Four Bajan fishermen spent Barbados' Independence Day (Wednesday of this week, November 30) in a jail in Tobago and you couldn't ask for a more fitting summation of either the West Indian attitude or its plight. It's ridiculous enough that Barbados and Tobago should think of themselves as nations at all, since they're barely big enough to be categorised as islands; but when one "nation" has the effrontery to lock up the citizens of the other on its Independence Day, that's really making a pappyshow of the West Indies. You wouldn't blame Barbados for sending its gunboats, if it had them; perhaps it should send its calypsonians.
Even if you combined the land mass of these two great nations, they would total only 731 square kilometres; that's hardly continental. Indeed, if Barbados and Tobago were both twice as big as they actually are and laid side-by-side-by-side-by-side, they would still fit comfortably within the metropolitan boundaries of the city of Sao Paulo; and, where Brasil accommodates ten million people, the two Caribbean islands muster around 300,000 between them-give or take three or four citizens either pulling in a seine in the Caribbean or languishing in a cell in Scarborough. There are many, many more people with Rihanna T-shirts than Bajan passports.
And Barbados and Tobago are relatively big islands, compared to some of the other West Indian "nations." St Kitts-Nevis has a total population of 50K, spread over its massive 261 square kilometres. The Spanish say, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans" but no conquistador could have predicted the Al-mighty's guffaws, had he only heard a general election debate in Antigua (281 sq km)-Barbuda (161 sq km), where the question of Barbuda's secession is apparently taken seriously. Andy Johnson, then head of news at TV6, told me of an election speech in Barbuda in which the speaker kept insisting "the country" could do such-and-such; it took Andy half an hour to figure out that "the country" referred to was Barbuda, population 1,500; Monaco is not shaking in its boots.
Now the existence of the separate passports (and the attitude of the immigration officers who police them), the 15 different prime ministers and Cabinets and national anthems and flags and votes at the United Nations-and the fact that Bajan fishermen can be and are locked up in Tobago jails-show that these little places constituting Caricom are, in a strictly legal sense, "countries;" but when did these foolish little rocks begin to actually think of themselves as nations? The Bajan empire stretches from St Lucy to Christ Church; Bridgetown ain't Constantinople.
It took the Cricket World Cup we hosted in 2007 to do what the combined Caribbean governments couldn't: make a single international travel zone of all the cricket-playing islands; the International Cricket Council had more practical force than the Treaty of Chaguaramas. Had we little rocks stuck to our national guns, had we regarded Aussie fans in 2007 the way Tobago does Bajan fishermen or Barbados does Guyanese carpenters today, we might have had no cricket tourists at all. You would have to be idle rich or completely insane to willingly organise four separate visas to watch your team in the world's smallest, least important sporting competition. (Subtract India's billion people and Scrabble has a larger world following than cricket.)
If Chris Dehring, CEO of that 2007 World Cup, had told an English cricket fan he had to obtain a visa to travel from Barbados to Grenada and another to go on to St Lucia (when he could drive from London to Moscow in his own car), the Brit would have laughed in Dehring's face. If the rest of the world is laughing at us-and they are-we're certainly taking ourselves seriously; indeed, pompously. Some of us, anyhow. The big news in T&T, where the bread and the circuses have to be constantly made bigger and more spectacular, if they are to continue to distract an increasingly sceptical public, the centre ring has just been taken over by the clowns.
News broke, last week, that the planned assassination of the Prime Minister and part of the Cabinet had been foiled; but, apart from the people who were allegedly targeted and the people allegedly targeting them, no one seems to be taking it too seriously. If the Bajans have their flying fish and coo-coo, Trinis seem to think they may have a lying dish and coup-coup. Only ten per cent of callers to one phone-in poll believed the assassination plot was true; 90 per cent of the citizenry could not be sure that a life-and-death matter was not really a cloak-and-dagger one; but at least the Trini ass-ass plot made the BBC news; without riots, no one outside Caricom will notice the new Lucian PM; or recognise him as the same old one.
But this is what happens when you take yourself either too seriously on the one hand or not seriously enough on the other. If we in the West Indies began from a serious starting point-that, individually, we are laughably small and entirely irrelevant to the rest of the world-then we might be able to take the first steps to recognising what the ICC could see: that our global value is measured either all together or not at all. But begin with 15 precious little national anthems and you can only end in one place: in another country's jail on your Independence Day. The world economic crisis that may precipitate the collapse of the greatest civilisation mankind has devised-the Eurozone-may present these backward little islands, led by small-minded opportunists, with their last chance to do the only thing that will allow them to survive: come together as one. At firetrucking last!
• BC Pires is openly batting for the West Indies
