Five hundred years ago, Europeans came to the Caribbean to make money. The land did not belong to them and the people to whom it belonged lived here. It did not matter that they were strangers. In the context of the time they were a superior race. They were strong, they had swords, spears and gunpowder.

     

 Above all they were Christians and the people who lived here were considered inferior. They looked different, their weapons were primitive and they did not know anything about Christianity. They were considered to be pagans.

     

Thus on the basis of these racial and religious differences, these people from Europe assumed to themselves the right to exploit the people who owned these islands and to claim the islands to themselves.

     

 They enslaved the natives, killed them out, divided the land among themselves and then imported Black people from Africa to replace the natives.

    

  It was not exactly collusion between the European Nations. The islands were such a prize that they fought mercilessly for them and changed places on each island as the fortunes of war fluctuated. 

     

The English came in 1623 and after they had totally decimated the Natives, waged war after war with the Spanish, French and Dutch to gain and maintain a foothold on these islands. They built their forts in the various islands to defend them using the Black people to do the construction work.

     

They fought like dogs for the islands when they were profitable. They made lots of money farming sugar cane, cotton and other tropical goods in a protected market and repatriated all the money to England. They left hardly anything behind except an impoverished illiterate black population. This black population now strains itself to preserve the broken down sugar mills and to cherish the old buildings which these European vultures left behind because they could not carry them back to England.

     

When the Industrial Revolution grew apace and England could get along without the Caribbean islands, they quietly left the islands in deep debt and returned to England to the splendid country houses which they had built from the labour sweat and blood of Africans in the Caribbean. 

     

 In 1847 Britain embraced the World Market and left the Caribbean Islands to fend for themselves. They abandoned the islands, only making a dramatic re-entry when they saw a chance to make some money to repatriate to Britain. Like in 1905 when they built the Sugar Factory to continue the age-old exploitation of Black people on the land.

     

The building of the Sugar Factory was a travesty of history. The Sugar Industry was not paying. The old mills were a waste of money and time. The landlords saw the industry facing collapse and knew that inevitably the land would pass from their hands to the hands of the black community who would squat on the land as soon as the debt-burdened landlords turned their backs for Britain. 

     

The only way they could save their land from this prospect was to contrive some seemingly legitimate use for it and that was where the idea came from to build a central sugar factory in St. Kitts and a net work of railway lines to transport the sugar cane to the central mill.

   

   The Sugar Factory made much money for the shareholders in England. What was left out of the profits after maintaining the aristocratic great houses at Golden Rock was marginal. Nearly half a century after the establishment of the Sugar Factory, the field workers were still living in one-room houses, with a shit-pan in the yard. They caught water from a public standpipe and bathed either in the sea or in a public bath where some careless ones also shitted.

    

  The Factory workers were slightly better off. They earned incentive wages in the crop time and eked a living in the long dull season.

   

   The Sugar Industry was not meant to profit the island. It was meant to fulfill three objectives. One, it was concocted to keep the land in the hands of the landlords. Two, it was designed to make money for the landlords and the expatriate owners of the Sugar Factory. Three, it was designed to provide a little money for the colonial government of the Leeward Islands; to relieve Britain of the responsibility of providing grants-in-aid.        

     

The Sugar Factory investors and their landlord supporters were able to get Britain to offer them a protected price. After all, the investors were British so the British gladly supported their own as long as their own people had an interest in the Sugar Industry of St. Kitts.

     

After less than seventy years the inevitable happened Profits dropped, the white people of Golden Rock quietly left. The British shareholders deftly off- loaded a near derelict sugar factory to the government. Then losses began to accumulate and the aging Golden Rock houses were occupied by Blacks. All of a sudden the management became black to manage an industry, which had already been bled to a shell.

     

 I believe, and it is clear that the Sugar Factory and its satellite sugar estates were not meant to last. From the beginning it was a device to get quick money and leave. The usual trick from the days of Thomas Warner.

     

Look at how quickly the prized buildings at Golden Rock became derelict. Even the Factory Manager’s mansion, the hub of the island’s economy could not last one hundred (100) years but fell into near ruin in less than seventy.

     

The white people from abroad didn’t want it anymore. But just as we did with the broken down sugar mills, we are clinging to the broken sugar industry, unwittingly waiting for the white people from abroad to take note that we have a few thousand acres of land to which they may return, to make money to repatriate to their own countries.

     

It is creeping up. The white landlord is coming back again. He is coming back to buy large portions of our small amount of land. He is coming back to put people to work on the land on which our forefathers died.

     

He is getting the land cheap, almost for nothing as he did when Warner first came to St. Kitts.

     

Watch de creep up. Our profitable land is in danger of falling, for the third time, into the hands of the foreign landlord. Our people are once more in danger of being enslaved by the foreign landlord.

      

If you watch carefully, you will see that white people are coming back with the old form of colonization. They are coming in as Thomas Warner did, with a small party of supporters to exploit our “native” population.

     

They are dazzling us with all the lights, bamboozling us with their accents and using our resources to their advantage.

   

   Some weeks ago I went to the Marriott. I had to go on my knees to see the Human Resource Manager.  

     

 She was a young woman whose obvious qualification for her job was that she is white and foreign. I have no doubt that she has had some training for the job, but it is not the training or her aptitude, which is important. It is that she is white and foreign, a part of the support of the modern colonizers.

     

 I want somebody to convince me that in 2004 a new hotel in St. Kitts cannot find a local human resource manager. You mean with all these University trained bright young people in St. Kitts none of them can qualify to take on a top post at the Marriott! You mean to tell me that the only jobs Kittitians can do in a hotel is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water? I mean makers of beds and mixers of drink, watchmen and laundry women? In St. Kitts which has the brightest young people in the Caribbean?  This is the creep up of neo-capitalism on the old plantation system.        

     

We have to watch it. Watch de creep up.