By Michael D. Wamble Staff Writer

Speaking Creole to power

he missionaries who landed on the beautiful shore of the island that would be named St. Lucia took their roles in spreading the Gospel seriously.

To reach enslaved and free Africans who occupied the isle, these men and women spoke the language of the people: Creole.

Creole can still be heard in nations across the Eastern Caribbean that include Guadeloupe, Martinique, Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti.

The language is also alive in sections of Louisiana and within the Canadian province of Quebec.

For Msgr. Patrick Anthony, Creole is more than a blend of African and French vocabularies and sentence structure. It is an expression of culture, and thereby an expression of faith.

	Michael D. Wamble talks with Msgr. Patrick Anthony. Read The Interview

Anthony serves as information officer for the Archdiocese of Castries, St. Lucia, and editor of the archdiocese newspaper, the Catholic Chronicle.

It was Anthony who had to meet the international media when enraged self-proclaimed Rastafarians attacked worshippers at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception during the first week of 2001.

St. Joseph of Cluny Sister Theresa Egan, 73, was beaten to death. Father Charles Gaillard was set on fire.

The episode was an anomaly in recent St. Lucian history.

The country the late Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott called home isn’t shaped by violence. Its character mirrors that of Anthony, warm and outgoing.

Both the man and the island make up in hospitality and heart what they lack in physical stature.

With a population nearing 191,000 people, the nation proudly boasts two Nobel laureates—Walcott in literature, and Sir Arthur Lewis in economics—both awarded within the past 25 years.

When editor Anthony isn’t in his official capacity, you can find him in the streets at a block party in the island’s winding hills, or breaking banana bread with St. Lucia’s lanky, beige-toned Prime Minister Kenny Anthony (no relation).

The irony of the violent episode was the assertion by the dreadlocked attackers of waging war against a “white” Catholic Church.

The population is nearly 90 percent Afro-Caribbean. From Archbishop Kelvin Felix’s leadership to the beautiful stories illustrated on the basilica’s walls, St. Lucia has married its African history with its Catholicity. After all, the country is 86 percent Catholic.

And its chief export is bananas.



The banana split

I f you shop at Jewel or Dominick’s, then you’ve never purchased a St. Lucian banana.

Major grocers in Chicago and throughout the United States buy their yellow peels from Dole and other conglomerates that pick their product from South America.

In the Windward Islands, the bananas are green. And they mean everything to the culture, if not the financial stability of St. Lucia.

It is possible to eat a banana or a banana-flavored food for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and of course, for dessert.

The banana’s prominence on the island has led to its presence in expressions of faith.

At an elevated retreat center, hosts are kept in a tabernacle made of Balata wood. The tabernacle is carved in the shape of a banana tree, thick with bunches. Along the base of the sculptured piece, a shoot reaches out bearing fruit, said Anthony, as Scriptures said Jesus would.

For many decades, St. Lucia enjoyed a preferential trade status with the United Kingdom that allowed the nation’s economy to remain healthy in the face of South American “Banana Republics.”

The dominance of banana estates in St. Lucia’s history is simple. It is the easiest cash crop to tend on the island given the lack of intensive farming needed to bring bananas to buyers.

According to former University of the West Indies professor Wayne Sandiford, author of “On the Brink of Decline: Bananas in the Windward Islands,” farmers, who have invested their lives in bananas, have found it difficult to wean themselves from the immediacy of banana money.

In his book, Sandiford provides a decidedly non-U.S. view of the effects of the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a group some U.S. religious social justice groups challenged during a meeting last year in Seattle. The rules of trade set by the WTO have forced some developing nations like St. Lucia to compete with major international corporations that can exert more power and influence in world markets.

“It was under those rules of international trade that the European banana import regime was successfully challenged by the United States and a few Latin American countries,” Sandiford reiterated as part of a panel discussing the issue.

“The success of the challenge could now put the Windward Islands banana industry on the brink of decline.”

Government officials are more critical than Sandiford on the effects of the WTO.

“We are called to worship globalization,” said George Odlum, who has served various positions in the St. Lucian government, as a “rough beast for bread and salvation or peril.”

Said Odlum, who also participated in the panel, “Developing countries including small island states are being asked to bear the brunt of the cost of economic expansion without benefiting proportionately.”

Then come the cruise ships.



An uneasy marriage

Tourism makes up 28 percent of St. Lucia’s gross domestic product, said Hilary Modeste, the country’s Minister of Tourism.

“The Caribbean is four times more dependent on tourism than any other region in the world,” said Modeste. According to Modeste’s statistics, one of every four people enter the region through tourism.

Of that number, 70 percent of all visitors stay in all-inclusive resorts like Sandals that serve couples, mainly newlyweds. In 1994, the island was named “Honeymoon Island of the Year” by a Caribbean publication.

Within St. Lucia there is a battle over the growth of tourism.

Talking to banana farmers and workers, one hears claims that they don’t benefit from “the ships.” Their voices express a sense of abandonment over the government’s eagerness to turn St. Lucia into a visitors’ paradise.

Below that surface is the unease felt by black workers, who recently secured their independence in 1979, about becoming dependent on a service industry—tourism—whose clients are mostly whites from the United States and the U.K.

This ambivalence confuses and upsets Konrad Wagner, general manager of Sandals in St. Lucia. Sandals is a chain of all-inclusive resorts with sites in Jamaica, Cuba and other Caribbean isles.

“The days should be gone when people say, ‘I work in the manufacturing industry. I have nothing to do with tourism,’” said Wagner.

Said Modeste, the tourism industry in St. Lucia employs 11,000 people, almost 22 percent of the population.

The truth is that there are pockets of eco-tourism growing on the island in the form of Heritage Tours offered to visitors. The tours often include stops at independent banana estates.

Modeste would like to foster connections between the banana and tourism industries through these tours.

“I don’t believe we’ve been able to capture our rich history,” said Modeste, in the area of tourism. “But we are on our way.”

Through the partial funding of the European Union, Modeste’s department has started a Heritage Tourism Unit to show visiting couples the island’s waterfalls, traditions of cassava bread, African and French-influenced dances as well as banana estates.

Both Modeste and Wagner, general manager of Sandals in St. Lucia, believe island governments should set guidelines to regulate the cruise ship industry that gives so little back to country.

“The Caribbean should come together to set a common policy on cruise ships,” said Wagner, who of course views the industry as competition.

The Sandals manager did join with banana proponents by stating that the ships pollute local waters in their delivery of “hostage consumers.”

Wagner said he would also like to see casinos built in resorts and hotels. It is a proposal that the Catholic Church and the government oppose.

Yet, with the demise of the banana economy, many in St. Lucia view tourism as a life-jacket thrown out into the eastern Caribbean.

“We have to be careful not to blame tourism for the problem of the banana industry,” said Wagner. “Tourism is the only product we have with which we can compete on the world market. And at the moment, eco-tourism can not pay our bills.”

Companies like Black Entertainment Television, through its BET on Jazz cable channel, have brought countless tourists and music aficionados to the annual St. Lucia Jazz Festival each May.

Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, guitarist George Benson, and Chicago’s piano virtuoso Ramsey Lewis are but a few of the many jazz notables to shine in the festival’s spotlight.

So whether it’s the sound of Marsalis’ trumpet or the rhythm of its residents, St. Lucia has discovered that tourism, not bananas, may be the key to its future.