Barbados for us was a holiday haven, peaceful and safe, in contrast to the island where we had based our lives. For in Jamaica the post-independence dream was decaying. It was a shocking reversal for the English colony that was predicted to be “most likely to succeed” after emancipation. But by the middle of the 1970s, the traditional star of the anglophone colonies was in chaos, torn apart by political factionalism. On one side was the left-wing People’s National Party (PNP), led by the charismatic Michael Manley, on the other the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), led by Edward Seaga. Both of them were battling it out for political control of the country and the opportunity to exploit its wealth. The intensity of this conflict was exacerbated by Cold War politics. Jamaica was a key player in the region, and so external forces quickly became involved in the island’s clashes; and there were allegations that money and guns were being smuggled into the island by the American CIA as well as the Communist regime in nearby Cuba, both groups hoping to sway the island towards their particular ideological position.
Most of the violence was centred around the inner city of Kingston, in places like Trench Town, which had originally been established as a social housing project for workers, but had by the 1970s become a place for the poor and dispossessed. These ghettos were divided into factional terrains, one section claimed for the PNP, the other for the JLP; and politicians from both sides provided their supporters with guns and funds in order to cement votes and loyalties. Here illiterate teenage boys, armed with Kalashnikovs or U.S.-import Glocks, roamed the streets picking off enemies who threatened the integrity of their territory. Inevitably some of the money and weapons went to seed the narcotics business. And thus out of the smouldering ashes of these violent streets emerged the “Yardies,” who became one of the most significant crime cartels in the world. It was a frightening and dangerous time, with violence erupting unpredictably and constantly.
At least some of the country’s problems had their roots in Jamaica’s brutal slave past. As the richest of the British colonies, it had attracted the most rapacious attention from its colonizers and suffered the most terrible cruelty and abasement of all the English sugar islands. The violent resentment this provoked had simmered for centuries and was now spilling over into all areas of Jamaican society. By the midpoint of the decade the professional middle classes were migrating from the island as quickly as they could, and in 1976 my family also took flight. The country we were destined for was the very one that George Ashby had left behind over three centuries before.
We landed in a country that was a cauldron of bitter rhetoric about migration which left us in no doubt how unwelcome we were. The backstory to this had begun in the post-war period, when Britain had experienced a shortage of labour in key areas of its reconstruction programme, such as transport, catering and the National Health Service. Desperate for new workers, the government launched a widespread advertising campaign in the Caribbean to lure the islanders to Britain. It played on their loyalty to the “mother country,” and stressed their patriotic duty to help with rebuilding the nation. As a result, in the years spanning 1948–73, over half a million Caribbean people migrated to Britain, most of them arriving before 1962. These people became known as the “Windrush generation,” after the first ship of these migrants to dock in Britain. Most were Jamaican; only 25,247 or 8.5 per cent were Barbadians. But by the time we arrived in the 1970s, Britain was in recession and unemployment was rising, and a vociferous minority were demanding that these migrants be sent home. Their most respectable spokesperson was the Conservative MP Enoch Powell. His infamous “rivers of blood” speech criticizing Commonwealth immigration, delivered at the Conservative Party conference in 1968, had warned that Britain would disintegrate into open conflict if the repatriation of these people did not take place.
Even as a fourteen-year-old, I could appreciate that this was a debate beset with ironies. The British, who had first colonized the Caribbean and enriched themselves on black backs, now wanted people of Caribbean descent out of Britain because they were “costing” the country too much. And their unworthiness to stay in England was justified by the very same racist theories that George Ashby and Robert Cooper had used to validate their own misuse of their slaves.
This was a particularly bewildering time for my family (despite the pride we felt at my father’s knighthood that year for his services to medicine in the Caribbean and wider Commonwealth). We were socially isolated, as most of my parents’ contemporaries had resettled in the United States or Canada. We had little in common with the Caribbean migrants who had arrived here in the post-war years. Our move was not a wager, or an attempt to transform our social position, but instead an astute career move for my father who, having been offered two jobs, one in America and one in Britain, chose the latter. Thus we had few familial links with the Windrush generation, and our life experience was very different. I can remember one of my Caribbean aunts, who came to study law, remarking snobbishly, “We wouldn’t talk to them there, so why should we mix with them here?”
In addition we were the sort of black family that did not then exist in the British imagination: affluent, professional, relatively cultured. So in our leisure time our mother would take us to the opera or ballet or piano recitals at the South Bank. And every day I set off for my exclusive private girls’ school, where I was the only pupil of Afro-Caribbean descent, and my brother and sister did the same. In the Caribbean, where nearly everyone was like me, some shade of black, my race was largely irrelevant and I rarely thought of myself in that context. Now, for the first time in my life, I was acutely aware of my colour and all the stereotypes associated with it. Like my Barbadian ancestors—white, black and brown—I was discovering that the colour of my skin was what people noticed first and foremost.
As I grew up, I realized that my perpetual sense of displacement, the fate of most migrants, was something that would never leave me and that I could make a life nonetheless. I understood that migration was a kind of death, in which one’s old self must be buried in order for a new self to be born, and that this move has made me who I am today. Inevitably, my feelings about the “mother country” are rather ambivalent. So much here is now famililar and so much remains completely strange. My colour still enters the room before I do, and in some situations I have to work inordinately hard to make others put it aside. I know that despite the privileges of my upbringing, some people see me just as another inferior, troublesome black face. And I cannot help resenting the notion that while I am, according to some, not good enough to be British, my ancestors were nonetheless good enough to help build the country, defend it and die for it.
I have settled in a country where the epic forces that created my family are still shaping British life, despite being largely unacknowledged. Sugar surrounds me here. Each year, thousands of locals and tourists visit the grand Tate Galleries without remembering that its collections were funded by the exploitative sugar company Tate & Lyle. And they wander though the grandeur of All Souls College, Oxford, without being aware that it was paid for by the profits generated by the slaves who toiled and died at the Codrington estate in Barbados. Sugar built the magnificent Harewood House in Leeds and many of the lovely mansions in Bristol’s majestic Queen Square; while much of the profits that the West Indian proprietors collected in compensation for their “losses” at emancipation fed back to the City of London, shoring it up and helping make it the dynamic, global business centre it has become.
Just as it is easy to forget that the “white gold” of sugar paid for the bricks that built many of the grand buildings, homes, museums and collections that make up Britain’s cultural heritage and enabled its cities to flourish, so too we ignore the fact that the impact of the trade in “black ivory” is evident in the many-hued faces that throng their streets. Most of us do not understand the forces that brought our ancestors together from opposite ends of the world. That is, we do not appreciate how the arrival of Europeans in the New World precipitated a ser
ies of events, most significantly including the capture and transportation of millions of unwilling Africans to cultivate cash crops like tobacco, cotton and sugar. Nor do we appreciate how the racist theories they evolved to justify the abuse and commodification of their charges would continue to shape our communities and our life chances to this day. Over 150 years after slavery was abolished, Africans and the descendants of Africans remain markedly disadvantaged compared to the descendants of those who promoted the trade against them. The pernicious racial thinking that evolved to feed our insatiable hunger for sugar, and was used to justify our trangression of the laws of humanity, continues to influence us all.
In the Caribbean, the legacy of the sugar boom and the slave trade is not so easily ignored or forgotten. Although sugar is no longer the vibrant industry it once was, it is still cultivated, and the vista of endless fields of cane is still emblematic of the region, as is the sweet syrupy smell of the fields as they are fired and raised. Sugar has transformed the landscape and changed the region’s ecosystem. It has shaped our economies, traditions and national identities. Indeed, by pulling together the unique racial mix of the islands—black, white, Amerindian, East Indian, Syrian, Chinese—it is written across our very faces. The continuing politics of colour—the association of lighter complexions with status and influence, and darker skins with poverty and powerlessness—is still palpably alive, particularly among older people who remember the plantations with both horror and nostalgia. Many families like my own are mixed-race on both sides, blending the histories of both oppressor and oppressed.
Epilogue
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come treading our past through the blood of the slaughtered.
—JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
THE GREAT SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY wave of migration which saw hundreds of thousands of people leave England in search of a better life is so deeply embedded in global history that most of us do not give it conscious thought. But its reverberations continue to be felt. George Ashby and his continental counterparts would enrich Europe beyond its wildest imaginings and extend that sub-continent’s influence and ideologies across the globe. They also transformed two continents, North and South America, as well as the glittering archipelago of islands that circle their waist. They populated these vast tracts of land, instigating seismic change in their landscape and social geography. And they introduced new species of animal and plant life into the places they settled, and made extinct many more. They also precipitated dramatic cataclysms among indigenous populations, not just through military action but also by exposing them to new diseases. And they instigated the arrival of millions of unwilling Africans, killing many a multitude in the process. (There are now over 100 million people of African descent in the New World.)
Mass emigration shaped the England that George Ashby left behind, as well. A nation that had never before tasted a potato or a tomato or smoked tobacco now embraced these new sensations with alacrity. England was flooded with exotic tropical foodstuffs, such as cocoa and sugar, that would transform its people’s tastes and diets. These commodities would enrich the mother country exponentially, creating new industries and generating tens of thousands of new jobs. Through the traffic between the colonies and the various trading centres of the mother country, like Bristol and Liverpool, they encountered races they had never met before: Africans, Indians, Chinese. (By the eighteenth century the black population of London alone numbered almost 10,000.) These encounters with new civilizations influenced the art, music and dress of Britain, just as the debates around the rights and wrongs of slavery stimulated an entirely new type of discussion about human rights, race and religion.
With all that grew out of this epic movement of people, did this act of mass resettlement achieve the goals of those who chose to participate in it? Were the exploitation and loss of life that resulted worth what they gained by coming to the New World? Certainly, in immediate terms, George Ashby had made the right decision: he and his children were undoubtedly better off than they would have been if they had stayed put. But whether their migration was a good thing overall is debatable. Lord Rosebery, the Liberal British statesman and towering figure of British politics at the end of the 1800s, called the British Empire “the greatest secular agency for good that the world has seen.” But the economist J. A. Hobson, in his magnum opus Imperialism, published in 1902, argued that far from being a “force for good,” imperialism was merely a search for new markets and investment opportunities that had a deleterious effect not just on the majority of overseas subjects but also on those left behind in Britain.
Whatever its rights and wrongs, it is impossible not to be in awe of the daring of the migrants who found the strength in themselves to leave behind the limitations imposed on them in their home country, in the hope of finding something better elsewhere. Somehow they managed to push past the natural inertia that binds most of us to the familiar, and despite the fear of perishing in a strange land, they went anyway. Once there, the success of people like George Ashby was largely a result of how well he adjusted to the New World and how successfully he came to terms with the loss of the Old. After settling in Barbados, George Ashby, like many others, never looked back. But if he had abandoned his birthplace, he would discover to his chagrin that the turmoil of the mother country would still be felt in his new island home.
However, just as we admire these migrants’ courage, we cannot help but lament the effect they had and profoundly question their judgement. In Barbados, the island on which George Ashby took his gamble, he and his eager contemporaries converted its topography from a primeval forest into a land as neat as a patchwork quilt, and transformed an uninhabited island into a European enclave and then a predominantly black one. What they brought together in the crucible of the New World was undoubtedly terrible. The sugar industry that they founded was an insatiable maw that swallowed millions of lives and spewed out a racist ideology that has blighted the lives of many to this day. In the process, a prelapsarian paradise became a moral quagmire, where black people were brutally and relentlessly exploited for others’ financial enrichment.
But, to paraphrase the poet Sheena Pugh, “sometimes things do not always go from bad to worse.” And modern-day Barbados has been something of a good-news story. Though only a tiny dot on the map, the island is buoyant. A stable economy, a well-developed infrastructure and an excellent education system have made it one of the most attractive places to live in the entire Caribbean. Thus the nation described in the mid-1960s as having “a fairly homogeneous level of under-development” had, by 1992, climbed up the United Nations Development Programme Index to “the highest placed country in the developing world,” with almost 100 per cent literacy, an impressive human rights record, and one of the longest life expectancies of any country in the world.
Socially, too, it has evolved. With independence, the coloured elite, who had previously tended to ally themselves with the colonial authorities and the white plantocracy, realized that the realities of life in a functioning democracy demanded a new perspective, and that they could only maintain political power by collaborating with the black masses who made up the majority of voters. So the old colonial values were gradually thrown off and new national symbols were created. There was a resurgence of interest in the nation’s African roots and an emergence of a new racial consciousness that gave pride to the majority of the island’s inhabitants. Of course, some colonial fallout remains: there is a curious diffidence among islanders, and Barbados is still, as my father puts it, “a colour-coded society,” in which outside the workplace some white Barbadians tend to avoid socializing with their black counterparts.
Despite this, ties with Britain remain strong and survive in the army and in its legal and parliamentary systems. But Britain’s influence on the island is waning, replaced by that of America, whose proximity to the island and status as a world superpower mean that it has—for now—more sway. But even American domin
ance in the region is being threatened by that rising star, China, which is working hard to secure influence in the Caribbean basin.
By the end of the twentieth century, Barbados had a greater claim than Jamaica to be considered the success story of the anglophone Caribbean. But how did an island so much smaller and poorer in natural resources emerge in front of its more naturally blessed neighbour? The Barbadian economist Courtney Blackman attributed the Barbadian economic miracle to several sources, including its lack of an indigenous population and its geographical position, which meant that it enjoyed a relatively peaceful early colonial career, especially in comparison to many other islands which changed hands numerous times or were forced to fight prolonged internal wars. The failure of the Bussa Rebellion too proved a historical gift to the island when set alongside the terrible price Haiti paid for its successful revolution. At the time, Haiti bucked the might of the European world, but it is now the most impoverished state in the region. Barbados also has the advantage of a long unbroken tradition of democratic government, whose leaders proved willing to invest in education, infrastructure and welfare programmes, rather than pocket the island’s wealth for themselves. A strong commitment to the rule of law and religious tolerance also played their part. All of these factors, along with a goodly dose of luck, help to explain the island’s unlikely triumph.
Sugar in the Blood Page 36