SABA (THE BOTTOM) - Colonial societies have associated lighter skin, European ancestry, and social standing with education, refinement, authority, and respectability. Those assumptions shaped all societies in the region, including Saba. These social facts can be found in any credible history book.
However, focusing exclusively on this colonial inheritance cannot explain how power operated and keeps shifting in the Caribbean. In this second installment of setting the record straight we present a way of reading and experiencing Saba that is not dictated by the dominant racialized debates taking place in Europe, North America, or among Caribbean diasporic communities residing in these places.
To understand Saba's past, we propose thinking in terms of what we call the colour question. Unlike approaches that reduce history to race or representation alone, the colour question asks a broader historical question: how have colour, family, kinship networks, friendships, education, occupation, religion, migration, reputation, gender and political power interacted over time? The colour question is therefore not synonymous with what is often called colorism in the US or Europe, nor is it simply a politics of representation.
Rather it is concerned with the ways colonial ideas about colour have intersected with other forms of status, while paying equal attention to the many ways Sabans have resisted and reshaped those assumptions. The colour question studies power in motion rather than treating hierarchy as fixed.
To summarize, the colour question is about studying articulations (for instance how a woman’s own strivings connects with her family networks and the church she attends in partially explaining her social climb), rather than about presupposing automatic intersections (e.g. that having a darker shade and being a woman from a particular village presupposes lower class status).
Saba's political history illustrates this complexity. Cornelia Jones became the first Black woman elected to the Island Council in 1953. Carmen Simmons later became the first woman to head a political party list on the island, and Christina Charles served as first woman on the Executive Council.
Roy Smith and Max Nicholson served as Junior Ministers for Saba in the Central Government of the Netherlands Antilles. Raphael Sorton served as Administrator, while Wycliffe Smith and Sydney Sorton each served as Lieutenant Governor and Roy Smith, Franklin Wilson, Shamara Nicholson-Linzey, and Sydney Sorton served as Acting Lieutenant Governor. Today, Jocelyne Levenstone serves as Island Governor after Johnathan Johnson.
All these figures, their rise and political sojourns, speaks to both Saban dynamics and those that held in the federation of the former Netherlands Antilles. One day the intimate and troubled relationships between Saban politicians and those from the other islands, the close and enduring friendship between for instance Ishmael Levenstone and the Aruban leader Betico Croes comes to mind, will be investigated and properly told.
So too the understandings of everyday Sabans such as Eddie Johnson and Patricia Linzey correct those claiming that the Netherlands Antilles ended on the 10th of October 2010, 10-10-10. They remind us that 10-10-10 was only the culmination of a slow process of demise after 1986 when Aruba left the then 6 island federation. Culturally however exchanges and kinship ties remain between people on Saba and those residing on the other islands and the Netherlands.
Leadership on Saba has never been the exclusive preserve of one family, one class, or one colour. Successive generations repeatedly challenged assumptions about who possessed the education, competence, and legitimacy to govern. This history is reflected in a recollection by one of Saba’s political stalwart Will Johnson in a 2014 publication.
Remembering an election from his childhood, he recalled overhearing his mother tell his father that he could vote for Anslyn if he wished, but she would vote for Matthew Levenstone because "he could do something for my children." The anecdote is revealing precisely because it complicates easy assumptions. Political choices were never determined by colour or class alone. Trust, perceived competence, personal relationships, and service to the community also shaped public life.
Authors:
Prof. dr. Francio Guadeloupe - University of Amsterdam/Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian & Caribbean studies.
Lysanne Charles, MSc - poet and PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam.
Set the Record Straight part 1
In the past native Dutch with education and standing went to the natives in the colonized world to report on their hardships, their plights and the bright spots in their lives. Most of the native Dutch experts were, in keeping with the times, men.
They were the to-go-to experts on the mores and cultures of the Indonesians, Arubans, Bonaireans, Curaçaoans, Sabans, Statians, Papuans, and Surinamers. Those the experts from the Netherlands interviewed in the Dutch colonies were never their equals. In fact, while they were interviewing them, the colonized natives were rendering them services, for instance cooking a meal, being a guide, doing translation work, or driving them around. Audiences in the Netherlands were told that there were simply no objective experts in the colonies.
After colonialism lost its cache in the Netherlands, because people in the former colonies and dependencies more forcefully began to exhibit their ‘somebodiness’, and mostly youths in the Netherlands found imperialism suspect, this form of reporting or rather travelogue lost some of its aura.
The diaspora of the former colonies, who gained formal tertiary education must be explicitly credited for pushing the public in the Netherlands to recognize that brains and knowledge, expertise, also exists in the former colonies. Given these internal and external forces, the idea of the western expert has had to be reformed and repackaged.
Nowadays experts hailing from the Netherlands come in different shades, genders, and sexes. Native Dutch with education and standing are still around. In fact, they remain the majority.
But as the empire struck back with e.g. Surinamese and Curaçaoan children being born and bred in the Netherlands, and as DEI made headways with the call for a politics of representation, leading diasporic voices today lay claim to speak for and about the people who reside in Suriname, Indonesia, Papua, and the Caribbean isles.
Note the sleight of hand, the diaspora becomes the brain and knowledge of the former colonies. The recently published article ‘De kennis over Saba ontbreekt in Europees Nederland’/Knowledge of Saba is lacking in the European Netherlands’ by Milouska Meulens unwittingly fits that bill.
We cannot shrug of the feeling reading that piece that the very specific realities of Saba get equated with the struggles of the Black Caribbeans in the Netherlands and the big stories of the USA that make Antilleans and Surinamese diasporas feel good about themselves often at the expense of history and events occurring in the former colonies.
We offer here the necessary nuance: far from being an exception, Black Sabans, to stay in the terminology of Milouska Muelens, have occupied positions of leadership for generations. Before the appointment of Joceyln Levenstone as the new governor—who Muelens likens to Obama—Saba had already been led by two Black Lieutenant Governors, Wycliffe Smith and Sydney Sorton.
Smith served as Lieutenant Governor from 1983 to 1989. He was succeeded by Sydney Sorton, who served from 1989 to 1998 and again from 2006 to 2008. Franklin Wilson, Shamara Nicholson-Linzey, and the same Sydney Sorton, have all also served as acting Lieutenant Governor in recent years.
Their tenures reflect an era in which educated Black Sabans increasingly occupied the island's most senior public offices, including serving as division and later department heads; this development is part of the wider history of Emancipation of the downtrodden in the Caribbean and the Dutch world. And the emancipation of white Sabans, most of whom were poor and destitute, is also part of this history.
In the second installment new week we will continue to set the record straight.
Authors:
Prof. dr. Francio Guadeloupe - University of Amsterdam/Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian & Caribbean studies.
Lysanne Charles, MSc - poet and PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam.
