Caribbean Beat — March/April 2019 (#156)

on this day
A flag on
the island
Fifty years ago, a British military force
landed on a tiny Caribbean island — to
be welcomed with open arms. The
“invasion” of Anguilla was an odd and
maybe anachronistic moment in the
Caribbean’s colonial history — but,
James Ferguson suggests, it left
Anguillans with exactly what they
wanted: a version of independence
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
From Haiti’s revolution of 1791 to the more peaceful mass
movements of the 1930s onwards in the English-speaking colonies,
the modern history of the Caribbean has been determined by a
rejection of foreign rule and a desire for independence. While not
all territories have opted for autonomy, the great majority have,
creating nation states out of colonial dependencies. Few citizens
of the contemporary Caribbean would want to turn the clock back and find
themselves ruled from London or Madrid.
Needless to say, of course, there is always an exception to prove the rule,
and here it takes the form of a direct appeal to the former colonial power to
re-establish control over the territory in question. I can think of only two such
cases in the Caribbean. The first occurred in 1861, when the president of the
Dominican Republic, confronted by political chaos and bankruptcy, asked
Queen Isabella II of Spain to reconvert the country into a Spanish colony after
seventeen years of independence (the US and France had already declined
the offer). It ended messily: after two years of inept and repressive colonial
administration, a popular insurrection turned into guerrilla war, and the Spanish
were finally kicked out for good in 1865.
The second case was much more recent, and featured a tiny, formerly
British colony, best known today for its stunning beaches and luxury resorts:
Anguilla. And this incident bizarrely culminated
fifty years ago, on 19 March, 1969, with a British
military invasion of the island.
Anguilla had long been a remote outpost
among Britain’s Caribbean possessions. Small
and mostly arid, it was not suited to plantationbased
agriculture, and as such had fewer enslaved
Africans than nearby islands. The French made
a couple of half-hearted attempts to seize it, but
the British retained control from its first colonisation
in 1650. Its insignificance was illustrated by
the fact that it was not considered worthy of its
own governor, and was administered first from
Antigua and then, from 1825, from St Kitts. This
arrangement fuelled resentment, as Anguillans
viewed the legislative union as inefficient and discriminatory.
A petition of 1872 requesting direct
rule from London was ignored.
A further cost-cutting exercise in 1882 saw
Anguilla pulled into the three-island union of
St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, part of the Leeward
Islands Federation. Nobody, however, thought to
consult the people of Anguilla, who endured great
hardships and mass emigration due to famines and
the shockwaves of the 1930s Great Depression.
The British persisted with the three-island model,
first as a crown colony in 1956 and then as a selfgoverning
associated state in 1967. This effectively
handed over control of Anguilla to the majority
legislators in St Kitts.
This unwanted alignment was to prove a
tipping point in Nevis and Anguilla, which both
viewed themselves as deprived of resources and
development by the biggest of the three islands.
In one instance, Canada had donated funds for
a pier to be built in Anguilla. The money went to
St Kitts, where the pier was duly constructed
instead. The premier of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla
was Robert Bradshaw, a tough veteran trade unionist,
who seemingly had little time for Anguilla. “I
will not rest,” he allegedly once said, “until I have
reduced that place to a desert.” Discontent simmered
in Nevis even after the granting of limited
self-rule, but in Anguilla, where no such concession
was made, anger would soon turn into open revolt.
110 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM