A Small Place 655and collapse that wealthy Antiguans fly to New York
for medical care and poor Antiguans consider it a
death sentence to be taken to such a place.
This state of injustice has existed for centuries.
First, the black Antiguans were slaves, then they
were the colonized, forced to maintain a very low
position in society, and now they are the victims of
a corrupt black government. Kincaid is dismayed
that what at first seems like progress—the slaves
are emancipated, the colony becomes a free, self-
governing nation—is not progress at all. Instead
of being miseducated, the population now seems
uneducated, and their will to effect positive changes
seems paralyzed.
Barbara Z. Thaden
oppreSSion in A Small Place
The history of Antigua is a history of oppression.
Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493, the
tiny, surreally beautiful island in the Leeward Islands
was colonized by “human rubbish from Europe,”
those unhappy, unsuccessful-at-home white people
who, to satisfy their avarice, immediately brought
African slaves to Antigua to toil on sugar planta-
tions. The author writes as a descendant of those
African slaves, whose history and culture and lan-
guage and religion is nothing but the history and
culture and language and religion of slavery and
oppression. When England outlawed the slave trade
and then slavery itself in its colonies, those who had
become wealthy through the slave trade continued
to become even wealthier through oppressing and
exploiting the formerly enslaved Africans.
The Barclay brothers, for example, who had
become wealthy through slave-trading, became even
wealthier as bankers by investing the savings of
the former slaves and lending it back to them with
interest. The white, colonial government, which
ruled until 1947, educated all former slaves using
the British curriculum, which emphasized the grand
history of Britain and the benighted condition of
the Africans who were rescued from savagery and
transported to this British colony to become Chris-
tians and to become civilized (eventually) but to
always be so much less than, so far below, any white
British subject precisely because they had needed to
be rescued from savagery in the first place.
Allowed only the most menial positions (laun-
dress, waiter, servant), these black Antiguans lived
in grinding poverty while white Antiguans lived in
luxury. Even emigrants from the Middle East and
Jewish refugees from Hitler’s racist extermination
policy of World War II in Europe came to Antigua
and oppressed those black Antiguans whose ances-
tors had been there since the time of Columbus.
What really infuriates Kincaid is that after
Antiguans gained their independence from Britain
and became a self-governing country, the aver-
age Antiguan was even worse off under the newly
elected black government than he had been under
the British. She asks, “Have you ever wondered that
all we ever learned from you is how to corrupt our
societies and how to be tyrants?” The reason, to her,
is obvious. To the natives, the British government
had always seemed to be only a tyrant and kidnap-
per and thief, who took what was not its own and
made laws to enrich itself and oppress its former
slaves. The average black Antiguan was educated
to know his inferiority, his inability to really fight
off this white capitalism, which impoverished most
of the islanders, so that when a black government
did come to power, it knew only how to sell itself
to the highest (white or foreign) bidder and enrich
itself through corruption. The people of such a small
place have no history with which to compare this, no
cultural or national identity with which to counter
such a government, not even a self-imposed moral-
ity by which to judge themselves. Because they live
in a small place, they are not aware of much that
is going on in the world, and because they are the
descendants of slaves, they have either been denied
an education entirely or educated and indoctrinated
into the belief that they are inferior while the white
race is naturally superior and magnanimous enough
to allow the black inhabitants to live in the shadow
of their superiority and benefit from the greatness of
their culture. Thus, while Kincaid mourns the wreck
of the once magnificent library where she used to
read as a girl, and blames the corrupt black govern-
ment and the uncooperative wealthy white citizens
for allowing it to remain in disrepair, she at the same
time acknowledges that everything she read there
reinforced the greatness of British culture, British
history, British government, the English language,