men of wealth or status who held office in the island, as well as their loyalty to Britain, they name their far-flung final resting places as Kensal Green, London for example Council Members James William Brown d.
The frontier is also traditionally associated with violence. In this respect, Kingstown was no exception. The fear that drove them to the town changed from marauding Garifuna to their own dissatisfied estate labourers. The historian Woodville Marshall, who has studied the causes and consequences of these riots, observes that: The Barbados Globe of the period reported: However, this picture of Kingstown as the place of white planter refuge is not as simple as it appears.
Before emancipation the social organisation of towns like Kingstown was characterised by contradiction and ambiguity. There was greater mixing than on plantations between enslaved and free, as well as across the whole range of class and colour. After emancipation the town increasingly became the space in which competing political interests of various sorts were worked out. He points out that this was reflected in new definitions of crime and criminality, and the introduction of new mechanisms of control such as the treadmill.
With more mobility among the general population, he records in his diary frequent brawls, drunkenness in taverns, illicit shebeens and debauchery in abodes of violence, as well as parties where stolen goods were consumed at town premises McDonald, He refers specifically to the plundering of houses and provision grounds. Also commonplace was theft from ships landing cargoes like brandy, estate stores, butter and salt-fish.
Rioting in the town was recorded in the following years: McDonald has analysed the repressive post-emancipation measures, including heavily punitive legislation to control Kingstown, and over-zealous magistrates, introduced by a fearful white political minority supported by the colonial administrative representative. He notes that by the number of prisoners on the island — 1, — was four times the annual pre-emancipation average. Kingstown had its own jail and house of correction.
The measures, he argues, were introduced as an attempt to maintain white elite power by eradicating differences in the town between the free coloured community and black ex-slave apprentices McDonald, When the opportunity arose their introduction faced a backlash.
Revisionist history
At times the outcome of court cases was challenged by vocal groups who freed prisoners on their way to and from jail Boa, Sheena Boa, who has also studied the causes of some of these nineteenth-century Vincentian protests and their main participants, has shown that working-class women from Kingstown were often prominent in leading this unrest Boa, In the Caribbean, civilisation, work and language have been linked, admittedly in different ways and with different priorities, from colonial-through-postcolonial analyses from Anthony Trollope to George Lamming.
He points out that work, however brutally organised, was equated with order and civilisation. At a practical level, the colonial authorities in St Vincent were anxious to improve the society and protect it from contamination by wild nature. In colonial consciousness, this necessary ordering not only included flora and fauna but also encompassed, firstly, the Kalina and Garifuna populations who opposed imperial intrusion, and later, the enslaved and freed population of African origin.
Modern frontier retentions
In his journal John Anderson presents in a stark manner the dilemma, as he saw it, of the post-slavery relationship between civilisation and wilderness in St Vincent. A well-read scholar of his day, Anderson asks bluntly: It is in his view a dilemma that is highly skewed against St Vincent with its mass of black population. However, he opines that civilisation faces insurmountable odds in favour of the wild, particularly in the form of inadequacy of labour and the poverty of language. The concerns that civilisation might be halted, or even backslide, continued to be echoed by the colonial administration well into the nineteenth century.
As Bonham Richardson points out: The change from a slave-based to an emancipated society did not change the underlying assumptions of white superiority among the colonial and planter elite. In contrast there was among the oppressed a keen awareness of the need to attain freedom and full participation in a society structured along class and colour lines. As mentioned above, throughout each decade of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century in St Vincent, there were riots or protests in which race or colour played a prominent part as a spur to conscious opposition when these rights were understood to be denied.
One island administrator, while discussing the threat of the withdrawal of a number of eastern Caribbean island military garrisons, explained its manifestation in the following way: In other words, a frontier. By the turn of the twentieth century the notion of colonial civilisation that was on offer in St Vincent became more prosaic, associated with the spread of modern public medicine and education. For many years fever had exacted a deadly toll on troops stationed in the islands. Between the years and , for example, mortality rates for troops stationed on St Vincent were In addition, in St Vincent, smallpox, leprosy, tetanus and mal rouge were common Boyce, In , in the wake of the discovery of the yellow-fever-carrying mosquito, Boyce reported on the outcome of an active campaign of fever eradication in the region as nothing less than a civilising achievement.
Civilisation with its attendant reforms, among which stand out education and hygiene: The notion of civilisation in the Caribbean, and specifically in the Vincentian context, has had a long and tortuous life. However overlooked or implicit, wildernesses are not difficult to locate. For the modern Caribbean state, as I have suggested elsewhere, the contemporary wilderness includes substantial acreage of land where illegal drugs are grown, or sea and air routes through which illegal substances are navigated.
In the urban context it is found in places ineffectively policed by the State: But the notion of the frontier, whether or not recognised as the locus for negotiating equilibrium between civilisation and the wild, remains very much alive. How might the frontier be located in early-twenty-first century St Vincent? The following section first discusses the waning of the frontier.
Chapter 4 provides four examples of its resilience in what is now the island state of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Three examples are of frontier resilience by individuals, while the fourth is an illustration of wilderness as a frontier remnant. In the British imperial Government decided that St Vincent, which they considered more remote than Grenada, remained a sufficiently distant place to which they should expel King JaJa of Opobo, the palm oil middle-man trader who threatened their West African palm oil trade. And with this modernity, signs of frontier wilderness dissipated to some extent.
Indications of this slowly growing modernity included the building of a local police barracks started in and completed in — a building that also housed treasury and customs and excise departments. A colonial hospital was built in and the provision of street lighting for a few central streets was begun in Kingstown, the capital and frontier town, continues to offer a mixture of modernity and dilapidation. Make an imaginative leap to twenty-first-century Kingstown and you quickly discover a hot and hard urban space with business or party politics on its mind. There has been a gradual exodus of residents from the town centre, first to Edinboro to the east of the capital in the late nineteenth century, followed by housing developments in the surrounding hills of Montrose to the north- east, and Cane Garden to the west of Kingstown, all former plantation lands.
Montrose, now a suburb of Kingstown, was acquired by the State to house public servants. Cane Garden was sold to private buyers in lots of varying sizes. The city centre is dominated by a covered vegetable market and the House of Assembly. Instead, there are signs of attempts to banish nature from the town. They were all cut down. The cobble-stones in the town centre are now frayed, leaving gaps and divots between the stones. Main roads are clogged with cars either parked or searching for parking spaces, at rush hour forming long queues to enter or leave the capital.
They transport for their customers weekly shopping, coconuts, sacks of potatoes or gas canisters. Cars give them priority as they walk in the road. A mid-twentieth-century experiment in establishing town centre traffic lights failed. At first they worked intermittently, then not at all. They stand ignored and rusting on road sides or suspended above the main roads. Though the purpose-built covered market hosts around vendors, another or so prefer to take their chances outside the rates are cheaper, collectors easier to avoid. Some erect temporary bivouacs of canvas that cover as much ground as the vegetable market, or sit in the shade of every permanent overhang.
They display on camp beds or rough wood or plastic tables their small-scale items for sale: A few self-styled preachers with clanging bell, Bible, tambourine or squeaking microphone stand at intersections and shout warnings of hell fire or extol the benefits of repentance. The wide drains of the main streets are open.
It is not difficult to spot a rat or two scuttling along the shaded side of these drains. In this chapter I wish to tease out the different, more contemporary meanings of the frontier in the southern extreme of the collective thirty-two-island state of SVG. To the south of the St Vincent main island lie the Grenadines. They stretch over some Roughly two-thirds of these islets belong to SVG and the rest to Grenada. Seven of the larger St Vincent Grenadine islands have permanent inhabitants. The remaining islets comprise uninhabited smaller rock formations of various sizes and shapes above the water line.
What frontier issues might a small sovereign state with such a porous and variegated southern boundary peripheries of a periphery experience? Before , concessions to settle the Grenadines were given to colonisers by both French and British governors. Most of the islands that were large enough to support a small population became associated with single landowning families: They operated simple social systems that tied the populations, of no more than a few hundred on each populated island, to the land through sharecropping, keeping of animals and fishing.
In the twentieth century a small proportion of the men, many of whom were good sailors, obtained half-yearly employment working as seamen on ocean-going bulk transport ships registered in Liberia or Panama. Until the late twentieth century neglect and degradation have been the historical experiences of each tiny populated Grenadine island. This neglect took the form of a lack of basic amenities as a result of mainland uninterest from successive Government administrations, both colonial and postcolonial. The island of Canouan illustrates the common experience of neglect and resource shortages.
Located near the middle of the chain of the Grenadines, Canouan comprises a mere 1, acres ha. Before there was no police station, and although it had a small fee-paying primary school dating from , the first government school was opened in A medical doctor and dentist might visit monthly, depending on weather conditions. The first political elections were superficial events that offered ineffective representation. The first representative for the Grenadines region never visited the island. With regular droughts from , drinking water had to be imported each dry season for fifty years.
In the early s the island remained without so basic an amenity as electricity. Mitchell, a descendant of a Canouan islander, summarised the longstanding plight of the Grenadines through the experience of this island. Neglect has reinforced strong island loyalties and led to occasional attempts at secession. This historic frontier status, characterised by central Government indifference and neglect, has, in the past twenty or so years, changed dramatically.
Bequia has established an international reputation as a destination for yachting enthusiasts. By , the Mustique Company had built seventy-five foreign exclusive homes and another twenty-five people had bought development lots Vaughn, The modern frontier appeal these atolls hold is their remoteness. Fed by year-round warm breeze, sunshine and substantial foreign capital expenditure, these features conspire to turn frontier remoteness into frontier exclusivity and exoticism. Saladino, the main expatriate entrepreneur in Canouan, recounted to me his Canouan Crusoe experience when he first stumbled across that island:.
The discovery of the island of Canouan was as a result of sailing with friends on a motor yacht and visiting most of the Grenadine islands … we saw this unknown, beautiful, lush land and having sailed around, were astounded by the number of great beaches. The combination of lush and strong colours of the vegetation with the pure turquoise of the waters was very reminiscent of the island of Sardinia and its outer islands. The obvious question was why no developer had ventured there. These tourism developers offer their clients the frontier experience of an exclusive and romanticised relationship with nature.
The author of Mustique suggests that: Wealthy developers have now put substantial amounts of money for tourism development into at least five tiny SVG island developments. In return they usually obtain a wide range of taxation and other lucrative privileges for their investments. This is, of course, all part of the frontier financial process.
- Charles Shephard (Author of An Historical Account of the Island of St Vincent).
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In CRD acquired 1, acres It since acquired another 78 acres It has built a new airport; repaired hurricane destruction damage promptly; and with business tourism partners built a hotel, a golf course, a casino and holiday villas for sale. Foreign partner developers come and go they have included Donald Trump, the hotel chain Raffles and most recently the Irish developer Dermot Desmond. The most recent strategy appears now to be similar to that pursued in Mustique, essentially constructing homes for exclusive foreign home ownership.
Before arriving at this goal the frontier living experience of islanders was somewhat different. As recently as the s, local Canouan households were required to be self-sufficient. They supported themselves on their own produce: Local residents stored their harvests and sold the produce after they replanted. There was local fishing for men and whelk collection on the rocks around the coast for women.
History Of The Island Of Domi
Sailors also worked on merchant shipping for half-year periods. Since the exclusive tourism developments on the island, many Canouan people have restructured their way of life. In a period of about fifteen years the shift has been from centuries of almost subsistence living to servicing international tourism. They can see the tangible changes to their living conditions — more regular health care, opportunities for house ownership and for educating their children to secondary school level, as well as the opportunity to obtain computing and other technical skills, all of which were in short supply when they were younger.
However, the process of change has not been problem-free. In the early stages of hotel development in the s the local population protested at the desecration of grave sites while the resort was being built. I spoke with one elderly lady who led the protest and who described to me her concerns:. I lay down in the road, mister gentleman. As God is my witness. I lay right down in that road. I tell them run your machine, your tractor and your bulldozer over me if you want.
Hope is my family name. We live in this island generation upon generation. From the time they bring my great, great gran-pappy out of Guinea. My naval string bury under a tree on Yambou land. All my family bury in Massa Sam cemetery. That company just reach. They machines mash down every living piece of cemetery, not a head stone, a flowers pot, not one mark in the earth remain mister gentleman. It was a Saturday morning, ten-thirty.
Sun hot as hell. We and all the village go up to the company gate. Look me here, take me now! Bring all your guard, all your gun, all your dog them, we not moving. He a sharp man, eh? It take out in High Wycombe, England. He come back to dead and bury here in Massa Sam cemetery. I make two daughters for he and they bury there too.