Set the Record Straight - Part II The Colour Question on Saba

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, for example 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 six-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

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