Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 Read Free

the
Vestry, which had eleven members elected by the people themselves. The Warden,
the only official on the island from the St. Kitts Government, was invited to
attend the meetings, and so was the Anglican rector, but neither of them could
vote. The Vestry levied taxes, issued licenses, imposed export duties and
generally ran the island.
    This too was a pattern that would
be followed throughout the island's history; one government, usually through
St. Kitts and always under protest, to satisfy the constructionary minds of the
English, and another government of Anguillans at home to get things done.
    Fifty years later, in 1871, another
political reshuffling took place, when the British created the Leeward Islands
Federation, in which each island was to be its own presidency. Three years
before, in 1868, phosphate had been found at Crocus Bay on Anguilla .
It was being exported to Philadelphia ,
so the island was in one of its rare periods of financial well-being. The
Anguillans appealed to Governor-General Sir Benjamin Pine, asking if they could
be a separate presidency as long as things were being rearranged anyway, but when
the dust had settled the combination of St. Kitts and Anguilla was one unit in the Federation.
    What is this St. Kitts, that Anguilla keeps being stuck into paper states with it? Is it an island at all similar to Anguilla ?
No; it is volcanic where Anguilla is coral, mountainous where Anguilla is flat,
rainy where Anguilla is dry, plantation-ridden and slave-oriented where
Anguilla has always sheltered the independent poor.
    Is it, then, the nearest island to Anguilla ?
No; the nearest populated island is St. Martin , three
miles away; the next nearest is St. Barthelemy, twenty-five miles away; the
next nearest is Saba , thirty miles away; the next
nearest is St. Eustatius , fifty miles away. St. Kitts is
seventy miles from Anguilla .
    There is no geographical connection
between St. Kitts and Anguilla of any kind, nor is there
any social connection between them. St. Kitts's population is limited almost
entirely to upper-class whites and lower-class blacks while Anguilla has a multiracial population limited almost entirely to poor middle-class
property owners. (As an Anguillan said to me, "They call us poor, but you
have to go to St. Kitts to see a filthy slum." I saw it, and it was
filthy. The water supply is a communal curbside faucet every block, and the
sewage disposal is a gutter down the middle of the street.)
    There is only one connection
between St. Kitts and Anguilla . On the maps and in the
file drawers back in England ,
St. Kitts is the closest British colony to the British colony of Anguilla .
    Two years after St. Kitts and Anguilla became one presidency in the Leeward Islands Federation, the Anguillans
complained to England again, saying the Kittitians were "utter strangers to us" and
"this legislative dependence on St. Kitts can in no sense be called a
legislative union, it has operated and continues to operate most injuriously
against us, and is mutually disliked."
    That complaint went the way of the
rest. In fact, when another administrative change was made nine years later
(governments never last very long in the Caribbean), the paper linkage was
formed even more tightly by combining the two islands with a third island,
Nevis (which is the closest island to St. Kitts, which does have
somewhat similar geography, and which does have a somewhat similar
population), under a single presidency. But the portents were even worse than
the action; the legal name for the combination of Anguilla and St. Kitts and Nevis was St. Christopher-Nevis . Not until seventy years later, in 1951, was the word Anguilla added to the name of the colony into which the island of Anguilla had willy-nilly been
forced.
    By the end of the Second World War,
the British held several hundred islands in the Caribbean ,
most of them small and unpopulated, all of them grouped into fourteen separate
political entities. There