Black Volcano

An old song in the West Indies has a refrain: "Mama don't want no peas, no rice, no coconut oil." Mama wants them now. If food from the mainland is not run past submarine packs in the blue-green Caribbean Sea, panic, riots and revolt are imminent. Last week in Jamaica, worried, corseted Colonial Governor Sir Arthur Richards invoked the wartime use of flogging to curb: 1) sporadic outbreaks of violence by roving bands of hungry, unemployed natives; 2) a "wild or acute form of panic."

Fear of starvation and a long-smoldering resentment at economic senility and past exploitation have made the natives in the slumlands of Spanish Town and Old Harbor increasingly restless. On the fringes of Kingston there are 9,000 now unemployed inland and mountain laborers, who refuse to go home after a taste of higher wages on Jamaica's new U.S. naval base. The cruiser Ajax and troops from Bermuda quelled Kingston's strike riots in 1938. Now 1,300 white vigilantes patrol the streets at night with clubs and revolvers. Last week Canadian and U.S. troops were ordered out on parade one day before the annual celebration of Emancipation Day, commemorating the freeing of Jamaican slaves in 1838. The marching troops were a tacit warning that Jamaican police are backed by armed forces.

Sugar. Ugly rumors of a Harlem-trained fifth column have been given wide-eyed credence in some Washington quarters. But the problem of Jamaica is endemic throughout the chain of strategic U.S., British, French and Dutch islands guarding the approaches to the Panama Canal. In its more somber and involved aspects the crisis resembles that in India. The immediate problem is the lack of shipping, which Nelson Rockefeller hopes to solve by building Caribbean schooners. Basically the problem is that of a one-crop economy (primarily sugar; sugar and bananas in Jamaica). Emphasis on monoculture has kept the potentially self-sufficient islands dependent for food on outside imports. It has also throttled the urge toward participation in Government by the Negro laboring classes.

The arrival of U.S. troops and base-building dollars brought an inflationary spiral and a minor social revolution. In Jamaica, where Jim Crow was unknown before, some soldiers and civilian base workers tried to order "niggers" out of clubs and bars they had been frequenting for years. Others, failing to recognize the Caribbean caste system, which separates mulattoes from blacks and then grades the mulattoes socially according to the shades of their skins, fraternized with "the wrong people." At the same time the U.S. "invasion" raised hopes that a new deal in West Indian political and economic life would spring from a closer integration with the U.S.

Power. The leader in Jamaica and possibly of the entire Caribbean, if the blacks and mulattoes ever decide to work in harmony, is Norman Washington Manley, K.C., Jamaica's ablest lawyer. Half-black, half-Irish Manley is an Oxford graduate and husband of the British sculptress Edna Switherton. An inspiring orator despite continual interruptions with an antiasthma nose dropper, Manley until recently held a firm grip on Jamaica's People's National Party, whose platform calls for "democracy, self-government, nationhood." Before Manley, the great people's leader was his cousin, rambunctious, rabble-rousing Alexander Bustamente, now broken in power. But the People's Party is split. Manley is working with the Government in the immediate crisis, while a left wing demands action of some kind. Dynamite. The U.S. and Britain last March set up a joint Caribbean Commission. Co-chairmen were Charles Taussig, Rooseveltian liberal, and Sir Frank Stockdale, controller of a British West Indies development and welfare fund. What the Commission found and recommended has not been made public. But an indication that its report was loaded with dynamite came last week from U.S. Ambassador John Gilbert Winant in London. Typically Winantian was the manner in which he gently dropped a bombshell before the Royal Empire Society, founded in 1868 for development of British overseas relations (world membership: 18,900).

Gil Winant was 20 minutes late for the Society's jam-packed luncheon meeting. He apologized, he apologized again for his slowness in reading the entire text of the recent policy speech by Secretary of State Cordell Hull: he had forgotten his glasses. Another apology came when he admitted that he had lost his advance copy of the chairman's speech. Then Winant revealed that he had mislaid the notes prepared for his own speech. Thoroughly won over by Winant's forgetfulness and humble sincerity, the Society presently learned that one thing the Ambassador had not forgotten was his heart. Speaking from that heart and his knowledge of the Taussig report, Winant explained that West Indian problems were now a "joint responsibility" of the U.S. and Britain.

Hope. Between the U.S. and Britain's greater dominions, said he, there is friendship and understanding. But he bluntly stated that the U.S. is either confused by British colonial policy or openly resents it.

To point up this claim he said: "A careful survey of public opinion in the U.S. recently showed a greater divergence of viewpoint on British colonial policy than on any other subject that has divided us." To soften the blow, he added: "There is a chance for a good life for those who live in the fertile islands whose shores are washed by the Caribbean. It is well for us to remember that their welfare is in large measure dependent on the policies of your Government, and mine."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.