A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

always been so corrupt. They took things, but it was on a small scale. For instance, if the government built some new housing to be sold to people, then a minister or two would get a few of the houses for themselves. They would then sell them outright, or rent them. Everybody knew about this. Some of the ministers were honest. One of them, a famous one in Antigua, a leader of the Trade and Labour Union movement, even died a pauper. Another minister, when his party lost power, had to drive a taxi. It is he, the taxi-driving ex-minister, who taught the other ministers a lesson. If you say to them, “Why you all so thief?” they say, “When I leave here, you want me to go drive taxi?” All the ministers have “green cards”—a document that makes them legal residents of the United States of America. The ministers, the people who govern the island of Antigua, who are also citizens of Antigua, are legal residents of the United States, a place they visit frequently.
    And it is in that strange voice, then—the voice that suggests innocence, art, lunacy—that they say these things, pausing to take breath before this monument to rottenness, that monument to rottenness, as if they were tour guides; as if, having observed the event of tourism, they have absorbed it so completely that they have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction.
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    An event in Antigua has been the founding, in 1939, of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union, an organization whose purpose was to obtain better wages, better working conditions, and just a better life in general for working people in Antigua. It eventually became, along with being a union, a political party, demanding universal suffrage, demanding that land in Antigua not be owned by syndicates made up of English people (most of whom still lived in England and had never laid eyes on Antigua), but by Antiguans, and demanding that Antiguans rule Antigua. An event in Antigua has been that the president of this union has headed the government in Antigua, as Premier and then, when Antigua became independent from Britain, as Prime Minister, for twenty-five of the thirty years that Antigua had had some form of self-government. Sometimes, when Antiguans look at this man, they see the event of George Washington, liberator and first President of the United States; sometimes, when Antiguans look at this man, they see the event of Jackie Presser, the head of the Teamsters Union in America, who is now serving time in prison for misappropriating his union’s funds. For five years, Antigua had another Prime Minister. He stood for but was not re-elected to that office. The Prime Minister whose reign he interrupted then had him charged with using his office for personal profit, and he was sent to jail for eight months. The event of the Prime Minister whose career ended in political defeat and then jail is a sad event, for people had hoped that he would replace the old, dull, corrupt event with honesty, brilliance, and prosperity; instead, the sugar industry went bankrupt, the tourists did not come, his Minister of Public Works was dismissed because he was thought to have taken large amounts of public money, his illegitimate half brother, a member of his cabinet, spat on a stewardess while an aeroplane on which he was a passenger was in flight.
    The event of the corruptness of the other Prime Minister of Antigua is traced to another event. They say that when this Prime Minister was a young man he worked for a merchant-importer who was also one of the largest bakers in Antigua. He worked for this man as a bookkeeper, and as a young bookkeeper he earned a salary that a young bookkeeper would earn, but the merchant-importer noticed that this young bookkeeper owned brand-new motorcars and seemed generally prosperous. In Antigua and in the 1930s, very few people owned cars or were generally prosperous, so the