MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 28 March 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Selwyn Walter has been good-naturedly taunting me about whether or not I, of all people, should be saying and writing Guiana Island and not Guana Island. At first, I was inclined to say call the rose by any other name and it will smell as sweet. What’s in a name?
And then I realised that Selwyn Walter was in fact raising a more serious question. Namely, he or she who names, defines. As a people, we are always allowing others to name, and therefore to define those things around us. In the beginning we were named and defined by foreign capital, so even now.
It is like the original name of Antigua used by the Amerindians. It was Ouladli – meaning, “land of oil,” eucalyptus oil, when Antigua was a wooded country before the British planters levelled almost everything in sight. Antigua then began its long colonial life in ecological disaster. Professor Gregson Davis in Antigua Black makes the telling point of the ecological disaster which colonialism imposed on us. As with everything else we have chosen to ignore our own. One of our finest scholars spent pages showing that colonialism in the service of King Sugar, imposed an environmental disaster in Antigua by cutting down the tree-cover on the island, indiscriminately.
Professor Davis was PM Lester Bird’s contemporary. I doubt whether PM Lester Bird read the book. And if he did I am sure he did not assimilate Professor Gregson Davis’ point. Namely, that we the inheritors of Antigua and Barbuda cannot go on perpetuating the ecological disaster which colonialism imposed on us. We cannot correct it. But we can arrest it. Moreover, that we cease to accept that this country exists primarily for the other. It is after all, the base and basis of our own self-realisation. It is that or it is nothing.
But to get back to the point, some alien wiseacre told us that Ouladli was first written down by a French priest, and since, said the wiseacre ‘Ou’ in French is pronounced “W” in English. Ouladli was really Waladli, and then this was further corrupted to Wadadli. And the corruption has stuck. It did not occur to us that the alien wiseacre who came up with this nonsense about “Ou” in French is pronounced “W” in English, obviously knew no French, except perhaps “Oui” meaning “yes”. We stuck with the nonsense. And have continued to perpetuate nonsense.
Similarly, with “Prince Klass”. A white writer, writing what she specifically says was “legend”, fictionalised the historical character King Court into Prince Klass. Despite all historical evidence to the contrary, officialdom has stubbornly stuck with the white fiction of ‘Prince’ Klass rather than the historical accuracy of Caribbean historians. We repeatedly deny our own to our own. It is, to say the least, an historical disease. It has to be historically corrected, to say the most.
The point is, Selwyn Walter felt that Tim Hector, of all persons, should not be going along with the corruption of Guiana Island. I can only say in my defence, Selwyn, that I have for so long being going against the tide of ignorance which enshrouds this island that I sometimes let this or that pass. This was one such instance.
Original maps of Antigua, state the name of the island as Iguana Island, named after the Iguana which was very prevalent there. Those iguanas were part of rituals performed by the earliest inhabitants. Major Hole recounts an artistic drawing of an Iguana which was not “representational” on the Island and which would have done credit to “a modern painter”. It was obviously done by the Siboney’s but has since disappeared. Soon, if PM Lester Bird has his way, buzz-dozers will erase the remaining history of the early inhabitants, still to be researched.
Later other early maps of the island use the name Guana Island.
The historical record shows that some time about 1667 English settlers from British Guiana (now Guyana) emigrated to Antigua after that country was taken over by the Dutch. It seems that this settlement from Guiana led to the Island being called Guiana Island.
However as late as 1812 Sir William Codrington III bought what was recorded then as Guana Island for £4,272 and the Codringtons owned the island until the great crash of 1929. Major Hugh Hole bought Guana Island from the Codrington estate, and it seems certain that he used the name Guana Island. When the island passed to the Hamilton Hills, they use Guiana Island, in deference to the English settlers from Guyana who after the Treaty of Breda sought refuge on the island and in Antigua.
In passing, the Codringtons introduced the fallow deer on Guana Island and Barbuda, which deer are now the national symbol of Antigua & Barbuda.
To be fair, the longest used name for the Island was Guana Island, certainly from the time the Tudway’s owned the Island somewhere about 1727 to Major Hole’s time in the 1940’s. Guana Island is, without doubt, the longest used name for the island.
Incidentally, an English historian friend of mine, said that deer skins from ‘Guana Island’ sold by the Codringtons in the 18th century enjoyed quite a reputation in England, but for a very short time.
A 1986 study of the North-east Coast of Antigua where Guana Island sits, by Multer Weiss and Nicholson reports that on the western central side of Guana Island and also northwest of Great Bird Island there is a unique patch-reef system. It is home to the most wonderful biodiversity, which is unmatched anywhere else on the island. The invertebrates there, Multer said in his study, perform invaluable sediment processing “and food-supply functions to the higher animals in the community”.
Mr Ivor Jackson, an Antiguan expert, reports that in the same Guana Island – Great Bird Island area “ghost shrimp decompose bacteria and miscellaneous marine worms eat organic debris and thereby aid in the maintenance of water quality.”
Needless to say since 1987, I have had to read a lot to understand my own environment. Nothing in my colonial schooling taught me anything of my own environment, save that it was inferior to fields of Daffodils and to areas where nightingales “sing of summer in full throated ease”. It is one helluva crime for generation after generation to be schooled without a clue as to their own environment!
But I would be remiss if I did not give this wonderful passage by Ivor Jackson, our own expert on the environment.
He wrote that the Parham-Guana Island area “is still one of the most diverse assemblages of both vertebrate and invertebrates on the Antiguan shelf”. He continued to say “most of the near 300 common Caribbean nearshore fish species are present.” Lester Bird and Dato Tan will jeopardise it all.
Later yet in 1993, I came across this from Dr William Alevizon, who did a scientific report for the Organization of American States (OAS) on the Management of Marine and Coastal Resources Along the North East Coast of Antigua.
In the OAS report Dr. Alevizon wrote:
“The area just east of North Sound contains a number of small islets. In addition to their more obvious unique terrestrial attributes as small islands, these are extremely valuable ecological components to the inshore marine ecosystem, providing nutrients and critical shoreline habitat for post lavaral through juvenile reef fishes.”
I readily confess that before I undertook these studies around 1988, largely influenced by Conrad Luke, Taffy and Bonnie Bufton of Guana Island, I was as ignorant as Lester Bird about my own habitat. Like Lester, I would have thought these islands were just waste land, and it is time we brought “development” to them to “civilise” them so to speak. There is nothing like ignorance! It is most ignorant of what it is most assured. It leads to the most outrageous foolishness, and which, if coated with big-words can even sound like sense. Like Lester now, I was all for the “urbanisation of coastal areas.”
And then the OAS study, among other things, rid me of this ignorance. And I saw the light!
”This urbanisation of Coastal areas” it is written in the OAS study “often involves dredging boat channels, building marinas, and sometimes even the deposition of materials from newly cleared sites directly into the sea. Such activities have the capacity to quickly devastate large areas of live bottom.”
The natural work of centuries is destroyed, devastated in a flash as it were, by heedless man, in pursuit of “urbanisation of Coastal areas”, for short called “development”. Such ‘development’ is devastation. But, is happily pursued by the ignorant or the wanton in pursuit of the modern god – money.
hen there is this again from the OAS report. It says “when land is stripped of natural vegetation through clearing there is little left to hold soils in place. Rains will then carry far greater loads of sediments directly into the sea. Such processes have already contributed substantially to the decline of Antigua’s reefs and seagrass areas.” We are already an ecological disaster area.
I must continue this, because I am sure members of Lester Bird’s Cabinet will not read these long scientific reports to inform themselves to function properly in public office, but it seems they read Fan the Flame for some reason or other. Said the OAS report, “Sediments” caused by so-called ‘development’ can sweep violently across reef and seagrass areas carried by waves and currents which will scour and scrape the bases of colonies, then are deposited among the living polyps or bury seagrasses”. So that “areas once bathed by sparkling blue seas, in time become subjected to waters clouded with sediments, reefs and seagrasses may or will be destroyed.”
hen I learned from the OAS report something entirely new to me. It is this: “Our ability to eliminate these sources of damage is essentially non-existent.”
After five centuries since Galileo, when we can say modern science began, there is nothing we can do to correct when once this type of damage takes place. We doom ourselves by our own wanton disregard of the environment. The damage is irreversible.
In other words violence done to the rich bio-diversity, in the Guana Island area, by Lester Bird, Dato Tan Kay Hock and their assorted lawyers and shareholders is irreversible even hundreds of years from now! It is clearly not a risk worth taking. We endanger a people, a whole people, for a few pieces of silver, probably less than 30 pieces of silver! And that despite the psycho-babble about millions.
There is no way that “building luxury houses at Crump Island”; the “construction of a bridge at the Narrows”; plus a modern casino, plus “scores of retail shops”; plus “residential developments”, plus “a 36 hole championship golf course wrapped around the chain of small un-inhabited islands and winding its way further south” will not irreparably and irreversibly damage to eco-system in the Guana Island area. There is no known method of construction that will not cause serious damage to the habitat called “hardgrounds” or “live bottom” which consists of a platform of limestone covered with a living carpet of sponges, octo-corals, and encrusting plants and animals, of which the north-east coast of Antigua is comprised.
he OAS Report was quick to point out that “Fisheries supported by Antigua’s coral reefs, mangroves, sea-grasses are a valuable natural resource contributing substantially o the economic well-being of fishermen and their markets, local restaurants, the general public and tourism. The health of Caribbean reef fisheries is ultimately tied to the habitats that support them.” Destroy the habitats and “the economic well-being” of an entire nation is irreversibly compromised.
And then this from the experts “We do not really know he complete resource requirements of the entire life cycle of Caribbean reef fishes, hence it is vital that substantial portions of the natural environment are retained in a healthy natural state.” Vital to retain substantial portions of the natural environment. If only Lester could forget his ceaseless worship of Mammon and absorb this serious passage, Antigua & Barbuda could well be saved a fight to the finish.
The OAS report was to prove that retaining the North East Coast of Antigua in its natural environment was not only sound, but it could make money, create jobs, through a Marine protected area. More on that later.
Last updated on 27 May 2022