Slap Down Antigua’s Gaston Browne! Discover New Paths of Solidarity With the Barbudan People and Defense of Barbuda’s Communal Land Tenure
Barbuda has something to teach the Caribbean and the world about its own self-government. Is this a lot to ask of less than 2000 people who live on an island territory of 62 miles of land thirty miles away from Antigua? Barbudans have been doing so since Hurricane Irma in 2017 and their devastating encounter with disaster capitalism and the threats of enclosure led by Antigua’s Gaston Browne.
Browne is the prime minister of Antigua & Barbuda, a federation from above that since colonial independence in 1981, has constantly shown contempt for Barbuda’s unique history and culture. Unlike most of the Caribbean that experienced plantation agriculture even after the abolition of slavery and the decline of indentured servitude, Barbudans have known communal land tenure.
On July 28th 2023, the Barbuda People’s Movement announced to the world that The Registered Land (Amendment) Bill represents another push in the ongoing attempt by Browne’s central government administration to bypass the Barbuda Council and restrict the exercise of its powers under The Barbuda Local Government Act (1976).
Barbuda’s lands were never included in the cadastral survey, a mapping of land for valuation and tax collection, when Antigua was surveyed in the early 1970s. Given the shared federation and independence in 1981, this is powerful evidence that Barbuda never agreed and colonial Antigua acknowledged that theirs were not “Crown Lands.” There appears historical debate if Barbuda ever agreed to go into the federated relationship with Antigua at all.
Who Wears the Crown? Gaston Browne?
Meanwhile, Gaston Browne proposes this bill, among a plethora of legal maneuvers, to compel Barbuda into “a freehold land system” by declaring all lands to be Crown lands. It is indeed funny that Browne and his government ministers believe themselves to be the “Crown.”
Barbudans will not allow their communal lands to be appropriated by the state power that serves the wealthy. In the past, thirty-three thousand acres of Syndicate lands were purchased by the taxpayers of A&B. Now the best of these lands has found its way into the hands of persons whose forebears were the architects and beneficiaries of enslavement and colonization of African people.
The Barbudan People’s Movement (BPM) has insisted: “Barbudans will not allow their land and resources to be sold to the benefit of the wealthy, leaving us disempowered and encircled, as has happened in Antigua and other islands. The Lands of Barbuda are owned in common by the Barbudan people. Barbuda’s lands are not for sale.”
For those on a world scale wishing to understand better “freehold land system” and what happened with the “syndicate lands” this is essential to grasp.
Denying Communal Heritage, Pretending to Hand Out Land?
Browne is trying to impose a freehold land system where he appears to be handing out deeds for a nominal fee and even promising to hand out parcels of land to those who don’t have some. Is this not consistent with Barbudan traditions that Browne otherwise denies exist?
Browne wants to force Barbudan communal lands into capitalist market relations. He knows that marginal toilers will go into debt, fall behind in taxes, or may be enticed to sell their land to the highest bidder. He is trying to fool Barbuda and the Caribbean by offering largely self-sufficient people as fishers and farmers propertied rights. But these only exist in a hierarchy. With most Barbudans living in the historical village of Codrington, if Browne can hand them their deeds (apparently respecting their property) he can still encircle Barbudan toilers, as he has pushed for with other legal initiatives, alienating them from the surrounding lands and beaches. It is on this basis that his business affairs with Peace Love and Happiness (PLH) —a development group led by billionaire co-founder of Patrón Tequila, John Paul DeJoria — hope to build a luxury resort on the other side of the island.
Now it is being clarified that Browne sees Barbuda as “Jumby Bay on steroids,” a 300-acre private luxury island two miles off the coast of Antigua. Is it ironic that “jumby” is the disembodied spirit of a dead person or a demon in Caribbean folklore?
The Jumby Bay development doesn’t simply have resorts but suites, villas, and private residences, owned and leased by the very wealthy. This model rejects the all-inclusive hotel for a high-end community of beachfront mansions and condominiums instead.
If this is the future of Barbuda, while Jumby Bay is advertised as “casting a spell of serene enchantment,” even if some of the very wealthy who buy up Barbuda are global celebrities of color, the fact remains, Barbudans will start to know ethnic cleansing like Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean.
Freehold or Nationalized? An Economy to Despise
In the late 1960s, Antigua’s V.C. Bird negotiated with Alexander Moody Stuart, the major Sugar Estate owner, to acquire their landholdings. The private property of the colonizer was not seized violently (though there had been an environment of protest) but was purchased by the taxpayers of Antigua and Barbuda. In some way, these concessions were public and nationalized property but the ordinary people of A&B had no power or authority over these lands. And the central government kept selling them to global developers and wealthy people. It has been debated in recent years whether the last vestiges of these government-owned lands should also be sold off. This has been so as the marginal toilers and unemployed of Antigua have no security.
Browne, known for being a real estate grabber in Antigua, and in the name of pursuing policies toward national development, has pursued alliances with global capital not merely to compel Barbuda into a luxury tourist destination. Rather, he believes the Barbuda fisherfolk and farmers are not economically viable and his vision of development has been notorious in its hostility to the preservation of Barbuda’s unique and rich ecology.
Barbuda is struggling against dispossession and being silenced. And in the last five years besides rebuilding from the hurricane have confronted Antigua with everything it has. From litigation to direct action, especially from the fisherfolk, the Barbudans have tried everything.
Why Is Gaston Browne’s Politics Not Seen Across the Caribbean as a Pappyshow?
Gaston Browne at the height of abusing Barbudans in the last six years took his turn as the head of CARICOM, that degenerate institution that believes it is the keeper of Caribbean civilization but fears the Caribbean popular will.
Browne is part of that gathering of forces that constantly asks for reparations from imperial institutions with no pretense to mobilizing Caribbean people in a war of liberation. How does he really feel about the British and American authorities? Perhaps he expresses from time to time the rage and insecurity of the peripheral privileged class. But his recent visit with Prince Edward in Britain was quite telling. Following the circus of Barbados’s Mia Mottley, he suggests that Antigua and Barbuda may soon become a republic. Haiti became a republic in 1804. Trinidad and Tobago declared themselves a republic in 1976. What has “republicanism” ever done to stem the tide of colonialism in the Caribbean?
Browne, like the prime ministers of Barbados and Jamaica, has built a cultural front around him of mediocre poets and preposterous professors who identify as Pan-Africanists and socialists for capitalism. Wrapping themselves in the African heritage, talking self-determination and reparations, Antigua’s rulers and cultural apparatus like the entire CARICOM gathering, says nothing about the actual attacks on communal lands in Barbuda.
Some CARICOM “anti-colonial” functionaries might say: “Why not ‘chant down’ Gaston Browne? Why slap down?” We believe Caribbean resistance should treat its oppressors like the post-colonial police treat ordinary people. They often slap those they arrest. When they are challenged, they often say — “well, we did not use a closed fist.” Sometimes the Caribbean police lie and do use a closed fist to arrest. We want all ah dem to see, we stand for “legality” and “equality.”
Antiguans & Barbudans Must Place Value on Themselves Not Their Lands
Formerly colonized people, overcoming racial and economic insecurity, understandably want to place value on themselves. But the discussion in A&B shows ordinary people have difficulty extricating themselves from the logic of global capital. From Bird to Browne, when Antiguans and Barbudans debate how they have managed their land and resources, too many underline whether they extracted enough from negotiations with global capitalists given market prices and trends.
Where Caribbean commoners are concerned with whose hands their land has fallen into, their anti-racist and anti-imperial analysis only goes so far. Where the Barbudans underline their land is not for sale, and insist we don’t want deeds from Browne, and we don’t want to hear from the state the market value of our land, they are making most advanced ethical projections that place them in the forefront of the world. Everyone should hold them in great esteem.
However, to the extent Barbuda’s economy otherwise is entangled with Antigua, Brown’s government punishes many Barbudans by informally threatening their jobs and delaying their pay. For those who can organize it, Barbudans really need mutual aid from a people- to-people foreign policy by the Caribbean diaspora.
What Type of People’s Movement? Facilitate Many Barbudan Councils and Assemblies.
The Barbuda People’s Movement has a majority in the Barbuda Council at present. For many years side by side with its African heritage, which is sometimes muted, Barbuda has been undermined by the limits of conventional political thought tied up between British Tory and Labour Party ideas.
Partially, these are the terms of the acrimonious dialogue with Gaston Browne, and also, they are the colonial remnants of law that hold back conquered peoples. Whether they can be used to favor or disfavor ordinary people at any one time, those who carry out communal land tenure should have a much larger social contract with the laws they live by.
The Echo of Teaching and Learning Across the Caribbean and the World
Nevertheless, the critical thinking around the legal arguments and impositions that Antigua’s Browne wishes to impose is starting to gather profound wisdom as the Barbudans start to make sharper global projections clarifying their struggle. The multi-directional flows of strategizing and agitation of solidarity from individuals and small groups across the world are starting to echo powerfully back and forth.
Friends of Barbuda are thankful to get communiques from the Barbuda people and its organizations. Surely, they have or can have many councils and assemblies. Their struggle, at its best in certain respects, has apparently superseded parliaments of dunces.
We must remember that the conditions Barbuda faces under Browne is not unlike Bonaire faces in the Dutch Caribbean. While Guyanese immigrants increasingly migrate to Antigua, many would be surprised to know that there is an archive of historical experience from Guyana that can help the contemporary Barbudan struggle.
Why not organize a series of popular assemblies to further the independent self-organization of Barbudans? Perhaps the Barbudans are already doing this and pushing the Barbuda Council from behind. Still, Barbuda can’t look at government and politics like an annual cultural festival. State power governs day and night and on weekends. Their armies and police even patrol us on holidays. Our self-directed liberating activity must be equal to the task of this confrontation to arrive on our own authority.
