Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 Read Free Page A

were also two small colonies on the mainlands of
South and Central America ( British Guiana and British Honduras ) and the islands of Bermuda off the North American coast.
    In 1958, the British Government
attempted to unload practically all its Caribbean holdings, ten island colonies stuffed together into something resembling a
loosely packed snowball thrown at a passing bus. This casserole was called the West
Indies Federation , and it included Antigua , Barbados , Dominica , Grenada , Jamaica (with the Cayman Islands and the Turks & Caicos
Islands), Montserrat , St.
Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla , St. Lucia , St. Vincent and Trinidad-Tobago. It also included a lot
of water, since the Federation was spread out over an expanse of Caribbean
Sea 1,600 miles wide and 800 miles long. Jamaica and the Cayman
Islands were a full thousand miles from the rest of the Federation, separated
from the others not only by all that water but also by such trivia as Haiti,
the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Turks
& Caicos Islands were a little north of everybody else, the other side of Puerto
Rico and Cuba .
Spotted amid the remaining nine were a half dozen colonies of France and Holland and the United
States . Between Jamaica and Trinidad lay fifteen hundred miles of open water,
with nothing in it at all.
    This wasn't the first federation
dreamed up by the British Colonial Office, but it was certainly the biggest.
The Colonial Office loved the idea of neat packages, and federations make a
charmingly neat package on paper. As Lord Caradon told me, "They've not
done so well, federations, so far. I think they'll do better in future. I don't
write off the federation idea." Lord Caradon, then Sir Hugh Foot, was
Governor of Jamaica while the West Indies Federation was
being organized and is generally considered a chief architect of the Nigerian
Federation; his faith does seem to die pretty hard. Particularly since, of the
half-dozen federations put together by the British since the end of the Second
World War, not one has remained intact.
    The West Indies
Federation began, as federations do, with a conference, this one
held at Montego Bay in 1947. A Standing Closer
Association Committee was formed to study the idea of mixing and matching all
these islands and to work up a constitution for the result.
    It may be appropriate here to
mention the old description of a camel as a horse designed by a committee, and
to suggest that perhaps a federation is a country designed by a committee.
    The conference eventually came up
with a report saying the federation idea was a good one, and the report was
submitted to a second conference, this one in London in 1953. The second conference was pleased with the first conference's report,
and in turn submitted it to the island governments involved. Jamaica ,
by a unanimous vote in both houses, was the first to accept the recommendation,
and all the other islands promptly followed suit.
    (The two mainland colonies, British
Honduras and British Guiana , the latter now Guyana , were
also invited in but declined, for private reasons of their own, not because the
Federation struck them as an unworkable idea. There is a complex racial balance
in those two lands, particularly in Guyana ;
federation would mean unrestricted immigration of blacks from the overcrowded
islands, which would destroy the balance forever. A tie to the mainland had
been put forward as one of the primary advantages of federation. This tie was
now proved to be impossible, but the Federation lunged forward anyway.)
    A third conference took place, in London again, in 1956, and at this conference the irrevocable decision to federate
took place.
    Now a year passes, in which
everybody argues about where the capital should be. A full year. Finally, after
enough bitterness and squabbling to convince anybody but a conference that
these people are never going to live together, it is decided to build the
capital in Trinidad .