In a society as stratified as that of Barbados, children like my father from modest black families had just one route to advancement: education. Had he been born two decades earlier he would have had no chance at all. In a 1905 edition of the planter newspaper, the Barbados Agricultural Report, an editorial expressed the ruling caste’s attitude to the education of those of African descent: “Some book learning is of course essential, but the mistake of conveying to the child the idea that such education as he acquires at school is calculated to make him eligible for the highest honours in life must be avoided.” So it was no wonder then that for many children of my father’s generation the very possibility of an education felt like a tremendous privilege.
My father’s formal education began at the age of five, and between the ages of eight to twelve he went to a local school called Wesley Hall. Here little brown- and black-skinned boys experienced a traditional colonial education, one that was a mimicry of that taught to children in the classrooms of England. In neatly pressed uniforms, and seated at their rudimentary desks, they were taught about thrones and empires, about William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings. Their own history—Barbados’s tempestuous and bloody story of sugar, slavery and colonialism—was the elephant in the room and barely spoken of. The children were also constantly reminded of the island’s ties to the “mother country”: the links between Big England and Little England had not been broken since the seventeenth century and the reign of James I.
A British school inspector arrived regularly in an official car with a miniature British flag flying on its bonnet to inspect the facilities and the classes. He also made other visits to mark special occasions such as “Empire Day” or the monarch’s birthday. At these times the school was festooned with Union Jacks; they flew from the mast atop the building, they were looped together in banners that draped the walls, and for good measure oversized versions were pinned to doors. After a lecture in which the boys were reminded of the “God-ordained” role of the British Empire to bring peace and prosperity to the world, the children were prompted to cheer “hip-hip-hooray” in perfect unison and pledge allegiance to the monarch:
God save our gracious king,
Long live our noble king,
God save the king.
My mother, Barbara, has similar memories of her school. She had started at Foundation in 1937, at the age of eight. With its long history, it is a school with a strong sense of tradition—indeed, the uniform she wore then was virtually the same as the one that the girls wear today: a yellow dress and navy-blue belt with a striped diagonal tie in yellow and blue, topped with a panama hat held on by an elastic band under the chin. And, as at Wesley Hall, her education was absurdly Anglo-Saxon. On an island where the changes of weather were predicated on notes of hot and dry, wet and humid, my mother recollects being recruited for a play about the seasons. She played autumn, a time of year that she had never experienced, dressed in a costume of paper leaves of rust and yellow. She also recollects the school putting on a play based on Dick Whittington, but since she was brown-skinned she could not play the female lead. “I played Dick,” she recalled, while “the little white girls played the pretty-up parts.” In colonial Barbados it took a long time before “black” was allowed to be “beautiful.” Her educational opportunities were even more proscribed than my father’s, since very few of the scholarships available at either secondary or university level were open to female students.
For my father, Kenneth, his only hope of progressing beyond Wesley Hall was through winning an exhibition scholarship that would give him the opportunity to move on to one of the elite secondary schools. As he was under twelve, this was a verbal examination that demonstrated his articulacy and his knowledge of British history. He passed with distinction and was presented with his award at a school ceremony where he and the other winners were reminded that “the future was theirs.” Once again his timing was good: for many decades these scholarships were the sole preserve of the lighter-skinned children of the middle classes, and allegations of bias against darker-skinned applicants were frequent.
His scholarship gave him a place at Harrison College, then the island’s premier boys’ secondary school and still today one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the region. It was founded in 1733 by the Bridgetown merchant Thomas Harrison, who intended it to serve as a “Public Free School for the poor and indigent boys of the parish,” though of course this did not include those of African descent. By 1870 the school’s role had shifted to serve the coloured community. Later it became a grammar school, “for children of the better classes,” both white and black, and in July 1923 a newspaper quoting the school magazine, the Harrisonian, summed up its new raison d’être:
The school intended to supply a thoroughly sound secondary education, first satisfying all the requirements of pupils intended for commercial pursuits, secondly by preparing for both English Public School and University and for Competitive Examinations through which every department of the Public Service is now accessible.
Once again, Harrison College made no concessions to its Caribbean context; there was no place for colonial history or local perspectives and the entire curriculum was orientated towards inculcating the culture of the colonial power. It was an entirely British affair, with teachers imported from what was still called “the mother country,” using British textbooks as dictated by the Cambridge examination syllabus. British hymns were sung and poems by Kipling and Dryden were recited. And so young men like my father graduated with “a good knowledge of the Greek classics and read North American novelists but showed no knowledge of or interest in Caribbean or African affairs.” Because they were exposed only to the products of Anglo-Saxon culture and banning any exploration of the island’s history or African traditions, the students were encouraged to see black people as ignorant, and their customs as primitive and risible. As one contemporary of my father’s explained:
Colonialism was not just an economic and political system, it was also a cultural system. Loyalty to empire was created through language, as well as through the church and the school. Both of these institutions taught the superiority of Europeans, their beliefs and their culture, and the inferiority of Africans, and, for that matter, of all non-British peoples.
The poet H. A. Vaughan, who has been described as the first Barbadian Black Power poet, wrote in these years:
Turn sideways now and let them see
What loveliness escapes the schools,
Then turn again, and smile, and be
The perfect answer to those fools
Who always prate of Greece and Rome,
“The face that launched a thousand ships”
And such like things, but keep tight lips
For burnished beauty nearer home.
The writer George Lamming also looked back on his education with dismay:
Today I shudder to think how a country so foreign to our instincts could have achieved the miracle of being called Mother … Empire was not a very dirty word, and seemed to bear little relation to those forms of domination we now call Imperialist … the colonial experience of my generation was almost wholly without violence. No violence, no concentration camp, no mysterious disappearances of hostile natives, no army encamped … The Caribbean endured a different kind of subjugation. It was a terror of the mind.
But beyond the classroom, the atmosphere was charged with the possibility of real change. During the 1930s, economic hardship had done more than provoke despair, it had also sparked a spirit of resistance that had not been seen before, as the working classes embraced a form of self-help and organizational independence. These developments were largely inspired by Marcus Garvey’s pan-Caribbean and international “Black Power” movement. As one historian noted: “Garvey’s politics, more than any other single factor, rooted within the consciousness of Barbadian workers the fact that only organised mass political action could deliver in a general way those social and economic objectives tha
t they had pursued through their friendly societies.”
In 1937, the agitation of the workers came to a head, when the black majority attended a rally headlined by the charismatic Trinidadian labour leader Clement Payne. In his hypnotic speech he called the workers to action. Regarded as a dangerous rabble-rouser, he was almost immediately put on trial in July of that year for deceiving the immigration authorities that he had been born in Barbados. His followers were outraged. Determined to demonstrate against the arrest, a crowd gathered outside the governor’s house, only to discover that Payne had already been deported.
Incensed, the workers converged on Bridgetown and a riot ensued. Private and public property was targeted and cars were smashed. The demonstrations were squashed temporarily, but flared up again a few days later on 26 July, when the protesters, armed with bottles, sticks and stones, converged on the commercial area of the city, smashing office fronts and store windows and overturning cars. They besieged the employees of the Barbados Mutual Office in their building, and threatened to burn it down. At first the authorities retaliated with a blank volley of shots. But this failed to deter the demonstrators and by midday on the 27th, when the police had been instructed to use any means necessary to “restrain or subdue the rebels,” they regrouped with fixed bayonets, and shot live rounds at the crowd. Several people were killed; the demonstration broke up and the protesters fled. Meanwhile, outside the capital, workers had been looting planters’ stocks and raiding potato fields. In response, the planters raised a force of special constables who killed a number of them. In total fourteen blacks were killed, forty-seven injured and 500 arrested. One hundred years after emancipation, as one historian concluded, the “open wounds of colonisation in Barbados were there for all to see.”
In response to these events the Barbados Labour Party, led by the up-and-coming politician Grantley Adams, was launched in October 1938. It was a middle-class movement designed “to provide political expression for the island’s law-abiding inhabitants,” as distinct from the so-called “lawless poor” that Payne was associated with. The following year, in 1939, Adams diagnosed the island’s problems. Reporting to a Royal Commission appointed to “investigate social and economic conditions in the West Indies,” Adams stated: “I suggest that the plantation system is basically the cause of our trouble, and I think that the system which has survived in Barbados for three hundred years, of having a small, narrow, wealthy class and a mass of cheap labour on the other side, should be abolished.”
For my father, meanwhile, the educational saga continued. As before, his future after secondary school pivoted on a very limited number of variables. His only chance for a first-rate university education was enshrined in the “Barbados Scholarship,” which funded one student each year to go abroad and study at a top university in either England or Canada. It was an intensely competitive situation, since every academically gifted child on the island applied. On his second attempt my father was successful and in 1940 he set off on his intellectual adventure. Traditionally, he would have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but with the outbreak of the Second World War he was sent to McGill University in Canada, on a slow banana boat, to read the Classics. He was twenty years old and he would not see his island home again for twelve years.
His memories of Montreal are fragmentary—life in a big northern city; the unimaginable cold of a Canadian winter; all those white faces! When he was not studying, he worked to supplement his grant, labouring at the Steel Company of Canada and Ford; it was a far cry from the perpetual sunshine and languorous rhythms of Caribbean life. Determined to study medicine, he applied, despite the ongoing war, to go to Britain to study. It was probably a fortuitous choice, since his opportunities in Canada were still restricted by the endemic racial prejudice there. One white West Indian who applied abroad to study medicine in 1930 was told by an unnamed Canadian university that they could offer him a place only if he was white, “but if I were coloured they would be unable to admit me as they did not have facilities for coloured men to be examining white women in the Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.”
In 1942 Kenneth and a handful of other West Indians gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and boarded a ship for England. Although his journey took place three centuries later than George Ashby’s, it was just as dangerous. The convoy in which they travelled was on permanent alert as they crossed the war-torn Atlantic, and one of the ships was torpedoed along the way. My father’s ship docked in Avonmouth, the port of the city of Bristol. What lingers in his memory of that first night on English soil was the meagre meal he and his companions were served, the product of wartime rationing: white fish on a white plate, accompanied by an unidentifiable green vegetable and three small boiled potatoes.
The following day, the group of students got on a train to London and moved into a hostel for international students near Russell Square. Life in the city was punctuated by the shrill sound of air raid warnings and retreats to shelters in tube stations, where cups of tea were doled out and camaraderie shared. It was a curiously convivial time for my father despite the danger, since so many West Indians he knew had come to the capital to study, work or volunteer for the war effort. These included people like my aunt Margaret Clairmonte, who believed devoutly that it was her duty as a British subject to serve the mother country. Her picture now hangs in the Barbados Museum, a young woman posing in her WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) uniform, smiling proudly for the camera. Then there was my father’s great friend Errol Barrow, who would become one of Barbados’s most revered and long-serving prime ministers. He was one of a batch of twelve brave and patriotic Barbadians recruited that year specifically for the Royal Air Force, only half of whom came back.
Despite their contributions to the British war effort, there are virtually no black faces represented in the English accounts of Second World War servicemen. The Americans are there, and the Canadians, as well as Poles and Australians, but not the West Indians. The academic Benedict Anderson has argued that a nation can be defined as an “imagined community” because it is impossible, in even the smallest states, that an individual can ever know “most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them,” so representation is particularly important. By excluding these West Indians who served and often died for the “mother country,” Britain has not only betrayed their memories; it has created a self-image that is a lie.
In 1943 my father Kenneth left the beleaguered capital for Queen’s University Belfast, where he would remain for five years taking his medical degree. Whereas in London there were enough black faces to provoke a degree of hostility, in Belfast blacks were so novel that most people were merely curious. (Of the scores of young men who made up that year’s intake only three were not white.) In contrast to the staid formality of the English, he found the Irish closer in character to West Indians: more relaxed and with an innate joy in listening to and telling stories. After Belfast, he would spend a couple of years in Liverpool and Edinburgh gaining postgraduate degrees, by which time he had been away from Barbados for over a decade.
In the years my father was absent from the island the rate of change accelerated considerably. As a result of the widespread social and political unrest, the British government had sent a commission to the West Indies in 1939 which made wide-ranging recommendations around education, immigration and the island’s financial management. Then the voting franchise was extended, which meant that the 1944 general election involved a much bigger electoral population. For the first time the Elector’s Association, the planters’ party, was under attack. On 4 November 1944, the Barbados Observer wrote:
Throughout the history of this island, it has been dominated by a small and selfish clique and it is indeed remarkable that now this clan senses that it has reached a crisis, it has actually had the shamelessness and temerity to publicly appeal to the people of this island and ask them to help them consolidate their weakening status.
Two weeks later the paper noted:
Barbados
is in revolt against the status quo. Throughout the country thousands of middle class and working class men and women are voicing the most determined protests against poverty and unemployment. These thousands are resolved to put more of the wealth in the colony at the service of the people … this spirit may well be called the NEW DEMOCRACY.
In the post-war years, this confidence was palpable across the entire Caribbean region, where the efforts of the commission began to bear fruit. Its effects, the historian C. L. R. James argued, manifested themselves in “vastly greater opportunities for West Indians in their own country and abroad.” In Barbados, for example, universal suffrage was established in 1950 and new educational reforms soon began to open up opportunities for a wider range of the population. Newly emboldened, excited West Indians across the region also began to look forward to the thought of achieving “dominion status” and a measure of control over their own affairs.
These aspirations soon began to seem achievable. Financially crippled by the war, England had become eager to offload its expensive colonies, so the only criterion necessary for independence was that the state in question could afford the obligations of this transition. The floodgates had been opened by India, Pakistan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the period 1947–48. Then, one by one, the African colonies also shed their ties with Britain, including Sudan in 1956, Ghana in 1957, and Nigeria in 1960.
Much of the Caribbean region’s restless longings for independence during this period were projected onto one sport: cricket. This arcane game is inexplicable to many parts of the globe, not least because its languorous rhythms, in which matches can last for days, seem so antithetical to the pace of modern life. To many the game, so popular in the erstwhile British colonies, seems like a pastime from an obsolete world, conjuring up images of bygone scenes of rural England, large country houses and young English aristocrats lolling about on grassy knolls. So it may seem strange, even somewhat absurd, today that a game should become the symbolic battleground between the mother country and these newly revitalized colonies. But on closer examination it makes perfect sense. Cricket was intrinsically bound up with the notion of “Englishness” and the game became a way of inculcating colonial values in colonial subjects and impressing on them the superiority of “Britishness.” Thus the sport, an obsession at all levels of Barbadian society, which purported to be an agent for social cohesion, also served to enhance the island’s rigid social structure and its inflexible social distinctions.
Sugar in the Blood Page 34