Being people

It’s August. Emancipation time. Come. 

Let’s talk about slavery.

Please note: I’m using the old word, the word that we used to use. Before I’m done, I’ll have moved onto the new one: enslavement. There’s a story behind and around those words, and we’ll get to that. But for now:

Let’s talk. About slavery.

Emancipate ourselves

There’s so much being written, so much being said, about how we are faring in this new, contagious world. And there is much to be said. I just finished reading this meditation. It resonated with me, made me wonder whether there was anything to add; thanks, Nahaja. I agree, I agree with these words: 

“Out of 184 countries, we are ranked 184th as it pertains to our COVID-19 response and ability to recover. The world is marking our manner.

Before these 2 weeks of a national lockdown are completed a strategic plan, with goal posts and milestones, should be presented to the Bahamian people that will give us something as a people to work toward.”

and these ones:

“The people are restless, aimless and frustrated because leadership is not giving us a mark to focus on other than be COVID-19 free which most of us know is a practical impossibility.”

But I want to depart in one specific way.

The fact that what the world thinks of us is what should be driving our efforts to make a change in the way we do business is why we must talk about slavery.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I don’t want to talk, not at this moment, about the plantations, about our demographics, about the way in which enslavement affected us in The Bahamas. I most certainly do not want to talk about the lie that slavery was “better in The Bahamas”. Not yet. Not yet.

I want to talk about slavery, and how the weight of it is flattening us, even today.

Social blankness

What troubles me here is the blankness of our society, the fact that we, Bahamians, do not yet see ourselves as worthy of real notice from ourselves. We need to rely on the judgement of the outside, we need to call upon the gaze of the outsider, the tourist, the world, to consider ourselves worthy of being treated and taken seriously, like the full human beings that we are. 

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not buying into our blankness. But it is tightly woven into the tapestry that we use to call ourselves “Bahamian”. Deep down, so deep down that we are not even aware of it, we Bahamians do not regard ourselves as human. As people. As good as any other people who walk this earth (except, perhaps, Haitians, than whom we are better … but only just).

You want to argue with me? I’ll win. 

Three examples:

The University of The Bahamas

Until 2016, until the moment at which it finally became a reality, we did not believe that we were worth enough to establish a university. A university? Why waste the money? All we need is a college, a place for training. 

The implication, which we never uncovered, which we never examined, is that only people have universities. Only people can think. We Bahamians don’t need a university because …

we are not people. 

we need not think.

Local government

By which I don’t mean what we call local government, which is really local tax collection on behalf of Big Brother Nassau. By which I mean the right of each part of the nation we inhabit to determine the well-being of itself. By which I mean the devolution of power, so that people who live in Exuma or Abaco or Andros or Ragged Island are not so slavishly (see the word I used there?) dependent on decision-makers in Nassau that they cannot utilize their time, talents, connections or supporters to develop, or flourish, or even recover from hurricanes. 

Local government? We don’t have it. 

Why? because self-governance is for people. 

Which we are not.

The arts

Or, the lack of support for them. The government of The Bahamas thinks so very little of us as a people who have the right to and need for beauty, self-expression, glory, that there are now no national places of training for anyone at all. Once upon a time we had a National Dance School, but that was a waste of money and space, because the arts are for people.

And we?

We’re not people.

you mussee think …

Finally, if you don’t believe me, ask our elders. What is it that we say when someone gets too biggety, too bumptious, too ambitious, too desirous of a better way of life?

…

Oh, right.

This is what we say.

Who you think you is?

You mussee think you is people.

I rest my case.

This is why we must talk about slavery: an institution that depended on the stripping of the humanity from the people it captured and enslaved and put to work to generate the capital that built the modern world. In order for that institution to survive, it had to remove all humanity from those whose labour it was stealing. But not only that. It not only had to remove the humanity from them, from us, from the outside; it had to remove all belief in that humanity from us, from them, from the inside out.

I will bet that this statement—you mussee think you is people—did not cross the Atlantic with us. It did not come from Africa. It is entirely a product of the society that enslavement made: a society in which we settle for little because we have been convinced that we deserve nothing.

And so. Is it any wonder the people we elect to lead us treat us as though we deserve that nothing? Isn’t it the case that we get the governments we deserve? We chose those people who confirm, in pronouncement, practice and policy, that we are not worth the space we take up in our islands. We chose the people who are convinced that our islands don’t need hospitals, that we don’t really need our university to be funded at a greater rate than our prison. We chose the people who determined that the rich and the white and the private boat and plane owners cannot possibly be carriers or spreaders of COVID-19, and thus they can move freely on an ocean that is barred to us, land on our airstrips and enjoy the beauty of our nation. They are not just better than the rest of us: they are people.

The rest of us?

Liberated chattel.

Isn’t it time to talk about slavery? And how it persists, through the beliefs and values we place on ourselves? Let’s not blame our politicians too much … after all, we put them there. What they do for and to us are what we have determined we are worth.

So let’s reckon first of all with ourselves.

Let’s recognize that we are, actually, people.

That we deserve to be treated as well as any other human being on earth. 

Let’s internalize that. And refuse to be represented by any individual who does not recognize and respect that in us.

Let us emancipate ourselves, and take a stand

for our humanness.

Let us think we are, and then be, 

people.