Born in 1928, Edouard Glissant is the son of a géreur (a ganger who organized the workers who cut the cane) and often accompanied his father to the plantations. Writing in 1958, he described the system he saw as a boy, and which still existed:
The agricultural workers are the prisoners of a system developed over a period of three hundred years. Each habitation is a social unit and is independent. The shacks belong to the owner, and he also owns a shop which has all the products anyone wants. The money that is given to the workers is immediately spent in the shop. The economy is a closed circuit. If a worker refuses to accept these working conditions, he is black-listed and cannot find work anywhere else.40
The cyclical nature of sugar production means that it cannot provide employment throughout the year, and the regular periods of enforced semi-idleness encouraged reliance on credit and a neverending cycle of debt. A form of unofficial debt-bondage replaced institutionalized slavery. Even when work was available, the plantation worker of the 1950s had to work for up to four days to cover his most basic needs.41
The abolition of slavery made the freed slaves French citizens and gave them the right to vote, but not necessarily the ability to exercise that right. Many were indifferent to politics and economic insecurity made them all vulnerable to pressure. Those who rented land were in a particularly difficult position. Many families in Martinique have stories about the great-uncle or grandparent who was driven from his shack and kitchen garden because he had offended a planter by disobeying an order or voting the wrong way in a local election. The memory of the béké on horseback and with a whip in his hand is a powerful and intimidating figure in the Martinican imagination. And that memory is part of the Fanon family’s collective memory too. Fanon’s brother Joby still speaks bitterly of a grandfather who was driven off his patch of rented land by just such a figure.42
A béké is a white Creole born in the Caribbean, or a descendant of one of the original settler-planters. ‘Creole’ derives from the Spanish criollo and was originally used to describe anyone born in Latin America or the Caribbean islands, regardless of their race. The origins of the word béké are obscure, but it is usually held to derive from an Ibo word meaning both ‘white’ and ‘foreigner’. The békés have been a small minority ever since slave times, and have never numbered more than 2,000. Writing in 1937, Victor Coridun, a minor poet and songwriter from Martinique, described their power, which was quite disproportionate to their numbers:
The whites of Martinique . . . own eight tenths of the land and all that it produces. In their deliberately closed and clenched hands, they in fact control every aspect of production and manufacture. Basically, they have their hands on all the control levers. The levers that control the economy: factories and shops, banks, bazaars and distilleries; the levers that control politics: parliamentarians and others, elected politicians, powerful men at the bottom and powerful men at the top; the levers that control society: the churches, charitable works and mutual aid organizations.43
When he briefly visited Martinique in 1941, the surrealist poet André Breton met a béké named Aubéry: ‘the master of the biggest rum distillery in Martinique . . . the supreme expression of the feudal system that anachronistically prevails in Martinique: all the plantations, factories and shops are in the hands of a few families who have been there since the conquest; they make up a real de facto dynasty and jealously ensure that their prerogatives and privileges are preserved’.44 The name Aubéry is still one to be reckoned with in Martinique.
In 1950, the anthropologist Michel Leiris estimated that some four-fifths of the land was owned by ‘big white landowners with a feudal mentality’,45 and in a major study of contacts between civilizations in Martinique and Guadeloupe commissioned by UNESCO, he describes them as living in a closed, endogamous society, and as being both parochial-minded and clannish.46 Their refusal to invite into their homes in the rich quarter of Didier, which is in the hills above Fort-de-France, the blacks with whom they worked quite happily during the day was legendary; marriage between a black and a béké was unthinkable.47 A Martinican politician quotes a béké as saying that ‘If a mulatto married an English princess, we would be very happy for both him and the country; but we would be very upset if he married one of our girls. That really would be the end of an era.’48 Needless to say, this did not prevent male békés from having sexual relations with black or mulatto women. According to Fanon, it was rumoured that the head of the Aubéry clan had had almost fifty children by such women.49 Ownership of most of the best land was not the only key to continued béké dominance; the foundation of the privately owned Crédit Martiniquais bank in 1922 gave the ethno-class a stranglehold on credit and finance too. Like most of the sugar industry, it was – and is – controlled by a handful of families who intermarried over the generations to produce a tightly knit oligarchy.
The ideological self-perception of the béké is well expressed in two novels that appeared in 1989 and 1991. Marie-Jeanne de Reine is herself a Martinican-born békée, and her La Grande Békée and its sequel Le Maître-Savane tell the story of a woman’s struggle to recreate and preserve a plantation destroyed by the eruption of Montagne Pelée in 1902. They combine elements of family saga, romance, exoticism and popular history. The first volume is dedicated – quite possibly uniquely – to ‘All the great békés: those who have existed, and those who still exist.’ In the second volume, Fleur Mase de la Joucquerie, who is the eponymous grande békée, tells her French-born grandson: ‘Remember that the blood of your pioneer ancestors runs in your veins. They did not hesitate to leave their peaceful lands in Poitou three hundred years ago, and to come here to build a new world. We békés are like that, capable of dropping everything to go somewhere else to build something.’50 As in so many myths of empire, the master – or in this case the mistress – simply forgets that it was the slave who laboured in the cane-fields. Fanon was to encounter the same mythology in Algeria: ‘The colon makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: “This land is a land that we have made”.’51
Jaham’s proud reference to blood and landed estates in France points to a major theme in béké mythology, but it is unlikely to be grounded in reality. Martinicans take a malicious glee in pointing out that the ancestors of the white minority are more likely to have been whores and vagabonds from the slums of the Atlantic ports than aristocrats.52 The existence of some békés-goyaves (guava-békés, or poor whites) also tends to undermine aristocratic pretensions, whilst the insistence on the metropolitan origins of the békés masks some odd contradictions. Pride in being French goes hand in hand with a resentment of metropolitan dominance and metropolitan institutions. The expression béké-France, as applied to metropolitans living in or visiting Martinique, is not a flattering one. Hostility to the ban on free trade with countries other than France during the early colonial period found expression in periodic planter revolts, and the békés have not always been averse to greater independence from France. They were not supporters of assimilation in 1946, and their enthusiasm for the wartime Vichy regime established on the island might be described as a final planter revolt intended to seize back the political power that had gradually been acquired by the black-mulatto middle class. The power of the béké has in fact always depended upon the existence of the French market, and sometimes on more direct intervention. In the mid-1990s, the Crédit Martiniquais found itself in serious difficulties as it was faced with a steep rise in bad debts. State intervention was necessary to save the private institution, which survived at the expense of French tax-payers.53
The main effect of the békés’ concern with the supposed purity of their blood line has been on the non-white population. In the eighteenth century, Moreau de St.-Méry, a white planter with philosophical leanings, elaborated a taxonomic table that distinguished between no fewer than 128 categories of ‘mixed blood’.54 The