The happy island

Richard West Barbados is almost as different from Trinidad as Trinidad from Jamaica. Trinidadians are exuberant, noisy, reckless, charming and lovers of carnival. The '13ajans' are quiet, prudent, hard-working and, some would say dour. While Trinidadians ape and admire North America, Bajans still look to what some of them still call 'the old country'. They can also laugh at the 'old country'. This is the Bajan magazine on the British press corps which came to the island in March to report on the kidnapping of Ronald Biggs, the train-robber (who later was freed and allowed to return to Brazil): Barbadians are just not accustomed to seeing grown men hiding under cars, in the boiling sun, cameras at the ready, hoping for a different angle on the Biggs file. Nor are they accustomed to a stampede of white men revealing their unfitness by panting furiously after a vain chase across the Supreme Court's yard to snatch a quote or two from their quarry before he was whisked away in the waiting police van back to Glendairy... The way they chose to wind down after a day in a crowded courtroom, listening to legal jargon in accents they were more accustomed of hearing on the No13 bus in London, also suggested that Banks Breweries Ltd and the various rum distilleries enjoyed a boom in sales during the period...

Barbados is also peaceful: even more peaceful than Trinidad; far, far more peaceful than Jamaica and those cities in England that suffer from the Jamaican malady. It is true that in Bridgetown these days one finds Rastas, dope addicts and violent criminals; but law and public opinion come down hard on them. In Barbados, unlike Britain, the newspapers and politicians do not champion the idlers and drop-outs against the police. In Bridgetown, unlike London, one walks the streets without fear of West Indian footpads.

Of course there is crime — especially that West Indian favourite, arson, which I have mentioned already in articles on Jamaica and Trinidad; it is a crime which may or may not have caused the death of West In. dian youths at a party in south-east London this year. People say that arson against the sugar crops was the only way that the slaves could revenge themselves on plantation owners, and still the tradition lives on.

In spite of its reputation for Britishness, Barbados has sent only a modest number of emigrants to Great Britain — most of them bus workers and nurses. And yet the island is not blessed by riches like oil or bauxite. It has had to make do with the old traditional sugar, with tourism and what are called 'screwdriver industries' — assembly work. Barbados is not one of the rich islands but it earns enough to be happy. Moreover its sugar will be wanted, its beaches will still be attractive when all the oil has been drained and all the bauxite dug from some of the richer islands.

Again and again one returns to the question of why Barbados is so successful and pleasant and peaceful, and why sad Jamaica is none of those things. Some say that Barbados is smaller and therefore 'a better size' than Jamaica; but some of the smaller islands, like nearby Grenada and Dominica, have suffered the same kind of troubles as Jamaica. Some point to the fact that Jamaica was colonised first by Spain, while England alone ruled Barbados from 1625 to the recent independence. True, but English rule in Jamaica lasted almost 300 years, including almost the whole of the slavery era. This was twice as long as English rule in Trinidad.

Nor was English rule in Barbados something to boast about. 'This Iland is the Dunghill whareone England doth cast forth its rubbidg' opined a 17th century visitor. `Rodgs and hors (rogues and whores) and such like peopel are those which are generally Broght heare. A rodge in England will hardly make a cheater heare: a Baud brought over puts one a demuor comportment, a whore, if hansumme makes a wife for sume rich planter'.

The poor whites of Barbados stem from indentured servants brought to the island on terms not much different from slavery; to whom were added hundreds of Catholic Irishmen sent into slavery after defeat by Cromwell. Those few who survived were joined by Protestant Englishmen after the failed Monmouth rebellion. Oliver Cromwell and James II may be said to have pioneered the modern practice of sending political enemies to their death in a distant slave camp.

An author in 1806 described the indigent whites as 'ignorant and debauched to the last degree' yet 'as proud as Lucifer himself, and in virtue of their freckled, ditchwater faces consider themselves on a level with every gentleman in the island'.

Needless to say, the poor whites felt no sympathy for the Negro slaves, who were treated as vilely here in Barbados as in the other English colonies. After the slave revolt of 1816 (when many plantations were ruined by fire), 214 men were hanged. If such revolts were not as common here in Barbados, this does not mean that conditions were milder; rather that rebels could not escape on a small flat island, as was possible in the jungles south of Guiana, or in the mountains of Jamaica. Yet slavery does not seem to have left quite such a stain in Barbados as on the other islands. Emancipation did not lead to social disruption, as in Jamaica or the United States. There was slow but generally peaceful progress to independence; and even when riot occurred in 1937, the Bajans refused to dwell on their fourteen dead, preferring to sing of the sad event with irony: Now lemme tell yuh bout Brain and Grant Two men dey say had great intelligence. Brain mount de box with a great surprise Saying "Barbados must be decolonise• Grant sit down and wait till he done He said "Friends this here ain't no fun".

But when dey done dey had it to say "Yes tonight is a funny day".

One of the pioneers of Barbadian independence was Clennell Wilsden Wickham, who served in Egypt and Palestine in the First World War and afterwards came back to the island to give his literary skill to radical journalism. Unlike later Marxist demagogues, he saw that independence could only be won and preserved if Barbadians tempered political aspirations with common sense. 'There was hard work to be done, people would still plough the fields, the poor would still be always with them, but they would make it impossible for any man to start earning his living before he was able to "read his Bible".'

His son, John Wickham, who is a meteorologist by profession and a frequent contributor to the Bridgetown press, has the same understanding of what are the limitations on change or 'progress'. He thinks that the very small size of the island has proved advantageous. After emancipation, the slaves were unable to leave the plantations simply because there was no land for free villages — 'They came to the edge of the sea and then turned back'. Although many Barbadians went abroad to earn money to buy land back on the island, much of the population still work on the big estates. This is economically sensible, since crops like sugar need large-scale cultivation and adequate capital backing to be viable.

The survival of the big estates has also given tradition and harmony to the villages centring on the sugar estates — each with its church, its store, its cricket pitch and its rum shop. As John Wickham says, some of the other islanders call Barbadians 'Uncle Toms', but they envy the wealth and peacefulness of this island.

The statue of Nelson in Bridgetown was one of the first erected after the Battle of Trafalgar. It has not been pulled down (like the one in Dublin) though Nelson was a defender of slavery and would not have sympathised with an independent Barbados. The Barbadians know this, but theY are not the kind of people to nurse a retrospective grudge. They neither dislike nor fawn on white people. They do not resent the fact that the Yacht Club is still in effect exclusive, but nor do they seek out Whites as guests. Tolerance and mutual respect are more regarded than earnest attempts at 'multi-racialism'.

After Jamaica, after England, Barbados is pleasantly free of ideology and political grievance, of frenzied agitation for rights and sexual or racial equality. The middle class values which rule in Barbados demand respect for learning, manners and modesty.

Barbadians do not appeal to the white radical chic in England who want to see black people 'stoned on agro' to borrow the memorable phrase of the Guardian's Jill Tweedie.(The inimitable Tweedie is torn to bits by V. S. Naipaul in his mordant essay 'Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad', now published in The Return of Eva Peron). Pity the poor West Indians who have had inflicted upon them by England first slavery, then Evangelical Christianity, and now middle-class, parlour Trotskyism. Propagandists of the last creed have happily made little headway so far in Barbados. White visitors to the island are not for the most part aggressively rich nor ideologically motivated. They go there for fun and to mind their own business. 'We've had some well known writers here recently' I was told during my stay, 'for example Jeffrey Bernard . .