independence
who cares?
Geoffrey Wagner
_.ful go forward to almost certain parliamentary gully than you do. These tiny, beautiful is. 110 should Grenada have to be independent if she In the present pandemonium of world politics to earth-shaking; and that Her. Majesty was ro, doesn't want to be?" was a typical Englisli to' of spice.' sun-soaked, pin-clean. The schoolboys are .ile news from the ex-British Windward Islands — St Lucia, St Vincent, Dominica, Grenade evu — tends to be regarded as slightly less than no allowing Grenada's plea for independence to ratification next year met with little more tvgi than a ripple of misrepresentation. "Why ov the picture. Your illiterate maid knows far Si more British than the British. Yet each island inquiry I had to field from the celebrated ' isle more about the placing of slip fielders or the tht lands are today the last places — unpolluted. 11,r4 First of all, you have to get something of .126 is different, with an individual character. Indeed, the recently elected Premier Mitchell of St Vincent (in parts a more verdurous Cornwall with built-in sunlight) has been trying to dispel the 'island paradise ' image that has made Jamaica the tourist mess it is. For these are the ' small ' islands, vagabond, tatterdemalion, a pre-television culture despised by V the ' big ' ones, Barbados and Trinidad. After the failure of the postwar Federation of the West Indies these ' small ' islands had te to sink or swim, mostly the former. With the departure of its last Governor, Sir Ian Turboa, Grenada became effectively auto
nomous under the Crown, with an indigenous of Governor (the only lady to be such, and a Dame to boot, within the Commonwealth), an indigenous Premier and Cabinet. It was entirely characteristic of this Premier, Eric Matthew Gairy, the most dynamic politician in the Caribbean, to decline some sort of subordinate union inside the hectic, plural Trini dad-Tobago politic and lately to organise, rather, with Premiers Mitchell of St Vincent and Compton of St Lucia a union, of goods and people, between the 'small ' islands, whose personality he saw it as important to preserve, and whose relationship to reality is uniquely their own. For these units are intensely human. The eccentric is almost the norm. Grenada has a mere hundred thousand souls or so. Gairy knows most of them. To the outside eye he appears a sensitive leader who has obviously tried to preserve something personal and pure in what he has rightly called " a shining example of a completely integrated multiracial society." Though personally charismatic (and understandably so within his context) he has shunned the jargon of race, albeit the temptations to indulge in it must at times have been strong; I have been present at parties, mainly composed of the plantocracy he has deposed plus the last of the British burnt-out cases, when to put in a good word for Gairy was to be met with derision and subsequent social ostracism.
The island itself is a glorious volcanic convulsion, with perfect deserted beaches, and its capital. St George's, still retaining mellow eighteenth century brickwork. Considering the lack of available employment and the general hardships of life for the average labourer, one can only say that the courtesy one is met with in the countryside is incredible, duplicable only today in peasant enclaves like Corsica and southern Eire perhaps.
Yet the ' small ' islands are tracially uneconomic. St Vincent has its arrowroot and Grenada its delightful if all-too-fragile nutmeg
-trees, Grenada has in fact a major share of the world's nutmeg trade, whose story is one . of strange reciprocity between East and West Indies. For it was in the 1830s that West In'fl overseers, brought to Malaya to improve sugar extraction, took back nutmeg seeds with them, as did at least one estate manager " because he liked his punch."
Independence was, to my mind, more the fulfilment of a Premier's promise in this case, to Eric Matthew Gairy is a man who tends 5 to keep his promises. During the recent Lon&i presentation his opposition argued, with "tdent merit, that the relevant Act (67) re
utred some form of popular referendum; reply was to point to his thirteen-to
representative margin as such. The aver! field labourer is not equipped to know '‘:‘hat independence means and they have rerwhelmingly elected a Premier to ' know ' tc)r them. Gairy couldn't keep on going back the people.
dlilarly, a year or so ago the -Financial inles, in a scathing survey, remarked on the Luaeconomic ' effect of Gairy's break-up of tr:le old estates. Uneconomic it may or may 1.,C)t be, yet this Premier was mandated to ii`reak them out of the grasp of the old famil'Ies and did so, returning them to the people
— to say nothing of the morality of the matter (you could as well argue that American industry would run far more ' economically ' if slavery were still permitted). Again, that Gairy is the head of the leading union on the island has also been challenged. Here one does not want to enter into local factionalisms, but rather describe them. As one on the executive committee of an AFL-CIO affiliate in America, I am obviously prorather than anti-union, and would prefer to point to the able pen of a Bayard Rustin who has, in American, been so convincingly showing how integration has been furthered, rather than retarded, by the common labour cause. The utopian attempt of Black Power militants, Rustin has shown, to effect a viable bridge between liberal intellectuals and a handful of semi-criminal fanatics did irreparable damage to the black cause, and set back the genuine advances won on the labour front, often through unionisation.
Obviously, no one is going to turn these tiny Windward Islands into a second Japan or West Germany overnight. In Grenada's case a little more fairness might be in order. Its Premier's great feel for human relationships, and his dogged loyalty to an improverished community, deserved a better press than it got.
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