It was a subdued Jeremiah Gumbs who padded about the dining-room in his slippers, pouring water, offering bread, like a man still with a duty to his ranch-hands. Afterwards he led me through the wire-netting door to the open verandah. Sand-flies and mosquitoes pounced. He slapped and clapped his big hands, killing and calm.
“Who is this lawyer guy? Is he a constitutional lawyer, a company lawyer, a criminal lawyer? Does he know anything about economics? You tell Webster. He’s got to have a development plan. Otherwise he’s going to frighten off a lot of people. And they are not that many. They are not that many.”
In the morning the sad American left, green check jacket matching his trousers.
Jeremiah Gumbs still suffered. “He was gonna invest plenty. He wasn’t gonna make money for four years. Then you’ll let someone else in? These people don’t understand economics. If Webster could worry he’d be worried. He was gonna build that road, open up that whole area. Put value on people’s property. Houses going up alongside the road. But these people don’t understand. Look at me. I put this place up. I advertised Anguilla. Now other people have put down their little places. The tourist comes to the airport, the taxi-drivers rush him, take him this place, that place. I advertised.” His voice began to sing. “It’s not a way to live. I don’t know. I feel there’s another way to live.”
I said I felt he had done enough for Anguilla.
He said he wouldn’t rest until he had done a lot more. “I love this country. I love the people. I know what poverty is like. I know what drought is like. I care. I remember when I was a boy …”
On my bill there was a charge for an Anguillan flag. I told Lady B. I hadn’t had one.
“You want one, young man?” She waved it at me when she gave it, and did a gigantic little mimicry of a drum-majorette. “Anguilla, here I come.”
I put it in my pocket, the flag of the territory that Jeremiah Gumbs didn’t look like opening up.
Independence, as a smooth administration: that worked. Independence as the preserver of an old community: that made sense. Independence as “development” and quick tourist money: that, as the San Francisco Group romantically sensed, defeats itself. Anguilla was going to disappoint more of its supporters. Independence had only just come; and Anguilla already required pacification.
PACIFICATION came, heavy-handed and absurd—but only to the outsider looking for comedy or a manageable cause. The Anguilla problem remains: the problem of a tiny colony set adrift, part of the jetsam of an empire, a near-primitive people suddenly returned to a free state, their renewed or continuing exploitation.
When I left Anguilla, Jeremiah Gumbs was giving instructions to the workmen (and a very slow, contemplative, sand-sifting workwoman) who were running up the barrack-like extension to the hotel. The other day, quite by chance, I saw him in a dark suit, his ring on the small finger of his large left hand, in the Delegates’ Lounge of the United Nations. Four English journalists were taking down his grave words.
The British invasion was two days away. Jeremiah—an American citizen, his business in the United States the Gumbs Fuel and Oil Burner Service of Edison, New Jersey—was the petitioner that day for Anguilla, before the Committee on Colonialism. He spoke lucidly and without exaggeration; his tone was one of injury, familiar to me; but everything he said about the planned British invasion was true.
He was the official Anguillan spokesman again. He was back in favour in Anguilla. And it was not surprising to learn from newspaper reports that the American in green had returned to Anguilla. He had returned as a lawyer. He had no law degree, but he had “an extensive law library”; he was given a permit to practise. He did more. He advised on the new Anguillan constitution. (The previous one, very short, had been drafted by a Harvard professor, who had somehow ceased to be important in Anguilla.) The National Observer gave some of the provisions of the new constitution. Businesses, foreign or local, could not be expropriated by the Anguillan government; foreign governments could not bring tax suits against Anguilla-based businesses. A judge of the Anguillan Supreme Court didn’t have to be an Anguillan or a lawyer; all he needed was a permit to practise law in Anguilla, and he had to be over thirty-five. The National Observer also gave some details of the franchise the American had asked for in December, for his basic building-materials plant: twenty-five years tax-free, the Anguillan government to get five hundred dollars a year in return.
After the British invasion the American was put on a Cessna and sent off the island.
“It may seem strange to people who have lost faith in the United Nations,” Jeremiah Gumbs said to reporters a week later, “but on our little island the United Nations is still regarded, in spite of its imperfections, as the great hope of small nations and people of goodwill anywhere.”
It was the New York Times Quotation of the Day. The Times also presented, as news, some lines from the two-year-old Anguillan anthem. Anguilla—as cause, as comedy—appeared set for a re-run.
1969
The Ultimate Colony
BRITISH HONDURAS is the last British territory on the American mainland, and the present Governor ought to be the last. But this is uncertain. After five years of internal self-government, with a Premier and ministers, complete independence is still difficult. The problem is one of succession. Guatemala says that British Honduras is hers and should be returned to her. American mediation has failed. In British Honduras itself the Opposition has grown strong on the charge that the government is preparing to sell out to Guatemala. The government says it isn’t. But it cannot act. It requires independence to prove its point, and independence will come only when the point is proved.
The Governor who is there, withdrawn, waiting to hand over, is Sir John Paul. His service before this was in West Africa, in Sierra Leone and the Gambia. British Honduras is his last colonial posting. He is fifty-three; his own future is uncertain. He is no longer a pensionable officer and he has as yet no job in England to go back to. In British Honduras he has little to do. He assents to bills in the name of the Queen; he is head of the Civil Service; he handles external affairs. His only direct responsibility is defence—there is a small British garrison—and public order—he shares control of the police with the minister concerned.
“Security and stability. Very important, but rather boring. One doesn’t really have a full-time job. One tends to be a little isolated and divorced. Quite rightly: the country runs itself. One doesn’t want to impinge.”
The Governor’s tact is like sensibility, an expression of a natural cool melancholy. He is a tall man, heavy but still athletic. During office hours he wears a white shirt and a tie, no jacket: the dress expressing the ambiguous formality of his job.
“So long as it’s a dependent territory the Governor can’t be an anomaly. But he can have damned little to do. It’s even worse when you’re a Governor-General. There’s even less to do. I had a year of that in the Gambia. I saw that the only way of getting out was to write a republican constitution. I did so. We put it to the electorate and they rejected it.”
White water-skis and fishing rods lean against the wall of the Governor’s office, airy and light. A half-open umbrella hangs from the grey steel safe. There is a wall-map: this all but empty British territory—nine thousand square miles, one hundred thousand people—incongruous in Latin America: Mexico the industrial giant to the north, Guatemala of the high mountains, the political assassinations, the temperate flowers and fruit, the Spanish and Mayan architectural antiquities, to the west and south. The wire-netted windows of the Governor’s office show the sparse gardens of Government House, the two tall royal palms. Just beyond the garden wall is the Caribbean, not blue here, thick with catfish, restless scavengers of the waters of this city built on swampland.
THE EMPIRE here was never grand. It began as a seventeenth-century coastal intrusion on the Spanish American Empire. The territory doubled its size in the last century. But it was acknowledged as an intrusion and was never settled; it never
became a land of plantations. The first interlopers came with their Negroes to cut logwood; their successors went further inland to cut mahogany. The mahogany forests have all been cut down. Bush remains, and scattered little bush communities: Maya Indians, who move among the mighty ruins of their civilization like any other degraded immigrant group; Black Caribs, transported from the West Indian island of St. Vincent, considered by Negroes to be very black and ugly, with a bad smell; Spanish and mestizo refugees from Yucatan; and, in the last ten years, some thousands of Mennonites, a Bible-reading German-American sect, who have transformed many square miles of tropical bush, bought at fifteen shillings an acre, into the landscape of pioneer America. The descendants of the Negro log-cutters, now two-thirds of the population, and confirmed lovers of city life, live in the overcrowded coastal capital, Belize City.
From the air Belize City is an arbitrary white huddle at the edge of a sodden land where forests occasionally reflect the sun as a pale white disc. The coastline is untidy with drowned islets, like darker cloud shadows; during the 1961 hurricane one “exclusive” American-owned islet, the cause of some local resentment, sank with its three cottages. Corrugatediron latrines overhang the wide, slow canals of the city; in one night-club tourists are invited to feed the catfish.
In this city to be buried in “a good dry hole” is to be lucky. In the late afternoons Negroes in jackets and ties—famous throughout Central America for their immunity to disease—walk behind the hearses to the cemetery just outside the town, waving white handkerchiefs. Afterwards they stand relaxed and emblematic among the higher tombstones, chatting, waving in the dusk. It is like a ceremony of bewildered farewell at the limit of the world. But they are only keeping off the mosquitoes and sandflies.
IN BELIZE CITY the Union Jack is the flag of Negro protest against the Guatemalan claim. The Negroes of British Honduras were not plantation slaves. They were foresters. And though until recently some private houses in Belize City could still show their old slave punishment cells, with the original chains, the Negroes look back with pride to the days when, securely British, they fought shoulder to shoulder with their proprietors against the Spaniards.
“If you mention slavery here,” the Negro leader of the Opposition says, “people would stare at you and wonder what you are talking about.”
The Guatemalans say jokingly that Guatemala should take back British Honduras and Britain should take back her Negroes. The Mexicans have a joke like this too: Mexico will take British Honduras, Guatemala will take the negritos.
The Vice President of Guatemala, one of his country’s leading intellectuals, doesn’t find the joke funny. He doesn’t want the Negroes, and he is frightened of Mexico. Mexico too has a claim, to a good half of British Honduras; but Mexico will act only if Guatemala does. The Guatemalan Vice President despairs. He is an Indian and a patriot; he thinks that Guatemala has lost British Honduras, her twenty-third department, that the land has been spitefully spoiled by the British, who packed it out with Negroes and now require neither the land nor the Negroes.
“We have no Negro problem. A Negro has only to square his shoulders, and ten of our Indians will run. We are a weak race. The British brought over those Negroes from the Congo, Angola, the Sudan. They can work well in the heat; our Indians can’t. Negroes don’t fall ill easily. Malaria doesn’t touch them. When the Negro mates with the Indian he produces the sambo. That is a race that quickly becomes degenerate.”
But Vice Presidents change; the Guatemalan claim can at any time become a Guatemalan crusade. Nothing will happen, though, while British Honduras remains British; and the question of who will get the Negroes will remain academic so long as there is a Governor and the Union Jack flies over Government House, not as protest, but as a sign of a continuing order.
GOVERNMENT HOUSE is a white two-storeyed wooden building that looks like a large private house. It has only three—enormous—bedrooms. Its neutral style conceals its age. It was begun in 1815, and is not like the Government Houses of the later Empire. It has been neglected for periods and has been through many hurricanes. The tidal wave that followed the last, in 1961, covered the main floor and disfigured the central mahogany staircase, the building’s only notable feature.
“It was all much grander in the Gambia. There had been East African governors before. They had, I think quite rightly, very strong views about how a Governor should be looked after. Most beautiful garden too. But of course this house suits the resources of the country.”
Government House costs the Government of British Honduras £11,000 a year. That covers everything: the monogrammed china and silver, bought through the Crown Agents in London; the three stewards, Lloyd, Garnett and George; Leone, the cook, Adela, the laundress; the two secretaries in the Governor’s outer office; and the Governor himself. The Governor’s ADC is an adjutant in the local Volunteer Guard.
“He’s part-time. There’s very little formality about this job now. The flag is lowered at 6:30. The police sentries do it. In the Gambia it was done with ceremony, with sounding—what do they call it—the Retreat. We did it once here and I must say I thought it was jolly impressive. We had a presentation of insignia and we had 350 to 400 guests and the flag was lowered and they beat the Retreat. But it taxed our resources so much we haven’t done it since.
“We have receptions every month or so. Generally. It’s the one place where everybody can meet. It’s not a criticism, but people here tend to mix with their own group. My wife does the whole thing herself. I have no housekeeper. So when I am on my own the entertaining is restricted.
“We had a fine new car. It’s just been smashed up. Brand-new Austin Princess, possibly a write-off. Most infuriating. It’s been sent to England for repairs. So we are reduced to a 1962 Rover.”
The Governor has a Land-Rover for touring. His tours are official, but muted and almost private: the Premier of British Honduras has made it clear that he doesn’t like official public “confrontations” with the Governor.
“He’s very sensible. One can only talk piously.”
The Governor has been to the Assembly only once. He has only once seen, and can no longer remember, the locally designed costume—black coat, white lace cuffs, white cravat, long red gown—which the mace-bearer, a former stevedore, complainingly wears. The Assembly has been adjourned and adjourned: the Governor has never made a Speech from the Throne.
“Not that this concerns me,” the Governor says.
The Governor has taken up painting again. “It keeps me out of mischief.” His Gambian watercolours—precise, meticulous, limpid—hang on the grey walls of Government House among old official photographs, a tarnished oil painting of the Berkshire downs and a view of the Thames.
“The Governor,” the Premier says, “is like St. John the Baptist. He gets smaller every day. Government House isn’t Government House. Government House is the Premier’s Office and the Assembly.”
NEXT TO GOVERNMENT HOUSE is the Premier’s official residence. It is an inelegant wooden bungalow, white with blue facings—the colours of the Premier’s party—and a red tin roof.
In the dining-room there is a larger-than-life portrait of the Premier, done by a local artist from a photograph. It shows a youthful, mischievous man of fifty in glasses and wearing an open-necked shirt. The mischief is in the eyes and the mouth; the lips are welted and look bruised and parched. The artist had trouble with the mouth, and managed to hit it off only while listening to the Premier’s voice on the radio. The Premier is heard every morning on the programme called Wake up and Work. The Premier is a man of mixed race: Maya Indian, European, some seepage of African. He looks white; this painting makes him black.
The Premier, the Honourable George Price, does not live in his official residence. He lives in his old family house in the run-down centre of Belize City. The unpainted house, on tall stilts, had been weathered black. It is blank and shuttered behind a high fence; and it has no front steps.
The Premier goes home ea
rly. He is unmarried; a neighbour cooks for him. He receives few visitors at home and he seldom takes home official papers. He reads novels—Thomas Mann is a favourite—and theological works. He says his prayers before going to bed. He is up at five and goes to Mass at 5:30. He does not worry through to political decisions; they come to him after the night of prayer and rest; and he is in his office punctually at eight. He has no grey hairs.
When he was a young man George Price studied for the priesthood—the disturbing mouth is that of a self-willed priest—and even his enemies say that neither age nor power has changed him. He is not interested in money; he is known to give away money; his outer office is always full of suppliants. His official car is a Land-Rover; he ceaselessly tours the empty country, greeting, checking. Then, abruptly every day, the public life ends.
“Mr. Price is not like the rest of men,” the leader of the Opposition says. “The rest of us have wives and families, recreations. Mr. Price has a one-track mind. He wants to get rid of the British but we believe he is quite willing to replace the British by the Guatemalans.”
“This is a subtle thing,” the Premier’s second-in-command says. “The subtlety is that if Guatemala takes over, Mr. Price has less to lose. Mr. Price’s complexion and racial make-up have given some credence to this belief.”
“It usually is a good way,” the Opposition second-in-command says, “to parade as a religious person. Who’s Price trying to kid? Price has long dreamed of a glorious Latin-Catholic Central American Empire.”
The Writer and the World: Essays Page 13