Sugar in the Blood (48 page)

This was a particularly bewildering time for my family (despite the pride we felt at my father’s knighthood that year for his services to medicine in the Caribbean and wider Commonwealth). We were socially isolated, as most of my parents’ contemporaries had resettled in the United States or Canada. We had little in common with the Caribbean migrants who had arrived here in the post-war years. Our move was not a wager, or an attempt to transform our social position, but
instead an astute career move for my father who, having been offered two jobs, one in America and one in Britain, chose the latter. Thus we had few familial links with the Windrush generation, and our life experience was very different. I can remember one of my Caribbean aunts, who came to study law, remarking snobbishly, “We wouldn’t talk to them there, so why should we mix with them here?”

In addition we were the sort of black family that did not then exist in the British imagination: affluent, professional, relatively cultured. So in our leisure time our mother would take us to the opera or ballet or piano recitals at the South Bank. And every day I set off for my exclusive private girls’ school, where I was the only pupil of Afro-Caribbean descent, and my brother and sister did the same. In the Caribbean, where nearly everyone was like me, some shade of black, my race was largely irrelevant and I rarely thought of myself in that context. Now, for the first time in my life, I was acutely aware of my colour and all the stereotypes associated with it. Like my Barbadian ancestors—white, black and brown—I was discovering that the colour of my skin was what people noticed first and foremost.

As I grew up, I realized that my perpetual sense of displacement, the fate of most migrants, was something that would never leave me and that I could make a life nonetheless. I understood that migration was a kind of death, in which one’s old self must be buried in order for a new self to be born, and that this move has made me who I am today. Inevitably, my feelings about the “mother country” are rather ambivalent. So much here is now famililar and so much remains completely strange. My colour still enters the room before I do, and in some situations I have to work inordinately hard to make others put it aside. I know that despite the privileges of my upbringing, some people see me just as another inferior, troublesome black face. And I cannot help resenting the notion that while I am, according to some, not good enough to be British, my ancestors were nonetheless good enough to help build the country, defend it and die for it.

I have settled in a country where the epic forces that created my family are still shaping British life, despite being largely unacknowledged. Sugar surrounds me here. Each year, thousands of locals and tourists
visit the grand Tate Galleries without remembering that its collections were funded by the exploitative sugar company Tate & Lyle. And they wander though the grandeur of All Souls College, Oxford, without being aware that it was paid for by the profits generated by the slaves who toiled and died at the Codrington estate in Barbados. Sugar built the magnificent Harewood House in Leeds and many of the lovely mansions in Bristol’s majestic Queen Square; while much of the profits that the West Indian proprietors collected in compensation for their “losses” at emancipation fed back to the City of London, shoring it up and helping make it the dynamic, global business centre it has become.

Just as it is easy to forget that the “white gold” of sugar paid for the bricks that built many of the grand buildings, homes, museums and collections that make up Britain’s cultural heritage and enabled its cities to flourish, so too we ignore the fact that the impact of the trade in “black ivory” is evident in the many-hued faces that throng their streets. Most of us do not understand the forces that brought our ancestors together from opposite ends of the world. That is, we do not appreciate how the arrival of Europeans in the New World precipitated a series of events, most significantly including the capture and transportation of millions of unwilling Africans to cultivate cash crops like tobacco, cotton and sugar. Nor do we appreciate how the racist theories they evolved to justify the abuse and commodification of their charges would continue to shape our communities and our life chances to this day. Over 150 years after slavery was abolished, Africans and the descendants of Africans remain markedly disadvantaged compared to the descendants of those who promoted the trade against them. The pernicious racial thinking that evolved to feed our insatiable hunger for sugar, and was used to justify our trangression of the laws of humanity, continues to influence us all.

In the Caribbean, the legacy of the sugar boom and the slave trade is not so easily ignored or forgotten. Although sugar is no longer the vibrant industry it once was, it is still cultivated, and the vista of endless fields of cane is still emblematic of the region, as is the sweet syrupy smell of the fields as they are fired and raised. Sugar has transformed the landscape and changed the region’s ecosystem. It has shaped our economies, traditions and national identities. Indeed, by pulling together the unique racial mix of the islands—black, white, Amerindian,
East Indian, Syrian, Chinese—it is written across our very faces. The continuing politics of colour—the association of lighter complexions with status and influence, and darker skins with poverty and powerlessness—is still palpably alive, particularly among older people who remember the plantations with both horror and nostalgia. Many families like my own are mixed-race on both sides, blending the histories of both oppressor and oppressed.

THE GREAT SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY
wave of migration which saw hundreds of thousands of people leave England in search of a better life is so deeply embedded in global history that most of us do not give it conscious thought. But its reverberations continue to be felt. George Ashby and his continental counterparts would enrich Europe beyond its wildest imaginings and extend that sub-continent’s influence and ideologies across the globe. They also transformed two continents, North and South America, as well as the glittering archipelago of islands that circle their waist. They populated these vast tracts of land, instigating seismic change in their landscape and social geography. And they introduced new species of animal and plant life into the places they settled, and made extinct many more. They also precipitated dramatic cataclysms among indigenous populations, not just through military action but also by exposing them to new diseases. And they instigated the arrival of millions of unwilling Africans, killing many a multitude in the process. (There are now over 100 million people of African descent in the New World.)

Mass emigration shaped the England that George Ashby left behind, as well. A nation that had never before tasted a potato or a tomato or smoked tobacco now embraced these new sensations with alacrity. England was flooded with exotic tropical foodstuffs, such as cocoa and sugar, that would transform its people’s tastes and diets. These commodities would enrich the mother country exponentially, creating new industries and generating tens of thousands of new jobs. Through the traffic between the colonies and the various trading centres of the
mother country, like Bristol and Liverpool, they encountered races they had never met before: Africans, Indians, Chinese. (By the eighteenth century the black population of London alone numbered almost 10,000.) These encounters with new civilizations influenced the art, music and dress of Britain, just as the debates around the rights and wrongs of slavery stimulated an entirely new type of discussion about human rights, race and religion.

With all that grew out of this epic movement of people, did this act of mass resettlement achieve the goals of those who chose to participate in it? Were the exploitation and loss of life that resulted worth what they gained by coming to the New World? Certainly, in immediate terms, George Ashby had made the right decision: he and his children were undoubtedly better off than they would have been if they had stayed put. But whether their migration was a good thing overall is debatable. Lord Rosebery, the Liberal British statesman and towering figure of British politics at the end of the 1800s, called the British Empire “the greatest secular agency for good that the world has seen.” But the economist J. A. Hobson, in his magnum opus
Imperialism
, published in 1902, argued that far from being a “force for good,” imperialism was merely a search for new markets and investment opportunities that had a deleterious effect not just on the majority of overseas subjects but also on those left behind in Britain.

Whatever its rights and wrongs, it is impossible not to be in awe of the daring of the migrants who found the strength in themselves to leave behind the limitations imposed on them in their home country, in the hope of finding something better elsewhere. Somehow they managed to push past the natural inertia that binds most of us to the familiar, and despite the fear of perishing in a strange land, they went anyway. Once there, the success of people like George Ashby was largely a result of how well he adjusted to the New World and how successfully he came to terms with the loss of the Old. After settling in Barbados, George Ashby, like many others, never looked back. But if he had abandoned his birthplace, he would discover to his chagrin that the turmoil of the mother country would still be felt in his new island home.

However, just as we admire these migrants’ courage, we cannot help but lament the effect they had and profoundly question their judgement. In Barbados, the island on which George Ashby took his gamble,
he and his eager contemporaries converted its topography from a primeval forest into a land as neat as a patchwork quilt, and transformed an uninhabited island into a European enclave and then a predominantly black one. What they brought together in the crucible of the New World was undoubtedly terrible. The sugar industry that they founded was an insatiable maw that swallowed millions of lives and spewed out a racist ideology that has blighted the lives of many to this day. In the process, a prelapsarian paradise became a moral quagmire, where black people were brutally and relentlessly exploited for others’ financial enrichment.

But, to paraphrase the poet Sheena Pugh, “sometimes things do not always go from bad to worse.” And modern-day Barbados has been something of a good-news story. Though only a tiny dot on the map, the island is buoyant. A stable economy, a well-developed infrastructure and an excellent education system have made it one of the most attractive places to live in the entire Caribbean. Thus the nation described in the mid-1960s as having “a fairly homogeneous level of under-development” had, by 1992, climbed up the United Nations Development Programme Index to “the highest placed country in the developing world,” with almost 100 per cent literacy, an impressive human rights record, and one of the longest life expectancies of any country in the world.

Socially, too, it has evolved. With independence, the coloured elite, who had previously tended to ally themselves with the colonial authorities and the white plantocracy, realized that the realities of life in a functioning democracy demanded a new perspective, and that they could only maintain political power by collaborating with the black masses who made up the majority of voters. So the old colonial values were gradually thrown off and new national symbols were created. There was a resurgence of interest in the nation’s African roots and an emergence of a new racial consciousness that gave pride to the majority of the island’s inhabitants. Of course, some colonial fallout remains: there is a curious diffidence among islanders, and Barbados is still, as my father puts it, “a colour-coded society,” in which outside the workplace some white Barbadians tend to avoid socializing with their black counterparts.

Despite this, ties with Britain remain strong and survive in the army
and in its legal and parliamentary systems. But Britain’s influence on the island is waning, replaced by that of America, whose proximity to the island and status as a world superpower mean that it has—for now—more sway. But even American dominance in the region is being threatened by that rising star, China, which is working hard to secure influence in the Caribbean basin.

By the end of the twentieth century, Barbados had a greater claim than Jamaica to be considered the success story of the anglophone Caribbean. But how did an island so much smaller and poorer in natural resources emerge in front of its more naturally blessed neighbour? The Barbadian economist Courtney Blackman attributed the Barbadian economic miracle to several sources, including its lack of an indigenous population and its geographical position, which meant that it enjoyed a relatively peaceful early colonial career, especially in comparison to many other islands which changed hands numerous times or were forced to fight prolonged internal wars. The failure of the Bussa Rebellion too proved a historical gift to the island when set alongside the terrible price Haiti paid for its successful revolution. At the time, Haiti bucked the might of the European world, but it is now the most impoverished state in the region. Barbados also has the advantage of a long unbroken tradition of democratic government, whose leaders proved willing to invest in education, infrastructure and welfare programmes, rather than pocket the island’s wealth for themselves. A strong commitment to the rule of law and religious tolerance also played their part. All of these factors, along with a goodly dose of luck, help to explain the island’s unlikely triumph.

Tourism continues to play a major role. It drives the island’s economy, but not without cost. Where once Barbados was dominated by plantations, now its most prestigious sites are occupied by resorts. Tourism has transformed Barbados from an agricultural economy to a service one; and it has changed the human and geographical face of the island. Just as the shift to sugar brought the first wave of English settlers, so tourism has introduced a second wave of British expatriates, as well as Americans and Canadians. In recent years the annual number of foreign visitors has at times exceeded one million people, almost five times the island’s population. Tourism has sculpted the landscape just as definitively as “King Sugar” once did: mangrove swamps have been
dredged to create marinas; streams have been diverted or have dried up; and the glorious sight of the Caribbean coastline with its brilliant blue waters and sugar-fine white sand is increasingly hard to discern, obscured by high-rise condos and huge hotels.