Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an

The An­gel of His­to­ry is an in­sight­ful in­scrip­tion writ­ten by Wal­ter Ben­jamin to de­scribe a Paul Klee paint­ing. The paint­ing in­spired Ben­jamin to de­scribe the in­equal­i­ty that ac­com­pa­nies progress, how progress for some is of­ten a se­ries of de­feats and op­pres­sion for oth­ers.

Ben­jamin's ob­ser­va­tion fits well in­to an­thro­po­log­i­cal dis­cus­sions about de­vel­op­ment. This is be­cause for all the grandiose, top-down talk of de­vel­op­ment and its ben­e­fits giv­en by in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies, gov­ern­ments and lo­cal au­thor­i­ties, there are many bot­tom-up ac­counts il­lus­trat­ing de­vel­op­ment to be a Tro­jan horse of ex­ploita­tion, de­pen­den­cy and de­struc­tion.

Read­ing about the THA's re­fusal to halt con­struc­tion in Char­lot­teville fol­low­ing a re­cent court or­der is a use­ful place to weigh up the is­sue of de­vel­op­ment and progress lo­cal­ly and ask who wins from the THA's vi­sion of "progress" in Char­lot­teville. Now, top-down or­gan­i­sa­tions will of­ten try to dis­cred­it those with a bot­tom-up view of progress.

The stan­dard ar­gu­ment, and it is one the Char­lot­teville Beach­front Move­ment has faced in its ques­tion­ing of the THA's mo­tives, is that those op­posed to de­vel­op­ment are op­posed to progress.

Yet what those op­posed are ac­tu­al­ly say­ing is they want progress to be ap­pro­pri­ate and sup­port­ive to ex­ist­ing stake­hold­ers and ask, why did the THA ig­nore the oth­er sug­ges­tions put for­ward for de­vel­op­ment? For those who don't know the THA's plans for the Char­lot­teville Beach­front, plans al­ready un­der way in­clude de­mol­ish­ing all the ex­ist­ing vend­ing huts and re­plac­ing them with a mas­sive con­crete and glass struc­ture ex­tend­ing across the cur­rent beach­front.

In or­der to do this they need­ed to move ven­dors, some who had been there for more than 30 years.By some lo­cal ac­counts, the THA went about this in prob­lem­at­ic ways. For ex­am­ple, lack­ing any le­gal au­thor­i­ty to evict the ven­dors, the Deputy Chief Sec­re­tary al­leged­ly ap­proached lo­cal ven­dors and told them they should ac­cept keys to tem­po­rary premis­es, should im­me­di­ate­ly va­cate their ex­ist­ing premis­es, and if they did not va­cate, would be re­moved from their ex­ist­ing premis­es.

Fur­ther­more, the Chief Sec­re­tary is on record as say­ing the de­vel­op­ment was a done deal not up for de­bate. He al­so claimed to have the con­sen­sus of the vil­lagers with him, yet, speak­ing to vil­lagers, there are many not in favour of this par­tic­u­lar de­vel­op­ment.

Pres­sured, many ven­dors moved to the tem­po­rary spots. At the time none were giv­en in­for­ma­tion about how long they would have to spend in the tem­po­rary ac­com­mo­da­tion, what their ten­an­cy terms might be, whether they would be ten­ants in the new beach­front struc­ture, what would be the terms of their con­tract, and what was the eval­u­a­tion of the en­vi­ron­men­tal and oth­er im­pact on Char­lot­teville.

In what seemed like an olive branch from the THA, ven­dors were lat­er told the first two years in the new struc­ture were rent-free. This ges­ture did not dis­close what the rent might be in two years' time or that if rents be­come too high, ven­dors would be easy to evict in favour of high­er-pay­ing ten­ants. Nor that the ven­dors pre­vi­ous­ly paid no rent on their huts, or that they've de­vel­oped cer­tain le­gal rights by virtue of their long and ex­ten­sive oc­cu­pa­tion of the lands.

As their lawyer point­ed out: "My clients are be­ing in­vit­ed un­der threat of evic­tion to sur­ren­der their rights, earned over two decades or more, in re­turn for noth­ing more than un­en­force­able promis­es. Fur­ther­more, the promis­es are un­de­fined and at the whim of the THA."The THA has al­so per­haps bent the rules. Legal­ly, EMA ap­provals were re­quired be­fore the THA could start work on the beach­front. Yet such ap­provals were nev­er grant­ed and the THA, af­ter evict­ing the ma­jor­i­ty of ven­dors, be­gan con­struc­tion work re­gard­less.

The court or­der against it now is to re­in­force a pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment in­struc­tion to se­cure such ap­provals be­fore any work be­gan. Even in the face of this re­cent or­der, the THA re­fused to com­ply im­me­di­ate­ly and it was a num­ber of days be­fore con­struc­tion stopped.Now, some might sug­gest that Char­lot­teville's days as one of the last un­spoilt fish­ing vil­lages in the Caribbean are no longer ten­able, that those sorts of idyl­lic havens for re­lax­ation and pro­tect­ing wildlife are no more.

But why should they get to de­cide what hap­pens to Char­lot­teville?Why should lo­cal economies and cul­tures like Char­lot­teville, with its small-scale eco-tourism, for which it is known around the world, be de­stroyed in or­der to "progress"? Can't progress in Char­lot­teville be slow­er, more small-scale and lo­cal­ly de­ter­mined?Sad­ly, not ac­cord­ing to Ben­jamin's An­gel of His­to­ry. It de­scribes progress in trag­ic terms, as storm af­ter storm, smash­ing through par­adise.

Dr Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an is an an­thro­pol­o­gist at UWI, St Au­gus­tine