Patriotism, Independence, and Fixing What is Wrong

Last evening, rain or no rain, a ceremony was held in Pompey Square to honour 41 "culture warriors". What can I say? My father was one of them, falling alphabetically (by first name) between Count Bernadino and Eddie Minnis, and placed there because of "Sammie Swain" and as "Muse of the National Arts Festival".But I was not there.It's not that I didn't appreciate the fact that my father was being honoured, or that I didn't agree with the list of cultural warriors, or that I didn't think it was a good idea. The reason for my absence was a very simple one: the invitation came too late.On Saturday last, July 5th, early in the afternoon, I got a phone call that invited me personally to the event. That there was a real determination that I be informed was evident, because the call came from the Minister of Tourism himself; and as Obie is a friend whom I knew from well before his ministerial self, I know that he was anxious that my brother and I be invited. I know, too, that there was a determination that we should be invited simply because the call came on a Saturday, which is not a normal working day. And so I cannot claim that I wasn't informed, or that I wasn't invited. Neither of the above is true.But what is also true is that I was already committed elsewhere last night. It was a commitment that was set two months ago, and it was non-negotiable. Moreover, my brother was physically out of the country; he is in Canada visiting his in-laws, as he always is at this time of the year. For us to have been in attendance at that event last night we would both have had to been given notice more than a month ago, before I set my rehearsal and performance schedule for the play I'm directing and before my brother booked his flights to and from Toronto.I told the Minister that I could not attend but that I would ask one of my cousins to represent my brother and me. And I did. But guess what? My cousins have lives, and every one of them was also otherwise committed. And so my father was honoured, and got a special lithograph of himself unveiled in the fabulous Pompey Square, and none of his family was there to take part in it.You know what, Bahamas? This is not good enough. As one of the cousins I asked said to me, with some heat, it denotes a fundamental lack of respect for what we do, as artists, as citizens, as people. The gesture is a good one, but it is also a band-aid. It is an apology for the years of neglect, benign and otherwise, of culture and artists in The Bahamas.It is, indeed, very little, and very late.I could say that, for all the nice things that have been said about him since his death in August 1987 shocked a nation and a government that had wholly taken him for granted, my father gave his life—literally—for this nation, my father has just now received a tangible honour, almost 30 years after his passing. But that would not be entirely fair. Other gestures have been attempted, and some have been made; in 2000 one government wanted to name the building now known as the National Centre for the Performing Arts (the former Shirley Street Theatre) after him, and in 2004 the National Arts Festival was given his name.I could say that, if it were not for his friends and his family and the people who truly loved and respected him—like those musicians, and others, who never fail, when they see me or my brother, to tell us what he did for them, how he changed their lives or their outlooks or their view of being Bahamian or the value they place on music or The Bahamas or both—E. Clement Bethel would have been forgotten, wiped from our collective memory as though he never lived, never existed. What he tried to put in place in honour of his country, what he worked for on behalf of his country—despite his knowledge that he carried in him a medical condition that could kill him and would, if he were neglectful of his own well-being and did not change the way he lived—has been erased, destroyed, wiped away by political indifference and the gangrene that infects the civil service.Every programme that he established has been cannibalized or gutted, or else it depends on the hard heads of individuals to survive each year. The National Dance School has lost its premises, its teaching company, and its focus on the national significance of dance in the building of our country. Theatre in the Park drowned under years of underfunding and lack of personnel to make it happen. The annual Carol Service was appropriated by the Ministry of Education. And the National Arts Festival—named after my father in an attempt to keep it alive—limps along underfunded and hobbled by the layers of bureaucracy that hinder its growth and development, by the ignorant interference of financial bureaucrats who question every expenditure without understanding the purpose or the benefits that accrue.A picture in a square is a lovely gesture. But it does very little to change the hard reality of the almost total destruction of my father's life's work. The rationale for my father's honour says it all. He was the first Bahamian to study classical piano as a profession, and he was a damn good pianist too, being the only person from this part of the world to take part in the inaugural Van Cliburn international Piano Competition; he was a composer, conductor and music teacher extraordinaire, and introduced hundreds of Bahamian children to music of all sorts, not least of all to the appreciation of their own; he was a nationalist who collected, arranged, and taught Bahamian folk songs to generations of young Bahamians for whom those songs would help define their being; he was a founder, and later the nationalizer, of the National Arts Festival; he was the founder of the National Dance School; he was an educator of some distinction, rising to be in charge of Highbury High School (later R. M. Bailey) and then moving to become the first Chief Cultural Affairs Officer and the first Director of Cultural Affairs for the Bahamas government; he represented The Bahamas abroad at major cultural events such as the Cultural Olympics in 1968 and the first, third and fourth CARIFESTAs in Guyana, Cuba and Barbados; he wrote and directed the Folklore Shows that between 1968 and 1972 helped set the groundwork for what we now consider "Bahamian" culture; he was the overall producer in 1973 of the Independence Cultural Pageant, an event that took only twenty minutes and which described, on Clifford Park, the sweep of Bahamian history that led to the night of July 9, 1973; he was the composer of the first Bahamian folk opera, Sammie Swain; he was one of the seminal shapers of the tradition of Bahamian choral music, setting a standard with the Nassau Renaissance Singers that others measured themselves by; he was, through his research and writing about it, one of the first people to portray Junkanoo a respected cultural event; and he was the first Bahamian ethnomusicologist and his Master's thesis on Bahamian music is still the foremost study of what is truly "Bahamian" about our musical expression.But he is being honoured for (to quote the press release) "'Sammie Swain' ... 'Muse of the National Arts Festival'.I wonder; did even the people who selected him to be among the 41 "warriors" honoured know all of the above about him? And if they didn't, what led them to choose him? Was it just that sense, so prevalent in Bahamian collective life, that he couldn't be left out? That someone would be offended if his name were left off the list?I hesitate as I write this, because I appreciate the gesture. I am glad that his name was on the government's list, and I am more than honoured to have had my father's lithograph produced by Jamaal Rolle and have it displayed in Pompey Square for the Independence period.But at the same time, there is a hollowness about this honour that does not escape me. The list of honourees that is circulated enumerates the people who are placed in the square, and it calls them "warriors", but it appears not to comprehend the war that they are fighting. They are fighting against obscurity, against the denigration of our selves and our culture, against mental slavery, against the erasure of what is Bahamian from our everyday worlds, but the very way in which this honoure was bestowed is part of the problem. It was rushed, under-researched, poorly communicated and ultimately uneducational. No one will know after the fact what these "warriors" fought for, what they won (and what they lost), or why people born after 2000 should even care.In my title I refer to "fixing" what is wrong. I've been writing for 1500 words and I'm no nearer the fixing than I was at the beginning of this piece. Let me just say this. We cannot, we absolutely cannot, continue to treat our citizens and our independence in this fashion if we ever hope to build patriots and a sense of pride and patriotism in our growing population. Simply naming people is not enough. We have a long, long way to go, Bahamas, and the road is uphill all the way. We need to be prepared if we are going to climb it. Otherwise we will be stepping and stepping and slipping downhill for the next forty years to come.

Bwapen: Village Burning

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcQb1r9eIJA]

Reycling in the Bahamas—More than you Think - Bahama Pundit

Last night's powercut led me to do some reading I should have done long ago. Still, there's nothing like striking while the iron is hot. Thank you, Larry Smith.

The bottom line is that economies of scale in recycling operations here are difficult to achieve. And there is limited public awareness and no official support for any of the initiatives described above - despite their obvious social and environmental value. In fact, the government does not even have a waste management or landfill policy.What we do have is a secret agreement between the government and an unknown company to take over the Harrold Road landfill. That agreement is supposed to include the sorting of recyclable materials in the waste stream, but no-one knows when it will be implemented or what the terms are.

Reycling in the Bahamas—More than you Think - Bahama Pundit. 

More random thoughts of a serious nature: crime, urbanization and other social ills (part I)

When I started work on this series I didn't think it would be a monthly thing. I was thinking more weekly. There is a certain momentum to be built up with more regular posts. However, my life is such that weekly posts are a tad beyond my reach right now. So monthly will have to do.

We talk a lot about crime these days, and it's with a kind of despair. We're quick to lay blame all over the place: it's the fault of the party in power; it's the fault of "illegal immigrants"; it's the fault of "broken homes"; it's the fault of inner city young men who have to be rescued from themselves.There's also a sense of fatality in the discussion, because what, after all, can we do (a) to change the party in power in the middle of its term (and, indeed, change the party in power to what? to whom?); (b) to stem the tide of illegal immigration; or (c) to change the fact that "80 per cent of students live in a home where their mother is the head of the household, where there is no father or father figure"? We are trying to use tough love and shock tactics to rescue the young men, and no doubt there will be results from that programme—potentially both good and bad—but without longterm, sustained, incremental changes such interventions will be short-lived and may backfire in the end. And to tell the truth, I think we know this. And so, wherever we turn, real hope is in short supply.But let's put the situation in some perspective. We are living in a society where over the past forty to fifty years, there has been explosive growth. This growth has taken many forms, but perhaps what is most critical is the massive growth in population, coupled with gross urbanization, which has concentrated between two-thirds and three-quarters of our entire population in one small point, the Bahamian capital of Nassau. The fact that Nassau is built on New Providence, one of our smaller islands, compounds the issue; according to the Bahamas Department of Statistics, the population density in New Providence was 3079.1  people per square mile in 2010. When you consider that New Providence, moreover, is unevenly populated, and that the city of Nassau takes up two-thirds of the island, this increases the number of people per square mile in the urban areas even more.I've suggested before that this simple fact can be regarded as part—and in my opinion, a large part—of the cause of the problems we are having. The concentration of people in the capital, with the resultant population density, is responsible in many ways for the myriad social issues we are facing today. The responses to my suggestion were swift and, as far as that went, fair; that there are places on earth that are more densely populated than Nassau which do not have the attendant social problems. There is something to this, but what is missing from this objection is that the people who made it failed to account for what I believe to be the salient difference between Nassau and (say) New York City, or Hong Kong, or Singapore. Let's take New York City—Manhattan to be precise—first of all. The Manhattan of the twenty-first century was not always the pleasant, relatively crime-free, attractive city that some of us may know. The Manhattan of the 1970s and 1980s was eerily like the Nassau of the 21st century: high crime, crumbling inner city communities, racial and social tensions, police brutality, gnawing poverty in the centre, startling—and terrified—wealth on the edges. Something was done to make Manhattan a safer, cleaner place; the problem was studied and very specific solutions were implemented, with the result that the city was transformed.Or let's take Singapore. In 1965, at the moment of its establishment as an independent nation, that city-state faced more challenging issues than we do today: poor housing, proliferating squatter settlement, high unemployment, poor sanitation, escalating crime. Once again, the transformation into the clean and orderly place we like to romanticize was not accidental. It was part of a social and economic campaign that recognized the issues and took steps to ameliorate them.Or, more striking still, let's take London or Paris of the nineteenth century. Victorian London was grimy, crime-ridden, violent, and diseased; contemporary Paris was all that, and politically unstable. And a large part of the reason for the turbulence of the time was that both countries had experienced the kind of shift in population and its consequences that The Bahamas has in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Owing to the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, European cities like Paris and London became centres of population for the first time in their histories. (Before the industrial revolution, most people in Europe inhabited the countryside; after the industrial revolution, the population had shifted to urban centres.) Like The Bahamas over the past fifty to a hundred years, both cities experienced the kind of growth that no one had ever dreamed about, much less planned for. The industrial revolution changed the economies of Europe, concentrating wealth and power on factories where both had previously rested in the land. Factories demanded labourers and paid wages for their services, and the lives of ordinary English and French men, women and children were being transformed by the possibility of earning cash. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into those cities in consequence. Of course, as is the case with urbanization everywhere, the dream was more potent than the reality, and the influx of people to the cities brought about more misery and instability than anyone could have imagined.We have only to look at the work of Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens to see that the issues that plague The Bahamas today are not unique, are not congenital, and are not unresolvable. But where these examples differ from ours is instructive. Let me list those differences, as I see them.1) In every case, to approach a solution, the issues were looked at dispassionately.2) The people crafting the solutions were part of the societies in question, and their success or failure to find those solutions impacted them.3) The entities implementing the solutions had specific responsibility for the implementation and the outcome of the solutions.I'm going to take these one by one, though not all in the same article. The rest of this post will focus on the question of dispassionate approaches to problem-solving.

Dispassionate Approaches: the value of empiricism

With regard to dispassionate approaches and the value of engaging in them, let us take the European situation first of all. The social turbulence of the nineteenth century led to the establishment of specific areas of study that we take for granted today; disciplines such as sociology, criminology and psychology were the response by thinking citizens to the challenges of their times. They were not called the social "sciences" for nothing; the idea that lay behind their establishment was clear. If the scientific method, when applied to the material world, could transform that world by harnessing energy, creating machines to do more work than humans ever could, or developing vehicles that travelled further and faster than legs could take one, whether they be the legs of humans, oxen, or horses, then it could also transform the social world when used in the same way to study society. And what was key to the process were the principles that underpinned the scientific method: the use of empirical evidence to understand the world, and then the application of that understanding to change it.So what do we mean by empirical evidence? It's information collected about a situation that is both objective and verifiable. It's information that is also as accurate as it can be, given the tools that one has at one's disposal. And it is information that is relevant to the situation at hand—not information borrowed from someone else's time or place.What's perhaps most striking about this method is that it depends on evidence that is collected in a way that we might find unusual in our own Bahamian context, where "knowledge" is synonymous with opinion, political preference, sensationalism, guesswork, superstition, and prejudice. Let's take the question of "illegal" immigrants as an example. Just how many such individuals exist in our country today? We hear all kinds of outrageous claims. Some people say 90,000. Some believe it's more. But there is an empirical study, conducted 10 years ago, that gives a baseline for the number of Haitian immigrants in The Bahamas (at that time roughly 30,000 people). It was a study that was conducted not only on New Providence, but also in selected Family Islands, and the figure it gives is much lower. What is more, there is another empirical study, the all-Bahamas census, that corroborates the findings of the 2004-5 IOM report and suggests that some 39,000, or 11%, of our population is made up of Haitian "nationals".But the empiricist would point out that even this figure is flawed, because we are dealing with faulty definitions. What do we mean by "illegal immigrant" anyway? Most often, we mean people from Haiti. But not all people from Haiti are in The Bahamas illegally. Many have permission to live and work here; several are permanent residents, having worked for and paid for that status; and several others are legitimate citizens. But we also often muddy the waters by including the Bahamian-born children of Haitian immigrants in the mix as well—an issue that is extremely problematic, given the fact that many of us also consider the fact of being "born here" as conferring "Bahamian" status (unless, of course, one of your parents came from Haiti). To date, the only recent report that has attempted to deal with this issue remains the IOM Report, which attempted to survey Haitians in The Bahamas regardless of their status. And so we do not know what we mean when we say "illegal immigrants" are responsible for our social ills.Let's go back to the question that we started with, then: the idea of escalating crime in The Bahamas (by which we mean mostly in Nassau), and the common habit of blaming this crime on the "Haitian element". If we were to study the issue dispassionately, using empirical evidence, we would discover that the common position in this case is just plain wrong, according to every set of statistics we can find collected by different agencies. Here I'll be referring to three such sets: statistics collected by police, statistics collected by the prison, and statistics collected by the College of The Bahamas. As far as murder is concerned, between 2005 and 2009, the number of murder suspects categorized as being of "Haitian" ethnicity corresponds fairly closly to the official number of people classified as "Haitian nationals" according to 2010 the census: 12%. For the prison population, the number of people incarcerated who were born in Haiti is between 2% and 3%—a far cry from the official figure of 11% of the population. The popular correlation of "illegal immigrants" with escalating criminal activity is, quite simply, wrong. According to every set of statistics we have at our disposal, it is "tru-tru" Bahamians who commit most of the crime from which we suffer.The sooner we admit this as fact, then, the sooner we can find solutions which might make a difference. For it stands to reason that if our assumptions are so wrong, then maybe many of the other assumptions that we spout so freely—like the ideas that "broken homes" contribute to crime, or that unemployment does, or even the involvement of women in the workforce—are wrong as well. And if our assumptions are wrong, then our proposed solutions are very likely going to be ineffective. The more we bandy about ideas that are poorly researched, cobbled together from "gut" feelings (which may well translate simply as prejudice), or, worse, come from pathological partisan politics, we run the risk not only of not fixing the problems, but of making them worse.So let's go back to my contention that what we are experiencing today is the result of the rapid social changes that have taken place over the past 50 years, and the slow response of our social institutions to those changes. A dispassionate review of the situation will enable us (a) to identify the extent and type of the changes; (b) seek and identify root causes of social ills; and (c) craft responses that are relevant and have some chance of succeeding as a result, freeing us from the bigotry, partisan politics, and knee-jerk reactions that currently characterize our proposed solutions. It will also help to give us hope. For if others have faced similar problems and solved them, then we can do so as well.---*featured photo taken from 2006 Winston V. Saunders' You Can Lead A Horse To Water in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photo by Eric Rose.

Random thoughts of a serious nature

It's pretty clear that all is not well in our beautiful Bahamaland. I know; that's an understatement, perhaps of prodigious proportions, perhaps just an understatement. We have been independent for forty-plus years, and in that time we have created new classes, new racial profiles for the country, we have urbanized most of the island of New Providence, we have attracted 6 million tourists, we have racked up a staggering debt, and—most worrying to most of us—we have also moved, in one generation, from being a sleepy, peaceful nation to one where criminal violence is taken for granted, and where fear, anger and untimely grief are commonplace emotions for us all.You may be surprised when I say that this is, in many ways, par for the course. What I mean by that is that societies that experience rapid growth of any kind, be it in terms of population, revenue, immigration, any rapid change—become unstable unless those changes are anticipated and planned for, unless, indeed, the social structures that maintain order are elastic enough and strong enough to respond to those changes. In most cases throughout history around the world, social structures are slow to change, are cumbersome, and cannot respond adequately, and when rapid transformations occur, periods of instability occur. Those periods may be inevitable, but they are not insoluble.I'm saying that because I think that the one thing that I don't see enough of in our society right now is hope. It's true that we are going through tougher times than the current generations are used to; but The Bahamas has weathered far tougher times of far different kinds, and, in the past, has overcome them, has even flourished. But it takes the ability to understand what's going on and the ability and the will to respond in ways that may not be so commonplace.One of the most important ways we have to learn to respond it to be able to put aside emotion and to look at the problems dispassionately, analytically, without blame, without fallacious reasoning, without hype, without sensationalism. This is critical in our nation, because in addition to the not uncommon social instability we are facing right now, we are also a nation who has inherited a historical burden that makes it difficult to believe in things that can make a difference. If I were to name that burden as "racism" it would oversimplify it. But we have inherited a view of the world that is racist and that was created and perfected for the purpose of enslaving a group of people and of maintaining their subordination over time. Even though that subordination has officially ended, the world view that maintained it continues, and according to that world view the descendants of African slaves are fundamentally incapable of governing themselves or others peacefully or in an orderly fashion—evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.If we are to begin to approach a solution to our social problems, we have to recognize this burden of history and eradicate it.So I have been thinking about how to begin that process. Now that classes are over, I would like to begin a series of posts that outline the conclusions I've come to. For writing may be a small, small thing, but there's value to approaching big problems in a different way.Here's what you won't see me do.You won't see me divide the world into two political parties and assume that the one that isn't in power has any of the answers. It's pretty clear that our political class has no idea whatsoever how to solve our problems—or, if it does, has not got the courage or the humanity to exercise those solutions.You won't see me divide the world into races, either; because finger-pointing and racial profiling don't solve the problem either, and are, indeed, part of it. That does not mean I'm not going to talk about race; I am, but not from the point of view of skin colour or of individual human beings. What we need now is a structural dismantling of racist institutions, not a petty battle about and between individuals.You won't see me assume that there is such a thing as a "true-true" Bahamian and draw lines around and between people of different origns or nationalities. We all inhabit the same space, and we have to learn how to be generous with that space to all those who contribute.There are some things you will see me do, but not just yet. Watch this space. I'm trying to clear my head. I'm trying to start a different conversation, and to get some ideas going that might, in the end, help us stabilize our nation. In the long run, of course. Because there is no magic bullet at all.

Transforming Spaces 2014: Water

[easy-media med="3247"]I took the morning tour. I could write about it, but pictures are worth ... well, you know. Check out the gallery above.

Research at the College of The Bahamas

Some time ago I wrote a post about the absurdity of cutting the budget for the College of The Bahamas at the same time as the College is being mandated to move to university status. Not only is the College the national tertiary level institution, but it's the only indigenous public institution that is engaged in any form of ongoing Bahamian research.How many of you who are reading this know that? (Colleagues, especially those of you engaged in research, you don't count.)Apparently the Minister of Education, who was once a Deputy Chair of the College Council, doesn't know that.Certainly the government, which happily pays out hundreds of thousands of dollars to foreign agencies and institutions, doesn't know that. Or doesn't care.Well, here's the truth of it.Last Sunday, I returned from Exuma, where seven of my students and I had partnered up with students and faculty from Harvard University as part of the Sustainable Exuma project. Our contribution was at the research end. My students spent ten days in selected communities in Long Island, Great Exuma and the Exuma Cays, studying topics ranging from land tenure to sustainable tourism to social and economic interactions in those communities. In a couple of weeks' time they will be giving a presentation to a small group of their peers on those studies. This past Friday, another group of my students gave presentations on the ongoing research they are conducting into the viability of the proposed Bahamian carnival. Their topics included the sustainability of a Bahamian carnival, getting Bahamians' buy-in for the carnival, the carnival's benefit to Junkanoo, security at the carnival, and marketing the carnival to tourists. They have engaged in secondary analysis and first-hand interviewing of stakeholders and experts. At the Student Research Symposium, which is in its sixth year, other students (all undergraduates) presented on topics as varied as young Bahamians' residence in New Providence, mathematical models for the human spine, and the effect of alcohol use and erectile dysfunction among Bahamian men.And last semester, my students engaged in interviews with people who were ten years old or older on July 10, 1973, to collect their memories of that date and also to collect their evaluation of how far we have come over the past forty years. Those interviews are being transferred to a digital archive which will be available for Bahamians to dip into in the near future, but which will also be available in 2023 when we are fifty years old.None of these students are graduates. They are all undergraduates. And they are all conducting original, Bahamian research.Meanwhile, COB faculty are focussing on (forgive me, scientists; I can only speak for my discipline, so my colleagues can help me fill in the gaps): violence in Bahamian society, including violence in the home, the school, the street; criminality in Bahamian society; profiles of inmates at Fox Hill prison; migration; statelessness; human trafficking (yes, politicians, COB is studying human trafficking; there was no need to invite the UN to do it for you); potcakes and pet-keeping; manifestations of Bahamian Creole (aka Bahamian dialect); ways of teaching that incorporate the Creole. Other studies involving both faculty and students include the shortage of Bahamian nurses; the potential impact of VAT; the economic impact of Junkanoo; and the efficacy of the Stafford Sands economic model for the twenty-first century. Not to mention the ever-expanding study of Bahamian history, in broad strokes and in nuance.Where can we find this research? you are probably asking. Well, it's around in various forms. There are books published with the research in them, and there is the International Journal of Bahamian Studies, published annually and available online. There's also the School of English's journal Lucayos, also available online. If you pay attention, you'll know what we're all working on.