In his play The Tempest, William Shakespeare’s Antonio uses the quote, “What is past is prologue,” which suggests that the past is written, but the future is ours to decide, the choices we make going forward. If that is indeed the case, we in Anguilla need to fasten our seat belts for we are in for one bumpy ride.
In progressive California, the city of Manhattan Beach at the urging of the KKK and others, used eminent domain to take the beachfront property of Charles and Willa Bruce, a black family, without compensating them, though after some 100 years, the property was returned to the heirs of the Bruce family.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Osage Indians suffered a reign of terror because they had the misfortune to have oil reserves on their land. They were methodically slaughtered for their fortune. David Grann‘s book entitled “Killers of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” provided the source material for the Martin Scorsese movie by the same name.
History is rife with such stories throughout the world. The Belgian Congo, under King Leopold committed atrocities to the nth degree. The same may be said of the British Empire and what they did in India, and other places, not to mention what they did to us in the Caribbean.
Between 1904 and 1907 in what is now called Namibia, the Germans murdered the Herero and Nama tribes with the most brutal of methods, battle, starvation and thirst, forced labor, sexual violence, malnutrition, medical experiments, and disease, just to get rid of a colony of people to gain access to their land.
You ask what has those atrocities to do with us in Anguilla, and I go back to Shakespeare’s phrase, “What is past is prologue.” We may not have suffered at the hands of cruel slave masters, ours was a fate worse than death, for what is happening to us today is subtle and by the very same hands of our own, after having been left alone to fend for ourselves. We suffered a plethora of ills and by the grace of God, we were able to survive.
Our past has determined where our future takes us. We have had the good fortune to have inherited the land upon which we live, land that is a now very valuable commodity to those who would displace us from our homeland.
In Anguilla, we have had the misfortune of being abandoned by all. Like an abandoned child who had to learn to fend for itself, we had to do just that, fend for ourselves and, as the old saying goes, necessity is, and for us, was the mother of invention, and with that old Anguillan ingenuity, we forged a path forward, a path that now seems to be taking us into the wrong direction.
Ever since that fateful day in 1967, when a group of brave souls decided to no longer be pawns in anyone’s chess game, to be specific, the Central Government of St. Kitts Nevis and Anguilla, and by extension the government of the United Kingdom, we would take our future in our hands, for better or worse. We’ve had one tumultuous time along the way. We have gone from one despot to another, each one worse than the one preceding him.
In Anguilla, we have suffered at the hands of a Central government headed by one Robert L. Bradshaw and, by extension, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, a group of white men some four thousand miles away, who couldn’t find Anguilla even if they accidentally fell on it.
That said, we are a group of people who were unaccustomed to the modern conveniences of everyday life. We did without electricity, running water, paved roads, proper schools, and proper health services. Dr. Kennedy Simmonds, fresh out of medical school, recalls being sent to Anguilla to substitute for Dr. Haas, who hadn’t had a vacation in years, being appalled by the primitive conditions substituting for health care.
He recalls having to work at the Cottage Hospital that had no electricity, no running water – having to manage three clinics at different ends of the island in addition to making house calls day and night, do medicine, pediatrics, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology at the hospital, and dentistry, which only offered extractions. He remembers the only electricity for the OR was provided by a long cord which ran overhead from Lloyd’s Guest House.
His first operation was on a member of the Warden’s family. He recalls having to improvise regarding anesthesia, ether sprinkled over a piece of gauze held over the patient’s face, checking hemoglobin by putting a drop of blood on a card that looked like blotting paper and by comparing the degree of redness with a color chart, doing a lower segment c-section much to the dismay of the OR Nurse. These were just some of the problems facing a people that no one, seemed to give a damn about.
Our conditions were so bad that we wrote letters to anyone who would lend an ear. Sadly, no one listened. Finally, the piece de resistance, which in some cases was a request, was sent to the Governor General in Antigua, asking him to intervene with the dissolution of the State. (Petty) When that didn’t work, we let him know in no uncertain terms that: “a people cannot live without hope for long without erupting socially.” Once again, our cries fell on deaf ears, and so our revolution was born.
That was over fifty-odd years ago, and we seem to be regressing at warp speed. We have had leaders more concerned with their party’s agenda and what they could leach off the people, rather than the welfare of their constituents they swore to defend and protect. They pass laws without considering the effects upon us their constituents. We’ll look to future elections. ~ Part II
