From The Publisher
1993 was an ominous year for St. Lucia. It was the year the European Community would become a unified market, thereby throwing into doubt the continuance of the preferential treatment bananas were enjoying on the UK market. The nation’s worse fears were confirmed when the year began with banana prices falling below most farmers’ cost of production. Farmers responded. They demanded a guarantee minimum price of 30 cents per pound of bananas, the dissolution of the allegedly corrupt board of directors of the St. Lucia Banana Growers’ Association (SLBGA), the appointment of a new board and the streamlining of SLBGA operations to return to farmers a larger share of banana export receipts.
No one heeded the farmers’ demands. So on October 5, 1993, they went on strike, not only refusing to harvest their bananas but taking drastic actions to ensure the fruits of nonstriking farmers never reach port. The Strike, which wasn’t without precedent, was quite understandable. However, what no one could have predicted was that it would not only end with the deaths of two farmers but would signal a shift in the political and socioeconomic structure of the country.
One comes away from a reading of The Struggle For Survival with the feeling that the plight of farmers was nothing less than an allegory of the history of the island, and the deaths an omen of the future of the banana industry in St. Lucia.
However, to the extent that the Caribbean islands share a common heritage, history and culture, The Struggle For Survival speaks not just of banana farmers or of St. Lucians but of the West Indian Civilization. In fact, the Struggle For Survival is a testament of all enslaved, colonized, dispossessed and marginalized people and their struggle for survival and self-realization.
The Struggle For Survival is a must read for all students of St. Lucian and Caribbean history, because in tracing how the banana industry has contributed to the socioeconomic and political development of the country, the book provides a compelling narrative on why and how St. Lucia became the way it is.
The Struggle For Survival is history that reads like a novel. The book is a multilayered and dynamic narrative of the history, politics, culture and economics of St. Lucia. With just one glance through history, the book captures the essence of St. Lucian society.
The Struggle For Survival eloquently retells the story of the tragic 1993 banana strike that culminated in the shooting death of two farmers. However, by going beyond the tragedy and delving into the island’s history, farmers’ struggles against droughts, hurricanes, falling prices, corrupt institutions, and multinational corporations is seen as a microcosm of the struggles of a people against slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and natural calamities. As such, The Struggle For Survival is nothing less than a story about the birth of a nation, and, by portrayal, the birth of West Indian Civilization.
The Crusader
When the great fire of 1948 devastated the capital, Castries, a North American magazine carried an article on the tragic event which began with the observation that Disaster is no stranger to Saint Lucia.
Indeed, not, and Dr. Anderson Reynolds, in this, his second published work, has chronicled in dramatic sequence, those disasters and misfortunes which, periodically, have affected the island from its discovery down to the present day.
Dr. Reynolds has a great fascination for history and, like the German philosophers, Hegel and Oswald Spengler, believes that history has an uncanny way of repeating itself, and woe to those who take no notice of historical events. Dr. Reynolds demonstrates how, in Saint Lucia, because of that failure to take note and to learn from the lessons of history, Saint Lucians have brought about misfortunes upon themselves which could have been avoided. From slavery to colonialism, but, more specifically, in contemporary events: sugar strikes, banana farmers’ strikes and other industrial actions by workers. With that Lemming-like mentality Saint Lucians have paid the price for ignoring the lessons of the past.
What is it about the concern with history that has been occupying Saint Lucian contemporary writers? Dr. Anderson Reynolds in his first novel, Death by Fire, Dr. Earl Long in his second novel, Voices From A Drum, Mr. Michael Aubertin with his novel, Neg Marron, and Mr. McDonald Dixon in his first novel Season Of Mist, all have been dealing with certain aspects of the Saint Lucian historical experience. That backward glance it has occurred to me, is not simply an effort to come to terms with that historical experience, but, more importantly, to establish who and what we are, what makes us tick. It is, in a very definite way, to establish the Saint Lucian personality, the Saint Lucian national and cultural identity.
Saint Lucians, like Dr. Reynolds are beginning to look at their island and at the development of themselves as a people.
This is an invaluable book, a source of much information. Much scholarly research has gone into the writing of this work. More, it seeks to clarify issues and contemporary events, issues and events which have become somewhat blurred in the minds of the people, and in certain cases, misrepresented for political purposes, and totally unknown to the younger generation who take so many things for granted, and therefore unaware of the struggles, often violent and sanguine, which have brought Saint Lucia from slavery, then a poor, backward colonial territory to the relative prosperity which the island enjoys today. Yet, despite that relative prosperity, Dr. Reynolds is apprehensive of the future, always bearing in mind the lessons of history.
The Voice
Anyone who has read the first novel, Death By Fire (New York, 2001), would welcome this latest contribution by Dr. Anderson Reynolds to the increasing corpus of fine literary work by St. Lucian writers.
No doubt, encouraged by the success of Death By Fire, for which he was awarded St. Lucia’s top prize for literature at the 2001 M&C Fine Arts Awards (the local equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for literature or the Grammy for musical excellence) Reynolds spared little time in putting together what looks like part 2 of a project leading to become a series dedicated to historical themes.
The Struggle for Survival is a hardcover release, published by Jako Books, and printed in the United States of America. This 206 paged gem, handsomely jacketed, is on local bookshelves at an affordable price of EC55.00. It is liberally illustrated with close to three dozen photographs of early and more recent historical and developmental events, some of which you probably would never have seen unless you visited the local archives.
The book is about St. Lucia and its people. A fact captured by the sub-title, an historical, political and socio-economic perspective of St. Lucia. In its nineteen, mainly short and easy-to-read chapters, the reader will find compacted a wealth of material on such varied subjects as history, politics, agronomy, domestic economics, glimpses into the geography of the island, as well as some of the most insightful nutritional and genetic information on the banana, St. Lucia’s premier agricultural product, ever documented for local consumption.
It is easily noticeable that the tragic events of the 1993 no-cut strikes in the banana industry has center-stage in the book, but only as a backdrop to a catalogue of events and circumstances that shaped St. Lucia and its people for over three centuries from Caribs to European settlement to the present. Those events started with banana farmers expressing dissatisfaction with monetary returns for their fruit, mismanagement of the authority appointed to oversee their welfare, and the demand for the sacking of the directors. Dr. Reynolds tell us, repeatedly, that because no one listened to the protestations of the striking banana farmers, the end result was a violent confrontation between the strikers and police in the historic Mabouya Valley, and the death, by shooting, of two of their colleagues.
But being the central theme, the author releases the details in slow motion, as it were, and not unlike the scriptwriter for a suspense thriller, he first teases the appetite, and so the reader is treated to a whole lot of other instructive accounts of history and other developments of island life and struggles before coming to chapter 10 for a blow by blow account of the actual showdown. But even before this, the reader would have been told in Chapter Nine of the major lessons of history which, the farmers failed to heed, and thus history repeated itself by teaching yet another lesson the hard way. Then shortly after, at Chapter Twelve, the reader is reminded that the 1993 incident was by no means without precedent, and the author tells of one of the outstanding episodes of the sugar industry, precursor to bananas, in 1957in that same Valley. An interesting and most significant parallel indeed.
There is no denying that for Dr. Reynolds history is the great teacher that one chooses to be guided by, or ignore at one’s peril. You get a sense, by reading the book, however, that history is replete with instances reminding one that there are always certain forces (fate) that are beyond the control of island people, and before which they remain powerless. This the author traces back to the post-Columbian era. From then till now, the rules of production and trade, and European superiority over the early inhabitants, Caribs and Arawaks, then the slave, and ex-slave population in a later era all had been testimony. He cites the greed of European settlers and its toll in the underdevelopment of the island in the 19th and 20th centuries (see pg.30). According to Reynolds, the helplessness (or dependence and despondency) of the island population persists throughout the sugar-cane plantation era, into and beyond emancipation, and it was not until the introduction of banana that the social and economic and even political status of islanders began to change developmentally, when they began to truly experience the meaning of independence and empowerment, all but temporarily (see pg. 95-97) as shown by the events of 1993.
The Struggle for Survival is truly a compendium of St. Lucian life from early times to the modern era. It captures all the great episodes, trials, setbacks, tribulations, exploits of plantation owners and the collusion of colonial administrators in retarding the progress of the natives and the social and economic highs and lows. In page after page in well researched material, the author tells of the dehumanizing effects of slavery and colonization and the dominance of the Northern neighbors, first over Africa as a whole and later the colonies echoing the accusations of historian Dr. Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), and quite recently, St. Lucian academic, Dr. Humphrey Regis (Africans before Caricom).
Perhaps through the pages of The Struggle for Survival, readers will get a fresh, new perspective of the cash or monocrop syndrome; why locals continue to exhibit a preference for foreign good; and why we continue, as a people, to be so dependent on external patron, decades after attaining our political independence from Britain.
In the Struggle for Survival, the author treats the contest for dominance between sugar and banana, the latter, when it really began to take root, in the early 60s became the very heart and soul of the island (p.96) and the fate of the inhabitants was inextricably linked with that of bananas (p.87). And, speaking of bananas, the author shows that not only does he know a whole lot more about the fruit that has shaped the lives of so many better than the many in the trade, but he shows his knowledge and resourcefulness in the area of agronomy and as the expert in food and resource economics that he is. (He provides more data than you can use in one sitting).
To the prospective readers of this valuable volume, I say, though you may have been acquainted with stories and hearsay of the bravado of local political greats like George Charles and John Compton, you will certainly feel differently about both of these elders after reading Reynolds accounts of their escapades on behalf of farmers back in the turbulent 50s, when the duo were comrades-in-arms in pursuit of a seemingly common objective. Much has been said and written about John Compton in particular. One of the most striking perhaps legendary is the belief of some that he is endowed with supernatural powers and that he cannot be harmed. Find out some more by reading Chapters 10 and 12. And while you’re at it, tell me how you feel about reading that same Compton’s (as Minister) reflections on his political journey, starting with his entry, in the Mabouya Valley, back in the 50s, up till that fateful day in 1993 when, on his orders (himself a banana farmer) to take whatever steps necessary to restore law and order, the police gunned down two young farmers, in that same Valley where he had started his political career. (See chapter 15- Things fall apart). To many, this was the straw that broke his political back.
Arguably, the most dramatic and memorable development in St. Lucian politics, however, occurred during the 1978-82 period, featuring the supreme, controversial political figure of all time William George Odlum. Not unlike John Compton versus George Charles between 1961-1964, he, more than anyone else, dominated the political scene, and not only did he change its very color and shape, but along with Peter Josie and others, was credited with enthusing the populace with a new dynamics altogether. Chapter 13 (The Birth of a Nation) and subsequent ones present this maturing politics in motion, citing the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Another point not to be missed. The book clarifies a long-held misconception by some that it was John Compton who introduced bananas as an alternative crop to sugar-cane. But you must read Chapter 12 for the details. Equally useful, history enthusiasts and students of social psychology would be well advised to visit Chapter 9 (pp. 68-71) for what looks like a plausible theory for the Vieux Fortian psyche, which has been the subject of debate and controversy over the years.
Whereas bananas hold center-stage, the book examines and comments on the other aspects of life, critiquing and offering suggestions, opinions and positing alternative approaches. The author is generous in his praise of Compton’s tripod approach to development (agriculture, tourism, and manufacture) and credits him for initiating (somewhere in the 70s) an industrial thrust and agenda that led to a social and political revolution (Chapter 17). On the other hand, his critique of the philosophy that protects tourism and treats the industry like a Van Gogh, I find quite unabashed and somewhat inspiring. He laments the social and cultural destabilizing effects of tourism and the loss of sovereignty resulting from the construction of each new hotel along the beach fronts- (Chapters 16-18 offer tremendous food for thought).
In this excellent work, Dr. Reynolds takes, finally, a deep sincere analytical look into the state of things in the island today and what the age of information and technology expects of St. Lucia in order to make it hereon. He believes the rate of illiteracy is still too high (27% plus), and the extent to which large numbers misinterpret government policies, he states, makes one wonder how can the country go forward with that level of ignorance?
The Struggle for Survival is a powerful commentary you’d probably want to read in one sitting; but then it’s so loaded, you’d need time to digest it all. The book is really trademark, history-digging Reynolds. On the face of it, it is my thinking that anyone who reads The Struggle for Survival must come to the ineluctable conclusion that whatever one’s perspective (be you John Compton, George Odlum, Pat Joseph, Geest Banana) history is a bitch; that history teaches lessons often too late to be useful; that history is sympathetic to no one.
I thoroughly enjoyed myself reading the book. I bet you will too.
