1 Introduction
“I shouldn’t have to walk onto a plantation in twenty-first century Barbados and not see myself and my ancestors represented—only see the glory of what that plantation space was.” (Innis, 2020). This sentiment, echoed by many West Indians, was expressed by Tara Inniss, a historian at the University of the West Indies (UWI), during a recent panel discussion broadcast live via YouTube. The discussion, hosted by the UWI Museum, critically examined the meaning of colonial-era monuments and monumental landscapes in contemporary Caribbean society.
The occasion for this discussion was a momentous storm of global events sweeping through several countries. This storm created a wave of iconoclasm vandalizing and toppling statues erected to honor slave owners, traders, colonizers, and Confederate generals who fought to defend the institution of slavery. Many more such monuments to champions of African enslavement find themselves threatened by the worldwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department (Diaz et al., June 2020). The slaying of yet another unarmed (and non-hostile) Black man by law enforcement personnel aggravated centuries-old, unhealed wounds of racial injustice. The incident also galvanized the discussion—already taking place—on whose heritage is represented and how that heritage is represented.
The editors of the present volume had been planning this publication long before current events thrust the Black Lives Matter movement once more into the spotlight. However, these events make such a publication even more timely—as archaeologists, once part of the colonial enterprise, now grapple with how the Caribbean’s archaeological heritage can be interpreted in a manner that represents and honors the heritage of all the people who created the sites and landscapes of our region. While the focus of this volume, unlike the wider discussion now taking place in the media, is not on statues and monuments, it fits well within this discussion. Discussing the uses of
In some cases, they were fortified edifices meant to reassure the plantocracy and convince potential aggressors of their resolve to defend vulnerable island outposts against assault by sea as well as insurrection by the enslaved and Indigenous populations within. In other instances, they were plantations that served not only as production sites but also as monumental displays of a planter’s wealth or aspirational attempts to convince onlookers of said wealth (Hicks, 2007, p. 37, 39; Meniketti, 2015, p. 218). As one leading architectural publication has noted, those who possess wealth are the ones who are able to imprint their ambitions, goals, and ideals on the built landscape (O’Neill, 2020).
What of those, however, whose forced labor and skills were used to transform the built landscape? How are they represented? Do their descendants, who comprise the region’s demographic majority, see themselves and their heritage represented at these sites, and if they do, is it a representation they are willing to accept? These are the questions this chapter seeks to address. The issues of representation and interpretation of a heritage that is intertwined with the still painful and controversial legacies of enslavement and colonization will be explored by examining the perspectives of various entities and individuals. These entities and individuals range from corporate stakeholders in the tourism industry, specifically from the heritage tourism sector to grassroots community activists.
While the insular Caribbean and regions beyond shall of course feature in this discussion, the chapter’s focus will be on the representation of the archaeological and built heritage of Saint Kitts. Saint Kitts and neighboring Nevis, both located in the northeastern Caribbean archipelago, were governed by Britain as a single political entity before gaining formal independence in 1983. Saint Christopher or Saint Kitts, the larger of the two, became England’s first West Indian colony in 1624, and in the following year also became the site of France’s first foray into colonizing the insular Caribbean. The two European entities made uneasy bedfellows, and disputes, often escalating into armed conflict, were common. One of the few moments of Anglo-French settler unity occurred when they joined forces to decimate the Kalinago population, the island’s first settlers. By the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Saint Kitts came completely under English control. Strategically important as the most important sugar producer in the Leeward Islands, over the course of the next two centuries, Saint Kitts would be a frequent target of French attacks. It was occupied by the French on several occasions, but never again spent any significant period within the Francophone sphere.
In regions of the Americas where the plantation was a ubiquitous feature of the landscape, it should perhaps come as no surprise that as economies shifted from dependence on labor-intensive cash crops, plantations either shut down or were repurposed. In the latter case, the majority of the Caribbean plantations that survived the changes of the post-slavery industrial and service economy were reinvented as “plantation inns.” These hotels and restaurants promise to transport their guests back to a romanticized era of grand architecture set in an idyllic tropical landscape. A few—such as Mount Gay and Foursquare Estates in Barbados, Appleton Estate in Jamaica, and Plantation Diamond in Guyana’s Demerara region—have become the sites of world-renowned rum distilleries. Several of these distillers offer plantation tours, in which visitors are regaled with tales of the centuries-old history of the plantation as well as the handcrafted care and expertise that goes into creating its unique brand of sugarcane-derived spirit.
These tours often feed into tourists’ preconceived notions of the islands as a paradise—notions reinforced by the tourism promotional material that potential visitors consume in the supply countries (White, 2013, pp. 175–188).1 However, these notions often conflict with the darker side of the host country’s history and its inherited socioeconomic legacy. The history of most popular Caribbean Island destinations is inseparable from the legacy of plantation slavery (Monzote, 2013, pp. 17–24). This legacy is central to a larger story in which the Caribbean islands, their Indigenous peoples, and the Africans brought to their shores were exploited to create enormous wealth for Northern Hemispheric nations. At the same time, the islands were restricted to producing primary products, which ironically fueled the Northern Hemisphere’s Industrial Revolution. The Caribbean’s present-day overreliance on the tourism sector and its high consumption of imported consumer goods from the Global North is the perpetuation of a structure of exploitation and economic dependence. This structure was erected by the former colonial powers of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, and their later peer rival the United States.
How, then, does a small Caribbean nation attract visitors from these very countries of the Global North, and yet also fulfil the necessity of ensuring that
The role of Caribbean islands such as Saint Kitts and Nevis and their peoples as empire builders of the Atlantic World brings us to our second, but nonetheless important motive for authentic historical representation. Visitors are rarely exposed to this perspective in the education systems or media of their home countries. Such ignorance serves to propagate inaccurate and racialized stereotypes as the causes of and reasons for the continued disparity in economic development between the North and the Caribbean. While the authors argue for the necessity of presenting visitors with this perspective, we also acknowledge that confronting visitors with a perspective that challenges their existing bias may create discomfort and even hostility (Biser, 2017).
In the former Confederate States of the US South, several antebellum plantations are now historic sites inscribed in the National Register of Historic Places. Despite the obvious and inescapable connection of these plantations to slavery, nearly all their register entries are uniformly and glaringly silent on the enslaved persons who toiled on them and in many cases built their mansions. When the Blacks who labored on these properties are mentioned, references to slavery and discussion of the types of work they did are usually either scrupulously avoided or glossed over to present a paternalistic view of the planter (Reeves, 2020). The recently created Black Craftspeople Digital Archive website (blackcraftspeople.org) seeks to address this skewered representation of history. Here in the Caribbean, a similar phenomenon can be observed at many of the former plantations now functioning as plantation inns or where some other form of planned visitor experience is offered.
Before venturing further, it is important to define two key terms central to this chapter: history and heritage. E. H. Carr terms history as “a particular conception of what constitutes human rationality: every historian, whether he knows it or not, has such a conception” (Carr, 2008). In other words, history is how we conceive past events and the rationale we apply to interpreting these events. Heritage, on the other hand, is the legacy of these past events as
2 Confronting the Slavery-Era Heritage of Saint Kitts from an Elite Perspective
So how is this heritage being confronted on Saint Kitts, where the legacy of the sugar plantation is more entrenched in the physical and cultural landscape than on any other Eastern Caribbean Island apart from Barbados? Recorded interviews conducted with the individuals responsible for managing two of the island’s most iconic plantation-based tourist attractions have divulged notably divergent approaches toward interpreting the legacy of slavery to their visitors. These two individuals are Clayton Perkins and Maurice Widdowson, who respectively manage Fairview Inn and Romney Manor/Wingfield Estate. We recorded interviews with them on June 23rd and July 1st, 2020, respectively.
2.1 1 A. Fairview Inn
Mr. Perkins is the Chief Executive Officer of Delisle Walwyn & Co. Ltd., the oldest privately owned limited liability company on Saint Kitts and Nevis, with origins that can be traced back to the nineteenth century.2 Delisle Walwyn is a company that is itself steeped in history, with its recently renovated corporate headquarters located on Liverpool Row, a street that was once the commercial center of the capital city, Basseterre. Liverpool Row’s name betrays the close trading ties that once existed between Basseterre and the British city of Liverpool, one of the premier English slave trading ports (Saint Kitts & Nevis National Archives, n.d.).
In 2008 Kishu Chandiramani, patriarch of the Chandiramani family, a prominent Indo-Kittitian business family popularly known by their company name “Rams,” purchased a famous but then derelict former plantation known as the Fairview Inn. The Rams family are majority shareholders in Delisle Walwyn, and the latter leased the property from the family with the intention of developing Fairview Inn into the flagship attraction for Delisle Walwyn’s tour company, Kantours (Perkins, 2020). The now renovated Fairview Inn Great
The expansion of sugar cultivation in the West Indies from the early eighteenth century led to the modest manors of the planters being replaced by grander structures. Plantation landscapes were also being modified, reflecting greater focus on a more strictly organized agricultural regime (Hicks, 2007, p. 41). The changes being wrought on the residences of planters and on plantation landscapes were likely spurred by two impulses. One would have been the desire to display newfound or increased prosperity and power: power not only over the sugar landscape, but also over the growing enslaved African workforce upon which they were increasingly dependent. This greater reliance on a steadily increasing African population brings us to the second impulse. Planters became ever more fearful of their enslaved workforce, as seen in legislation passed by planter-dominated assemblies (Saint Kitts & Nevis National Archives, 1711, 1722). However, due to the planters’ own insatiable demand for more enslaved labor, the Black population continued to grow. The reorganization of the plantation landscape to portray power over the enslaved was a reflection of their fear of the Blacks who began outnumbering them.
Figure 5.1, depicting a St. Kitts plantation in the late nineteenth century, aptly illustrates the preoccupation of many contemporary artists with portraying a well-ordered landscape in which the enslaved Black persons, prominently featured in the foreground, performed their designated functions, just like the livestock and structures such as windmills. The most prominent background features in this image are the fosandyrtified military sites Brimstone Hill (on the left) and Fort Charles, also known as Fig Tree Fort (on the extreme right). Both fortifications are depicted with imperial flags flying above their battlements. The visual depictions of these fortifications in the background serve to convey a sense of control over a landscape whose productivity and viability depended on enslaved African labor. Such control represented an ideal both for the planter class and the metropole whose prosperity depended on the products of Caribbean plantations.
Sandy Point Estate and Windmill, St. Kitts (St. Christopher), British West Indies, ca.1795. www.slaveryimages.org-ImageRef. NW0005
Literature and other documentary sources were and still are powerful tools in the idealization of plantation landscapes. From the eighteenth century, several poetic works and essays were produced extolling proper techniques of
The invention of photography in the late nineteenth century, several decades after the legal termination of slavery in the British Empire, added a potent visual tool to the arsenal of documentation meant to portray an idealized plantation landscape. Postcards depicting neatly dressed estate workers against a sanitized backdrop of plantation grounds and buildings were marketed to affluent visitors to the British West Indies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Figure 5.2). The images were meant to mask the reality of the arduous work regimen and squalid living conditions that had barely improved for the majority of the Black population since emancipation (Gilmore, 1995).
Planting cane, Island of St. Kitts, B.W.I. – digital file from original | Library of Congress (loc.gov)
The Facebook pages of both Fairview Inn and Romney Manor prominently feature photos of painstakingly restored estate buildings and immaculately landscaped grounds.5 As with the black-and-white postcards of a century
“[T]he elements of what happened in Africa that a lot of people don’t know. A lot of people don’t realize that there were many Africans who were prisoners of war. Some were highly educated, there were children of chiefs of tribes and so on […] and so we tend to tell that story because a lot of people don’t understand that story very well. We tell the story a little bit of where they came from in Africa and how they got to the coastline
and so on. And then we focused also, a little bit more than usual, on the life of the slave, what they ate, where they lived. So, we haven’t focused so much on the labor side of the slave story and the work they did on the plantation, we more focused on how they got there and how they lived.” “So obviously we touched on the slavery element but we didn’t want to take the typical kind of approach […] We wanted to look at the elements that are not touched on so much. But I think coming back directly tothe question [of interpreting the legacy of slavery], each plantation has its own story and I think you have to kinda look at it in that context.” (Perkins, 2020)
As can be seen in this excerpt from the recorded interview with Clayton Perkins, the new exhibit places emphasis on interpreting the following features in the lives of Africans in Africa and the Caribbean: the varying circumstances under which Africans became captives who were then transported to the Americas as enslaved persons; the diverse socioeconomic backgrounds of the African captives; and the societies from which most of the captives originated. The foodways, housing, and other aspects of the material culture of the enslaved in the Caribbean appear to be the main focus of the exhibit.6
It is noteworthy that the management of Fairview has chosen to focus much of the exhibit’s interpretation of the enslaved experience on their lives before they became enslaved. This approach has the potential to afford the visitor and members of the public the opportunity to learn more about African societies, which up to the present day are still subject to persistent and highly racialized myths and misunderstandings, including crude stereotypes. Many of the West African societies encountered by European slave traders, emissaries, and other travelers from Europe in the fifteenth century onwards were as complex as the ones they had left back home. These African societies were distinguished by highly developed systems of trade and commerce; artisanship in many fields, from textiles to metallurgy; and a high degree of social stratification, with various classes including artisans, warriors, merchants, priests, and nobility (Thornton, 1998, pp. 43–97).
The intended orientation of the new exhibit at Fairview is laudable for the initiative it takes toward presenting a multidimensional perspective of Africans in the Americas as more than just slaves. However, even here there seem to be missed opportunities. For example, while most of the enslaved labor force on a plantation were field hands, a significant percentage were
As a tour site we have to be sensitive about not labeling and making persons from countries that enslaved Africans feel that they are guilty. We are in the business of selling a memorable experience. It is a part of the history; we can’t run from it so you have to tell the story. It is more a matter of the delivery rather than running from the history (Perkins, 2020).
During the period of enslavement, Europeans and their North American settler cousins consumed the tropical products of enslaved labor, cultivated on Caribbean landscapes represented in an idealized form in various texts and visual media, from landscape art to maps. In modern times, Europeans and North Americans travel to the Caribbean to consume the destination itself, a destination similarly represented, in idealized fashion, as paradise. However, the consumption of paradise can be accompanied by postcolonial guilt (Korber, 2017). As Perkins’s comments demonstrate, tourism entities are very aware of this postcolonial guilt. These entities often seek to assuage this guilt through various strategies. One such strategy is to completely ignore the legacy of slavery, as seen earlier in the example of many plantations listed on the US National Register of Historic Places. This strategy is not only limited to the US South; several such glaring examples are found dotted throughout the Caribbean.
Another common strategy is to downplay the harsh realities of the pre- and even post-emancipation plantation regime, while at the same time promoting a sense of identity between white visitors and the plantation owners (Korber, 2017). On its website, St. Nicholas Abbey, one of the most renowned plantations
The approach taken by Fairview’s new exhibit also avoids the harsh realities of the enslaved experience on the plantation. Unlike many others, however, the exhibit appears to make an attempt at personifying the enslaved and presenting them as individuals, with cultural identities completely separate from the slave identities Europeans attempted to impose on them in their new plantation environment.
2.2 1B. Romney Manor/Wingfield Estate
In contrast to Perkins, who is originally from the tiny Eastern Caribbean Island town of Plymouth in Montserrat, Maurice Archibald Widdowson hails from the northwestern English city of Lancaster. Widdowson credits the decade he spent in Zambia before arriving in Saint Kitts as having exerted an important early influence on his attitudes toward the history and heritage of Saint Kitts and the Caribbean. His time in Central Africa left an impression on him, making him more interested in Afro-Caribbean heritage. The English-born businessman is of the opinion that had he arrived in the Caribbean straight from the UK, he would have approached the history and heritage of the two adjoining plantations he now owns “less sensitively, less intellectually and less prepared” (Widdowson, 2020).
Widdowson leased Romney Manor in 1975, motivated by the abandoned plantation’s location midway along the island’s main road, between the cruise ship port at Basseterre and Brimstone Hill Fortress, the latter then the island’s
I think there’s a lot of ignorance both in the society at large (globally) and even locally among school kids […] They only think of slaves in terms of working in the fields. They don’t see the fact that they actually run every element of the estate and they just think that they were whipped out to death on a daily basis in the scorching sun and cut cane. They didn’t understand that slaves actually did all the masonry, all the carpentry, the distiller, the distilling process. All those elements, the guy that run the lime kiln […] the ironsmith and I want to bring those facts to people. (Widdowson, 2020)
Widdowson also expressed the desire to use the interpretation of the enslaved experience at Wingfield Estate to “tell the remarkable story of Betto Douglas. A story of cruelty, injustice and of determination that made life easier perhaps for other enslaved people” (Widdowson, 2020).10 Betto Douglas was an enslaved African woman on Romney Estate who, in the early nineteenth century, lobbied for manumission for her sons and herself, as well as seeking legal action against Richard Cardin, the manager of the plantation, for cruel and unjust punishment. She had been held in the stocks at Wingfield Estate for six months (UCL Department of History, 2020). Widdowson plans to recreate the stocks Douglas had been placed in. However, he is concerned that some visitors may seek to trivialize Douglas’s experience by sitting in the stocks to have their photographs taken. He is particularly concerned about the potential for this type of disrespectful behavior from North American visitors who, in his experience, have a tendency to “trivialize anything.” Therefore, “period-appropriate” cast-iron fencing will be placed around the stocks, allowing visitors to view but not physically interact with the exhibit (Widdowson, 2020).
Widdowson argues, “You cannot in my opinion tell a story (of Wingfield) without including the slaves that work there.” For Widdowson, telling that story also includes incorporating their relationship with the landscape around the plantation. He is seeking government sponsorship to have an enslaved burial site located a quarter mile from Wingfield fenced off, and greater recognition given to the site. Widdowson would like to see the site “sanctified in some way and recognized.” At present, members of the public walk across the site without being aware of its significance (Widdowson, 2020).
Fairview Inn and Romney Manor/Wingfield Estate represent two interesting approaches to confronting the legacy of slavery at former plantation sites now
The present owner of Romney Manor and Wingfield Estate has approached the legacy of his plantation by seeking to carve a dual path. One path is to create a strong sense of connection with the local community—which is predominantly of African descent—that goes beyond creating employment. One example of an initiative that will seek to deepen this connection, while at the same time creating additional revenue for Widdowson’s business and employment for the community, is the proposed future rum distillery at Wingfield Estate. The intention is to brand the locally produced rum under the “Old Road Rum Company” (Widdowson, 2020). This runs counter to common practice in the region, where most rum distilleries located on historic plantations trademark the estate’s name as the rum’s brand name.
The other track of this dual path is to make parts of the plantation and surrounding landscapes memorials to the enslaved persons whose labor and skills transformed the landscape, and whose deaths made them an enduring, yet under-recognized part of it. If Widdowson’s proposed initiatives come to fruition, inquiry into the community’s response to them could be revealing as to how a community comes to terms with creating opportunities—for both employment and retrospection—out of the legacies of sugar, struggle, and enslavement.
3 Confronting the Slavery- and Post-Slavery-Era Heritage of Saint Kitts from a Grassroots Perspective
The two previous individuals interviewed are prominent members of the St. Kitts–Nevis Hotel and Tourism Association (HTA) and manage two of the country’s most high-profile visitor attractions. Similarly, the other two interviewees share a commonality in being socially active members of the Rastafarian community. Rastafarians are noted for their Afrocentric philosophy, which includes agitating for full recognition of and reparations for the social and
3.1 Samande Reid and Buckley’s Revolt
Samande is an agriculture-based cottage-industry entrepreneur who produces and sells tamarind balls, a popular local delicacy made from the fruit of the ubiquitous tamarind tree. He is also well known in Saint Kitts for his prominent role in promoting the annual commemoration of the 1935 worker’s strike, known as “Buckley’s Revolt” due to the violent culmination of the island-wide strike at Buckley’s Estate. Buckley’s Estate is located at the western end of Basseterre. Buckley’s Revolt was the earliest of a series of labor revolts throughout the Caribbean in the mid- to late 1930s. Samande’s involvement in commemorating the revolt was spurred by his own readings on the event after completing his formal schooling as a young man. He was concerned by the fact that the school’s curriculum did not teach enough about the event.
The experience of having to learn about a seminal event in national and regional history outside of the formal school system influenced Samande’s attitudes toward using sites associated with slavery as tourism attractions. Samande argues, “These sites shouldn’t be just used as tourist attractions but they should also be used to educate our young ones […] so they wouldn’t be fumbling when asked a question” (Reid, 2020). Clearly Samande is of the opinion that only just persons who are directly employed in the tourism industry, but all members of the community, including the youth, should be able to interpret the history of sites associated with slavery for visitors. It is noteworthy that Samande shares a similar perspective as Maurice Widdowson, namely that there needs to be greater knowledge of local heroes such as Betto Douglas and the mid-nineteenth-century Maroon leader “Markus of the Woods” (also commonly known as “Markus, King of the Woods”), who are associated with particular sites (Reid, 2020). Using plantation sites as stages to present the stories of individuals such as Betto Douglas and Markus would undoubtedly broaden the dialogue from enslavement to include resistance as well. The theme of resistance, while of course inseparable from enslavement, is not as heavily saddled with the victimhood baggage that many Caribbean people negatively associate with slavery.
Having worked in education, both authors have had the experience of encountering resistance from students with regard to learning about the history of enslavement, an attitude that, in many cases, is influenced by parents or other older family members. Utilizing plantation sites as means to raise
The commemoration of the 1935 Buckley’s Revolt also highlights another factor in the interpretation of these historic sites: which era of a site’s history holds the greatest relevance to local and national communities, and should be emphasized in any heritage awareness or public education exercise? For the several centuries that it had been in operation, Buckley’s Estate would have held significance to its owners and, as the producer of an important commodity, to merchants in both Saint Kitts and England with whom it conducted business. However, after the fateful events of January 20 to 29, 1935, Buckley’s Estate was elevated to a unique status that, in the collective memory of Kittitians, makes it distinct from the many other estates that dominate Saint Kitts’s landscape. Buckley’s is most remembered not as a site of production or even, unlike other plantations, a former site of enslavement; it is remembered for events that served as a catalyst for the growth of trade unionism, working-class political activism, and greater rights for workers in Saint Kitts and Nevis and the rest of the British Empire.
The prioritization of the latter period of a site’s existence in the collective psyche is not unique to Buckley’s Estate. A single event—as in the case of Buckley’s Estate—or a phase during which a site undergoes a major change in its use can significantly alter or influence how that site is remembered. Recent ethnographic fieldwork has revealed how a major change of function has influenced the memory of the oldest coastal fortification on Saint Kitts. Located on the southern end of the anchorage at the port town of Sandy Point, Charles Fort was constructed circa the early 1680s. Evidence indicates that the fortress is one of the oldest existing original structures in the region, outside of the Hispanic Caribbean (Gill, 2020, pp. 61–62, 150–161).
Yet community memory of the site is heavily influenced by the relatively brief period, from the 1890s to the 1980s, when the fortress was repurposed as a leper asylum bearing the name “Hansen Home.” Charles Fort’s role as a leprosarium has shaped Sandy Pointer’s perceptions of themselves, their community, and the historic rivalry between the port towns of Basseterre and Sandy Point. Many Sandy Pointers claim that their town was chosen as the location for the leprosarium to demote Sandy Point from its status as the island’s capital. The claim is historically impossible for two reasons. First, Sandy Point was never a capital city. Secondly, Basseterre has held the status of capital city since 1727, when the English moved their administrative seat from Old Road after having completely taken over the former French sections of Saint Kitts (Gill, 2020, pp. 230–233). Paradoxically, despite the conspiracy theories surrounding
The example of Charles Fort serves merely to highlight how specific events or periods can shape the memory and interpretation of a site. Forging positive relationships between communities and the sites they share a history with requires an awareness of which aspects of that site’s history a community finds relevant. This is not to say that other aspects of a site’s history should be overlooked or downplayed, as doing so would only create a false or incomplete narrative. However, as sites will ultimately depend upon their associated communities—both present and future generations—for their continued survival, it is necessary to be aware of the stories of a site’s history that can forge connections with the community: connections that evoke pride rather than apathy or unease. By exploring and promoting such connections, archaeologists can generate greater interest from the community in investigating and protecting sites. The relevant heritage management entities can then capitalize on the heightened awareness and empathy within the community, and engage the latter as proactive partners in the long-term protection and interpretation of sites.
3.2 Ras Kalonji
John Jeffers, who carries the name Ras Kalonji since his adoption of the Rastafari faith, acquired his trade as a printer while residing in New York City, a North American metropolis that is a mecca for immigrants from Saint Kitts and Nevis and other Caribbean countries. Kalonji specializes in the printing of Black Consciousness and Afrocentric images and texts on posters, buttons, and garments. A cottage-industry entrepreneur like Samande, he operates out of a store in the Pelican Mall, where he also sells herbal supplements. The mall is located on Bay Road in Basseterre, in very close proximity to the Port Zante cruise ship port. At the time of our interview, Kalonji was wearing one of his creations, a tee shirt with the now infamous image of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, who died within a few minutes due to physical trauma caused by the inappropriate manner of restraint.
Ras Kalonji credits his conversion to Rastafari with influencing his gravitation to a Black Consciousness ideology and shaping his attitudes toward built and archaeological heritage. Kalonji strongly feels that there are many sites and monuments on Saint Kitts that should be renamed because their present
One example given by Kalonji is Basseterre’s historic playing field Warner Park, named after Saint Kitts’s first English governor, Thomas Warner, who, along with his French counterpart Pierre d’Esnambuc, led a bloody campaign against the Kalinago that decimated their population on the island. The entrepreneur and social activist feels that “renaming and redefining (these sites) would help me better relate to them” (Kalonji, 2020). As with Widdowson, Kalonji sees the role a name can play in shaping the public’s relationship with a site. Widdowson seeks to break with convention and name his rum not after the estate, but the surrounding community; Kalonji seeks to remove names associated with past oppressors. Kalonji’s perspective is also shared by many, as evidenced in the current heated debate in the United States and some European countries over the renaming of monuments and buildings named after individuals who were either connected with the African slave trade or openly supported slavery. Earlier, we discussed how sites where enslavement occurred can become focal points for community and national pride by promoting their connections to persons who resisted enslavement or exploitation. Conversely, a site such as Warner Park in Saint Kitts, an Ivy League university building, or an army base in the United States may have no direct connection with slavery or genocide. However, bearing the name of individuals who either participated in or openly condoned such atrocities creates a connection with the individuals and events that many find troublesome at the very least.
4 Conclusion
The individuals interviewed shared widely varying perspectives on addressing the complex legacy of our historic sites. However, a common thread weaving through these perspectives is the recognition that the narrative created around these sites heavily influences how the public relates to them. Strategies taken to address the legacies of slavery and exploitation range from highlighting commonly overlooked aspects of African societies and memorializing acts of resistance at specific sites to naming strategies meant to create positive associations. The different approaches taken and being called for all make one thing clear: whether a bridge or a wall is created between a site and the community will depend on how that site’s story is told.
Biser, M. (2017, August 28). I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8847385/what-i-learned-from-leading-tours-about-slavery-at-a-plantation.
Diaz, J., Hauser, C., Bailey, J. M., Landler, M., McCann, E., Pronczuk, M., Vigdor, N., & Zaveri, M. (2020, June 24). How statues are falling around the world: Statues and monuments that have long honored racist figures are being boxed up, spray-painted—or beheaded. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/confederate-statues-photos.html.
Reeves, J. (2020, February 23). US “honor roll” of historic places often ignores slavery. AP News. https://apnews.com/b4773e5d162b5825ad3a5b3572fd19c9.
Sandy Point Estate and Windmill, St. Kitts (St. Christopher), British West Indies, ca. (1795), Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed June 20, 2023, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1471.
St. Kitts–Nevis National Archives. (1722). An Act for attaining several Negroes therein mentioned; and for the more effectual preventing Negroes from running away from their masters’ service; and for explaining and rendering more effectual an act entitled An Act for the better government of Negroes and other slaves.
St. Kitts–Nevis National Archives. n.d. “Liverpool Row.” https://www.historicstkitts.kn/places/liverpool-row-2.
UCL Department of History. (2020). Richard Edward Cardin. Legacies of British Slavery. http://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/25862.
Just for clarification, the term “supply country” refers to the tourist or visitor’s country of origin, while “host country” refers to the tourist destination.
The latter is a plantation inn that ceased operations in 2017.
One example is the volume published by Clement Caines in 1801, while residing on Saint Kitts.
https://www.facebook.com/fairviewskn/; https://www.facebook.com/maurice.widdowson/posts/10223545414529046.
Unfortunately, the authors were unable to visit the exhibit in person due to the coronavirus shutdown.
Ibid.
Damage and destruction of historic sites on Saint Kitts and Nevis, from plantations to fortifications, by developers seeking to acquire cut stones, or “headstones” as they are locally known, usually to be used in the construction of luxury properties, is an unfortunately common occurrence, to which public officials and heritage entities frequently turn a blind eye when it is politically convenient to do so.
Coincidentally, the authors of this chapter intend to present a proposal to the Government of Saint Kitts and Nevis that Betto Douglas and Markus of the Woods (the latter a Maroon leader) be nominated as National Heroes.