By Gabriel J. Christian, Esq.
In Memoriam
Dr. Wellsworth Morrison Christian
Born at St. Joseph, Maryland April 10, 1953 – Died at Upper Marlboro, Maryland on June 9, 1990
The First Local Born Veterinary Surgeon and Chief Veterinary Officer of Dominica
(1980-1990)
My earliest memories of the Christmas season are suffused with the aroma of smoked meat, the herbs being chopped to make boudin (blood sausage) and the squealing farewell of one of our hogs as it succumbed to the butcher’s knife. Who were our butchers of my childhood? The most famous and enduring was fireman Cognet of Portsmouth. Fireman Cognet was of French and African origin; a red man with bronze colored curly hair. As Mr. Cognet deftly used his small knife to dispatch the pig, or cow, or hacked the slaughtered animal into choice parts, his ever-present cigarette hung from his lips with the smoke curling past his squinting eyes. A boiling pot of water was always boiling atop a woodfire with some blackened stones to support it. The hot water was to scald the skin so we could scrape off the pig hair with knives. When all was done Cognet would allow one of us to roast the pigs tail or balls – a treat we devoured after a lightly seasoning it with salt.
The boys (Wellsworth, Lawson, Samuel, and I) would all pitch in; the girls (Christalin, Esther and Hildreth) would watch the unfolding scene in our backyard from the back window of our home. Toward the end of that Christmas time or Easter holiday ritual of slaughtering a pig, goat, sheep, or cow, we would sell some meat to neighbors and set some aside for the family.
Christmas fare was mostly homemade, the bounty of our fertile island. Our holiday plates were rich with locally grown yams, dasheen, fried plantains, and sweet potatoes – layered by clove studded baked homemade ham – a specialty of our father and mother. To drink we had lime juice cordial made by the L Rose & Company at Bath Estate, and sorrel and ginger beer drinks we made in our own kitchen.
In those days we still had Bagatelle Rum, Belfast Rum, Shillingford’s River Estate Rum, and local soft drink companies making Ju-C, Coca Cola and 7-Up. That cornucopia all had its roots in the bounty of local agriculture and an island humming with industry.
That focus on agriculture was instilled in us by a father who, after his service in the World War II British Army, had enrolled as a soil conservation officer in the Layou Valley. As a soil conservation officer Wendell McKenzie Christian’s job was to manage the planting of bamboo plants from faraway Malaysia to bind the soil; the utilization of wind breaks to limit wind erosion and the terracing of slopes to preserve the rich soil of Dominica’s most productive agricultural land – the site of the famous Cocoa Center and Hillsborough Estate. The Layou Agriculture Station was the foremost extension office of the local department of agriculture. More important for our orientation in agriculture was our mother Alberta Christian who grew up in St. Joseph but was born in the Layou Valley in 1929 where her father Aaron John Baptiste served as an estate foreman. Her mother Virginia John Baptiste nee Austrie of Castlebruce was a housewife but sometimes worked at Hillsborough Estate amidst its rich rows of tobacco. Our mother in time became the prime agriculturist, ably supported by our father. Mother was a civil servant who worked as the manager of the Workshop for the Blind which taught the disabled to be self-sufficient by making baskets, hampers, and trays. But the garden was our mother’s love, the solace to her soul. By her spiritual connection with the land, she imbued us with a love of our island that endures.
Today young Dominicans may not know that we grew enough tobacco to feed the J.A.S Garraway Tobacco factory. In 1970, at age nine, I worked at that factory during the summer shredding rejected cigarettes to retrieve tobacco to return to production. After two weeks I earned the grand sum of two dollars for my labors.
With that grounding in agriculture came an additional academic coupling. Our Dad had books in our modest library on animal husbandry and how best to grow chickens. It was in one of those books I first learnt of broilers and Rhode Island Roosters. On our visits to Dad’s brother, classical musician, and Lemuel McPherson Christian’s musical studio on Sunday after church, we would stare in wonder at his herbarium and preserved insect collection he kept in two wood vanished and plate glass square display boxes. The pressed plants in the herbarium and the insects had name tags next to them. Uncle Lemuel had worked as a curator at the Botanic Gardens – which in its heyday was one of the best small botanic gardens in the world. Started as a division of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England, the Botanic Gardens was the robust foundation of Dominica’s agriculture which trained legions of local farmers in best practices while engaging in scientific studies and plant propagation. That history can be viewed on the Dominica Botanic Garden website of the Dominica Academy of Arts & Sciences (www.dominicagardens.com). That site, organized by Dr. Dave Shillingford, Dr. Clayton Shillingford, the late Raglan Riviere, with the assistance over the years of Arlington James and Major Francis Richards, is a dignified recognition of our heritage in agriculture and the botanic sciences. In our youth, the Botanic Gardens with its well-manicured lawns and cricket pitch; its gazebo and bamboo grove, was the dazzling jewel which rendered a gloss on all our lives.
If the Botanic Gardens was the apex, then the dedication of our parents to agro-Industry was the base; a base replicated in many a family, village, and town of my generation. That sense of industry required that we had to feed the pigs and chickens in our yard, scrub the pigsty and dispose of the waste. In our early days we had to go into the Roseau Valley to harvest zebgwa grass with which we fed our chickens; lime peel from the L. Rose processing plant which was favored by our cattle and tabletop leftovers from the kitchen of the Dominica Fire Brigade Headquarters which we brought home in pails to add to our pigs’ diet. By that time Dad had moved on from being a soil conservation officer, police officer to being a distinguished founding member of the modern Dominica Fire Service.
Some of my earliest memories are of fluffy golden chicks walking around brooders in our drawing room. These chicks were bought by the dozen from the Cambridge University educated British veterinarian Dr. Blatcher who ran his shop on Kennedy Avenue. He also sold Purina chicken feed such as “growing mash” that we procured to feed our chicks. From Nassief’s store on the banks of the Roseau River we would buy coconut meal for our cattle we kept in Roseau Valley and later at the Government Stock Farm. On occasion we would buy fish meal to accompany the rejected bananas we got from the Geest industries banana boxing plant at Fond Cole.
The embers of the slave era still glowed in the many cane fields at Fond Cole near where the deep-water harbor is located and adjoining the stock farm at places such as Yam Piece. When our parents built their home at Didier Lane in 1970, we even sold some stacks of cane to the mill at Belfast for rum making. The most popular and sweetest cane for sucking then, by young and old, was a purplish-black stalk variety called “Black Sam.” In the era when enslaved Africans worked the land, our island once housed fourteen sugar making mills; the decaying bric-a-brac of which one could chance upon in some clearing in the forest of our thickly wooded island from to time. The camouflage of myriad vines, and weeds would have made those former engines of production unrecognizable at a distance. After emancipation in 1834 sugar had diminished and in the early 1900s Dominica was for a time the leading lime producer in the world. L. Rose & Company was the agro-industrial powerhouse of my childhood with lime groves marching up in rows into the interior of the Roseau Valley and the Bath Estate factory buzzing with coopers assembling barrels to accommodate the lime juice bound for the United Kingdom. When the sluice gates from the lime press were opened into the Roseau River, the surface would turn yellow with the freshly pressed peel and smell like lemonade as it went out to sea.
That was an era when Dominica’s agriculture production was robust, and tractors drove along our island roads heaped with fresh harvested limes, huge Humber and Bedford trucks groaned under the weight of boxes of bananas, grapefruits and oranges as they exited the fertile Dominican hinterland to the Roseau jetty for export to the United Kingdom and other countries. At the port, carriers with boxes of bananas and oranges atop their heads – mostly ladies – would scurry along the jetty to waiting lighters. We had no deep-water port then and the lighters were small boats worked by oarsmen – with sweat streaked bareback – who powered their craft by oar strokes to the glistening white Geest industries boat anchored offshore which awaited their cargo.
Sadly, it was in that period starting in 1969 that the unplanned harvesting of our forests began. A Canadian timber company, DomCan Timbers, operated a mill at Canefield where the airport is now located. Along our narrow country roads huge tractor trailers lugged huge trunks of gommier and other hardwood trees from our forests for export to Canada and other markets. The sawmill at Canefield would coat passing vehicles in a fine patina of sawdust as they wound their way along the road which cut through the clang and bang of the sawmill. Never having reforested the slopes where the old forest growth had been harvested, we have seen the deterioration of our rivers, flash flooding and major erosion of our “crème terre” or precious topsoil. To avoid the desertification, we must engage a massive reforestation project across the island. Desertification has happened in the Caribbean before – witness Haiti.
In a society humming with production, we would often eat our own home-grown meats. Over the years we had ducks, chickens, rabbits, sheep, cattle, beans, and goats. We also grew lettuce, okras, pumpkins, carrots, watercress and christophine in our backyard over the years. Our parents would also purchase raw coffee and cocoa beans. Mum and Dad would roast the beans over a coal pot in our yard or backstep. Thereafter, we would gather around the dinner table to remove the shells off the roasted cocoa beans which sat atop old copies of the Dominica newspapers of the day such as Herald, The Chronicle or Star.
Once shelled we would grind our roasted coffee or cocoa beans. During most of my childhood we had a coffee mill and cocoa mill. However, in the mid-1960s we did not have a cocoa mill and I would accompany our older brother Wellsworth to a little house in Pound where an old woman called Ma Yuma rented her mill by the turns. A turn was equivalent to the amount of beans in the mill’s feed cup. When the bean in the feed cup was used you had completed a turn. I think it was ten cents or a quarter a turn. I enjoyed going back and forth with Wellsworth to mill cocoa at Ma Yuma. My job was to scoop the rich cocoa paste exiting the grinding wheel of the mill and place it into an enamel bowl. At home, our Dad would bark out an order as if we were in the British Army, “Everybody fall in! Every manjack put a hand.” That was his way of summoning Christalin, Wellsworth, Lawson, Samuel, Esther, Hildreth and me to duty. Hurrying to our duties to avoid a scolding, we would take dollops of the glistening oily cocoa paste and roll it into balls. We would then douse the balls into flour so they would not stick to each other and store them in used Milo, or Dancow cans.
One-year Dad got us several small turtles, but I am unsure what ever became of them. In another year, a favored pig caught a cold. We removed it from the exposed pigsty and brought it under the warm and cozy crawl space of our home at Boyd’s Avenue in Roseau and rubbed it down with Canadian Healing oil. In nursing that pig back to health we learnt that for agriculture to thrive it must be inspired by an abiding love and dedication to the livestock and plant life. Where we did not diligently do our chores, we would be scolded for laziness. More grave derelictions of duty would earn one a flogging.
In 1972 thereabouts our Singer Vogue Sunbeam by Chrysler of England, license number 2685, was down with engine trouble. That car was an essential instrumentality in our home industry as we used its trunk (or boot) to carry animal feed, bananas and dasheen plants, and other produce. We had about a dozen small pigs to be fed at a pen we maintained in the Layou Valley. As the last boy in the family, such lowly chores were my burden. Older brothers like Wellsworth and Lawson were already teaching at the esteemed Dominica Grammar School (DGS?). Samuel was Headboy at the Sixth Form College. No slop pail in the hand business for these noble men. That role fell to little me.
I had just started school at the DGS and felt “stink” as they would say back then to have to carry a slop pail through town. Many decades later I recall how I hung my head low, as I plodded along, pail in hand. I had to travel three or four miles each way with a pail of slop to feed our pigs. Sometime later, a pack of Alsatians from a wealthy home at St. Aroment – home of our local bourgeoisie – descended on our pigsty in the Roseau Valley and gobbled up half of our little pig population. Some other pigs had to be put down as they were too badly bitten. We were never compensated.
Such a combination of animal life, backyard gardening and cottage agro-industry allowed for us to provide for our own nutrition in a self-sufficient, intelligent, and industrious fashion. We were more self-reliant in feeding ourselves and the exertion of effort which governed our lives meant that obesity was less of a public health concern.
In 1979 my old DGS history teacher Hubert Charles of Portsmouth became principal at the school. Charles was the first Dominican I knew who attended John Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland. Irving W. Andre, the eminent Canadian jurist and historian of Dominican descent, later blazed a trail to John Hopkins. Charles had been an outstanding teacher of West Indian History and I credit him and my European History teacher at Sixth Form, Henry Volney, for my love of the subject. That love was to propel my work in publishing alongside my co-author and co-founder of www.pontcassepress.com Judge Irving Andre.
After Hurricane David destroyed Dominica on August 29, 1979 Charles called me and asked me to teach agriculture science at the DGS at 5th form level. I had scored well at the Cambridge University GCE “O” Level in agriculture and there was no graduate teacher around. At the tender age of 18 I dove valiantly into teaching agriculture science to Errol Emmanuel, Simeon Joseph, Val Cuffy, Russell Greenaway and several other DGS senior boys. I felt that my enthusiasm for teaching made up for my lack of anything more than my “O” Levels and “A” Levels. Later, once a graduate teacher was found for agriculture science, I moved on to teaching English, Geography and English Literature.
By 1980 Dr. Wellsworth Christian had graduated with a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from the Kerala Agriculture University in southern India. He replaced Indian national Dr. Mithian that year to become the first Dominica born Chief Veterinary Officer. Dr. Christian later graduated with honors with an MS degree in tropical veterinary medicine from the University of Florida, Gainesville. Sadly, he died in Maryland at age 37 on June 9, 1990 after treatment at the National Institute of Health failed to cure his pulmonary disease. His only child Trudy Christian graduated from the Convent High School as valedictorian and later earned a BS in biology from Midwestern and an MS in Public Health from the University of the West Indies. His widow Alicia Abraham Christian, a graduate teacher in the French language, is principal at the DGS.
In 2015 we forged the Caribbean Agriculture Network with aviator and food exporter to the US Virgin Islands Captain Franky Tonge. We later allied with local agriculturists Errol Emmanuel, Francis Richards, Dr. Dave Lloyd, and others. The mission with CAN is to team so local agriculture can thrive.
Such an early linkage to the diverse aspects of agriculture, linked to academia and the scientific method opened wide the early curiosity which inexorably led us towards Chocolat de la Dominique in 2008. I give thanks to my family, Major Francis Richards, Greg Thomas at DEXIA such as Theodora Williams, DEXIA and Chef Ushinski for making the first chocolate bar project successful. In 2015 we partnered with Eric Reid of Spagnvola Chocolate in Gaithersburg, Maryland to launch Dominica’s first premium chocolate bar. We had achieved the feat after many days harvesting, fermenting, and drying cocoa beans via a proprietary method fashioned by Eric Reid. We proposed a Dominica Cocoa Institute then to build a high-end cocoa industry. That is still in process.
View more photos at https://photos.app.goo.gl/jHqvekkWwJTkFv9S9
We have laboured at making a go with the solar powered Alwen’s Promise Eco-Education Inn in the Layou Valley designed by Ben Uyeda and the Cornell University team. That effort has been upended by natural disaster and an increasing tendency towards lawlessness on the island which undermines industrious effort. The idea behind that project was to advance sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and eco-tourism. All those aspects favor the environmental protection of our island which is increasingly facing floods due to rapid deforestation and the absence of a dynamic reforestation program.
Today our law firm works with African American farmer Philip ” PJ” Haynie and the National Black Growers Council of the United States to further agriculture and agriculture education. We have been fortunate to work with www.rebuilddominica.org bring down the University of Maryland Eastern Shore to teach food preservation and to forge an MOU between www.umes.edu and the Dominica State College. In 2015 Rebuild Dominica successfully partnered with Dr. Julius Garvey, son of the late great Marcus Mosiah Garvey who founded the Universal Metro Improvement Association (UNIA), to bring new varieties of breadfruit into Dominica.
Today we are engaged with innovators in sustainable agriculture equipment manufacturing. Such systems can improve yields for row crop farmers. Truly, the love of agriculture nurtured by our parents and the industrious environment of the Dominica of our childhood endures in our efforts. Our island faces challenges in that we import too much food that we could produce ourselves. As to the land and its preservation, we have been poor custodians. Environmental preservation must become the duty of every citizen. May it always be that we work to grow the food we eat, while partnering with each other and others to preserve and prosper the island we love.
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