The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  A short side street leads to Pall Mall Square: the church, the timbered colonial-Georgian Public Library and Court, the St. Kitts Club, the private houses with lower floors of masonry, upper floors shingled, white and fragile, and steep four-sided roofs. The garden is unkempt, the wire fences around the central Victorian fountain trampled down, the lamp-standards empty and rusting; but the trees and flowers and the backdrop of mountains are still spectacular. Pall Mall Square is where PAM holds its public meetings. It is also, as all St. Kitts knows, the place where, among trees and flowers and buildings like these, “new” Negroes from Africa were put up for auction, after being rested and nourished in the importers’ barracoons, which were there, on the beach, not far from today’s oil-storage tanks.

  The past crowds the tiny island like the sugar-cane itself. Deeper and deeper protest is always possible.

  AT ABOUT ten every morning the guards change outside Government Headquarters. The green-bereted officer shouts, boots stamp; and the two relieved soldiers, looking quickly up and down the street, get into the back of the idling Land-Rover and are driven to Defence Force Headquarters, an exposed wooden hut on high ground near ZIZ, the one-studio radio station.

  Against the soft green hills beyond Basseterre, the bright blue sea and the cloud-topped peak of Nevis, a Negro lounges in a washed-out paratrooper’s uniform, thin and bandy-legged, zipped-up and tight, like a soft toy.

  It seems to be drama for the sake of drama. But there are bullet marks on the inside of the hut. These are shown as evidence of the armed raid that was made on Basseterre by persons unknown in June 1967, at the beginning of the Anguillan crisis. The police station was also attacked. Many shots were fired but no one was killed; the raiders disappeared. Bradshaw added to his legend by walking the next morning from Government Headquarters to Masses House in the uniform of a Colonel, with a rifle, bandolier, and binoculars.

  The raid remains a mystery. Some people believe it was staged, but there are Anguillans who now say that they were responsible and that their aim was to protect the independence of their island by kidnapping Bradshaw and holding him as a hostage. The raid failed because it was badly organized—no one had thought about transport in Basseterre—and because Bradshaw had been tipped off by an Anguillan businessman.

  Days after the raid leading members of PAM and WAM were arrested. They went on trial four months later. Defence lawyers were harassed; and Bradshaw’s supporters demonstrated when all the accused men were acquitted. Ever since, the rule of law in St. Kitts has appeared to be in danger. The definition of power has become simple.

  I see them:

  These bold men; these rare men—

  Above all other men that toil—

  That LIVE the truth; that suffer:

  These policemen. We love them!

  The poem is from The Labour Spokesman. There may no longer be a danger from Anguilla, but the police and the army have come to St. Kitts to stay.

  I FIRST saw St. Kitts eight years ago, at night, from a broken-down immigrant ship in Basseterre harbour. We didn’t land. The emigrants had been rocking for some time in the bay in large open boats. The ship’s lights played on sweated shirts and dresses, red eyes in upturned oily faces, cardboard boxes and suitcases painted with names and careful addresses in England.

  In the morning, on the open sea, the nightmare was over. The jackets and ties and the suitcases had gone. The emigrants, as I found out, moving among them, were politically educated. Copies of The Labour Spokesman were about. Many of the emigrants from Anguilla, which had been recently hit by a hurricane, were in constant touch with God.

  The emigrants had a leader. He was a slender young mulatto, going to England to do law. He moved among the emigrants like a trusted agitator; he was protective. He was a man of some background and his political concern, in such circumstances, seemed unusual. He mistrusted my inquiries. He thought I was a British agent and told the emigrants not to talk to me. They became unfriendly; word spread that I had called one of them a nigger. I was rescued from the adventure by a young Baptist missionary.

  I didn’t get the name of the ship-board leader then. In St. Kitts and the Caribbean he is now famous. He did more than study law. He returned to St. Kitts to challenge Bradshaw. He founded PAM. He has been jailed, tried, and acquitted; he is only thirty-one. He is Dr. William Herbert. A good deal of his magic in St. Kitts, his power to challenge, comes from that title of Doctor—obtained for a legal thesis—which he was then travelling to London to get.

  He came into the Basseterre hotel dining-room one morning. As soon as we were introduced he reminded me of our last meeting. The ship, he said, was Spanish and disorganized and he was young. He was as restless and swift and West Indian–handsome as I had remembered: his five months in jail have not marked him.

  “I don’t want to frighten you,” he said, when he came to see me later that day. “But you should be careful. Writers can disappear. Two soldiers will be watching the hotel tonight.”

  We drove to a rusting seaside bar, deserted, a failed tourist amenity.

  “Have you seen Bradshaw?”

  I said that the feeling in Government Headquarters was that I might be a British agent. Mr. Bradshaw wouldn’t give an interview, but he had come over to the hotel one morning to greet me.

  “He’s an interesting man. He knows a lot about African art and magic and so on. It perhaps explains his hold, you know.”

  We went to look at Frigate Bay, part of the uninhabited area of scrub and salt-ponds which is attached like a tail to the oval mass of St. Kitts. The government had recently announced a L29-million tourist development plan for Frigate Bay. Some in-transit cruise passengers had been taken to inspect the site a few days before; The Labour Spokesman had announced it as the start of the tourist season.

  “Development!” Herbert said, waving at the desolation. “If you come here at night they shoot you, you know. It’s a military area. They say we are trying to sabotage.”

  On the way back we detoured through some Basseterre slum streets. Herbert waved at women and children. “How, how, man?” Many waved back. He said it was his method, concentrating on the women and children; they drew the men in.

  HERBERT is the first and only Ph.D. in St. Kitts. Beside him, Bradshaw is archaic, the leader of people lifted up from despair, the man of the people who in power achieves a personal style which all then feel they share. In St. Kitts and the West Indies Bradshaw is now a legend, for the gold swizzle-stick he is reputed to bring out at parties to stir his champagne, the gold brush for his moustache, the formal English dress, even the silk hose and buckle shoes on some ceremonial occasions, the vintage yellow Rolls-Royce. He has a local reputation for his knowledge of antiques and African art and for his book-reading. He is believed to be a member of several book clubs. He reads much Winston Churchill; his favourite book, his PRO told me, is The Good Earth; his favourite comic strip, Li’l Abner.

  It is an attractive legend. But I found him subdued, in dress and speech. I was sorry he didn’t want to talk more to me; he said he had suffered much from writers. I understood. I looked at his moustache and thought of the gold brush. He is well-built, a young fifty-one, one of those men made ordinary by their photographs. We talked standing up. His speech was precise, very British, with little of St. Kitts in his accent. He stood obliquely to me; he wore dark glasses. As we walked down the hotel steps to the Land-Rover with his party’s slogan, “Labour Leads,” he told me he was pessimistic about the future of small countries like St. Kitts. He worked, but he was full of despair. He had supported the West Indian Federation, but that had failed. And it is true that Bradshaw began to lose his grip on St. Kitts during his time as a minister in the West Indian Federal Government, whose headquarters was in Trinidad.

  The Negro folk leader is a peasant leader. St. Kitts is like a black English parish, far from the source of beauty and fashion. The folk leader who emerges requires, by his exceptional gifts, to be absorbed into that higher so
ciety of which the parish is a shadow. For leaders like Bradshaw, though, there is no such society. They are linked forever to the primitives who were the source of their original power. They are doomed to smallness; they have to create their own style. Christophe, Emperor of Haiti, creator of a Negro aristocracy with laughable names, came from this very island of St. Kitts, where he was a slave and a tailor; the inspiration for the Citadel in Haiti came from those fortifications at Brimstone Hill beside the littoral road.

  THE DIFFERENCE between Herbert and Bradshaw is the difference between Herbert’s title of Doctor and Bradshaw’s title of Papa. Each man’s manner seems to contradict his title. Herbert has none of Bradshaw’s applied style. His out-of-court dress is casual; his car is old; the house he is building outside Basseterre is the usual St. Kitts miniature. His speech is more colloquial than Bradshaw’s, his accent more local. His manners are at once middle-class and popular, one mode containing the other. He never strains; he moves with the assurance of his class and his looks. To all this he adds the Ph.D.

  “Tell me,” Bradshaw’s black PRO asked with some bitterness, “who do you think is the more educated man? Herbert or Bradshaw?”

  It would have been too sophisticated a question to put to the young and newly educated who went to Herbert’s early lectures on economics, law, and political theory in Pall Mall Square.

  “Studyation is better than education,” Bradshaw said, comforting his ageing illiterates from the canefields. It became one of his mots.

  But Herbert grew as the leader of literate protest. Everything became his cause. New electricity rates were announced: large users were to pay less per unit. Standard practice in other countries, but Herbert and PAM said the new rates were unfair to the poor of St. Kitts. The poor agreed.

  Bradshaw and one of his ministers became law students; Bradshaw was almost fifty. The faded notifications of their enrolment in a London Inn are still displayed in the portico of the Court in Pall Mall Square; both men were said to be eating dinners during their official trips to London. Then Anguilla seceded; PAM and WAM were as troublesome as their names; the world press was hostile. Herbert, jailed, tried, acquitted, became a Caribbean figure. Bradshaw was isolated. He appeared to be on the way out. But then he recruited a young St. Kitts lawyer-lecturer as his Public Relations Officer.

  This man has saved Bradshaw, and in a few months he has given a new twist to St. Kitts politics. Bradshaw’s tactics have changed. He is no longer the established leader on the defensive, attracting fresh agitation. He has become once again the leader of protest. It is in protest that he now competes with Herbert. The young PRO has provided the lectures and the intellectual backing. He is known to the irreverent as Bradshaw’s Race Relations Officer. The cause is Black Power.

  The avowed aim is the dismantling of that order which the geography of the island illustrates. The word the PRO sometimes uses is Revolution. The word has got to the white suburb of Fortlands and the Golf Club, where the little group of English expatriates is known as the Whisperers.

  Someone put it like this: “What Bradshaw now wants to do is to make a fresh start, with the land and the people.”

  The politics of St. Kitts today, opaque to the visitor looking for principles and areas of difference, become clearer as soon as it is realized that both parties are parties of protest, in the vacuum of independence; and that for both parties the cause of protest is that past, of slavery. What is at stake is the kingship, and this has recently been simplified. The difficult message of Black Power—identity, economic involvement, solidarity, as the PRO defines it—has become mangled in transmission. It can now be heard that Bradshaw, for all the English aspirations of his past, is a full-blooded Ashanti. Herbert is visibly mulatto.

  Herbert’s father was Labour Relations Officer for the sugar industry at the time of Bradshaw’s famous thirteen-week strike. It was a difficult time for the Herbert family. They were threatened and abused by the strikers; and the St. Kitts story is that Herbert, still a boy, met Bradshaw in the street one day and vowed to get even. Herbert says the meeting may have taken place, but he doesn’t remember it.

  I asked him now whether power in St. Kitts was worth the time, the energy, the dangers.

  “A man is in the sea,” Herbert said. “He must swim.”

  THERE is still a Government House in St. Kitts, a modest, wide-verandaed timber house on an airy hill. The butler wears white; a lithograph of a local scene, a gift of the Queen, hangs in the drawing-room; there is a signed photograph of the Duke of Edinburgh. The governor is a Negro knight from another island, a much respected lawyer and academic. He is without a role; he is isolated from the local politics of kingship, this fight between the lawyers, in which the rule of law may go. He has spent much of his time in Government House working on a study of recent West Indian constitution-making. It is called The Way to Power.

  THE PRO on whom Bradshaw depends, the lawyer-lecturer to whom he has surrendered part of his power, is Lee Moore, a short, slight, bearded, country-born Negro of about thirty. Moore says that when he came back to St. Kitts from London he rejected the view that what was needed in St. Kitts was a Negro aristocracy. But the political usefulness of Black Power was only accidentally discovered, in the excitement that followed a lecture he gave on the subject.

  Now, like Herbert, Lee Moore drives around the circular St. Kitts road, mixing law business with campaigning, waving, mixing gravity with heartiness. On his car there is a sticker, cut out from a petrol advertisement: Join the Power Set.

  I made a tour with him late one afternoon. Shortly after nightfall we had a puncture. He was unwilling to use the jack; he said he didn’t know where to put it. He crouched and peered; he was confused. Some cars went by without stopping. I began to fear for his clothes and dignity. Then two cyclists passed. They shouted and came back to help. “We thought it was one of those brutes,” one of them said. A van stopped. The jack wasn’t used. The car was lifted while the wheel was changed.

  Moore was in a state of some excitement when we drove off again, and it was a little time before I understood that is was an important triumph.

  “It’s how I always change a wheel. Did you hear what those boys on the cycles shouted? ‘It’s Lee Moore’s car.’”

  Power, the willing services of the simple and the protecting: another man of the people in the making, another Negro on the move.

  After a while he said reflectively, “If it was Herbert he would still be there, I can tell you.”

  Herbert, though, might have used the jack.

  1969

  The Shipwrecked

  Six Thousand

  AMONG the green and hilly islands of the Caribbean Anguilla is like a mistake, a sport. It is seventeen miles long and two miles wide and so flat that when Anguillans give you directions they don’t tell you to turn right or left; they say east or west. It is rocky and arid. There are no palm trees, no big trees. Mangrove is thick above the beaches, which look as they must have done when Columbus came. The forests that then existed have long been cut down; and the Anguillans, charcoal-burners and boat-builders, are the natural enemies of anything green that looks like growing big.

  Sugar-cane used to grow in some places, but even in the days of slavery it was never an island of plantations. In 1825, nine years before the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, there were about three hundred white people and three hundred free coloureds, people of mixed race. Between them they kept about three thousand Negroes. The Negroes were a liability. On other Caribbean islands Negroes were let off on Saturdays to work on their own plots. In Anguilla they were turned loose for half the week to forage for themselves.

  Today there are only about twelve thousand Anguillans. Half of them live or work overseas, in the nearby United States Virgin Islands, in Harlem, and in Slough in Buckinghamshire, known locally as Slough-bucks. But there are houses and plots for most of them to return to; the desolate island has long been parcelled out.

  In mid-Decembe
r last year, when I was there, the island was filling up for Christmas. The Viscount aircraft of LIAT, Leeward Islands Air Transport (“We fly where buccaneers sailed”), had stopped calling ever since Anguilla rebelled in 1967 and broke away from the newly independent three-island British Commonwealth state of St. Kitts–Nevis–Anguilla. But the Anguillans (after chasing away an American and his DC-3) had set up three fiercely competitive little airlines of their own, Air Anguilla, Anguilla Airways, Valley Air Services, each with its own livery and its own five-passenger Piper Aztecs regularly doing the five-minute, five-dollar connecting hop from St. Martin.

  More than any other Caribbean community, the Anguillans have the sense of home. The land has been theirs immemorially; no humiliation attaches to it. There are no Great Houses, as in St. Kitts; there are not even ruins.

  FOR THE ANGUILLANS history begins with the myth of a shipwreck. This was how the white founders came, the ancestors of the now multi-coloured clans of Flemings, Hodges, Richardsons, Websters, Gumbs. About the arrival of the Negroes there is some confusion. Many know they were imported as slaves. But one young man was sure they were here before the shipwreck. Another felt they had come a year or two after. He didn’t know how or why. “I forget that part.” The past does not count. The Anguillans have lived for too long like a shipwrecked community.

  They are not well educated. Instead, they have skills, like boatbuilding, and religion, which is a continual excitement. Few Anguillans act without divine guidance. The Anguillan exodus to Sloughbucks that began in 1960 had the sanction of God; and a similar certitude is behind the secession from St. Kitts and the boldness of many recent Anguillan actions.