Bahama Republic

Election fever has brought some interesting things back to my attention, such as this blog, Bahama Republic.It's not that I didn't know it existed. It's right there in my blogroll, among the various links that are expired, obsolete, or moved. That means I knew about it three, four or five years ago (don't know how long ago I constructed the blogroll—the older I get, the more time compresses into one big blur). Still. As is the case with many of those links, I haven't revisited it in some time.But links to its posts are resurfacing on Facebook via the Demand Debates campaign, and because there's more discussion regarding life and work at the College of The Bahamas.Go check it out. It's good reading. I tend to fall into its camp with regard to the ways in which we view ourselves, our fundamental conservatism and fear of confrontation, our need of "brain-un-washing". I particularly agree with the idea that 2012 and possibly years to come "may see the continuation of the unfinished revolution of the 1960/70s." I'm not sure I share all of its cynicism, and while I am as unimpressed with the "achievements" of the past five years as the author is, I have not been convinced that a return to a PLP administration will be the magic bullet that solves all our problems.My only criticism? There's nothing on the site to indicate who's behind it. Now while I can't blame a person (who for all I know may well be a civil servant, and therefore prohibited from exercising the constitutionally guaranteed right of free-ish speech, or a sitting MP, or even—weird thought—a down-low member of the FNM cabinet) for wishing to keep a low profile, the lack of identifiable authorship does give me pause. Anonymity is sometimes necessary, but in this cyberage it is also an easy way to make statements for which one does not have to take responsibility. We live in a country where responsibility is too easily shifted from the person to the generic; it seems to me that one way to counter that failing is for each citizen to step up and take personal responsibility for what they feel, think and say.That said, what do I know? I don't know the author's situation, and for all I know his/her livelihood may depend on keeping the powerful happy. In that case, the blog itself is an exercise in responsibility.In any event, go read Bahama Republic. It's heartening to see the continued level of discussion, and well worth it.

Elections—and beyond

So, in the parlance of the day: Papa done ring da bell.Whatever that means.Don't get me wrong. I can talk the talk like any other Bahamian in 2012. Papa = the current prime minister, Hubert Ingraham. "The Bell" = the announcement of a date for the next general election. I know how to translate the statement.I just don't know what it means.Here's why. Some time ago, I wrote up my own manifesto (since the political parties vying for leadership of the country hadn't seen fit to share any of their promises or policies for the next five years) as a voter, a participant in a process that is commonly called "democratic". Since that time, others have joined me in making similar statements, and a few voices have called for our leaders and other politicians to have the balls to step out from behind their carefully crafted propaganda and open themselves up to discussions of issues with reasonable citizens.But, disappointingly, and with one important exception (Branville McCartney of the DNA) they haven't.And this, to my mind, does not bode well for our future. This is, after all, not like any other election year. For one thing, there are three major parties contesting the general election, a broad slate of independents, and a few fringe parties as well; for another, the two oldest parties are in fact comprised of the political parties that have made some impact over the past twenty years—the BDM in the case of the FNM, the NDP in the case of the PLP, and the CDR split between the two. Even the DNA has absorbed at least one extant party into its ranks: Rodney Moncur's Worker's Party. For another thing, for any dispassionate person, it is very unclear who is likely to win the next election. Popular support for both parties seems to have declined since 2007 and 2002. Back then, both the FNM and the PLP had trouble finding public spaces that were large enough to hold the assemblies of their supporters, and ended up taking turns on Clifford Park itself, which was packed with bodies sporting the shirts of the party colours: red for the FNM, yellow for the PLP. This season, however, the largest gatherings in Nassau have taken place on beaches—which, thanks to the generosity of both parties in giving away Bahamian beachfront property to foreign investors, are relatively small spaces in our city-island. This past Easter Monday, the FNM repaired to the Montagu foreshore, (for which it seems to have no trouble taking credit, but which was actually renovated by a private concern acting, at least officially, in a non-partisan manner) and the PLP occupied the Western Esplanade. Photographs have been circulating around cyberspace in an effort to compare the two gatherings and suggest that one was bigger than the other. There is a sort of frenzy on Facebook and other places Bahamians gather, where people engage in heated and emotionally charged exchanges of—what else?—propaganda, hurling the same invective our MPs have been hurling at one another across the floor of the house of assembly. But there is also a very large silence as well, and it is this silence that makes the outcome of the election so difficult to determine.I'd like to consider that silence at some other time, because I find it very interesting. It's a silence that sits in judgement, that does not buy into the insult-trading or hop the partisan bandwagon. It's the kind of silence that affected the outcome of the Elizabeth by-election, where a seat was won because the majority of registered voters did not turn out to vote. I know that Larry Smith has argued that low voter turn-out is not uncommon for by-elections, and I agree to a point, but I also sense (as does he) that there is more at work here than that; it seems to me that there is a growing group of Bahamians who watch the antics of all the political parties with a mixture of disgust and despair, because all politicians alike are missing the point. Which is that no matter who wins on May 7th, 2012, we will all have to live in this country together on May 8th.So my question is this. Given the passion and energy being expended in tearing down the other parties, or the other leaders—in dismissing reasonable questions and observations as "FNM" or "PLP" or even "DNA"—each of these being intended as insult, what happens the day after elections, when one party has won and the other(s) has/ve not? How do we work on building a nation of Bahamians? I have heard absolutely nothing from any party about what the future holds. The PLP has crafted some very general principles for the next few years, but these, when decoded, seem to amount to a reinstatement of what was in the works between 2002 and 2007 when they were in power. The FNM has focussed very much on vague generalities like "proven leadership" and "deliverance", and what has been done, largely in material, infrastructural terms, in the very recent past (one or two years at most). The DNA speaks in broad terms, pushing the buttons that they feel gain them support, but not showing any real coherent ideology about which their philosophy has been crafted (well, OK, to say that the PLP and the FNM have any coherent ideology would be being too kind, but at least their track records suggest that one group makes noises that are vaguely populist while the other tends to appease the local business community).Election seasons last for no more than six months at best. The remaining four and a half years require some measure of governance. And what frightens me the most in this election is how much it seems to be a game to those who are playing it. It's entertainment, a sport, which involves the kind of trash-talking that one expects to hear at a football game (American or soccer, makes no difference) or before a boxing match, but which has very little place in the governing of the country. One could argue (and I certainly would) that for four of the past five years, there was no governance at all, but just more of this sparring in the house of assembly, just more trading of insults back and forth across the floor, while the world got on with changing its foundations all around us and the ground on which our society and economy rest crumbles away. I am not impressed by the roads and the harbour or the extension of the hospital, as every one of these, no matter the expenditure, represents to my mind a kind of patch on a society whose foundations are in danger of falling apart. Nor am I impressed with the way in which the opposition opposed these things, because, well, whining and insult do not an opposition make. And I'm also not impressed with the kinds of "solutions" proposed by either of the opposing parties, because no one is explaining how they are going to implement those solutions. I would venture to suggest that it is time that the era of development-by-foreign-investment come to a close in The Bahamas. But I see no evidence that the parties who have governed for the last twenty years in that climate have come up with any ideas about how to manage this country all by themselves.So as we stare down the home stretch, as we slide into these last three weeks before Bahamians go to the polls and cast our votes, I would like at least one day to be dedicated to having the people who are contesting the elections to tell us what their vision is for this nation. Where do we go from here? How do we find our place in the twenty-first century? Why should I cast a vote for men who were educated before Bahamian Independence, and whose philosophies are, must be, out of place in this digital, global age? Why should I cast one for a man who has ridden the wave of dissatisfaction with our leaders to prominence as a real third-party contender, but who has not yet crafted a vision of his own as to how the country might be different?Do I have hope for the Bahamian future, no matter who wins the next election? I can't honestly say that I do. I have seen no vision from any of our prospective leaders, but see divisiveness and excess among their followers. So I'm preparing for five more years of struggle, no matter who wins or doesn't win this election; for five more years of escalating violence in our society; for five more years of a contracting economy, traffic problems, and decreasing revenues. I'm preparing for five more years of governmental desperation, of prostitution of the country to the biggest donor (China seems to be the crowd favourite right now), of undereducation and of brain drain, no matter who wins. Because the governing of a country—and of a postcolonial, neocolonized country on the edge of America at the turn of the digital age—is a delicate, precious business; and, because governing in such a climate requires more than snap decisions made by a despot, the demurring of a wannabe democrat, or the pontification of a malcontent, I have seen no indication that any of our prospective leaders are capable of governing at all.May 7th can't come soon enough. But, people, think what May 8th will bring. 

On the mis-education of the Bahamian citizen

One of the reasons I am unmoved by either any of the current political parties' manifesti, plans or proposals, is that I have the pleasure of teaching new groups of young Bahamians every year. This is a pleasure, because they are far more open and interested than they have any right to be, given the abysmal neglect of their generation and those immediately preceding them by the governments of our nation; but it is also a scandal. They know so very little about their country, themselves, and the world they are expected to navigate.We came into our own as a nation in 1973, almost 40 years ago. The generations that straddled that watershed were erudite, educated, aware of the world and our place in it, bent on changing the world they had grown up in, and educated to do so. The generations that they produced, by contrast, are none of those things. There are of course pockets of erudition, handfuls of individuals who can be considered "educated" in the democratic sense of the term, but these are not common. They are usually the products of families for whom The Bahamas matters, who may have earned a critical place in Bahamian history, who invest in education for themselves and their children, not because of what they perceive that education might earn them but for its own sake. More damningly, they are all too often also the graduates of private schools, hailing from the middle class or the upper middle class, children of privilege. Ironically, our self-rule and our independence, bought at some cost by people for whom education was by no means a given, to whom education was prohibited, has created a society in which the so-called "universal" education has bred a population whose ignorance is legion.As I tell my students, I don't blame them for reaching voting age without knowing anything important about themselves or their country. I can't; the fault is not theirs. But as I also tell them, I will blame them henceforth (to invoke the one-word motto of my alma mater) if they maintain that ignorance now that they know they possess it. That it should proliferate after a generation of Bahamian scholars, all of them investing their time, money, and energy into writing our stories, in penning our histories, in telling tales about us, is an indictment on every single government of The Bahamas since independence.But even that indictment cannot be evenly spread. Different administrations bear different kinds of guilt. The first Progressive Liberal Party administrations must shoulder the responsibility for skewing our history, for telling only part of it, for erasing whole chunks of Bahamian life and experience from the spoken record. Even given the fact that there is something understandable in the fact that the first decade of community building in the wake of majority rule was given over to the Black Bahamian experience, the continuation of that bias into the third decade after Majority Rule is unconscionable, given the fact that The Bahamas was the site of not one but two important republics in the New World, and a site of a very ancient, if politically skewed, democracy. The myth created out of the PLP rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s was that Black Bahamians had no vote and no voice in the pre-PLP era. The result of this half-truth is that young Black Bahamians were never made aware of the role of free African settlers in the Eleutherian Republic—the second republic in the new world—or of the Pirates' Republic of the end of the seventeenth century, which, though branded as lawless and rebellious by a Britain intent on global conquest, was also multi-racial and strangely democratic. The other result of this half-truth is that successive generations of Black Bahamians were created who had, and have, no comprehension of the actual composition of the Bahamian population, who take fair-skinned Bahamians of colour for the "whites" who controlled the nation in the past, and who take actual white Bahamians of ancient pedigree for tourists; and this serves to disenfranchise otherwise productive Bahamian citizens, to render them invisible, to remove from them a real stake in the fortunes of the nation.The first Free National Movement administrations, on the other hand, must bear a different responsibility. Perhaps coincidentally, the change of government from PLP to FNM occurred in the same year as the complete phasing-out of General Certificate of Education, the international school-leaving qualification previously earned by Bahamian students. The creation of the BGCSE was not the doing of the FNM, but the way in which it was administered must be. It is on the doorstep of the FNM that we must lay the blame for the continued miseducation of Bahamians. The miseducation of Bahamians with regard to the Bahamian citizenry and the place of whites within the Bahamas was addressed, but was done so as destructively as the miseducation of Bahamians under the PLP had been done. Instead of increasing the knowledge of young Bahamians about their nation and the world within which it existed, a choice was made to decrease that knowledge. History was not only made an optional subject, but even the origins of the Bahamian nation itself were concealed. It is impossible to recount the story of the rise of universal democracy in The Bahamas without privileging the role of the PLP; and so the history of the post-independence Bahamas was not taught at all. It is impossible to talk about slavery without acknowledging the oppression of Africans by Europeans; and so the history of Bahamian enslavement was not taught at all. By erasing critical eras of Bahamian history, by valourizing pre-1967 heroes such as Stafford Sands and Roland Symonette, or by recognizing (belatedly) other pre-independence heroes such as Cecil Wallace-Whitfield,  the first two FNM administrations effectively blotted out the story of the Bahamas that obtained between 1967/73 and 1992.I am told—I wasn't there, but have no reason to doubt the source—that during the 1990s, attempts to address living Bahamian history were actively discouraged by serving educators. I am thinking about an incident recounted by a colleague of mine, who told of a time when he stood up to make some reference to the days of Black Bahamian oppression at a school assembly where he was a guest speaker, only to be rebuked by the head teacher, who told him that teaching young Bahamians about the past would encourage racism against white people. That helps to explain the huge gaps in the knowledge of the students I teach today, some twenty years after that most recent active erasure of our selves. These are students who have heard of Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X, of Barack Obama, but who have no idea of who Lynden Pindling and Milo Butler and Cecil Wallace-Whitfield were, much less having even heard of other great Bahamians like Randol Fawkes, Etienne Dupuch, or Roland Symonette. They do not know what was suffered to give them free access to education, or what it means to be able to earn a college degree. They have barely heard of apartheid, the Holocaust, or colonialism. They do not know that the red, white and blue they associate with the Stars and Stripes were also once the colours of the Bahamian colony, not because of our American proximity, but because of our annexure to Britain. They have never heard of the Haitian Revolution, or know that Haiti was the first and the only successful ex-slave republic anywhere in the world. They do not know that, when he was released from prison and knew that victory for native South Africans was assured, Nelson Mandela came to The Bahamas to study the way in which we had achieved majority rule without bloodshed and created a successful society in its wake. They do not know who Nelson Mandela is. They do not know, and yet they are expected to become full citizens of this African-influenced, slave-shaped, postcolonial nation. The idea is absurd.And so I regard the incoherencies that pass for election rhetoric with a sense of disgust. These people who are now on their game, who are engaged in the grotesque performance that passes for "democracy" in the voting nations of the late capitalist era, are either complicit in the creation of the mass ignorance of the voters, or they are the products of the skew-eyed histories that have shaped our existence since independence. How can anyone who believes in democracy as the expression of the will of a people, support any set of politicians who have so completely seen to the erasure of the kind of knowledge that best informs that will? How can one, with good conscience, cast a vote in this climate? Why should I care about the leaders of the parties, when I know that they will all come out the same in the wash—blustery, misinformed/misinforming, irresponsible?Somebody tell me why.

Towards A Voters' Manifesto

It's 2012 and the silly season is officially upon us. Bloggers and tabloids and Facebook commentators have begun their discussions and predictions. To quote Pat Rahming (and I'll quote him again before this post is over), everybody catchin politics like germ.It's a rare situation this election. For the first time in 35 years, it's a proper three-way race; in almost all of the 38 new constituencies, voters will have the option to choose candidates from one of three parties.Predictably, and unfortunately so, the discussion is progressing the way football hooligans support their favourite teams. Most of the loudest voices have painted themselves with the war-hues of their favourites, so that the air has taken on the quality of a rastafarian flag or (to employ the more common metaphor) a stoplight; the political parties (I am tempted to call them teams) adorn themselves in the party colours of red, gold and green.Equally predictably, the squabbling is as shallow and as thought-free as that paint. In almost no quarter does one hear discussions of the issues that affect us all, regardless of party -- of the economic future of the country, of ways in which we hope to function as citizens, of the kinds of fundamental changes that are necessary for the continued process of nationhood -- of questions of how to expand and deepen the democratic project, or how, in this small country of 350,000 people, to find solutions to the problems that plague us.I've been thinking for a long time now that what we need are not more political parties with platforms, plans and promises as fragile and transparent as cheap glass. No. What we need is a voters' manifesto -- a code by which we, the voters, live and move and cast our votes. So I've been thinking about what I want from a country and from a representative, and working back from there. Watch this space -- as I develop it, I'll post it. Maybe you'll share my perspective. If so, let's work for our own small change whenever the election is called!

Happy Majority Rule Day

When exactly are we going to make this a national day of observance?Last year, efforts were made to remind our people of the significance of this day, which, despite the failures of the present, was such an achievement that it inspired Nelson Mandela upon his release from prison to study The Bahamas in crafting a new South Africa.This year, a pretty general silence.Well, I for one will observe this day -- a day that made it possible for my father, my mother and my uncles and aunts to hold the positions they held in the late twentieth century, and for which basic freedoms our forefathers fought. If you're black, brown, tan, beige, golden, milky coffee, ecru, or ivory, no matter what color shirt you wear, go read some history; chances are that without the victory of January 10 you would not be where you are now.So: Happy Majority Rule Day. Let's grow some respect and some ideals. Neither is a waste of time.

The Duty to Vote - by Simon

I've been thinking about this commentary by "Simon" of Bahama Pundit (and the Nassau Guardian):

To refuse to vote is a decision.  It shows a level of disdain and contempt for our democratic system.  There is certain arrogance to those who feel that voting is beneath them and that they won’t participate in electing “those politicians” (who, incidentally, are our fellow citizens).

Voting is not fundamentally about politicians.  It is about the citizenry choosing their elected representatives and holding them accountable.  Democracy, like the human condition is imperfect, requiring constant improvement and renewal.  The alternative is a system of anarchy.

There is also an immaturity to those who refuse to help choose the nation’s elected representatives and refuse also to participate in governance.  Still, they expect someone else to make the tough decisions on everything from crime to the economy to education.

Often, these same individuals have much to say on issues of public policy though they refuse to vote or become involved in governance.  There is a level of hypocrisy by those who sit on their high horses complaining about the politicians while refusing to participate.

A refusal to exercise one’s right to vote is a dereliction of a basic right for which many have fought and died, and for which many are still struggling.  For the progeny of slaves it is a sort of disregard and dishonouring of the struggles of those ancestors who for generations fought for basic freedoms, including in The Bahamas for majority rule.

Those who refuse to exercise their right to vote for cavalier and unreflective reasons, do a disservice to the witness of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Bahamian men and women freedom fighters, and protestors around the world today for whom the right to vote is a democratic gift not to be taken lightly nor for granted.

The Right and Duty to Vote - via Bahama Pundit.

In many—many—respects I agree with him. The right to vote is more than an entitlement; in any democratic society, is a responsibility, the major responsibility perhaps, of citizens in democratic societies. Simon's right to shift the point from the politician to the citizen, and is also right to remind his readers about the cost of democracy, and to remind us all not to take it for granted. But there is a whole lot more to it than that, in my opinion.

For I have a problem with this idea that the responsibility in any democratic society is one-way, that it adheres to the citizen only, and that the politician is exempt. Because while I agree wholeheartedly that one has a duty to register and even tend to agree that one should turn out to vote, I balk at the idea that my vote must be constrained by the choices offered to me by people who, it seems, more often than not, have very limited imaginations about the potential of this nation, who indeed have very limited comprehension of statehood at all, and who are really put in place because they bowed down and said the right things to the right political overlord. Even in the most informal cases, a person has the right to abstain when the time comes to vote, and that abstention is counted; it is, in effect, an anti-vote, a rejection of the choices placed before one, or of the lack of choice imposed on the voter by political machineries that are fundamentally antidemocratic at their very core. What, after all, is democratic about a system in which representatives are chosen in the wake of an unholy alliance between a set of individuals entrenched in a political game and the super-partisan delegates whose job it is to choose and/or ratify candidates? When does the ordinary citizen, who is faceless and nameless and often even party-less, get to have some say in who will sit in Parliament on her behalf?

So while I agree with the duty of every citizen to participate in this most fundamental of democratic rights and responsibilities, and while I think that Australia is on to a good thing—every citizen is obliged to vote by law—I resist entirely this idea that the politician has no responsibility to the citizens or to the state that they govern. I especially resist it in our Bahamaland, where local government is another word for more direct taxation and where there is no such thing for the over two-thirds of the population who reside in the city of Nassau. There is nothing democratic about the shifting around of constituency boundaries by that parliamentary joke called the "Boundaries Commission"  and there is nothing democratic about the musical chairs being played by the three political parties in scrambling to find candidates who, by some strategic algorithm, are best poised to win within some made-up geographical area. And so I reserve the right, having registered and planning fully to turn out to vote, to make my displeasure known at the polls if (or when) the three parties who are scrambling for power do not show me enough respect to offer for office an individual for whom I can vote without feeling that the choice is one among many evils.

In short, I believe in the citizen's duty to vote. But it doesn't stop there. I believe as much, perhaps more, in the politicians' duty to govern. And until I am confident that they think as much of this nation as I do, I reserve the right to choose no one to represent me at all.

On Postcolonial Wretchedness

A week ago, as those of you who follow my Twittter feed may remember, the College of The Bahamas hosted a one-day symposium in honour of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist whose field of study was the psyche of the colonized. Now Fanon's books were on my parents' bookshelves long before I realized their significance; I particularly remember a tattered (and ttherefore well-read) copy of Black Skin, White Masks hanging around. But I didn't read Fanon until my university days. But when I got hold of The Wretched of the Earth I didn't put it down. Its words, then 25 years after they were written, rang so true I couldn't. How much more true they seem now for me, sitting in my so-called independent postcolonial country, feeling called upon to justify the value, nearly forty years after we got the political trappings of statehood, of a single university.The justification, if, absurdly, one must make it, is something for another day. Today I am thinking about the value of democracy, of statehood, of the wretchedness of postcolonialism. I'm thinking, too, as much as Fanon's words and ideas have stayed with me, having seeped into my subconscious and shaped my worldview from my twenties until now, that it's a good time to go back and reread them. To do so will solve all mysteries. They will go some way to explain why our society has become so violent so quickly; they will help us to understand the fundamental absurdities of our public institutions -- why, for instance, the taxpayers almost never get back from their government what they put in, why the humanity and the spirit of the Bahamian citizen is never nurtured by public institutions, why to find the funding (which has been given, often by private Bahamian donors, for this very purpose) to conduct research through the College of The Bahamas into areas which could help us at least understand what is happening in our society is so extraordinarily difficult. Why it took so long, for instance, for the funding to be released for the Fanon Symposium itself, even after it had been approved and some of those funds had been independently solicited. Why institutions that have been established ostensibly to serve the Bahamian public are allowed to operate in disrepair, even though the Bahamian public pays to use them -- the joke of the so-called National Centre for the Performing Arts comes to mind, whose roof has been leaking since Frances and Jeanne but for which no line item to effect repairs explicitly on it. Why we waste 2 million dollars a year putting on Junkanoo parades but invest nothing whatsoever in the preservation of costumes, the official transfer of skills from elders to youth, the teaching of Junkanoo history, or anything else that can take root and grow. Why we think that a white skin and a northern accent are qualifications in themselves, but dredge up spurious personal experiences to block the advancement of a Bahamian whose qualifications, experience and understanding of our nation are superior. These are pathologies, and Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist, has named them and prescribed their treatment. We would do well to (re)read his works, fifty years on.

Democracy is an experiment

Democracy is an experiment. It doesn't just happen. It isn't a natural state of affairs. Natural states of affairs tend towards hierarchy -- the idea that some people automatically have more power than others. Sometimes those natural states of affairs are nice places in which to live. Some dictators are benevolent and think about the common good. But more often than not, those natural states thrive on exclusion, tyranny, and oppression.Democracy is the radical idea that all the members of a polity are equal players in the social and political world. That isn't to say that everyone is of necessity equally endowed with material or social goods, or that everyone must be exactly the same. Democracy doesn't function superficially, looking at what people have as the final criterion. It doesn't replicate the child's obsession with fairness at the level of the state, and spend long minutes pouring and repouring out the can of coke to make sure that no one gets more than anybody else. Rather, it operates at the level of principle. It doesn't require everyone to be the same. What it does guarantee -- or ought to, anyway -- is that everyone has equal opportunity, equal rights.Democracy isn't a lazy man's -- or woman's -- ideal. This is because democracy cannot exist in a vacuum. It must be created and re created. It must be nourished and born again. It isn't the property of a state or an organization. It is, in the words of Jean Jacques Rousseau , a compact, an agreement among citizens that this is how we want to live. And to make sure it works, to ensure its persistence, each individual citizen must claim both the rights and the responsibilities that come with living in a democracy. If one or the other is neglected, the experiment fails.Where citizens refuse to exercise their rights, democracy fades. In true-true democracies, principles are more important than expediency. Nothing, no perk, no imbalance, no convenience is more important than the principle of equality and right. But no one gives up benefits without a struggle. Even in those societies that we look to as beacons of democracy, the equalities guaranteed by their institutions were rarely, if ever, automatically conferred. Complacency is the enemy of democracy, and when citizens choose the safe over the risky, the practical over the possible, the easy profit over the principled right, they put their citizenship in jeopardy; by choosing to be safe or practical or complacent we erode our democratic foundation. We are acting in limited self-interest rather than in the common good. We put our individual comfort before the collective advancement, and the end result is all too often a reduction in the rights we are afforded rather than their multiplication.On the other hand, where citizens refuse to exercise their responsibility democracy dies. The democratic process is a difficult one, requiring constant vigilance and review. We must be students of democracy in order to make our societies work. We must know ourselves, our histories, our strengths and our flaws. We must demand the changes that we need at every level of the society, and we must not stop making those demands when our material comforts are served. There are injustices everywhere we look around us. There are flaws and faults at every level of our society, and the vast majority of these are addressable not by politicians and civil servants but by each one of us. They range from tiny annoyances to complex ethical dilemmas, and they face us every day. The fact that our state is unwilling or unable to punish our minor transgressions should not, in a democracy, matter in the end; our duty as citizens is to demonstrate our individual and personal commitment to the democratic project and behave as we ought to whether we are being observed or not. When we do not, the democratic experiment fails.For democracy is an experiment, an ideal. It is the belief that human beings can come together and create the societies they want to live in by according one another equal rights before the law and by behaving as though they believe in those rights. For the experiment to work, as Rousseau says, we must be willing to curb our individual freedoms in the interest of serving the common good. Democracy is voluntary, and that is the burden and the glory of being a citizen. We must do it ourselves; no one else can guarantee it for us. It is a collective enterprise, and it requires negotiating this delicate tension between sacrificing some individual personal freedom to guarantee equal freedom for all.

--Opening remarks delivered at the first anniversary of We the People, November 16 2011

Hurricanes, Governments and Other Little Things

So I started writing this offline during Hurricane Irene and her immediate aftermath. (It seems as though "so" is the conjunction of choice of the second decade of the twenty-first century; I have heard countless interviews where the answerer starts with a long, meditative "So". Just between us fellas, it drives me crazy. Nevertheless: ) So our cable service was down for a lot of yesterday and therefore our main internet was out. The only way we could get in touch with the world beyond our walls was by cellular data network, which in The Bahamas is not 3G or 4G or any other kind of G but which slowness aside, was working throughout Irene. Props to BTC for staying up all through the storm.That being the case, we were all forced to revert to twentieth-century one-way methods of communication for necessary information. Specifically: we were obliged to turn to the radio and our local TV station (which broadcasts locally as well as uploading to a satellite for conversion to a cable feed) and find out what's been going on.Twenty-first century Americans and other undemocratic people may need some kind of introduction to the kind of world we live in, a world inherited from the British, who despite all their numerous flaws and failings as imperialist conquerors share a couple of assumptions about democracies and government with their European fellows. The most fundamental of these is an understanding about what a government is and what a democratic government is obliged to do. Strangely enough, some of those ideas took in their ex-colonies. After all, they were the only ways by which the empire was justified. The main one, though, is that it is the responsibility of a democratic government to provide certain services for its people. Those services facilitate and encourage and strengthen the democratic experiment. By ensuring that all citizens are provided with at least the basic necessities for life, health and education, they create an environment in which democratic activity can flourish. For democracy is hard work. It is not a privilege; rather, it is a set of rights and duties, and it cannot survive where people are so unequal that they cannot participate in the democratic project, or where people are so involved in scraping a living on the edges of society that they do not have the luxury of thinking about their place in that society.One of those services, and the one I'm most concerned about at this moment (though there are many others) is the provision, especially in the twenty-first century, of balanced, accurate, official information. Now in our country we appear to provide for that. We Bahamians, contrary to our private beliefs, pay taxes, and a good portion of our tax money supports a public broadcasting station whose sole job it is to provide that balanced, accurate, official information. All too often the information offered by the BCB (otherwise known as ZNS, its original call title from the 1930s when it was established) is partisan, press-released, irrelevant or outdated. Still. Where ZNS has been excellent in the past (and as recently as 2005 with the passage of Hurricane Wilma) has been in times of national emergency, such as during hurricanes. Throughout the twenty-first century, the BCB has provided unparallelled service in keeping all Bahamians connected through the most trying circumstances. For me, some of the most memorable hurricane broadcasts were during the passage of major storms through the various islands, when Nassauvians, sometimes unaffected by the weather but hugely concerned for family and friends elsewhere, were kept informed and reassured by newspeople who went above and beyond the call of duty to make contact, shoot video, and send word to the Nassau stations of what was happening in the affected areas. The most memorable of these for me was the coverage of the passage of the monster storms Frances, Jeanne and Wilma through the northern Bahamas, especially through Jeanne, when the Freeport newscrew remained on the air and broadcasting even as water was rising in their studios.Nothing in our recent history, therefore, prepared me for the absence of any such reporting by the BCB during Hurricane Irene. We learned about the fate of Acklins and Crooked Island not from the news station we had learned to trust, but from the online tabloid Bahamas Press, which is notorious for breaking news that is grounded in truth but which is not always so accurate in details. Witness, for example, BP's insistence that St. Paul's Anglican Church at Clarence Town, Long Island, had "collapsed", when in fact the church had lost part of its roof but remained standing; had the BCB been doing the job most citizens expect of it, that story would have been accurate from the start. BP may have exaggerated the story a little, but at least it provided information—information for which we citizens pay every year through our customs duties and our other taxes, but information which, during the passage of Hurricane Irene, was sadly lacking from our national broadcasting corporation.For most of the first day of Irene's passage, the BCB appeared, with the National Emergency Management Agency, to be following Bahamas Press instead of collecting and disseminating its own information. While this is excellent for BP, it is not so good for ZNS, which styles itself "the people's station"; it has failed the people. This was not entirely the case. The discrepancy between the television coverage and that on the radio was all too clear; the radio provided some of the same sort of coverage as we had been accustomed to expecting, but the television was a dire disappointment, showing reruns of file footage from other storms and only going live for regularly scheduled programming. No doubt the excuse will be a lack of a budget for emergency broadcasts. That in itself, to my mind, is the supreme failure. I would prefer for ZNS to be silent throughout the year if I only knew I could count on accurate, live, and to-the-minute real-time twenty-first century video coverage in times of emergencies. After all, if citizens can provide their own media—if the American Weather Channel Twitter feed can feature video and photographs from around the Bahamas during the passage of the story, why cannot ZNS do the same for its own citizens? Rerunning footage from Hurricanes Michelle (2001), Frances (2004) and Jeanne (2004) seems an insult rather than a service.I have far more to say on this matter, but I fear that if I try to say it all it will never be finished. I'll post this for the time being in hopes of engendering some discussion here and now. But I'll just return to my initial premise. It can't just be a matter of budget at times like these. National broadcasting stations, as they exist in countries whose democratic infrastructure is European rather than America (and therefore, to my mind, more truly democratic in fact—more on that later) do not have the option of jettisoning such coverage in lean times. The fact that they exist is just for a purpose such as the passage of a hurricane; I see no other good reason for my tax money to be taken to keep them alive.

Totally worth watching

BlackFoodTV is worth following. I don't check the site out enough. But it's worth it. Go see for yourself.The Culture of Things with Erin Greene and Tina Johnson.http://www.justin.tv/widgets/archive_embed_player.swf
Watch live video from BlackFoodTV on Justin.tv

Larry Smith on The Alternate Reality of Bahamian Squatter Settlements

This is an issue that needs research, reflection, and discussion, not knee-jerking. Larry Smith starts the ball rolling at Bahama Pundit.

... the deeper we delve into the so-called 'Haitian problem', the more we come face to face with ourselves. The squatter settlements that give rise to so much public angst are a clear example of the alternate reality that many Bahamians live in, and we are not the only ones grappling with these issues....The reality is that squatters include indigenous Bahamians, Haitian-Bahamians, immigrants with work permits and illegal immigrants. But these one-dimensional labels merely mask the complexity of the problem, as the following three examples illustrate.A 2003 news report on squatters focused on a young man who, although born here, was not a Bahamian because his parents are Haitians. He had never been to Haiti, and though he had applied three times for Bahamian citizenship and spent about $4,500 on paperwork and lawyers, he had nothing to show for his efforts.A friend of mine knows of a "true-blood Bahamian" who works as a messenger and had a daughter with a Haitian woman. "The daughter was educated here and is hardworking, but has no status. She is confined to the fringes of society because her father can't be bothered to help her get regularized."Then there is the Haitian who has worked here for years and become a permanent resident. "He has several children," my friend told me. "One son is here on a work permit, a second son went to R M Bailey and appears to be a Bahamian, and a third son just arrived from Haiti and can't speak English. The second son is intelligent and well-educated, but has no status and is very angry about it."These examples put a human face on the problem, and we can multiply them many times throughout our society. The root question is, how do we deal with them? One answer is to deport immigrant children who are born and raised here. Another is to regularize them to become productive members of our society.The other key point to bear in mind is that squatting is often the only option for low-income people with no collateral or savings who subsist on temporary jobs. They can't afford the cost of land or housing, so they are forced to rely on irregular arrangements facilitated by Bahamians.Squatter settlements are the inevitable result.via The Alternate Reality of Bahamian Squatter Settlements - Bahama Pundit.

Attention, Government of The Bahamas:

It's a new century. It's the age of culture.When are we going to be joining it?YouTube - Il Volo - EPK.This is the kind of opportunity you are letting your citizens miss. With vision, boys like Osano Neely and Matthew Walker could have done this. Without vision and support, all we can do is bend over and take foreign investment in places where the sun don't shine.Am I angry?You bet.Always.

Those Disastrous, Unforgettable Elections of 1977 « P. Anthony White… online

For those Bahamians who have never heard of a third party that made a difference in Bahamian democratic elections, go read P. Anthony White. To wit:

... perhaps the most celebrated – and most wrenching for many – of all general elections held in the modern Bahamas were the historic polls of 1977, when the electorate was stretched in three political directions. But let us historically backtrack for a spell.via Those Diastrous, Unforgettable Elections of 1977 « P. Anthony White… online.

It's interesting and instructive, specially as I've spent the evening with several Bahamians younger than me who have never heard of the BDP.(What do they teach people in schools these days anyway? To what use is our quarter of a billion education budget put?)White's site is the best one for this subject, and one of the only ones that gives the BDP a fair shake. Now the 1977 elections were the first ones I really remember. (I remember bits and pieces from earlier ones, like the UBP spray-painted in the road of my neighbourhood when I was a very very young child in 1967, and the discussions about Independence in 1972, which bored me to tears, what with the White Papers and the Green Papers and the Referendum yaddaya.) In 1977 I was in high school and old enough to give some thought to who I might vote for when I was eighteen, so I paid attention.And there was lots to pay attention to.Here's the background in a nutshell:

... by about 1975, there came the famous split in the Opposition, and Cecil Wallace-Whitfield was once more at the centre of it all, surrounded by many who had been with him from the days of the Free PLP.The other side was formed into the Bahamian Democratic Party. When the 1977 elections were called, both sides offered complements of candidates, some very familiar political faces.

The result: the opposition was divided and the PLP won the election by a landslide.But go read about it. And take notes. And realize that the elections coming up have every chance of being equally memorable -- not necessarily in the same way as the 1977 elections -- but memorable nevertheless.And go ask yourselves and your teachers and your ministers of education why this historical moment has never come up in all our discussions about third, fourth, fifth and (I hear) sixth parties circling the barrel for the coming elections.

From Facebook and Ken Clarke:

IF your political system and process depends on and is controlled by money and significantly controlled by those who have money, while the overwhelming majority of your people have absolutely no way of ever being in position to have that kind of money and thus influence that process; can you still call that a democracy?

I wouldn't call it that. Stay tuned and see why.

Bahamas Press » Plans by FNM to allow foreigners the right to vote in Parliamentary Elections in The Bahamas?

Writing about politics is usually such a bore, I don't generally engage in it. Politicians don't much care what Bahamians have to say anyway, so it's usually also a waste of time. And the media -- Bahamas Press and its so-called "wutless" competitors alike -- tend to sensationalize the trivial in this regard, rarely engaging in the kind of analysis or debate that changes things or leads to a broadening of democracy that it becomes difficult to carry on political conversations. But this headline grabbed my attention enough to get me to read the story, and the section regarding the comparison between the UK's voting policies and ours was so very misleading that it seemed important that there be some sort of response.It's not that I'm against the ideas of non-citizens voting in elections. In another country, under different circumstances, I would entertain the discussion, perhaps even raise it. But in this country, where non-citizens have more rights and privileges than Bahamians in almost every other way, I find the idea insulting.I happen to believe that the principles of democracy go far beyond voting. Voting is one way in which the citizenry participate in their government. The politician placed in power therefore has some kind of obligation to that citizenry, an obligation that has to do with meeting the needs first of all of all the people. Now this is something that Bahamian governments in general have done very poorly, in particular over the last fifteen years or so; ours has become a nation that puts Bahamians last in virtually every arena. For some reason unfathomable to me, we Bahamians elect and re-elect politicians who despise their country and their people and take every opportunity to find ways to disempower us all, politicians who lie down and become carpet when they meet people from abroad, but who stand up and become granite when faced with their fellow-countrymen, politicians who insist on behaving as though we are all as stupid as they imagine we are, as they have trained us to be.You will notice that I refer to them as "politicians". "Leaders" seems to give them too much credit. But I digress.Here's the bit of the BP article that struck me as disingenuous.

According to the FNM source, “In Great Britain right now, if you are a resident not born in the UK, but is working there, you can vote in National Elections. In fact, the privilege has been extended to member states of the EU. When it comes to UK Parliamentary elections, not only members of territories can vote, as like residents of The Turks and Caicos, but citizens from all Commonwealth Countries and British Territories can indeed vote in any Parliamentary General Election in the UK,”BP’s resident CEO, Alexander James, who resides in Cardiff, also participated in the recent UK elections, as he is a resident there. James is from the Bahamas and is a born Bahamian; so the idea is not far-fetched.According to the UK Electoral Services Department, Commonwealth Member States, including local citizens of the Bahamas, Jamaica, Rwanda, Zambia, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa and others all can register and participate in British Parliamentary elections.via Bahamas Press » Plans by FNM to allow foreigners the right to vote in Parliamentary Elections in The Bahamas?.

While there is some truth to the idea that "foreigners" can vote in UK elections, there is far more truth that democracy in the UK and Europe is so much more far-reaching than democracy in The Bahamas that the concept of considering allowing anyone but Bahamian citizens the right to vote at this time is ludicrous; the problem with referencing the UK in this matter is that we have not referenced the UK in the provision of services to our citizenry, and we have not put the matter into context.So here's some context.The UK is part of the European Union. There are several tiers of government in Britain: local councils, (i.e. true-true local government, not this travesty we "have" here), national government, and the European Parliament. The purpose of allowing non-nationals to vote has to do with the levels of service and privilege that devolve to the inhabitants of the UK as a result. Voting in Europe in general, unlike voting here, is not a matter of handing unbridled power to a small handful of people to do what they will with for five years, as it is here. The role of government in the UK is far more complex, with different tiers of responsibilities and different services provided.In our so-called nation, the idea of Bahamians receiving services from any tier of government is, to put it kindly, a bit of a laugh. We only have one tier, and it spends most of its time offering services to foreign investors. No wonder the idea of allowing those investors the right to vote has come up.Let's take it further. When I was in the UK during the 1990s, I was able to vote and be active, should I have wanted to, in local elections. I had a Canadian friend who campaigned for the Labour party, who worked in council elections, who voted, who did everything that the politically active do. Technically, as a member of the British Commonwealth, I was also able to vote in council elections; my aunt, who was living in Cambridge at the time, was also able to do so. But here's the thing. We were all paying taxes to the council, to the local government; living in the area obliged us to do so. Voting in council elections was part of our right to say how our taxes were to be put to use -- and they were. Resources were allocated to everyone, including the very least fortunate -- and this was in Maggie Thatcher's Britain, even though John Major was the titular head of it. It was possible to apply for government funding or services in every arena I can think of. As a student, I was obliged to register with the nearest surgery for medical purposes, and that surgery sent me notices on an annual basis to tell me to come in for my check-up. I cannot remember whether my German friends were permitted to vote in those elections, but I think they did -- these were the earlier years of Britain's engagement with the EU, pre-Chunnel, so what is permissible now may not have been then. But I can tell you who were not permitted to vote in any election: my American friends, even though they too paid taxes and received services. This so-called British magnanimity was not boundless.The thing I'm getting at is that the concept of allowing non-nationals to vote in British elections was one that had a philosophy behind it -- something that I do not expect our politicians to have. The philosophy was this: the job of the government is to provide services for its people (not *just* to seat its behinds in power). Local councils had the task of making their cities and regions liveable; they collected their own taxes and disposed of them accordingly. Those people who received those taxes were given a voice regarding the disposal of those monies.The idea of offering "foreigners" the vote here, though, has fundamentally different roots. In The Bahamas (and in the Caribbean in general) governments seem to forget their obligations to their citizenry. They don't refer to us as citizens, and they don't treat us as such; they provide very poor service, and they make very obvious distinctions between Bahamians and non-Bahamians in every arena. Non-Bahamians roads are paved; non-Bahamians' harbours are deepened; non-Bahamian businessmen get tax concessions; non-Bahamians get tax breaks, get the right to build in national parks, get appointments with Prime Ministers, get to call shots, get to influence government policy -- all without the vote. To give them a vote seems to be more a ploy on the part of the politicians who serve them to get themselves re-elected.And against this I take a stand.Here's my fifty cents. When the Bahamian governments we elect find some way to meet the needs of all its people, no matter how small or insignificant we are imagined to be (and our politicians, make no mistake, consider us, the Bahamian citizens, very small and insignificant indeed), then let's allow them to think about this. But until I see democracy enacted throughout this nation in ways beyond simply having a vote every five years, then let's put the kibosh on this so-called idea.

Gilbert Morris on Blackness & The Presumptions of Ultimate Power

This is an interesting thesis, to say the least. I want to reject it outright, but I am not sure I can. I can certainly see evidence of what Morris is talking about in the case of our own turn-of-the-century leaders; there is a core lack of confidence in the ability—or is it the right?—of Bahamians to take control of our own destiny. It's something I run up against in my students again and again—as one young man told me, "white man always on top". It's a myth, sure, but it's a myth whose psychic power, especially, apparently, among men, hinders us from taking advantage of the authority that independence and nationhood confers.I had a conversation last night with someone who compared the confidence (might we call it the arrogance) of someone like Stafford Sands, the architect and mover of the Bahamian economy to this day, who pretty well invented, or refined the invention of, the successful service economy in the immediate post-war era, when the majority of nations were seeking to develop along the Euroamerican "proper" path, which meant building agriculture, developing industry, and becoming a player on the global market through exports. Thanks to Sands, The Bahamas ignored that trajectory and built up tourism and financial services, starting in the 1950s, several decades before this was acceptable on the global economic scene, and we were unable to explain the success of that model until the whole world had adopted it. Now, we find ourselves unable to imagine something equally brilliant and equally radical to maintain what we have achieved.I'm really concerned to reject Morris's argument in the case of Obama, who as a truly African-American man seemed to have a fairly rounded concept of the world and of the need for power. For me the jury may still be out here. But as a general rule, I have long felt something along the lines of what Morris writes about. It lies at the core of what I have already termed the insufficient consideration given to the meaning and structure of democracy in the Bahamian setting; it explains why our leaders are so anxious to sell the country they are supposed to be managing for future generations, and why roads that take tourists to the harbour and Paradise Island, or the selling of crown land for a temporary handful of house-slave jobs seem to be the best ideas that our leaders can offer to us.Morris's article is worth the read, believe me. It's not the most cheerful thesis to engage with, and it's certainly not wholly politically correct, but I'm not sure it is entirely wrong. My only criticism is that Morris presents it as a fait accompli rather than as a malaise that can be cured.Read it, and let me know what you think. A taste:

Blacks have never had a "concept of the world" sufficient to drive foreign policy. This has been the prerogative of the 'dominant culture'.... given the legacy of slavery, “white supremacy” and racial discrimination in the United States, when a moment [of] racial fairness or ethnic equality (say in Iraq) collides with a moment of racial tension or Machiavellian exploitation of ethnic differences that advances American policy objectives, how can a person whose very being and cultural primacy is structured to protest unfairness and inequality opt for the Machiavellian strategy?via Gyroscopia: Blacks & The Presumptions of Ultimate Power - Caribbean Basin Review.

And more importantly, consider Morris's conclusions -- which I, for one, question on certain fundamental grounds, not least of which is that leaders who are women, and therefore similarly disenfranchised, have demonstrated that they are not affected by these "rules", but which hold enough water to warrant some deep thought:

• it is inconceivable that a Black or minority person can exercise power with an instinct of belongingness, since, nothing will have prepared him or her to deal with the interstices and immediacy of superpower politics.
• Social protest movements ... do not prepare their beneficiaries for and they move “against the grain” of superpower imperatives, which aim at serving its power first, and principles second, if at all.
• In the foreign policy superstructure, there are few Blacks, working on technical questions aimed at securing power for and maintaining the dominance of the United States beyond being part of the apparatus. Yet, this is the heart of American influence, and its perch from which, beyond imposing its will, it can be a force for good in the world.

via Gyroscopia: Blacks & The Presumptions of Ultimate Power - Caribbean Basin Review.

Youri Kemp suggests a way to address New Providence traffic

And I think he's on to something.

The long term benefits would be the upgrade of an essential public good, more persons using the public transportation system instead of their 1 and 1/2 cars daily, a new company to be listed on the national stock exchange, a cleaner environment, savings to the average consumer on fuel, an efficient and reliable bus service along with a new industry complete with everything from administrative staffing, to mechanics, to bus drivers along with the creation of a private sector entity, financed with government bonds or backing -- an entity that can actually pay off its debt to the government or other parties or being co-owned by the government via shares, while providing a useful and essential public good in addition to it being sensitive to individual livelihood.via Caribbean News Now!: Commentary: Getting around in New Providence.

By the way, the link to the COB study he refers to is here:http://nicobethel.net/uploads/transportation_report.pdf

Reimagining oneself: possible, and profitable

Came across this in my reading and thought not of the change in Durham, SC itself, but in the attitude and the social structure that wrought that change. We are trying something similar here with the various attempts at rejuvenating downtown, but we aren't thinking big enough. To start, we need a municipality to govern the city of Nassau; beyond that, it mightn't hurt to have true local government for the entire island of New Providence as well. It's pretty clear to me that what we do have doesn't work in the slightest right now. But read the excerpt and then read the whole article and think about it.

TEN years ago, Matthew Beason’s duties as a restaurant manager here included driving to the airport to retrieve a weekly shipment of duck confit and pâté from New York.“We couldn’t even buy anything like that around here,” said Mr. Beason, who went on to open Six Plates Wine Bar, now one of many ambitious restaurants around Durham. “Now, virtually every place in town makes its own.”Of the rivalrous cities that make up the so-called Research Triangle — Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham — Durham 10 years ago was the unkempt sibling: scruffy and aging.“There was no one on the street at night, just the smell of tobacco drying in the warehouses,” Mr. Beason said.Now, a drive around town might yield the smell of clams from the coastal town of Snead’s Ferry, steaming in white wine, mustard and shallots at Piedmont restaurant; pungent spice and sweet fennel from the “lamby joe” sandwich at Six Plates; and seared mushrooms and fresh asparagus turned in a pan with spring garlic at Watts Grocery.The vast brick buildings still roll through the city center, emblazoned with ads for Lucky Strike and Bull Durham cigarettes. They are being repurposed as art studios, biotechnology laboratories and radio stations.More important for food lovers, hundreds of outlying acres of rich Piedmont soil have “transitioned” from tobacco, and now sprout peas, strawberries, fennel, artichokes and lettuce. Animals also thrive in the gentle climate, giving chefs access to local milk, cheese, eggs, pigs, chickens, quail, lambs and rabbits.

via Durham, a Tobacco Town, Turns to Local Food - NYTimes.com.

National Pride

So Friday was National Pride Day, and individuals and groups around cyberspace hailed the wearing of Bahamian colours and the celebration of all things Bahamian.I'm glad. It's a start. Maybe it's more than a start; maybe it's a step or two towards understanding ourselves and our country, the fact that we the people made the choice to celebrate our nationality and took matters into our own hands.Because not even ten years ago such a day didn't exist. It came into being in 2004, when the Independence Committee headed by Winston Saunders (who had spearheaded the celebratory 29th Independence revelry, celebratory because many Bahamians then believed in help and hope, and the even larger Thirtieth Anniversary celebrations, when it became fashionable and possible to enjoy Independence), noted around the table that even in the midst of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations several very disappointing things had taken place. The first was that many stores and businesses throughout the country had had t shirt days recognizing American independence, decorating their storefronts and windows in red, white and blue, but far fewer were celebrating Bahamian independence in the same way. The second was that people had begun to recognize a need to celebrate being Bahamian but few people really knew how; few people stood still and proud when the National Anthem was being played, many slouching and talking, and many allowing their children to frolic and disturb others; merchants were investing in flags and other paraphernalia but the colours were all too often wrong, more Bajan than Bahamian; and several people in their zeal to celebrate the nation were unintentionally disrespecting it, transgressing the laws governing the national symbols, combining crests with flags, turning flags into clothing or umbrellas, and the like.And then there was the story of the young woman--a girl, really, who had been sent to represent The Bahamas on a broadcast programme in Britain and who, when invited to sing the national anthem, warbled: "O, say, can you see ..."The committee--on which I was sitting for the first time in my capacity as Director of Culture, moved by the overwhelming public embrace of the two independence celebrations of 2002 and 2003--decided that it was time, time, long overdue time to start educating the Bahamian public about the nation, about Independence, about national colours, about the national symbols. So National Pride Day was established. The first one was held the Friday before Independence! And Rawson Square in Nassau was turned into a place of celebration of all things Bahamian.The fact that Friday seemed to be the first time it really took off, replicated itself without the specific and concerted effort of the government, indicates how governments can (and should) plant seeds, water them, and then watch them grow. All too often we underplay, misunderstand, or misrepresent the role of governments in the creation of social and national coherence. For some, the role of government should be invisible; for others it should be omnipotent. The one leads to chaos, leads to vacuums and nature's abhorrence of them, nature's filling of them with all sorts of nonsense like the redefinition of black and white in the Bahamas, like the rewriting of history, the re-enacting of falsehoods. The other leads to rigidity, inflexibility, marginalization, and the dreaded victimization of people and things that don't fit the paradigm.What has happened with National Pride Day is evidence of how governments can work best.So. A step in the right direction, indeed. But it's only a step, and we need a quick march. So let's celebrate the celebration and work on moving on. Or, perhaps more appropriately for this time of year, moving forward, onward, upward, and together.

People who live in glass offices

So last night I was watching TV—a British show called Hustle which is a very well-made, complex-charactered, witty cousin of the TNT show Leverage—Hustle came first, and I can see no acknowledgement in the official record of the connection between the two, but come on now—and at one point (not for the first time) the characters disappear into an office somewhere. I turned to Philip and said: "What is it with these glass offices that you see on TV these days? When did people start working in fishbowls?" (I don't think fishbowls was actually what I said—in fact, I know it wasn't—but it was in my head, so I'll put it out there.) He turned back to me and asked: "Why are you obsessed with offices? This is the fifth time you've asked me that question."And you know, he's right. I am obsessed with offices. And I have asked the question often. I ask it every time I see a new TV show with a new set of offices.People in the USA in particular seem to have taken to working in, yes, fishbowls.OK. My husband might be perplexed by my "obsession", but savvy anthropologists will know just where I'm going with this. Or at least where I'm coming from. Other people may not be familiar with Edward T. Hall and his studies on the cultural use of space (otherwise known as proxemics), but Hall theorized that different cultures approach space in different ways. He illustrated by conducting a study of the organization of offices and office space in three cultures—Japan, Germany and the USA—and demonstrated that different office practices—office layouts, office conduct, office habits—obtained in each nation.This becomes relevant when we begin to realize that as Bahamians we are in the business of serving the world. From tourism to banking, we interact on a regular basis with people from all over, and without understanding that there are fundamental cultural differences which are often subconsciously/unconsciously held, we will judge one another based on cultural variations that a little understanding of basic things such as the use of space would eliminate.For instance. Five years ago when I started working in the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture, when my ship had finally come in and the government had finally actually hired me (16 months after the initial interview), I moved into a corner office at the new Ministry of Education Building on Thompson Boulevard. Mine was an unusual office. Because it was in the corner, it had windows on two sides, floor-to-ceiling panels set in the two outside walls. The interior partitions, though, were walls.I was privileged. I was, after all, a Director, which explained the privilege. In some ways, by my personal standards, I was even more privileged than administrative officers who were more senior than me—than the Finance Officer, the Deputy Permanent Secretaries, and one of the Under Secretaries. In that office, only Directors, the Permanent Secretary, and the Minister himself were honoured with offices that others couldn't see into.What was interesting was that the officers listed above—the Senior Officers in the Ministry, as determined by their salary grouping (not their salaries)—were given blinds for their offices. If they wanted to, they could create a barrier between themselves and the world beyond by closing their blinds and creating walls from the glass that was provided for them. The one Director who could not get a corner office (the building was clearly not designed for a Ministry with three of them, as it only provided two corner offices of the kind that could accommodate Directors (for those of you who are not following me, the Department of Public Personnel has a list of the sizes of offices that should be provided for senior officers, and I can tell you, the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture posed a problem for the HR department in that regard)) was also equipped with blinds. Not one other technical officer was given such a luxury.So what follows next begins to explain my obsession, as Philip calls it, with the glass offices I see on TV today. As I recall it, a whole lot of my tenure at the Ministry in my new capacity was filled with meetings. Tuesday mornings at 11 AM was the time we held Senior Officers' Meetings, which was convened by the Permanent Secretary and which required the Ministry's senior officers—the two Under Secretaries, the two Deputy Permanent Secretaries (Under Secretary trumps DPS, in case you were wondering), the First Assistant Secretaries (right under DPSs), the Senior Assistant Secretaries (next step down from FASs), the Finance Officer, the Directors (of which there were several, and of various kinds), and the Directors' seconds-in-command (for Youth and Sports, the Deputy Directors, for Culture the two Assistant Directors). (pace Rick, I can feel you spinning in your non-grave!). Sixteen people most of the time, sometimes more, all squeezed into the second-best conference room (called, for reasons those of us in Youth and Culture didn't quite get, the Sports Conference Room). These were meetings in which the PS briefed the senior staff on matters pertinent to the running of the Ministry—on the status of papers to go to Cabinet for example, on programmes that the Minister wanted to see implemented, on programmes that were already under way, especially those that involved the whole Ministry (such as Junkanoo, or National Youth Month, or some such event), and where heads of different sections (Directors, mainly) gave updates on the progress of their programmes (like JA activities for Youth, national sporting events for Sports, and national cultural events for Culture). We might be updated on the progress of our installation in these new quarters; we might be briefed on general staff matters, like how we were expected to implement General orders; we might be advised what was left in the budget for the half-year, and how we were to (not) spend it; we might be asked to seek solutions for various issues that had hit the press, like an increase in gang violence, trouble in a sporting association, or the complaints of musicians about the lack of jobs in the marketplace for them.My first months in office dealt with the status of the move. We were a newly reconstituted Ministry, having been reinstated by the PLP in 2002 after the FNM had dissolved the previous Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture in its second term, and that in itself brought a number of issues. We were also a Ministry that had very recently moved into new quarters. And these quarters were significantly different from the old ones. We were occupying a building that had been purpose-built for government activity at the turn of the millennium, while previous offices had occupied the seventh floor of the Post Office Building, an office from the turn of the third quarter of the 20th century, and reflecting office culture of a previous era. The largest difference was the open floor plan of the office, and this was causing considerable consternation among the officers and staff. Three things were causing this. The first was the fact that the new Minister had ordered that all of the Divisions of the Ministry—and all of the staff—were to be relocated to the new office, which meant bringing them in from the various field offices—from the Sports Centre, from the Youth Centre, and from Morro Castle (Culture's field office). The second was that there were only enough offices for Senior Officers and up; the rest of the staff and officers were to be housed in the large open office that constituted most of the south-western wing of the Ministry. And the third was that those offices that did exist were fronted with glass. In other words, if you stood in the open office and looked around, you could see into every office, except those that (as I have said) were assigned to the Director of Culture and the Director of Sports.And the Ministry was beginning by refusing to buy us blinds.I can't say why that was the case. We were never given a good reason why; we were simply told it was not the Ministry's policy to provide blinds for non-senior officers. Needless to say, this caused much discussion; as I have already noted, no one liked the idea of working in a fishbowl. There were many good reasons put forward as to why. For our regular officers, the idea that they were being expected to do their work from desks in the open office plans, when they would be moving with files of potentially sensitive information, and perhaps, for Youth Officers, might be expected to counsel young people in the open, was scandalous. For the senior officers who qualified for offices, the idea of working from glassed-in offices was a major breach of trust.The long and the short of it was the Permanent Secretary was faced with a mini-revolution. Work was not going to get done until all the offices received their blinds. We were not alone in the problem; the Ministry of Education was going through the same difficulties. The solution? To order blinds for every glassed-in office. Today, if you walk around those Ministries, you will notice that every glass wall is opaque; there is not one office in which the inhabitants work with the blinds up or open at all.I knew that something cultural was at work there. I knew that the problem wasn't going to be simply solved. But it wasn't until I reread Hall's proxemics in full that it clicked. We'd come to a point where the importation of someone else's office culture was not going to work for us; the floor plan that was designed for an American office was not translating to The Bahamas. Because we don't practice anthropology here in any wide format, we often miss the point; we think that Bahamians are unproductive for all kinds of reasons (some of them quite valid), among them the idea that we are genetically ill-prepared to work. But perhaps we miss the complete point, because we don't imagine that The Bahamas is worth studying for itself. The place where we work best, the place where phenomenal work gets done, is the Junkanoo shack—a supremely private, secretive place. We work best in secret. I know myself I don't perform well if I think people are looking over my shoulder, and I don't think that the answer should lie in our trying to fit into someone else's mould.So yes, I am obsessed with offices. I am obsessed with the question of glass. I don't think it's a frivolous obsession. I think it's an opportunity. We need to know who we are before we can begin to function at our best.