More of the same-old

It’s 2019. Conversations in the public domain are swinging round to elections, which are coming in two years. (Is it coincidental that conversations in the American public domain are doing the same?) But the conversations are more of the same-old same-old: who makes the best leader, who we want to elect. Who, who, who.

There are too few conversations about what we need as a nation if we hope to grow any further in the twenty-first century. Because the truth is, we are not growing. Our nation is floundering. And the only solutions politicians seem to be able to offer are weights to help us sink to the sea-bottom faster, not life rafts or under-the-seat flotation devices or even, heaven forfend, entirely new ships headed in entirely new directions.

But that is what we need.

In virtually every area we can measure, The Bahamas is objectively faring worse. Wait—I can hear the protests now. We are modestly performing better on international economic lists. We are complying with rich countries’ desires for smaller, poorer countries. We are scrambling to join international organisations which were set up to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, which, arguably, encourage the creation of poverty in order to simultaneously create wealth. In other words, looking at some internationally-sourced standards of measurement, we are “doing better” as a nation. Our numbers, they tell us, are headed in the right direction; our laws are more palatable to those nations who would prefer to keep their wealth in their own hands rather than sharing it across borders.

But when it comes to the lives of Bahamians?

Our cost of living has gone up.

Our standard of living has gone down.

Our tourism product is faltering, badly, even though no one will admit it.

Where our tourism product is holding its own (large New Providence resorts and small foreign concerns across the Family Islands), most of the gross revenue leaves the country. Experts estimate that 70% of every dollar earned by tourism is banked overseas.

What good are “jobs” when we are working on plantations whose profits are sent far, far away?

Bahamians are caught in a stranglehold of expense that prohibits our ever being able to become internationally competitive, even as we tremble on the edge of entering global free trade agreements that will open up our economy to be despoiled still further by the rapacious of the world.

And the only solutions our politicians can conceive to offer us are higher/more taxes, fewer services, and more competition from corporations whose home countries support their efforts through incentives, tax breaks, and free trade agreements that work in their favour but not in ours.

*

Two years ago, in deciding not to cast a vote for any political party or candidate in my constituency, my partners and I were vilified by people who felt we were, I don’t know, betraying the democratic process/opting out of creating change/supporting wrongdoing in the highest circles. In response, we stated that we had no confidence that anything we did, any vote we cast, would change the direction of The Bahamas in any positive way. Voting against bad policy is not a solution; it enables the election of the incompetent, the intellectually bankrupt, the politically hollow. And the result of the palpable anger against the bad governance of 2012-2017 was the election of a house of assembly that might, in the absence of concrete ideas of how to change the Bahamas’ fortunes, be open to any and every suggestion from external actors, and which could, given the tiny opposition in parliament, be in a position to do virtually anything at all.

Which is where we find ourselves today.

It does not matter who sits in government.

It matters what their plans are to change the course of our nation.

So, as we begin our conversations, and, hell, as we begin to see rallies and have closed-door meetings about the teams we might build that could win the next election, we need to start having conversations that are not partisan in nature, but that are clearly about policy. That talk about how we go about building a better country.

What solutions do we need to craft if we are not to slide rapidly into the maelstrom that is the general Caribbean economy?

In what, or whom, do we need to invest (while we still have the resources) to ensure that the wealth that we possessed for the fifty years between 1945 and 2005—in part by design and in part by accident—bears fruit and continues to benefit the Bahamian citizenry?

How do we avoid the disaster that is, to my mind, clearly around the corner—the disaster that recreates the economy of the colony of the Bahama Islands that existed until the 1950s and 1960s, where a few people (a tiny, interconnected oligarchy) amass all the wealth and all the power, and the rest serve as an underpaid, under-served, unhealthy workforce?

How do we leverage the advantages our nation has to make us into a Botswana of the Atlantic, rather than a nation in which wealth (almost always foreign) is our only criteria for success?

Because here’s the thing. If we are not having these conversations, or demanding them from the people who seek our votes two years from now, then what, what is our vote really for?

A message from my torturer

Keep getting this in my email:

Good day

Dо not mind оn my illitеrасy, I am from China.

This is your last chance to save your life and my LAST WARNING.

I uрlоаded thе mаliciоus рrоgram оn your systеm.

Sinсе thаt mоmеnt I рilfеrеd аll рrivy bасkgrоund frоm yоur system. Аdditiоnаlly I have some mоrе соmрromising еvidеnсе. The mоst interеsting evidenсе thаt I stоlе- its a vidеоtаpе with yоur masturbаtiоn. I аdjustеd virus оn а роrn web sitе аnd аftеr yоu loadеd it. Whеn yоu dесidеd with thе video аnd taрреd оn a рlаy buttоn, my dеlеtеrious sоft аt оncе sеt uр on yоur systеm. Аfter adjusting, yоur саmerа shoоt the vidеоtаре with yоu sеlf-abusing, in аdditiоn it sаvеd рrесisеly the роrn video you mаsturbаtеd оn. In nеxt fеw dаys my mаlwаrе соllесtеd аll yоur sосial and wоrk сontасts.

If yоu wаnt tо delete the reсоrds- pay me 300 euro in BTС(сryрtосurrenсy).

I provide yоu my Btc number - 127fnd1eojhha6ym6uXhhYkphvgY3AMTcU

Yоu have 24 hours aftеr reаding. Whеn I gеt trаnsfеr I will destroy the vidеotaрe еvermоrе.If you need 48 hours just Open the calculator on your desktop and press +++Оther wаy I will sеnd thе tape to all yоur сollеagues and friеnds.

WHAT HAVE I DONE??? What have I done???

Flee at once, all is discovered.

*

This is my favourite spam mail of all time, folks. There it is.

The NEW age of revolution

ev

There's a video I shared on Facebook. Its purpose: to explain to the world the real purpose behind the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement in France. The speaker in the video calls it "the revolution". 

We live in a revolutionary age. It's not something we can escape. Marshall McLuhan, writing long ago, observed that when the medium of communication changes, the entire world—social, cultural, political—shifts. In his book The Gutenburg Galaxy he offers evidence for his position, exploring in particular how the shift from script-culture (when books were handwritten) to print-culture (when writing could be mass-produced) bore fruit in the various revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He also demonstrated how the shift to broadcast media from print media (he lumped film in with print, but radio and television with broadcast media) had a similar revolutionary impact.

So it should be unsurprising that actual political revolutions are now happening—on both the right and the left. It should be unsurprising, indeed expected, that these revolutions are protests, one way or another, about the representative government associated with today's democracies—protests about the way in which the people we elect to represent us do NOT represent the people who elected them.

I've argued elsewhere and I want to argue again that it's time for us to rethink democracy. Not to get rid of it, but to re-tool it. Questions will arise. Print and broadcast culture flattened the world, created a shared culture that could be experienced by many people at once. The digital world ruled by clustering algorithms has retribalized society. There is absolutely no need—indeed, there is little space at all—for people with different views of the world to interact at all, much less discuss/debate their differences. But democracy is founded upon dialogue and debate. How do we keep our democracies alive when the world is being fragmented by algorithm into groups of people who consume the same things and think alike?

Discuss. And to get you started (or to finish you?), check out this experiment. To find out more about it in real time (which is how I got started), check out this podcast.

Independence, Culture, Identity: power, neglect and disrespect

The punchline

I'll tell you a sick joke. All my adult life, I've been a taxpayer and a law-abiding citizen, and all my adult life, the things that mean the most to me—knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and creative endeavour—have had no place in the society our politicians have assembled.A year and a half ago, I had a personal encounter that promised something different. I ran into the man who is now the Prime Minister, and he announced, as his manifesto did before that moment and as his maiden speech did after, that a Bahamian government would at long last take our culture seriously enough to give it an agency of its own. A stand-alone ministry, he promised. My response? I laughed. I've heard it all before.Turn back the clock to February 2006. There is a cultural conclave going on, a gathering of the Bahamian cultural community to discuss two main things: the preparation of the National Cultural Policy and the hosting of CARIFESTA X in The Bahamas. The culmination of this event is a speech given by the sitting prime minister, who announces two things: a cabinet shuffle, by which he will become the substantive minister of culture, and by which culture will be moved into the Office of the Prime Minister preliminary to the creation of a—you guessed it—standalone ministry of culture.And so the cultural affairs division moved, in name and in person, out of the top-floor offices on Thompson Boulevard. There was no place initially to which to move; the officers and staff of the division were given a day to pack up and leave, but had nowhere to go. Eventually, after some nomadism, we ended up being housed by the Antiquities, Monuments and Museums Corporation. The excitement of the announcement fizzled out when reality set in, and politics, as it often does, took over the actual service of the actual people. Then, as now, words were said. The reality was something fundamentally different.My response, when Dr. Minnis waxed enthusiastic about the standalone ministry of culture, therefore, was laughter. I knew better than most of the political hopefuls what exactly that promise would mean. I knew, because in 2006, I spent the better part of two months writing minutes, proposals, and draft cabinet papers that would enable the creation of such a standalone ministry to take place.

The problem

The basic problem is this: there is no such thing as a department of culture. The entity that governs Bahamian culture is quite simply a division––a collection of civil servants under a particular unit head served by a director. But the director of cultural affairs is not a substantive director. There is no budget head that is assigned to cultural affairs; the director of culture controls no actual money; all that individual has the authority to do is advise the permanent secretary and the minister on actions that might or might not make sense. In order for any work to get done, the cultural affairs division needs to be housed in a ministry, as it has no accountant, no registry, and no human resources officer assigned to it. Money cannot be released on the director's signature alone; the permanent secretary and sometimes undersecretaries can sign off on budget line items that are assigned to the cultural affairs division without the consent or even the knowledge of the director. I know, because it happened to me often enough. There is no career path for cultural officials, despite the fact that the division is one of the oldest in the government, having been established before independence, in 1972. There is no permanent location for the division, and the achievements of the division have been lost in time, because every time the division is moved somewhere new, its closed files do not travel with it.The road to a standalone ministry is a lengthy one. It requires the creation of an actual department of culture, with a budget head, which is controlled by a substantive director. It requires the creation of an accounts department, a registry, and a human resources department. It requires the identification of permanent offices. It requires the creation of cultural career paths which will allow those individuals who are hired to work in the division the opportunity to gain promotions throughout their careers. It requires thought, and it requires investment. It may require legislation.As I listened to Dr. Minnis, I held this knowledge in my head, along with the equal and opposite knowledge that the history of the Free National Movement has not been kind to culture or cultural activity; indeed, in 1997, the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture was disbanded altogether, and the cultural affairs division began its long trek through peculiar ministries, such as Public Service (and Culture).I also held this equal knowledge in my head: that the time for a standalone ministry of culture has long passed. Ministries of culture are a twentieth-century innovation, a holdover from a time when culture was a simple matter of creative expression, something that was relegated to the sidelines of society, and not integrated into the economy at all. Ministries, which are political entities fully funded by the central purse and dependent on it, are not the medium by which most cultural activity is generated or delivered throughout the Caribbean today; most Caribbean nations have created quasi-governmental corporations to manage and develop their culture. So even the idea of a stand-alone ministry of culture is dated, to say the least.

Culture, globally

In the twenty-first century, culture is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global economy, and ministries of culture are too slow and too heavy with political baggage to meet the needs of the new century. The impact of culture on the economies of all nations goes far beyond the expressionistic today. Creativity is the currency of the digital age. Cultural activity, its gatekeepers swept away by the expansion of the internet, is one of the most resilient and active of all economic sectors. As manufacturing shrinks, culture grows.This is even true in The Bahamas. I would guess, though no studies have yet been comprehensively done, that culture is one of the fastest growing sectors of the Bahamian economy. It is supremely under-recognized and ludicrously under-supported, but that has not stopped a generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings from going into professions that did not exist in The Bahamas for previous generations, like mine. Writers, filmmakers, artists, musicians—these are professions that have traction in our nation despite the complete neglect of the cultural sector by lawmakers and politicians.It is in this economic sector that the greatest potential lies for increasing revenue for our nation. The primary resource required by the cultural industries is human creativity, which is both unique and infinite. Secondary resources (which we do not have) include training centres, schools of the arts, investment, incentives, and proper cultural grants (the $1 million set aside is a pittance in this regard, especially considering the kinds of investments, the millions spent both in concessions and real money on attracting foreigners to set up businesses in this nation).Beyond the economy, cultural activity is critical to human survival. Despite our deeply ingrained belief that culture is something that children can indulge in, but that adults grow out of, despite our assumption that spending one's time in cultural activity is a luxury that many cannot afford, the reality is that to build a strong society requires the investment and support of writers, composers, choreographers, directors, actors, artists. These people are the translators and the creators of individual, community and national identity. In societies where art is not recognized, there can be no greatness, because there is no coherent sense of self. And we live in a society where, forty-five years after independence, we still have no national library, no national museum, no school for the arts. Need I go on?

Despite it all

But despite this all, the Bahamian cultural community, like the global cultural community, is growing. What's more: it is vocal, it is conscious, and it is fierce. It stands against the traditional xenophobia and misogyny of our society; many of our most outspoken activists are also creative workers in one realm or another. Bahamian art, plays, film and music do not accept the local status quo, and challenge long-held prejudices and habits. They make many feel uncomfortable. Discomfort is often a prelude to necessary change.And so. Promises notwithstanding, there is no standalone ministry of culture, outdated as that concept may be. Instead, the agency that does exist is now headed by a lawyer who has, as far as I know, no knowledge of or connection to the cultural community of The Bahamas (or, for that matter, to the sports community either. I cannot speak for youth).And the media is complicit. As it announces that for the first time our country has a female minister of youth, sports and culture, it lets pass the equally historic fact that for a year, for the first time, we in the cultural community had one of our own, a professional poet, writer, and actor, to serve us. The media speaks about sports, but neglects to consider the power of culture, both here and abroad, and fails to analyze the message that this cabinet shuffle has sent, loud and clear, to the Bahamian cultural community.This recent appointment demonstrates a deep disrespect for the cultural community, for Bahamian identity, and for the benefits, economic, social, and human, of investment in creative life.Further, as the appointment occurs the week before we limp into the ceremonies that recognize our 45th anniversary of independence, it reveals an abiding disregard for, and neglect of, the citizenry of this nation as a whole. Nations are built by artists and writers, who capture critical moments for their fellow citizens and translate them beyond the ordinary into forms that inspire reflection, discussion, and change. Nations are built by composers and choreographers who take beauty and turn it into movement or song. They're built by actors and directors, who use the palette of human emotion to reveal to citizens who collectively they are. Artists and cultural workers are the lifeblood of nations. The time is long overdue for us to have appropriate representation at the most powerful table in the land.This appointment? It gives us no such representation. It doesn't provide the cultural community with a potential champion, someone who understands and can fight for us, crafting legislation that builds up our common life, creating programmes and institutions that serve us. Instead, In fact, it's little more than an exercise in power. it shows us all that cabinet posts exist not to serve the citizenry, but to reward allegiance to the leader of the party in power.

Nothing new

The saddest thing of all is that there is nothing new about this disregard. It's not unique at all. It is merely a continuation of our governments' permanent official and political disregard for the core of what is Bahamian.We are masters of dissing our culture. We must be; we vote again and again for people who excel at it. But make no mistake here, my fellow Bahamians. By dissing our culture, we diss our selves.

Independence and ministries of culture

January 10, 2017.

Rawson Square, being occupied by We Marchers. I'm there, live streaming on Facebook, when the marchers come streaming in. There's a knot of people that's moving across the square, and when it gets to me I realize it's Dr. Minnis and his entourage: the (then former) Leader of the Opposition, moving through the crowd, gladhanding and accepting accolades.

He sees me.

"I know you should be a happy young lady," he tells me. "You see we've announced we will have an independent ministry of culture."

I laugh. I have heard this before. Eleven years ago: February 2006, to be exact.

"We'll see. Mouth could say anything," I tell him.

"That's the difference between doctors and lawyers," he tells me. "A doctor is trained to tell the truth. I can't talk bout lawyers."

Five months later, Dr. Minnis becomes the Prime Minister. We wait. (My breath is not bated; I know better. I have spoiled my ballot for a reason. But never mind.)

The ministries are announced.

There is—wait for it—a ministry of youth, sports and culture. O joy! But no, wait—That is not an independent ministry of culture at all.

Culture is still And Culture.

But at least it's headed for the VERY FIRST TIME by a professional cultural artist: Michael Pintard, poet, performer, playwright. Nobody seems to notice this, except for cultural artists; there's no announcement in the paper about an artist for the FIRST TIME being made minister of culture. (but later, there'll be whole stories about the first woman heading up sports. NOT the MBE awarded athlete MP, mind you, but anyway ...)

*Fast forward. July 2018. There has been a cabinet shuffle. Four ministries are affected, among them—you guessed it—the ministry of And Culture! Our poet is moved to, wait what? Agriculture. And who do you think the new Minister of And Culture is?

...a lawyer.

The Progressive Forum (3)

Here is the presentation I gave at today's Progressive Forum. [wpvideo nELGXa7V ]https://youtu.be/I7xJW6phfEQ

The Progressive Forum (2)

Gowon Bowe's presentation (what I could record of it). Forty-five minutes' worth. Ran out of memory before he was finished.https://youtu.be/00dRJTLbr-Y

The Progressive Forum (1)

Michael Stevenson's presentation at the Progressive Forum.https://youtu.be/EsRMRBw7xmk

Why democracy is more than just casting a vote

There's a common perception in The Bahamas, and perhaps in other parts of the world too, though I can't speak to them, that democracy flourishes during election seasons, when the citizenry is given its chance to elect the people that will govern the nation in ordinary times.

According to this perception, the power of the Bahamian people (in our parliamentary system) is limited to one moment in time, generally falling roughly every five years, when the citizens of the nation indicate their approval or disapproval for the way in which their affairs have been handled by voting for or against the group of people who have handled those affairs. Once that moment has passed, though, the people's power subsides, and the elected officials assume it.

But that is not all there is to democracy. Not at all.

What democracy is

The idea of "democracy"—at least the idea that the western world holds about democracy—is said to have originated in Ancient Greece, in Athens. Rather than being ruled by a monarch or an aristocracy, the government consisted of the Athenian citizens themselves. These citizens would gather in public spaces to discuss the affairs of the city-state, and vote directly on important matters.But that was ancient times, and only a handful of people living in Athens were considered "citizens": men who owned land. This limited the government to a small group of people who had decision-making power, and excluded from this process were women, servants, people who owned no land, and slaves.

Later manifestations of democracy, those that found their expressions in the Americas, initially adopted this model. But this was expanded in the nineteenth century to include all free male citizens of a particular nation-state, and then in the twentieth to include women as well. By the time we entered the twenty-first century, the idea of "democracy" included the right of all citizens of a nation-state to have some say—usually through voting for representatives—in their government.

So we can say that what we understand democracy to be is government of the people by the people. How that actually works itself out, though, is a matter of some difference the world over.Here in The Bahamas, it's worth thinking about the way we have so far engaged in the process, and it's time to ask ourselves whether the democracy we have become used to—casting a vote every five years—is still meeting our needs today.

Bahamian democracy—direct or representative?

What we practice here is representative democracy, a form of democracy which depends on the sovereign (i.e. the citizens) choosing individuals to represent their wider concerns in a place of government. The election of those individuals is a matter of trusting them to work not only for the general good but also in the interest of those people they represent.

This is a different form of democracy from that practised in ancient Greece or in ancient Africa, or even in Switzerland until the twentieth century. In those societies, democracy was direct: citizens gathered in public spaces to vote on matters that pertained to them.

Direct democracy works well in situations where the society is relatively small, where issues can be brought before town meetings and discussed by the populace, or where democracy is limited to certain sectors of the population—say land-owners, or men, or members of a certain race or class.

Representative democracy works better when populations grow too large for individual citizens to have a useful perspective of the needs of the whole society. It also is useful in situations where a minority of citizens have the education, the means, or the information to comprehend the bigger picture. It is a very practical way of running a society. Good government, after all, is time-consuming and requires a lot of effort.

The benefits of representative democracy

When populations grow too big and issues are pressing, every challenge cannot logistically be brought before every citizen to be voted upon. Further, ordinary citizens tend to be driven primarily by their own self-interest, and are not in the habit of considering the common good, especially where that common good might infringe upon their own needs or desires.

Take the question of New Providence traffic, for example. The source of the problem is simple: there are too many cars on the island. The solution is also simple: to reduce the number of cars on our roads in one way or another—by restricting the number of cars that can be imported, or by limiting the number of cars that a household can own, or by creating an efficient public transportation system that makes it unnecessary for individuals to have to drive everywhere.But which individual is likely to opt for any of these solutions? Some of us may voluntarily choose to limit ourselves to one car per household, but the probability that all of us will do so is slim. In a case where we voted directly on this issue, most people would probably choose to benefit themselves and their families and ignore the common good.In this situation, representative government is a valid option. Individuals are elected to take the difficult decisions on behalf of the state as a whole. And by voting for those individuals, most citizens agree to have a single person represent them at the decision-making levels in society.

The dangers of representative democracy

The issue facing us now in The Bahamas is that our governments are only as good as the people who represent their constituents. Our form of representative government is not very extensive. In a country of 400,000 odd people, we have the equivalent of one representative for every 1,000 citizens. This representative is expected to do many things: serve as members of the cabinet, chairs of government agencies, legislators, and representatives of their constituencies. They are expected to handle the most mundane annoyances—like the collection of trash and repair of potholes—as well as national and international issues, like foreign investors' project proposals and avoiding financial downgrades.

Unfortunately, the majority of representatives that we elect are ill prepared for these responsibilities. Our system of government is also poorly structured to meet the needs of the twenty-first century. The fact that we have only one single tier of government—people who serve at the national level—is also a drawback. It does not allow people who wish to serve their nation to gain experience in thinking and planning collectively, with the result that bad decisions are routinely made.

Our system is also overly partisan. In the normal scheme of things, the citizenry is given a say only at election time, and the ordinary citizen has no say over the people who are brought before them to elect. The vast majority of these individuals are selected by political parties in closed-door sessions with no public oversight and no accountability to the citizenry. Candidates are presented to the electorate in a take-it-or-leave-it manner, in the confidence that the electorate will simply vote along party lines.

Once elected, the MPs are no longer accountable to the people who elected them. There is nothing compelling them to keep their constituents informed about the legislation that comes before them as MPs; they are not obliged to consult with the people they purport to represent before voting on any particular matter. Indeed, their primary loyalty is expected to be to their political party, not to the citizens they represent. What this creates is an oligarchy rather than a democracy, and defeats the principle of government for and by the people. What we get instead is government for and by the party, a distortion of the very idea of democracy.

We need a new approach

The democracy that we practice here in The Bahamas, this voting for people who represent parties, not the citizenry, is not serving us well. The people we send to the House of Parliament are not our representatives at all. They are not there to serve us. They are there to serve their political parties, and we, the citizens, have no say within those entities unless we decide to declare an affiliation with one or the other, become an active member, and get to a place where we can vote for prospective candidates. But this state of affairs defeats the purpose of one person, one vote. Those people who choose the candidates do so behind closed doors, and are not accountable to the citizenry for that vote. The citizens, on the other hand, are at their mercy when they are faced with their choices at election time.

So what can we do about it?

Democracy: more than just casting a vote

In the first place, we have to get past this idea that democracy is something that happens once every five years. We have to get beyond the concept that the people we send to the House of Assembly are our "leaders", and remember they are our representatives. We have to start exercising the rights that are guaranteed us in our constitution, namely the freedoms of conscience (to believe what we want to believe), of expression (to say what we think) and of assembly (to gather together in large groups) to make our voices heard. When we are not happy with the way in which we are being represented, we have the right—indeed, because this is a democracy, we have the duty—to let our representatives know we are not happy. And we have to be prepared to do this whether we have leaders to follow or not.

So when we are unhappy with the way in which our representatives are serving us, we have the right and the duty to say so, and there are many legal channels available to us. There are certain limits on our freedom; we are not guaranteed absolute freedom of expression, for instance, and certain forms of speech, certain things we say—or the way in which we say them—have consequences. But we do have the right to say what we think, and we should. One of the slogans used by the We March movement of 2015-2016 was this: the power of the people is greater than the people in power. We would do well to remember that.

There is one last thing I need to say about democracy. One thing that is intoxicating about the idea that democracy is the government of the people by the people is the sense that it is the majority that makes the critical decisions. I frequently see discussions of democracy lead to this point: that whatever the majority of the people in the nation want is what must happen.But that misses the point of democracy, which is that each individual member of a society is equal to every other individual member. The mob (the unthinking majority, which reacts based on emotional, often selfish, impulses) is not greater than the individual; democracy is an aggregate of individuals. What that means is that in true democracies, the rights of minorities are guarded and protected.

The place of the minority

In our system, which elects people based on a simple majority of votes (the first-past-the-post system), we tend to hold the idea that if a citizen is not part of the mainstream, their rights are not valuable. But this is called the tyranny of the majority, and it is a danger that goes along with democratic systems that rely on the will of the majority. The tyranny of the majority is as dangerous a form of tyranny as any other, and must always be guarded against.It's not easy for individual citizens to think about the rights of others. After all, it's human nature to look out for one's own self-interest and seek to maximize it. But if we believe in democracy, this is a principle to which we must adhere, and it is a practice that we must exercise.

So as we move to hold our representatives accountable, as we move to make them aware of our will, as we move to ensure that they represent the citizens of our nation and not just their political parties or their own personal desires or benefit, we must also remember that the nation is greater than our own individual interests. As co-governors of this state, we have to recognize that we are and must be our neighbours' keepers, and it is our duty to look out not only for ourselves but also for all the others whose rights may have been overlooked because they are not part of the majority.

Democracy is not an easy thing! But it is worthwhile. We must never stop thinking about it, questioning it, and finding ways to expand it. So I challenge you, my fellow Bahamians. What are you doing to make our Bahamian democracy bigger, stronger and better?

Oban, the Glass Window, and other cautionary tales - Part I

Or, why I really spoiled my ballot

Time and rope

There is a great Bahamian saying: time longer dan rope.

A year has passed, a year and a month or so, since #OutDaBox242 began its much-excoriated campaign to raise the profile of voter registration and float the option of not having to choose the best of a bad lot at election time. Well, enough time has passed for the three of us, us three "educated fools", to get to a point where we are trying really hard not to say those four fatal words.It's not been a full year since the incredible landslide, but we are already realizing that the euphoria of getting rid of the last government does not compensate for what the new government lacks. And we are also well aware of the danger of the kind of majority that we put in the house of assembly. By changing the faces in that institution, we have made no real change at all. The prime minister still possesses far too much power that is good for any man. The government is far too strong and far too able to make bad decisions with virtually no check on its power in the house of assembly. The speaker has already abused his authority and abased his position in doing so. The minister of finance is still talking about the excesses of the previous government and why we can't get out from under. The minister of immigration and the attorney-general are now antagonists to freedom fighters that they were once allied with. Go find a newspaper from 2013, substitute names and faces, and see what, if anything, has changed.

I am hoping that enough time has passed for the emotionalism that blazed around the last election to have worn off to allow me to explain why I really spoiled my ballot––and why I shall continue to do so until we change the way we approach democracy in this nation we are trying to shape.

Where's the vision?

I cannot speak for my partners in crime, those comrades who with me refused to take part in the abortive exercise in non-democracy that occurred in the last general election, but I can speak for myself. My refusal to cast a vote in support of any candidate in my constituency, and hence my refusal to give my support to any political party, was partly motivated by a desire to protest the lack of real choice given to "voters". (It's not a new protest, by the way. Forty years ago, while most Bahamians were rejoicing in the glories of majority rule, Patrick Rahming was expressing the selfsame sentiments in his poem "Power": "vot'n ain' much power / if somebody else guh choose / the choice".)

But other, just as real, reasons I withheld my vote in 2017, and why I will do in 2022 (should we have to wait that long)––and beyond, unless we see fundamental changes in our society between now and then), centre around the following facts.

1. We are a new nation. This is not being said by way of excuse, but by way of fact. Our constitution is 45 years old, and our nationhood is seriously underdeveloped. And nations do not just happen; they must be dreamed up, imagined, crafted.

2. There is no nation-dreaming or crafting going on.

3. The vast majority of people being ratified as political candidates fit into three main categories:

   1. Hoary politicians who have held on grimly and are now awaiting their turns in the limelight and shouldering everyone else out of the way;

   2. Party loyalists or, worse, friends, families and lovers of the hoary and desperate members of category 1;

   3. People who have some deep-seated insecurity of their own, some illusion of grandeur, some outsize concept of themselves, and who find themselves drawn to the perks, prestige, and trappings that parliament can offer them, who like the idea of the blue plate that allows them to do what they want when they want, who wish to get the even bluer plate that comes with a car and a driver and the ability to sweep past the paeons to the top of the drive and have other paeons kiss their feet when they step out.

   (While there are some individuals who offer themselves for public service out of a sense of duty or obligation, who are called to serve, and who are the kinds of people I could support, their value is usually swallowed up by the corruption, the limitations, and the rapaciousness of the former three groups.)

4. There is absolutely no deep thought about who we are, where we are, what The Bahamas is or could be, our strengths, our weaknesses, our advantages, our opportunities, and ways to build a future.

5. There is no policy that is crafted to meet the needs of the late twentieth century, much less the twenty-first.

6. Governments ever since 1992 have given up the idea that Bahamians can or should be architects of their own fate. Instead, they place their faith pathetically in foreign investment, doling out unimaginable concessions to undeserving non-Bahamian prospectors without even understanding what the political and economic philosophy of foreign investment is supposed to achieve.

7. Our leaders stumble from crisis to crisis and grasp the ludicrous, the ridiculous and the illegal as a means to solve our problems––or, perhaps more accurately, to begin to seem to fulfil their vapid election promises.

For the rest of my life, then, I have resolved not to vote for any individual, party, or group that has not done the following things, and demonstrated that they have done them:

1. Articulated what they know about The Bahamas as a whole, as an archipelago, and indicated that they are aware of the critical issues facing us over the next 50 years;

2. Analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of our state and shown that they are able to understand our opportunities and threats;

3. Outlined solutions that are home-grown and rooted in local research, even if they draw on best practices from around the world. After all, we know ourselves best. And if these solutions are all Nassau-centric, they are not solutions;

4. Considered ways in which to stop the leakage of our best minds while we still import cheaper labour from elsewhere. We are a middle-income developing nation, and so we will lose our best while attracting expatriate second-best. Foreign direct investors are not solvers of local problems. They do not invest in other people's countries to build them. They are capitalists who are seeking strong profits. They cannot ever be substitutes for investment in ourselves;

5. Considered how to end the leakage of Bahamian-generated profits to jurisdictions beyond our own;

6. Recognized that New Providence is a toxic environment socially, physically and environmentally and begun crafting solutions to change that fact;

7. Recognized that the other 98% of the Bahamian archipelago is underdeveloped and the source of much of our potential;

8. Come up with educational strategies to prepare Bahamians for their futures that are NOT mirrors or confusions of the late colonial period;

9. Recognized that in a nation of under half a million people, solutions are possible.

 End of Part I - Stay tuned for Part II, coming Monday

Reflections on Majority Rule 2018 (better late than never)

Fifty-one years and two months ago, on January 10, 1967, the Colony of the Bahama Islands held the election that concluded with what we have come to call "Majority Rule". In 2014, January 10 was officially legislated as a public holiday. And four years after the creation of the Majority Rule Day public holiday, we remain divided as a people as to how, or even whether, to mark this moment, to commemorate this event.The problem is fundamentally political.On one hand, it's politically partisan. No matter how we spin history, it's impossible to separate majority rule from the ascension of the Progressive Liberal Party to the government. The election of the PLP constituted Majority Rule. Put another way, the black majority of this nation chose the PLP to represent it.It's also structurally political. Majority Rule is about the right of the racial majority in The Bahamas to direct its own fate. Before 1967, Bahamians of European descent were socially, economically and politically supreme, Bahamians of non-European descent subordinate. Being part of the white minority conferred a whole system of privileges that the black majority was denied. These included things as simple as access to health care and a high school education, protection from exploitation in the workplace, access to electricity, running water, telephone service and basic sanitation, the opportunity to start businesses or enter the professions, the ability to borrow money from banks, the ability to save money in banks, the right to own land where one pleased, the ability to vote for people who looked like us to represent us in the place where laws were made, and so on.These two elements, the partisan and the structural, combine to make the celebration of Majority Rule Day a point of discomfort for many Bahamians.

The problem of party politics

Opposition politics

First things first. It seems very difficult for contemporary opponents of the Progressive Liberal Party to celebrate their victory on January 10, 1967. Let's face it. That victory represents a political defeat, one when a way of life that was three centuries old came to an abrupt end.  The United Bahamian Party, formed in 1958 in answer to the growing political consciousness of the Bahamian people, dissolved less than 15 years later, in large part because Majority Rule made what it stood for obsolete. But upon that dissolution,  several former members of the UBP helped constitute the Free National Movement in 1972, and they have carried the pain of the 1967 defeat into the political climate of the twenty-first century. You can hear echoes of the UBP philosophy in social media discussions that suggest, sometimes outright, sometimes by implication, that the country was better governed before 1967: the budget was balanced, the education was better, corruption was non-existent, Bahamians were more mannerly, etc. These perspectives mirror and replicate paternalistic arguments advanced first by the British throughout the colonial era, then the UBP in the 1960s and then by the FNM in the 1970s––that the black majority was not ready to govern itself, that it had to be taught how to do so, slowly, and with extreme caution. For the Bahamians who fall into this category, Majority Rule Day is an unwarranted celebration of something that they believe (as the UBP and the FNM predicted in the sixties and the seventies) to have failed.

Governing politics

But there's another side to this issue. Let's not forget that it took The Bahamas 47 years to make Majority Rule Day a public holiday, and the Progressive Liberal Party, the immediate beneficiary of Majority Rule, was in power for 33 of those 47 years. Indeed, the social revolution that brought about Majority Rule swept the PLP into power and kept that party there for twenty-five years straight. It would seem only logical that the party of Lynden Pindling, the Black Moses who led the Black Bahamian Israelites out of the bondage of Bay Street's Egypt and towards the Promised Land on the tenth day of the first month should enshrine that day, should make it the first public holiday of this Bahamian era.But it did not. It was not until the Bahamian Black Moses had been dead almost 14 years that January 10 was elevated to a public holiday. How do we explain this?I'm going to go out on a limb and argue that to focus too closely on the actual events of January 10, 1967 was not in the interest of the PLP of the 1970s and the 1980s. In the first place, the PLP did not actually win the election that was held on January 10. The result of the 1967 election was a tie: 18 seats for the UBP and 18 for the PLP. No government could be formed until that broken. We all know now that in order for either party to form a government, negotiations had to be carried out with two men who were members of neither major political party of the day. Those negotiations, as we can see from the newspaper at the top of this blog post, were not finalized until January 14, some four days after the election, and they ended by giving the PLP a slim margin of one seat in the House of Assembly. (For those people who don't know the details, the two men were Randol Fawkes, who represented the Labour party, and Alvin Braynen, an independent. Braynen accepted the position of Speaker, which meant that he did not normally have a vote in the House, and Fawkes agreed to form a coalition government with the PLP, becoming the first Minister of Labour in the Pindling cabinet.)Perhaps the reason that Majority Rule was not made a public holiday during the first 25 years of the PLP's rule was that the PLP victory dependent entirely upon the actions of two individuals who were not members of the Progressive Liberal Party. The scrutiny that would have accompanied the creation of a holiday before that date meant that PLP would have had to modify its liberation mythology, the one that placed Lynden Pindling alone the head of the movement towards freedom. It would have meant recognizing the contribution of a white Bahamian and the contribution of a labour leader—a labour leader whose independence of spirit meant that he had criticized the PLP when he had seen fit to do so.And so, as uncomfortable as the commemoration of January 10, 1967 makes people who oppose the PLP as a political party, it has also been regarded with considerable ambivalence by the PLP itself.

The problem of structural politics

Beyond party politics, though, it would appear that there are other issues being debated that indicate an extension of that ambivalence further than members of one political party or another. Even for some of those people who recognize the significance of the 1960s to the expansion of democracy in The Bahamas, there is debate about the nature and the timing of the achievement.

Why 1967 is the right date

First of all, there's a question of whether the 1967 date is the most significant one. There is a school of thought that suggests that we should consider recognizing November 26 as Majority Rule Day, rather than January 10.For those who aren't aware, November 26, 1962 is the date on which Bahamian women voted for the first time. The proponents of this position make the argument that the extension of the suffrage to women had more significance in terms of creating a democratic majority than the almost accidental election of the PLP in 1967. Key to this particular argument is the idea that what we should be commemorating when we honour Majority Rule is the ability of the Bahamian populace to participate freely in the democratic process, rather than any particular outcome of that process. This argument is bolstered by the fact that, even though the PLP obtained only a small minority of the seats in parliament in 1962, it did win the popular vote.But this position relies on certain assumptions that are not borne out by the facts. Women's Suffrage was among a number of critical electoral reforms that followed the 1958 General Strike. Before that, there was plenty that was undemocratic about Bahamian general elections.Until 1942, voting was done by a show of hands in open halls; bribery for votes was widespread and blatant. It often took the form of a torn banknote. Half of the note would be given to the elector before he voted. If he raised his hand at the right moment for the correct candidate, he would be given the other half of the banknote at the end of the election.Property, not age, was the primary qualification to be able to vote. If you did not own your own property, or if you did not rent a property valued at over a certain amount, you could not vote. On the other hand, each man was permitted to vote as many times and in as many places as he owned property. The Bahamas was divided into districts that returned two or three representatives to parliament, and the wealthier you were, the more votes you could use. General elections were held over the period of three to four weeks to allow landowners to visit every island on which they owned land and vote.In this scenario, ordinary black Bahamian men were at an extreme disadvantage. If they did not own property, they could not vote at all. If they did own land, the likelihood that they owned more than one piece of land was slender. And if they did (like, say, L. W. Young) own multiple plots of land, the chances that they owned that land in more than one or two voting districts was almost negligible.At the other end of the spectrum stood a handful of men at the top of society. By the middle of the twentieth century, these men were being referred to as "the Bay Street Boys", and they made a point of acquiring land on every single island of The Bahamas. This gave them the right to vote in every single district, and thereby affect the outcome of any general election. The idea of one person, one vote, even as late as 1958, was not one that had any traction in The Bahamas.But the property vote (known as plural voting) was not the only way that a single Bahamian could conceivably cast numerous votes in an election. There was also the company vote—something that conferred a vote to men who served as directors on the boards of companies for each directors' position that they held. This rendered the influential even more so, and guaranteed that a handful of white Bahamian businessmen could affect the outcome of any election.In the wake of the General Strike of January 1958, the British colonial government  strongly recommended that a series of basic reforms be put in place in the Bahamian electoral system. Among these reforms were the extension of the vote to Bahamian women, the abolition of the company vote, and the abolition of the property vote. Two of these three recommendations were put in place in time for the 1962 election. Women were allowed to vote for the first time, and the company vote was abolished. But the plural vote remained, albeit in a restricted fashion. Landowners had the choice of voting in their residential district and one other.This was a limitation on the excesses of the past, but it was not the kind of suffrage that we associate with fair and open democracies, where one adult has one vote and one vote only. That particular electoral reform was not implemented until 1964, when the new constitution prescribed new constituencies, which elected ONE parliamentarian each, and each adult had one vote, subject to residential qualifications. The result: 1967 was the first such election.

That knotty problem called "race"

Another source of deep discomfort with the celebration of majority rule has to do with the question of who the "majority" referred to. It's apparent that we are still deeply conflicted about the Bahamian history of racial discrimination. But here are the facts. Until 1967, Bahamians were separated—the word should probably be segregated—into separate and definitely unequal groups. These groups were racially defined: people of European heritage occupied a highly privileged position in society, while people of African and mixed descent were subordinate. Numerous structural strategies maintained this situation, among them the various anti-democratic electoral strategies mentioned above. Majority rule meant, quite simply, that the members of the government for the first time represented, at least in appearance, the majority of the Bahamian population.There's one final reason why people are deeply ambivalent about this holiday, and it's this: although majority rule for Black Bahamians was attained in 1967, the majority of contemporary Bahamians feel unrepresented by the governments they elect. The question, quite fairly, is raised: what was truly gained by majority rule?

Who's the majority, anyway?

I want to come back to this point, because it's valid, and it's worth its own blog post. But that's another reason why we question the value of this day.Let me try and suggest an answer.Each generation faces its own struggles. In situations where freedom has been denied to any portion of a population, it takes time for that freedom to be felt and experienced by all. Our grandparents triumphed with their achievement of majority rule. But we have not advanced the struggle far enough. We live in a society where significant majorities—Bahamian women, for one example, and Bahamians who were not born before independence—remain underrepresented. Women comprise a slim majority (51%) of the population, but are still denied basic civil rights. This does not constitute majority rule.Further than that: the true majority of the population, Bahamians under the age of 45, is marginalized and unrepresented in the legislature. They are undereducated, poorly served by social programmes, underemployed, and leaving. For them, the concept of majority rule is a cruel joke.But it is possible to criticize the present while honouring the past. That, I believe, is our duty as we face Majority Rule Day every year. There is one major point about this new holiday: it forces us to face our social divisions, past and present, and forces us to talk to one another. It doesn't allow us to forget or ignore the injustices we have inherited and never resolved. And for that I'm grateful.Facebook Live video of Majority Rule Symposium 2018

The REAL indigenous Bahamian story (or part of it)

Thanks to the Speaker of House of Assembly, the term "indigenous Bahamian" has recently trended in public discourse. But. What is "indigenous" anyway?It seems the Speaker was using the term somewhat loosely -- i.e. someone who was born in The Bahamas during the 20th century, and probably to parents who, presumably, were also born in The Bahamas during the 20 century. But very few of us are demonstrably "indigenous" -- i.e. descended from the Lucayan Taino people, whom the Europeans met here when Columbus got so famously lost.So to fill in the picture just a little, here's an excerpt from a really interesting story about some even more interesting research that's being done on indigenous people in our part of the world. Turns out that most of us really aren't as "indigenous" or "native" as we believe.And it also turns out that some of us might just be more "indigenous" than we think...

The Bahamas weren’t settled until 1,500 years ago. The people who settled there are known as the Lucayan Taino, and they and the other Taino communities of the Caribbean were the natives who met the first Spanish colonists in 1492. At the time, the Taino were thriving; Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas estimated that about 600,000 people each lived on Jamaica and Puerto Rico, with as many as a million on Hispaniola. That didn’t last long; by the mid-16th century, smallpox and slavery had driven the Taino to the brink of extinction.Their presence still lingers throughout the islands, in the form of words that run through the heart of Caribbean life, like hurricane and canoe. There are also archaeological remains such as rock art that tell us something of the Taino's spiritual life beyond what comes down to us from the reports of Spanish priests. But the bustling communities and widely-flung trade networks that pre-dated European colonization are no more.It's long been suspected, however, that the Taino didn't die out altogether. Spanish colonists reportedly married Taino wives, and other records say that Taino and escaped African slaves also intermarried and formed communities. Some people in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and even the mainland US still proudly claim Taino heritage and practice traditions handed down from pre-Columbian times, from cooking to crafting. There's been a larger effort to revive Taino culture and identity in the last century and a half or so, but it has never been clear how directly genetically related modern Caribbean residents are to their vanished ancestors.... the story, it turns out, is more complicated than simple extinction, and new DNA evidence helps fill in some of the gaps. Archaeologists found three relatively complete skeletons in Preacher’s Cave, a site on the northern end of Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas. Alongside the skeletons, they also found a single tooth, which didn’t clearly belong with any of the three skeletons. Schroeder and his colleagues got permission to sequence DNA from the tooth, which radiocarbon dating showed was more than 1,000 years old. That’s at least 500 years before European contact, meaning the tooth must have belonged to a Lucayan Taino woman who lived on the island between 776 and 992 CE.

via Ancient DNA sheds light on what happened to the Taino, the native Caribbeans | Ars Technica

OBSESSIVELY THIRD WORLD

What Patrick said ...

Why we must fight for equality for us all, all the time

This post is from a friend of mine, a Singaporean friend who is gay. His struggle, and that of his community, remind me forcibly of the struggles that we face here in The Bahamas. It is the same and not the same, because here, too often, the voices and sentiments of bigots prevail. It takes courage and principle to stand up for what we say we believe in, if we indeed do believe in democracy and equality. Sometimes I feel we lack both. But I want to encourage all activists. What you/we are doing is important and necessary. Keep doing it. Here's why, from the other side of the world.

We speak up so that you can understand us better, and the struggles we go through. We speak up also because we have been told for so long to keep quiet. To hide who we are. To repress who we are. It takes courage for us to identify as LGBT. Many of us are in the position to share our stories and write about our experiences, but many of us suffer in silence because we live in a conservative family or community, or in poverty, or in shame, convinced that our sexuality is a curse. It takes unseen courage for many of us to attend Pink Dot. To take the MRT and endure curious stares and judgmental comments. To know that the authorities are keeping a wary eye on our actions and putting up barricades around our bodies. Many of you came to Pink Dot to support us.Many, many of you expressed your support on social media for my wearing the tank top, and helped the news go viral. That took courage too. Your courage gives us courage.

[Actions supporting equality do not need to be pro-anything. They need] only to be fair. ... [E]qual treatment, not special favour, is exactly what [we're] asking for. It’s too easy to favour the complaint. That was what the [Singapore] National Library did a few years ago when they removed the children’s books about non-traditional families from the children’s section because of some complaints. It’s much harder for an institution to take an impartial stance and adjudicate the merit of the complaint.

... When we were in school we recited the National Pledge every morning, and so, every morning we pledged ourselves “to build a democratic society based on justice and equality.” The writers of the pledge knew that equality is an on-going project. We were not equal then and we are not equal yet, but we can work towards equality. Gay rights are not just for the LGBT community; they are not special privileges for a vocal interest group. Gay rights are part of our national project of building an equal society. They are, right now, a key test of our will and means. I ask you, Straight People who are more than straight people, to support the struggle for equality with all the love you have for Singapore.

via Jee Responds To The ‘Gay Tank Top’ SAFRA Saga Going Viral – We Just Want Fair Treatment – Dear Straight People

Columnist Larry Smith dies age 67 | The Tribune

Late last night, my husband Philip came out of his study and said:

"I don't know how true this is, but they are reporting on Facebook that Larry Smith has died."

I have to confess. I didn't check Facebook. I couldn't. This was news for which I was totally unprepared, and for which I was absolutely unaccepting. Larry? So I went to bed, pretending that there was some mistake. Or that, as Philip said, as with the wave of sadness that took over Facebook last month regarding the death of a Mother Pratt, it was another Larry Smith.

But it wasn't.

Larry Smith

As of Monday, August 28, 2017

LARRY Smith, 67, well known columnist, died suddenly at his High Vista home on Sunday of complications from heart failure.

From 2004 he wrote the weekly column, “Tough Call,” in The Tribune.

#

Larry Andrew Smith was born in Nassau in 1950 to Roy and Barbara Smith. He attended Queen’s College before attending the University of Miami on a government scholarship to study political science and journalism. He worked for the Bahamas News Bureau before starting Media Enterprises in 1984.

#

He was married to Joanne Smith, daughter of Mr Justice van Sertima, and they have two daughters, Aliya Carey and Casey Smith.

via Columnist Larry Smith dies age 67 | The Tribune

There are no words left. Others have already written their own tributes. Mine will take some time. But what I do know is that we, The Bahamas, will feel this loss. We don't do investigative journalism all that much around here. But Larry? Larry was the real thing.

You don't believe me? Check this out.

Bahama Pundit

It's the best website in Nassau, thanks to Larry. Just read the last post, and you'll see what I mean. Then go back and read the whole archives.

Then, maybe then, you will begin to comprehend the magnitude of this loss to our nation. 

The Great Dismal Swamp. Worth reading. Worth listening. Really.

From the podcast 99% Invisible (NOT WRITTEN BY ME)

On the border of Virginia and North Carolina stretches a great, dismal swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, actually — that’s the name British colonists gave it centuries ago. The swamp covers about 190 square miles today, but at its peak, before parts of it were drained and developed, it was around ten times bigger, spanning roughly 2,000 square miles of Virginia and North Carolina.

And it’s understandable why people called the swamp “dismal.” Temperatures can reach over 100 degrees. It’s humid and soggy, filled with thorns and thickets, teeming with all sorts of dangerous and unpleasant wildlife. The panthers that used to live there are now gone, but even today there are black bears, poisonous snakes, and swarms of yellow flies and mosquitoes.

But hundreds of years ago, before the Civil War, the dangers of the swamp and its seeming impenetrability actually attracted people to it. The land was so untamed that horses and boats couldn’t enter, and the colonists who were filing into the region detested it. William Byrd II, a Virginia planter, called it “a miserable morass where nothing can inhabit.” But people did inhabit the swamp, including thousands of enslaved Africans and African Americans who escaped their captors and formed communities in the swamp. This “dismal” landscape was the site of one of the most remarkable and least told stories of resistance to slavery in American history.

via The Great Dismal Swamp - 99% Invisible