Markets

How come this does not happen in my market?  This has got to be one of the most charming videos that I have seen in a long time. The question is, how come this does not happen in my market?

You have to smile.  If not, you are a barbarian.  Need I say more?

Tourism

I get really angry when I read an uninformed tourism promotion article about Anguilla.  If you are a real Anguillian, visit this stupid article.  In the breathless prose we expect from tourism industry advertising hacks, we are invited to “succumb to this island’s charms.”  There follows all the usual rubbish about “crystal clear turquoise waters”. 

Perhaps the most annoying part of the article is the nonsense about The People.  Apparently, our island policies have resulted in a prosperous population in Anguilla with a good education system and a proud heritage.  Yuck! Yuck!  For those of us on the front line, the one thing you notice in our schools is how totally uneducated our school population is.  There is no good education system “with a proud heritage” in Anguilla.  Our graduating children can hardly read or write.  That is a fact.  As for the prosperous population, I have a few unemployed friends I would like to introduce you to.

The author blithely reports that there is only one criminal in Anguilla, and he has been caught.  She writes that the last crime wave in Anguilla involved one young person who was responsible for a few break-ins and minor thefts that were a challenge to the island’s reputation.  His arrest, and the community’s disapproval, served as a lesson to anyone with similar intent.  Please, I want to puke!  Who fed this author on free meals and drinks?

This would be embarrassing if it was written by a blogger. But it was published by Macleans.  This is the Time Magazine of Canada.  It is embarrassing and unprofessional, and the author does not spel so good either!

The only thing that makes sense in the article is the advice that “if you don’t arrive on your own yacht or your own jet, you’ll have to travel via St Maarten”.  I can only conclude that Donna must be doing a great job of promoting our subsidized, very expensive, alternative transportation to Anguilla.

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Access Tsar

Parents

Why parents must be held more accountable and responsible. I was talking to the unmarried father of an 8 year old boy recently. He has a problem with the mother of his child. Every time he brings the child back to the mother after he has spent the weekend with him, the mother locks the child out of the house. She refuses to let him back in the house until he cries and begs to her satisfaction. She screams abuse at the child constantly. He has tried to get the Department of Social Development to help him, but there is nothing they can do under our present legal system. There is nothing the police or the court can do. There is no legal remedy. The mother has all the ‘rights’ and the father only has ‘obligations’. His concern is that the lack of love and affection is going to turn his child into a criminal one of these days. He is so right.

The present serious juvenile crime situation in Anguilla is a social phenomenon, not entirely susceptible to legal solutions. Only the parents can solve the nub or nut of the problem. The sad thing is that so many of our parents are themselves the product of broken and abusive homes. All they can do is to repeat the cycle of domestic abuse and neglect. It is human nature to do so. It is also an aspect of culture and education. When so many mothers and fathers have been educated to bring up anti-social children, why are we surprised when they so often succeed?

That is why some social reformers advocate holding parents responsible. We need to put more pressure on parents to perform their parenting role. It should be backed up with educational programmes on how to be a good father and good mother. It always amazes me how many parents do not begin to understand how destructive their example and behaviour is. Then, when we point the finger at them, they respond by saying it is unfair. No, it is not unfair.

If a mother or father persistently permits their child to be a truant from school, that ought to be a crime on the part of the parent.

If a mother or father persistently permits their child to mix with gangsters, that ought to be a crime on the part of the parent.

If a mother or father persistently permits their child to bear arms and offensive weapons in the home, that ought to be a crime on the part of the parent.

The object is not to punish the parent. The object is to convince the parent that he or she needs to do more to monitor and supervise the behaviour and acquaintances of their child.

The result will not be a flooding of our jail with delinquent parents. The Magistrate will make an example of one or two, and suddenly attitudes will change.

It is not the fine or the jail that is the wake up call. It is being brought before the court and named and shamed that is the effective part of prosecuting a social crime. We have to face reality as a society and take active steps to break the cycle of child abuse and negligent parenting.

Of course, if we were rich like the Americans or the British, we could try doing like them and throwing lots of money at the problem. I don't see that working for them, and we certainly can’t make that a solution here.

Just my thoughts, while I thank God every day that I am not a parent myself.

Literacy

We lack both the vision and the administrative capacity to mine our resources. There is a thread on Anguilla Forum. It consists, as I write this, of three posts enquiring about the possibility of donating children’s books to Anguilla. No one has responded with advice.

There used to be a number of book projects, all uncoordinated with each other.

1. Teacher Art was getting books at the West End School, and sharing them with other schools. He, alas, is gone, and so is the project.

2. A lady in Canada with publisher connections was getting new books for Anguilla. She treated people who were sending down used books as if they were garbage collectors, and wanted nothing to do with their rubbish. I do not know what happened to her project.

3. We used to have an energetic and enthusiastic young national librarian. He is now, to his sorrow, our Labour Commissioner. His replacement is still too new for us to know what sort of vision he has. If he has one, he will not yet have had enough time for his plans to have been put into effect.

4. The Anguilla Community Foundation was providing reimbursement funding for those who sent books via the Post Office’s Home Shopping scheme. They had no rules. The Post Office charge is the same for one book as for a cubic foot of books.Well-meaning people were shipping single used books with a US yard sale value of 10c or 25c, paying postage to Miami, and then the Community Foundation were reimbursing people EC$14.00 for ocean freight. It was a waste of resources, and the initiative soon came to an end.

5. The Seven Seas Cruising Association shipped books to Anguilla. Tropical Shipping donated the ocean freight. A couple of truckloads of good books, mostly for children, found their way to the Library. That project ended successfully.

6. Four years ago, the Rotary Club of Anguilla made an effort to bring in used books from closing-down schools in Canada. The books were rejected by the librarians when they arrived as they were “old and dirty”, ie, they had been previously used. The Club would never attempt such a project again.

Such initiatives sometimes uncover a single donor who provides a massive amount of good stuff. It also sometimes happens that people send all their rubbish to Anguilla, thus adding to our landfill problem at Corito. There is no doubt that care and supervision is needed.

It is the Librarian’s job to co-ordinate this. He could be coerced or insulted into doing this job. But, does he have the staff with the ability to do it right?

This is the tip of a large iceberg of visitors who have a genuine interest in the people of our island, and the means and interest to help in some way, but who don’t know what to do or who to trust. They are an untapped possible source of membership of our voluntary organizations. But, we lack the administrative skills to marshal the potential. None of us outside the tourism sector makes any real effort to communicate with visiting philanthropists who could provide nearly unlimited assistance for the education of our children.

That should not be surprising. If the standard of a country’s public library is a barometer of the nation’s learning, then Anguilla is at the centre of a storm of illiteracy. Our public library’s resources are pathetically inadequate. There are so few paper-based educational and research resources on the shelves that it is a laughable institution.

My Trinidad High School library had the works of Cicero, Josephus and Julius Caesar, of Homer and Plato, the seven surviving plays of Sophocles, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the plays of Shakespeare and the poetry of Pope, among many thousands of other “old” and “new” books. By the time I was fifteen, my school-mates and I had dipped repeatedly into the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the Encyclopedias Britannica and Americana, all while playing and fighting as boys are wont to do. The shelves were over ten feet high. A stepladder was needed for the higher shelves. The works with the rude passages, such as Chaucer, were kept behind lock and key. Not that that was any obstacle for ingenious boys. The books on the top shelves were frequently borrowed, perhaps for the same reason. From Form 1 onwards, every boy had to hand in once a week at an English language class a “book review” or be punished with the removal of privileges.

Check out for yourselves the shelves of the public library of Anguilla. There are very few of them compared with a real library. They are about five feet high, half as tall as they should be. There are very few interesting books on them. The place is mainly used by schoolchildren to hang out in between classes and to get free access to the internet.

Don’t even ask about the library at the High School.

You should not be surprised if I tell you how few of our Form 6 students have the ability to write at a standard above that expected fifty years ago throughout the West Indies of Form 2 pupils.

Heritage

Nominations for the gold medal in cultural vandalism for 2009. The New Year has just begun. We already have the first nomination for the gold medal for cultural vandalism for 2009. It is a new award, invented today. The nominee is the Hon Hubert Hughes, proprietor of the old Cotton Gin Factory in The Valley.

The gin itself was erected in 1910. It last worked in about the year 1950. Then the world market price for cotton collapsed and the industry closed down in Anguilla. That means that the machinery was nearly one hundred years old. Up to the end of last year, the disused equipment was standing there as if waiting for the factory workers to return from lunch. There was a bale of compressed cotton still in the bailer, and a sprinkling of lint stuck on the belts. Everything was as it was when Carter Rey locked the door for the last time. Years later, someone was to remove and steal the bronze plaque presented to the Factory by the textile industry of Lancashire, congratulating the Anguillian cotton gin for having produced the best cotton lint that they had ever seen in England.

Last week, the cotton gin was demolished and ordered to be taken to the Corito garbage dump.

Corito Dump: Anguilla's graveyard for used machinery

I have not checked with Mr Hughes for confirmation that he gave the order, but he owns the property, and only the owner could have given permission for such a drastic alteration in the structure.

Empty space where the cotton gin used to be

Close-up of empty space

Remnants of equipment in the ceiling above

Some Anguillians are outraged. I have no idea why. After all, it was done so that the otherwise wasted space could be used as a Chinese Restaurant. It is going to look so much neater now. So much more modern, as befits an up-market destination such as Anguilla is.

Why would anyone think that Hubert should have considered the Cotton Gin to be an important part of Anguilla’s built heritage? What an idiotic concept, anyway. Built heritage! Just a fancy name for broken down old buildings and rusting machinery. Much more merciful to put them out of their misery, and tear them down. Only effete foreigners could find such a thing of interest. Little do these foreigners know that the old cotton ginnery symbolized nothing more than the state of near slavery that our Anguillian forebears were forced to live in right up to the modern time. We must get rid of these last remnants of exploitation in order to expunge our shame at the poverty of our grandparents.

Besides, it is not as if Anguilla is not already blessed with an abundance of monuments to the industrial endeavours of our Anguillian ancestors. There are magnificent old mansions scattered around the island that anyone who is determined to visit old structures can take their pick of. We don’t have to go to Jamaica or Barbados to find Great Houses. We have them right here.

Antique Anguillian house

So what if the Cotton Gin was one of the last pieces of Anguilla’s built heritage that was in relatively good working condition. There are other mementos of Anguilla’s rich economic history, for those sentimental fools who want to waste their time looking at that sort of thing. They can still go to Sandy Hill and admire the Sugar Works ruins of Governor Richardson.

Gov Richardson’s minimalist animal round foundations

What about the benefits to the living Anguillians? Is it not better for us to look after the financial needs of those who are living today, and those yet to come, rather than wasting time worrying about worn out machinery. As the US industrialist Henry Ford said, “History is bunk”.

It isn’t as if Anguilla already has too many Chinese restaurants. Anguilla desperately needs this Chinese restaurant. In the circumstances, the loss of Anguilla’s most famous surviving part of our built heritage is a small price to pay. I understand Anna wanted the equipment removed. It was occupying valuable space in her proposed new restaurant. Anyway, it was just old junk, wasn’t it? Hubert was glad to oblige. Anything for Anna.

Those idiot heritage persons should be grateful the truckers telephoned Colville Petty at his Heritage Museum, “Do you want this stuff, or should we take it to Corito?” He agreed to rescue what they offered him.

Cotton gin equipment dumped outside Petty’s museum

The rest of the rubbish is, presumably, now buried at the public dump. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.

If the Public Health Department insisted on its removal for health concerns, congratulations to them for their foresightedness.

If the Planning Department permitted it, in authorizing the change of use, kudos to them for their long sightedness.

If the Environment Department encouraged it when their views were sought, bravo to them for their concern and dedication!

This decision was an inspired one. In the race for the gold medal, it will be hard to beat for the rest of 2009.

Archives

To read any post together with all comments posted to it by readers, just click on its headline in the right-hand panel under “Archives”.

Clicking on a picture will enlarge it for easier viewing.

Archives building about to be converted to a mess hall for members of the House of Assembly. There's been some talk on anguillatalk.com and the radio about what would become of the Forest Bay Customs House when the Conch Bay, now Fairmont, project is built. We have to pretend it's going to be built, because they claim to have sold $70 million worth of property.

On page 3 of last week's "Anguillian" there are some pictures of the proposed Blowing Point terminal that looks like it was designed by some people in Canada who don't understand hurricanes.

It also looks like something they'd build in Canada.

Do we want arriving tourists to think they're in Canada? Will putting two palm trees in front of the building change that? Is promoting traditional Anguillian design elements any of our business or should we outsource such issues to whatever loudmouth wants to use them to trash someone on a talk show?

And, now I hear that the archives building at the Court House is to be turned into a restaurant for the Members of Parliament's convenience. Is this progress or not? I suppose that we want them to be comfortable. Who cares about some old papers, anyway?

In 1980, I was walking across the Government Secretariat when I noticed Evalie Bradley burning some papers in a small bonfire. I asked her what she was doing. She said, “Col Roberts told me to burn the files from the Revolution to clear an old filing cabinet for him to use”. I went to see Ronald Webster and spoke to him about the importance of retaining Anguilla's archives for the future. He agreed and ordered the burning to stop. He appointed me Anguilla's first official archivist, on condition that it would not cost anything. Later that year, I had a line item of $1.00 inserted in the estimates for preserving the archives. I used the judicial department budget to purchase two filing cabinets. I filled them with the collection of the “Anguilla Beacon” donated by Atlin Harrigan, and other archival material. So far as I know the archives are all stored in the building in the Court House/House of Assembly complex to this day.

I fully expect they will now complete the job started, but left incomplete, by Col Roberts.

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Culture

Does Anguilla Have a Culture? Several of the papers read at the recent Association of Caribbean Historians Conference in Paramaribo dealt with the importance of culture in the evolution and development of a post-colonial society. Reading them was an eye-opening experience. They caused me to ask questions about where we in Anguilla are going.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory. But, we live in the Twenty-first Century. The Colonial Era is long past. The history is inexorable. We have a colonial Constitution. But, our people are a post-colonial people.

The boast is frequently heard that there are few West Indians so independent-minded as the average Anguillian is. We lack no material want. There is a refrigerator in every room in our house. Each child has its own TV in the bedroom. National Bank and CCB ensured that every home had at least one computer before the year 2000 arrived. Children set off to school with a hundred dollar bill instead of a packed lunch. But, what does it all really mean?

Anguillians, like our brother and sister West Indians, are emerging from a heritage of shattered identities. We have survived the dehumanizing effects of slavery, colonialism and imperialism. Rapid economic development has occurred over the past five or six years. We have begun to stand on our own feet. An invasion of tourists and immigrants from all corners of the earth besets us. Large numbers of persons of other cultures arrive daily on our shores. Non-Anguillian residents, in all likelihood, now outnumber native-born Anguillians. Will Anguillans survive as a people?

All that holds an island people together is a set of symbols, a tiny territory, and an idea that we could be a nation. It takes cultural rootedness to develop a nation. Cultural identity is as equally important as political independence and economic self-sufficiency in the process of nation-building. Cultural development is the bedrock of the creation of a national identity. Do we own what Rex Nettleford has called, “a sense of belonging, a psychic ease, the valuing of our contributions, a space in which to grow and the natural acknowledgment of our worth and dignity as human beings”? Where is the Anguillian dance company? Who are our folklorists? Where is our pantomime? Where have all the actors, singers, dancers, directors and playwrights gone? How many Anguillians are involved in the plastic and fine arts? Other than Carnival once a year, do we honour our popular and traditional arts? Who drives Anguilla’s cultural policy?

Some of us are old enough to remember Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica and Guyana at the time of independence. What an upsurge of popular creativity we saw then. Are we experiencing the same? Is there any Anguillian working at the preservation and promotion of the arts? What infrastructural framework have we put in place for the management and future development of culture? Who is studying the double impacts of tourism and immigration, the influence of popular US culture, the drug trade, and crime, on our cultural identity? Is there anyone in Anguilla who cares deeply and is dedicated to creating a “civilized” society?

Is it sufficient for our people to have a job, with good money coming in? Is anything permitted, once we can make a good living? Is material satisfaction a complete substitute for intellectual stimulation?

Does Anguilla have a culture? Does any Anguillian even care whether we do or not?