St Kitts and Nevis

The smallest nation in the Americas, St Kitts and Nevis celebrates its Independence Day on 19 September, the anniversary of the day on which, in 1983, the country gained its independence from the United Kingdom. Since the two islands are among the earliest territories colonised by Europeans, you could say that Independence had been on the books for quite a while. Among the earliest? Saint Kitts was the first British colony in the Caribbean—set up in 1624—when then, when the island was partitioned, the French also set up a colony there in 1625. Prior to these successful colonies, French Huguenot refugees tried to set up shop as far back as 1538, only to be raided by the Spanish.

Of course the Brits and the French weren’t the first people who had the idea to call St Kitts home—that notion took hold around five thousand years earlier, when Amerindian people began to arrive. It was the Kalinago people who were present when the Europeans arrived, and unlike native peoples on other islands, the Kalinago allowed the newcomers to colonise—unfortunately, the Europeans didn’t take it upon themselves to respond to this hospitality with kindness. The Kalinago people were wiped out by 1626, the year of the Kalinago Genocide. Yes. That makes me both angry and incredibly sad.

The British Kittitians began to colonise nearby Nevis in 1628, though the two were governed separately, as different states, until the 19th century. At the same time they came together, they were joined to Anguilla.

Before full independence arrived in the 1980s, St Kitts and Nevis—with Anguilla— became fully autonomous in 1967. Anguilla separated from the islands in 1971. And then there were two. It’s not all smooth sailing—historically Nevis has accused St Kitts, the larger of the two islands, of neglecting its needs, and in 1998 there was a referendum on whether Nevis would separate from St Kitts—but the yea side didn’t get the two-thirds majority it would have needed.

For a long time sugar was the major industry in the country—but only a few years ago the state-owned sugar company shut its doors. Among important contributors to the economy are the ever-popular Caribbean staples of tourism and the offshore-banking sector.

Fun fact? It’s the smallest nation to ever host a World Cup event. World Cup? Cricket of course.

I had trouble tracking down a poem for today—but what I found is, in a way, even better. Caryl Phillips is the main game in the literature of St Kitts and Nevis, and Phillips is mostly a novelist, as well as an essayist. In his collection A New World Orderhe has an essay entitled “St Kitts: 19 September 1983”—which is, of course, their day of independence. Phillips was there to witness it. So I’ve taken the opening paragraph for this page—the essay as a whole is wonderful. Go to your local library or bookshop. Trust me.


from A New World Order

It is only in the hour-long wait in Antigua, having left the British Airways 747 and watched it soar dramatically away towards Barbados, that I realize I am once again in the Caribbean. In England an hour could never last so long. The heat, and the noise, and the lethargy-inducing humidity, seduce from my body the equivalent of a whole London summer’s sweat. And then mercifully the small Avro plane makes its scheduled appearance, and the forty-eight passengers rush (the plane is over-booked) headlong through the gate and on to the tarmac. As if participating in a second, a voluntary and more comfortable middle passage, the voyagers are all in a hurry to witness what has become for Britain a regular part of her year’s foreign diplomacy. However, for these passengers this will be a unique and emotional moment in their lifetime. This will be something to relate to their children and to their grandchildren thereafter: independence. St Kitts, the mother colony of the British Empire, together with her sister island, Nevis, will soon become the last of Britain’s associated states to achieve full political independence. St Kitts-Nevis, with a combined population of 45,000, will soon take her place as both the newest, and the smallest, country in the world.


—Caryl Phillips