Dear Editor,
In response to Patrick Cockburn's timely article "After sugar island horrors, toxic legacy of slavery will never die" ( i - 09.03.2024) the toxic legacy is not just moral, but also cultural and economic. The terrain that bore the uneconomic sugar plantations, which were finally shut down in 2005, is now fallow grassland, surrounded by a tourist train trundling around the island on the track built by the sugar plantation owners to bring their crop to the sole port on the island. Yet, as I describe in my travel book "Chasing Phileas Fogg: 80 Days on the Borealis", St Kitts was also the site of another colonial atrocity, as evil as the slave trade, namely the wholesale genocide of the local indigenous Carib population, who were massacred in 1626 by French and English settlers at Bloody Point, and the surviving women and childen were deported to Dominica. Consequently, unlike on other West Indian islands, the local black population of St Kitts have no indigenous traditions with which to blend and enrich their resurging African culture, and still have to rely on colonial mementoes for their tourist highlights.
Yours faithfully,
Wiktor Moszczynski
Letter to i - published11.03.2024
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