On Nine to Five

I was sitting in traffic the other day. Sitting in traffic, by the way, is something I would prefer not to do. It's a supreme waste of time, particularly on this island which is only twenty-one miles long. And a question bubbled up to the surface of my mind. It was this. Why am I sitting in traffic?The answer, on the face of it, was so simple one would have to be simple not to get it: Because it's a quarter to nine in the morning.It was far too simple an answer for me, I can tell you. My mind is an unruly thing. Another question came burbling up. But why?The answer came from Out There, wherever That might be: Because people work nine to five.My response was: no, they don't. And I meant it.Now, I'm not talking Sting-time here, though I could be. No; what I mean is this. People's brains don't simply turn on at nine in the morning and turn off at five. Thinking isn't something that knows the hours on the face of a clock; thoughts come when they come, and there's not a lot one can do about it. Contrary to what we've been trained to think, work — and particularly twenty-first-century work — is not best done in eight-hour blocks, with an hour in the middle for lunch.So why do we insist that work involves reporting to a building at nine o'clock and leaving it at five?To answer that fully, we have to have some idea of the origins of the twin concepts of labour and production, which incorporate the idea that a person can exchange what he or she does with hands or brain for money. Now, the thought that what I produce is separable from me, something I can sell at a price determined by someone else, has the kind of peculiarity that becomes greater and greater the longer you examine it, but never mind that.Quite simply, it's an idea that became current during the industrial revolution, when the creation of factories and mass production changed the way that work was regarded. In a factory, you see, individuals are hired for the use of their hands and for their presence, and very little beyond that. Especially after the production line was invented, the only purpose for employing human beings in a factory was to make sure the machines did their jobs as they should. But in economies that rely on other kinds of production, labour is not something that you can separate from people. One carpenter is not just as good as another, nor are two masons alike; you pay for the quality of the work produced, and not for the body that produces it. Even in an agricultural society, labour is only saleable during periods in which it doesn't matter who does the work, such as harvest time; during the rest of the year, skills matter.In short, the creation of factories created the concept of work as being something separate from the human being. Before that time, one did one's work where one found oneself; work spaces and home spaces overlapped, and workdays were determined by the projects one had to complete. On the farm, for instance, an eight-hour day means very little at all. You work till you finish what you have to do! If you finish it in four hours, good for you — and if it takes you twelve, well, there it is. Similarly, for an artisan or an artist, work is measured by the completion of a job. There's no value in sitting down from nine to five in one's workspace if it produces nothing at the end of the day.Now this makes sense to me. Work should be measured by achievement, by what is accomplished in a sitting, not by how long one spends on the job. Thing is, our society appears to believe the myth that a job is something detachable from a person. Someone asking for "a job" is more often than not asking for a place to be sent for eight hours a day, five days a week, with a pay check coming every now and then. What that job is hardly seems to matter. If one reports on time, leaves on time, and pushes the requisite amount of paper or cement around then that pay check just keeps on a-coming.Now this, I submit is odd. Even odder: far too many of these jobs appear to have to start at nine in the morning and end at five at night.What I don't get is this. It's perfectly possible for a person to be present in body between nine and five and doing no work at all — and it's equally possible for a person to be in traffic, or in bed, or in the shower, and to be working harder than the person at the desk. Inspiration doesn't know hours; anyone who has been woken up at three in the morning with an idea that just won't quit knows that this nine-to-five deal is a scam, an artificial set period that make it easier for accountants and bosses to deal out the dollars, but which really has very little to do with work.I have been a bureaucrat, a hotel worker, a writer and a teacher in my life. There's nothing magic about nine to five beyond the magic imparted by traffic jams, stress, and air pollution. I had the great fortune to have been employed in a twenty-four hour service industry at the beginning at my career, and so learned early that even working eight hours a day doesn't mean you have to work nine to five; I worked every shift my position allowed, from seven-to-three to four-to-twelve. As a teacher, I learned that being in the classroom for six hours a day is no measure whatsoever of how hard one works. People who believe that teachers have it good (they get off at three/they have long vacations) should try it. During those six hours, there is no downtime; you're lucky to get to sip some tea. Even when one leaves the classroom, one continues to work as long as one is awake, preparing, marking, thinking. And as a writer, I know that my brain does not turn off when I leave the office. Oddly enough, it seems to turn on.The thing is this. We no longer live in the industrial age. In this country, we never did. The age of the internet erodes all boundaries. Nine to five is obsolete. Isn't it about time we recognized this fact, and gave some thought to changing the horrid nine to five?

On the Stopping of Bucks

It wasn't me.It's not my fault.Whatever it is, I didn't do it.We live in a country, or in an era, or in a culture, or in something, where personal responsibility is hard to come by. Very few of us have ever done anything wrong. No. We make mistakes; none of us is perfect. When we transgress, it's always because of some external force. The road was slippery. The tree stepped out in front of us. Our finger slipped on the trigger and we miss and shoot the man. Or, we grow up poor. We didn't have the advantages you have. We don't know no better. The neighbour made us do it. The devil made us do it. God made us do it.We live in a society in which bucks are passed around and around, where if we watch them we are liable to grow dizzy with the movement. If we listen to ourselves, we are all leaves floating in the wind, corks a-bobbing on the sea. We have no volition of our own; we are at the mercy of circumstance.It is a rare, rare thing to find someone who will say, as American President Harry Truman once became famous for saying: the buck stops here.No. Around here, bucks don't often stop. Nothing is ever anyone's fault. We play the politics of blame so well we have almost forgotten how to engage with issues. The result: we become so busy pointing our fingers at one another when we notice problems that we never get around to fixing any of them.Let me begin with the freshest controversy: Junkanoo. It's January, after all. Now I shall say first off that this year has been one of the better ones with regard to blame and finger-pointing — at least so far — because to some degree there are fewer scapegoats around. This year the Junkanoos, particularly the competitors, held a lot of the responsibility for the parades. The Junkanoo Corporation of The Bahamas was given the authority to deal with the training of the judges and the tallying and the administration of the parades, and for the most part things went very well. Except. On Boxing Day, someone overlooked the biggest competitive category at all.Now we must admire the way in which that mistake was handled. The Chairman of the Parades Management Board took full responsibility for it. It may not have been directly his fault, in that he didn't overlook the Overall Group Costume category personally, but he took responsibility for it because it was his job to be responsible for it. Applause, Ken — well done. What he didn't say, but could have, was that the overlooking was a collective thing: that it wasn't something that one person or one group messed up on, but that it was something that happened in an open room in full view of the group observers who had come in to monitor the judging and the tallying of the parade. The Chairman wasn't the only person who had the responsibility of ensuring that the right things were provided to the judges; every group who sent an observer shared in that responsibility. And it would seem to me that because not one of them noticed the error, the responsibility must be shared.That's a concrete example, and a recent one, of how bucks get passed — and how they get stopped. We’re about to enter a two-year period of buck-passing now, and we can prepare ourselves for some spectacular examples. The general elections may not be around the corner, but they're down the road, and already bucks have begun flying around. It's always easy when one is in opposition to point at the weaknesses in the government's actions — and for the government to throw the weaknesses back at the opposition. No problem ever has an origin (beyond the actions of The Other Party) — and no problem has a real solution (beyond the deliverance of The Only Party). Buck-passing at its best.The thing is that reality works against us all. While we're so busy passing the buck — from NJC to Ministry to JCB, or from FNM to PLP to UBP, or from little man to big man to the Devil/God — problems are multiplying. When no one is responsible, everything crumbles.There is a branch of mathematics and physics that argues that no action that is independent, that even the smallest activity has repercussions elsewhere in the world. It's called chaos theory, and it demonstrates that the flap of a butterfly's wing in the Amazon can create tornadoes in the mid-western USA. According to this theory, the most careless, harmless action can have massive results far away. Of course, (and as usual), the scientists are arriving late at a point that theologians have known forever — since Cain, if we go in for the Old Testament. We are our brothers' keepers; we are all responsible for what happens around us. To pass the buck is not to duck responsibility at all; it's to ensure that nothing ever changes, nothing ever improves.Of course, it's not our fault — is it? We exist on the borders of the United States of America, after all. And they had this culture long before us.We can't help it, right?Wrong. As soon as we shoulder the responsibility we all bear for the society in which we live, as soon as we accept the buck, we can help it — and we will.

On New Tings

Bahamians, it's said, love new tings.To some degree, that's true. Just let a new restaurant open up. You better hope they got valet parking, because without it you'll never get near the place. You better eat before you go, because you won't get a table until well into the digestive process, and your stomach will start in on itself. And you better find out if they take reservations, because without them you may have to wait a week or two to even smell the door.Or just let a new car come on the market. Even better, let it be a big car, expensive, preferably with some gold on it somewhere — on the logo, maybe, or where lesser makers would put chrome. And then watch the roads, and count to see how many of them appear within the next month or so.Or just let a new service be provided for (say) a cell phone — or even let a new cell phone hit these shores. You'd be surprised (maybe you wouldn't) how many people invest in it.Or just let a new place of worship open its doors. Better yet, let that place of worship come complete with a new building or even a new style of service, and watch to see how full that place will become within a week or two of its establishment.But just don't mess with our overall way of life.I've got a couple of things in mind here, and most of them have to do with my ministry — two in particular. The first is National Youth Service. And the second is Junkanoo.You see, the idea of National Youth Service, which comes onstream at last this year, this month, has been kicking around for longer than many of us have been alive. (I use that "us" advisedly, by the way; I'm a little older than the idea, but only just.) It was first advanced by the brand-new Progressive Liberal Party shortly after they came to power, and discussions intensified about it right after Independence. Nothing happened back then, because the idea was too foreign, too new, and the populace resisted so strongly that the government dropped the idea. It resurfaced back at the end of the 1980s, when it became apparent that the so-called drug scourge had affected a whole generation of young Bahamians, many of them men; but once again the electorate struck back. No service for my good child, was the refrain. (Some people read that as no mixing — of classes, of races, didn't matter, but never mind that now.) And so it is that almost forty years after the idea was first introduced, National Youth Service is finally becoming a reality.Now some may argue that the reason it hasn't happened before is that the time was not right, or that the pitch wasn't right, or that — well, something wasn't right. I'm not so sure that those reasons aren't correct, but I'm not so sure that they are, either. I'm not so sure that it matters. What matters is that we did not like this new ting. And so we fought back against people of greater foresight and vision until it became absolutely clear to many of us that this was something we had to do, or else.And then there's Junkanoo. Well, there've been plenty of new tings happening in that festival lately, from the introduction of $75 dollar tickets to the institution of a new management structure. It's not entirely clear that Bahamians are overwhelmed with these changes. While some people flock to the best seats, many others — many of them relatives of the very people rushing in the streets — can't afford a good spot, and are excluded from full enjoyment of the achievements of their loved ones. And while the new management structure seems to have made the group leaders happier by raising the level of trust between the people operating the parades and the people competing in them, from the outside — or from the bottom — it's hard to tell that anything's different at all.You see, I'm not so sure that the adage that Bahamians like new tings goes much beyond our surfaces, or far beyond our stomachs (and even then, we're picky about what we put there). If a new ting comes attached to a new way of thinking about the world, a new way of seeing ourselves, we run like the blazes in the opposite direction. If we return to Junkanoo for a moment, consider what's really new about it. When was the last time we say something really revolutionary in someone's presentation, or in someone's costume or design? When did someone go out on a limb and bring something truly radical to Bay Street?The answer lies in the groups who don't get all that much airplay, who don't feature big in the public imagination: Colours, who build small, audition their members, score their music, and paste according to a limited palette of colours; Barabbas, who invented a new way of carrying cowbells and started a whole craze in drumming; the Fox Hill Congoes, a group who are almost gone from the public mind, but who introduced the legions of big bass drums to the parade.The fact that we don't celebrate these groups for their innovations, but rather ignore their new ideas or ridicule their difference and continue to pick our winners from the tried-and-true pairing of SaxoValle suggests to me that we really don't like new tings as much as we think we do.You see, the new tings we love best are those that come from away. New ideas, new habits, especially those proposed by Bahamians, are harder to catch on. We'll change clothes and hairstyles and vehicles and televisions and furniture and eating places and preferred vacation styles, but we're a whole lot slower to welcome new ways of doing the things we take for granted.The trouble is, until we wake up, look hard and embrace innovation, we are going to lose more and more of ourselves. Cultures thrive on change. Without innovation, our culture will continue to assimilate changes that come from beyond. And we'll find that the new tings we do like are going to come more and more from the outside, and will speak less and less to us about our selves.

On Being Caribbean

Peter Minshall is in town.For those of us who don't know who Peter Minshall is, or who may imagine that his contributions may have very little to do with our lives, being so plugged into the energy of our northern neighbours, it's time to think again.Think, for instance, Trinidad. Think Carnival. Think big themes, social commentary, giant puppets, super-costume; and then think Junkanoo.Minshall is the foremost designer in Trinidad's Carnival, where his work has revolutionized the way in which people regard and think about their festival. His creations are not simply pretty, you understand; sometimes they are frightening, shocking, or horrifying — but they always make you think. And his contribution is not limited to Trinidad. He's been invited to design the opening ceremonies for not one, but three Olympic Games: Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992, Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996, and part of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies in 2002.His influence on Bahamian Junkanoo has been profound, but it isn't what people may expect. While we often think that the brass lines and the tricks and the feathers are all "Trinidad" or "Carnival" imports, they're not where Minshall's made the most impact. No; Bahamian Junkanoo leaders were in Trinidad in 1983 when Minshall's shocking presentation, "The River", which provided a commentary on the rape and murder of purity, harmony and nature by technological man, appeared, and were there again, with Committee members, in 1986, when "Rat Race", a meditation on modern urban Caribbean life, appeared. No; where Minshall's influence on our Junkanoo has been greatest has been in the area of theme.There's a category in the judging process for Junkanoo that's called Execution of Theme, and it's here that Minshall's influence can be seen. Of all the groups who rush, it's the Valley Boys who have mastered this best. While other great groups like the Saxons and One Family and Roots have long been executing their themes in purely artistic fashions, using — often brilliantly — the designs of their dancers and their bellers and their back lines to illustrate their theme, starting in the second half of the 1980s the Valley Boys took a leaf from Minshall's book and began to perform their themes. Who can forget the moment when the Valley Boys' free dancers, all costumed in Defence Force camouflage, threw themselves onto their bellies at Charlotte Street and began to crawl? Or when, for their Wedding, the Valley Boys released balloons at the rollover, and danced down Bay Street, to cut the wedding cake in Rawson Square?For Minshall, you see, whose background is theatre, Carnival — and by extension Junkanoo — is the theatre of the street. Caribbean people, like Africans and Asians and unlike northerners, perform in the outdoors, in the open. The great Caribbean performance spaces are not the grand theatres and opera houses of New York or London; rather, they are the fields and parks and streets of cities.What are we doing with ours?I ask because it seems to me that we have been given the task of caretaking a special gift — the gift of performance, the gift of communicating with our whole bodies, of turning our selves into instruments for the expression of the human soul — but that we seem to be far more interested in who gets to administer the arena for this gift, or in who wins the competition that accompanies it. And that winning is everything. It doesn't matter whether what wins has lifted us out of ourselves, or has simply rerun what was done last year and the year before; it doesn’t matter whether the whole thing, the art of Junkanoo is moving forward, taking us with it, or whether it's sliding into irrelevancy. We've been given a gift to look after, and we're wasting it on politics and competition.What Peter Minshall has to teach us isn't how to build costumes or even how to put themes out on the street, though we'd certainly do well to learn both from him. No. The message he comes bringing is that we are Caribbean people. We can quibble all we like about the veracity of that fact — we can argue that if the Caribbean Sea stops at the southern shores of Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico it means we're outside the Caribbean, or we can claim that because Columbus, God bless the man, first set foot on one of our islands, it knits us up inextricably with the Caribbean — but the truth of the matter is that Junkanoo says it all.For Minshall, you see, the essence of the Caribbean being is hybridity — that glorious mixing that happens with cross-fertilization and jumbled-up genealogies. Like Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, we are strangers in our own lands, speaking with words that are foreign to us. Our fullest expressions happen beyond words — in the language created by music, by art, by our bodies in the dance. Junkanoo is the ultimate site of these expressions — or at least, it's supposed to be, and it can be. It's for us the most sacred work that any of us can perform. But Junkanoo, weather or no weather, is not invincible; if we play with it too much, we can lose its truth and be left with an empty shell.And so let us celebrate our Caribbeanness by recognizing the sacred trust that draws us all together: the trust that has us all, from Nassau straight down to Port of Spain, engaged in the creating of that wonderful theatre that is Junkanoo and Carnival. And let us respect that trust so much that we forget our differences and our competitions and our postponements, and concentrate on the work itself.

On Sovereignty and Second Homes

There is a village in Jamaica called Martha Brae. It is located today in the heart of the tourist playground of the island's north coast, and if you look its name up on the internet, most of the links that come up will be tourist-related. Most of them will speak of Martha Brae as a river, and will say nothing about the village. Most of them expect tourists to be living in Montego Bay, the nearest city. But as is the wont of the tourist industry, which is in many ways the plantation writ new, very few of them will lead the curious to anything that talks about the people or the culture of Jamaica.We live in a world of unequal wealth and power. We happen to live in a part of that world that balances on the cliff-edge of prosperity. There are few, if any, sovereign Black nations that boast more than The Bahamas does in the way of wealth, comfort, infrastructure and standard of living. Nevertheless, our wealth, our way of life — which the vast majority of us take for granted — are more precarious than we imagine.The recent study on poverty levels in The Bahamas indicates that 9% of the population lives below the poverty line, which is calculated at $7.84 per day ($2,863 per year). It further reveals that the distribution of the Bahamian poor is uneven; that the poorest Bahamians live on the southern Family Islands, where the poverty rate is 21%. A closer look at the statistics proves interesting. Only 6% of the total population of poor Bahamians lives in the Family Islands; the majority of the poor live in the cities of New Providence and Grand Bahama. Moreover, the gap between the two largest ethnic groups whose people live in poverty is wide; 25% of the Haitian/Haitian-Bahamian population live below the poverty line, compared to 8.7% of Bahamians.Now when compared with the poverty rate of the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, which stands well over one-third, we are doing well. That isn't to say that we must be complacent about our poverty rates; the fact that 76% of our poor live in our cities, where our affluent also live, suggests that we have plenty of work to do. But I would also suggest that we consider something else. The study calculates poverty in terms of cash income, and assumes that one needs cash to purchase everything that one needs. Now as far as Nassau and Freeport and perhaps Marsh Harbour go, that is true. But in the case of the southern islands, where the cash poverty rate is the highest, that is not so.You see, people in the Family Islands still fish and farm. Now that may be a foreign idea to those of us who — like me — make their living by getting into cars or buses and travelling to jobs, the most preferable of which involve sitting in air-conditioned offices making contact with other people by telephone, and spending our cash to eat our breakfasts, lunches and dinners. But foreign as it may be, many Family Islanders still have less need for cash on a daily basis than we do here in New Providence. So while $7.84 a day per person may not buy very much in New Providence, and while it may buy even less on a Family Island, the need to spend that $7.84 is less crucial. As long as Titta is growing her corn and grinding it into grits, as long as Pa is fishing — off the rock or on the shoals, doesn’t matter, or Co'n Slim is conching, as long as the whole family is crabbing when it rains, the basics of nutrition are cheaper in cash terms than they are in the cities. Bahamians in the southern islands may be poor, but they don't have to starve.Not yet, anyway.It's important, when looking at statistics and working out what to do about them, to remember that numbers aren't people. Numbers lie there on the page and let you look at them, while people get up each morning, pray to God, and go about their business. Bahamians have been doing that for centuries. It's important to remember that the last sixty years of our history mark the first time that two whole generations of Bahamians have had the ability to live a better life than their parents had. And it's important to remember, and to celebrate, what it was that allowed us to survive back in the days before the tourist dollar never done.It was land.You see, The Bahamas has only become cash-rich since we've discovered the benefits of prostitution. I am not talking about the literal exchange of sexual favours here. For the past sixty years, we've been placing a price tag on land — the very thing that saved us from poverty in the past. These days, we're selling everything that we previously considered useless, from the powdery white and pink sand that can't grow anything good to eat, to the arid hills that have no water beneath them, to the marshland that is impossible to farm, to the mangrove stands that are difficult to fish. Our newest policy: to sell off empty land throughout the Family Islands to wealthy northerners for their second homes. The idea is to get chunks of cash for land that isn't being used, and to generate jobs for the locals, thus raising their daily cash income. It's a bit like mining; you go into spaces no one would ever go to dig out the gold, and get rich quickly in the process.It's a good idea, especially for politicians, who work in five-year increments and rarely calculate beyond the nearest election or two. But, like most easy things, it's a bad idea in the long term.You see, the village of Martha Brae is a very special place, because it is a plot of land that Jamaicans who were formerly slaves bought for themselves. They bought it collectively, painfully, over a period of years; but it means everything to them because there after slavery was no good land left for the ex-slaves to live on. The best land on the island was owned by people who lived far, far away. Martha Brae was an affirmation of independence, a celebration of freedom and sovereignty, and poor as the inhabitants are, they have the dignity of their history, and they have their pride.We, who are still land-rich, must be careful in our quest for quick cash. Our zeal to eradicate the poverty rate in the Family Islands must not lead us to make the mistake of thinking that cash is the only way of measuring wealth. We must always remember the fundamental truth of all ex-slave societies: that prosperity built on servitude is not prosperity at all.

On the Invention of Santa

Santa, they tell me, used to dress in green. He also used to walk around on foot, wear a long robe, and visit children on December 6th. He didn't originally come from the North Pole (wherever that is), or have reindeer, or carry toys; he was Turkish, believe it or not, and while he was the patron saint of children, he was also the patron saint of sailors, scholars, merchants and thieves.Christmas is coming, and, like it or not, we're being flooded with images, stories, and concepts that affect us and our children. Now I'm not one of those people who believe that Santa is an anagram for "Satan", and make a whole lot out of that fact (after all, "God" is an anagram for "dog" and vice versa, and "evil" is simply "live" spelled backwards — we can do a whole lot with this game); but it's always useful to know where the things that take prominence in our lives come from, and what purpose they used to serve.It's useful because by doing so we're able to loosen some of the power these things have over us, and claim some of it for ourselves.Santa Claus is one of these things. Here, on the fringes of American culture, Santa is as much a part of our Christmas imagery as anything else. While we may not make him as central to our celebrations as Americans do — we're Christians, after all, and for many of us that means that we want to focus on the religious aspects of the season, not the secular ones — we still find his image and his colours everywhere we turn. So it'll be useful to get some idea of where these two things originated.Santa Claus as we know him has three main origins. The first is the story of Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, a Christian who lived in fourth-century Turkey. His entire life, it's said, was lived according to Christian principles. Nicholas dedicated his life to the service of God, and spent his inheritance on helping the sick, the poor, and the suffering. According to legend, he loved children — he gave good ones presents, and bad ones got switches instead. He walked on foot, and didn't drive any sleigh at all. He died on December 6th, and that date is celebrated as his day in parts of Europe.The second is nineteenth-century America. In the early nineteenth century, the major influence on Christmas ritual was Dutch, like many of the early settlers. Santa Claus is the Americanization of the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas — Sinterklaas. But the first images of this person portrayed a fat bearded elf who squeezed himself down chimneys, the kind of person who appears in the poem "The Night Before Christmas". But that Santa wasn't the one we know today. He didn't wear a red suit, he didn't wear a cap, he wasn't a big fat man; he was a little fat elf.The third is Coca-Cola. Ever notice how Santa's the colour of a Coke label? Well, there's a reason for that, and it's that the red suit trimmed with white fur was an invention of the Coca-Cola company. The idea was to sell more soft drinks, but what ended up happening was the selling of the idea itself. Santa's red costume is the product of one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. And as for his home in the North Pole (which is a block of ice anyway, as the North Pole is located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean) and his elves and his sleigh and the reindeer, they are all inventions that have been tacked on throughout the years.What's my point?Well, think of it this way. Santa Claus may be an American invention, and one that has spread, like American culture, to most countries of the world in some form or another, but he's a composite of a number of different concepts from another different places. Like Bahamians, Americans come from elsewhere. Like the Lucayans, the native Americans have been killed off and driven away, and their traditions do not form any part of mainstream American life. American culture, like ours, is a hybrid culture, something created out of the various bits and pieces the various peoples of the USA brought with them. Santa Claus is only one example; there are lots of others.My point, then, is this. Just as Santa was imagined and re-imagined over the years, so we Bahamians can create our own traditions out of the fragments of our histories. Just as the Americans dug into the various mythologies of Europe to come up with their image of Santa Claus, infusing it with bits and pieces they added themselves, so we can create our own festivals and traditions.So Christmas is coming. Every screen that we face reminds us of that fact, and there's a sense of urgency in the air. Traffic is thickening on the roads; it took me as long to get home the other night as it did to get to work that morning, probably because I happened to be heading in the same direction as the mall. Flights in and out of the country are booked, and people are already having their luggage bumped because the gifts are piling up in the cargo holds. Christmas is coming, Santa is out, and we're spending our free money on gifts.Isn't it time we created our own traditions and symbols to help us celebrate this very special time in our very own way?Christmas is coming. Joy to the world.Peace on earth, goodwill to all men.

On Colonialism

There's a song out there that those of us who were around on July 10, 1973 could once be heard singing. My favourite part of it goes like this:We been standing up to a different flag, Union Jack in the skyBut we ga have our own flag come the 10th of JulyThe chorus is less subtle. "Independence," it sings,Independence for the Bahamas,Independence, people, come sing a new song.Well, that was then, wasn't it? And this is now. We are singing a different song, all right, but I'm not so sure that it's all that new. And we're certainly standing up to a different flag, but it's still red, white and blue.You see, colonialism isn't simply a matter of governors and who gets to vote and prime ministers and having representation at the United Nations. All of those things are important, but in the end they're trappings. They do for a nation what jewellery does for a woman; they adorn, they define, but they can't really make her into anything if there's nothing there. A woman of substance, is accentuated by those trappings; but a jungless is nothing but the bling.I want to write about colonialism, because it seems to me we're more colonized than we ever were before. Last week I talked about Thanksgiving, which is only one manifestation of that. This week I want to give you a couple of other things to think about.For instance.There's the story of the witness in a criminal trial who, when called to testify, chose to plead the Fifth in his defence.There's the story of the man who, when stopped by American Immigration at the airport and asked for his passport, asked, "What I need a passport for? I only going to Miami!"What's so peculiar about these two incidents?They're all elements of American law, of the American culture, that are not part of our legal system. That is not to say that our legal system is inferior — not at all. But it is different. Our Constitution has never been amended, and so to plead the Fifth (which offers Americans the right to avoid self-incrimination) is irrelevant here in The Bahamas — just as we most definitely need passports to go to Miami. The freedoms guaranteed our press are not absolute; we have laws about what can and can't be printed. In Canada and Britain, their presses are enjoined not to print any material that can lead people to hate; here in The Bahamas, we have prohibitions about obscenity. But far too many of us assume that there is no difference between our rights and those accorded to Americans.The fact that we have trouble distinguishing where the border falls between our nation and the American nation tells me that we have not got rid of our colonial past. No; we have brought it with us into the present, and we have simply exchanged one garment for another.Now some of you may be thinking what's wrong with putting on the American cloak. After all, the USA is the most powerful, the richest, the greatest country in the world, right? (Well, no, not necessarily; it might be the most powerful country, but it isn't the richest, and it could be argued that the fact that Bahamians have better access to basic health care than Americans should suggest that there are limitations to the United States' greatness.) But that's not my point.My point is that we are not American. Certainly, we are brothers under the skin; we are far closer to the States, and to the Southern States, than our Caribbean counterparts, because most of our ancestors came from there. But our paths and theirs were different. In our country, the slaves and their descendants ended up in the majority; in the USA, people of African descent make up about twelve per cent of the population. In our country, emancipation came in 1834; in the USA they had to wait until 1865, and fought a bloody war to achieve it. In our country, people of colour could vote (as long as certain conditions were met) from before Emancipation occurred; in the USA, those rights were abandoned and had to be fought for, complete with martyrs, during the 1950s and 1960s.And what we don't recognize, or perhaps don't know, is that the American Civil Rights movement drew its strength and inspiration from us. So why should we be prepared, now, to surrender our sovereignty to American culture?Colonialism, you see, doesn't come in just one form. It can be social and political, as it was when the British were in charge; or it can be economic and cultural, as it is today. The latter is more subtle. The Americans don't have to be here physically for us to be colonized. Their television, their products, their food, their outlets, their computer programmes — all of these are making us American from the inside out.The problem isn't theirs at all; it's ours. We have retained the habits of colonialism. We like having someone bigger and stronger and wealthier to tell us what to do, and we seem to find comfort in the fact that we aren't as good as They are. We got rid of one colonial master, only to invite in another.I'm reminded of a comment Jesus made, about the unclean spirit that, having been cast out of a man, wanders around until it decides to return to the place from which it came, bringing seven other spirits more evil than itself.It would do us well to remember that. In the words of Our Lord, if you get rid of the spirit, but keep the same mind, the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.

On Thanksgiving

Let me tell you a story.It's a very Bahamian thing to do, you know, tell people stories. I could start mine in a number of ways. I could, for instance, start like this:I'll tell you a story bout Jackinanory …or I could start like this:It once was a time a very fine timethe monkey chew tobacco and he spit white lime…The point is, it's a Bahamian thing to do, to tell people stories. Remember that for later.Anyway, here's mine. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a class — a very large class of sophisticated, well-employed people. It so happened that I was giving a test on a Thursday evening near the end of November. I announced my intention a week or so in advance. In the class before the night of the test, a stream of people, one after another, came up to me. Every single one of them had the same request: could we postpone the test? The reason being given was simple. Thursday was Thanksgiving, and they were going to be on holiday, eating their Thanksgiving turkeys somewhere that was not the class.Now, being a good Bahamian — I watched our flag going up that flagpole at midnight on July 10, 1973, and I saw the blessing the Good Lord sent down upon it, stirring the air around it so that it opened out in a soft breeze that had not touched the Union Jack until that point — I flatly refused. My students were horrified."Are you American?" I asked them. "Do you have dual citizenship?"I was truly interested; I don't like people who make assumptions, and I didn't want to be guilt of one myself.As I remember it, not one of them was."I went to school in the US," said one brave soul."Well, I went to school in Canada," said I, "but you don't see me celebrating their Thanksgiving on Columbus Day." (I do not think I said Discovery Day; I don't think I can fix my mouth to say that.)I then took the stand that if they wanted to pass the class, they had to take the test. The worst thing they could've done was tell me they wanted to go home and celebrate a foreign holiday; it straightened up every patriotic bone in my body. There was a great outcry, but I stuck to my guns."If there's one thing I hate," I told them, "it's a group of independent Black people taking over an American holiday."And it's not as though it's anything to be proud of. Even Americans are learning to be critical of their Thanksgivings. Not that there's anything wrong with giving God thanks; that's what Harvest is for, as my good colleague Sebastian Campbell has already eloquently pointed out. But the implications of Thanksgiving, even for Americans, are pretty iffy, to say the least. They become even more iffy when people whose history is a whole long story of oppression insist on adopting the holiday.You see, American Thanksgiving is a celebration that remembers the Pilgrim Fathers. Now who were these people? They were a group of white settlers who, fleeing religious persecution in Great Britain, set up camp on a land that was already inhabited. As the story goes, each Thanksgiving was another chance for them to thank the Good Lord for keeping them alive for another year.On the surface, it doesn't seem all that terrible. But look at it this way.The Pilgrim Fathers did for the mainland of the USA what Columbus did for our islands. Their settlement, like his landfall, ultimately resulted in the devastation of the populations of native people who occupied, farmed and ruled the land that was North America. Each Thanksgiving, therefore, implies that the Pilgrim Fathers were giving thanks to God for helping them kill off a few more Indians, for helping them take over a little more of the land that belonged to the Six Nations (whose descendants tell us that they celebrate the oldest living participatory democracy on Earth). The states in which the Pilgrim Fathers landed have very few reservations at all; almost all their native people have been assimilated into the dominant, invasive population.It is for this that we give thanks.I don't accept it. I was born and grew up among a people for whom oppression is a daily part of life. I don't merely refer to people of African descent; all of us have experienced oppression in one form or another. As inhabitants of a tiny country on the edge of the greatest nation in the world, we are more than familiar with oppression. We should identify with the oppressed everywhere — not with the oppressors.I believe that those of us who do not carry an American passport but celebrate Thanksgiving like the Americans choose to identify with oppressors. To do so denies our very essence, erases our history a little more. To buy into this holiday, which commemorates people whose settlement of New England began the massacre of the Native peoples of the USA, tells me that we have very little solid sense of self. We ignore the fact that among us still walk Bahamians in whose veins run Native American blood. Some of us — Bowlegs and Wildgooses, among others — still carry Native American names. And for any one of us to celebrate American Thanksgiving on our soil obliterates who we are.E bo ben, my story done en.If you ax me for another, I'll tell it again.

On Zero

We're all familiar with the idea of the American Dream. Who isn't? In the musical Miss Saigon, which was written by two Frenchmen about the Vietnamese war, there's a song that bears that name. And for those of us who live on the periphery of that grand ol' country to the north, the American Dream pervades almost every cranny of our reality.You see, the American Dream is part of the myth of the American nation — the idea that a person can go from rags to riches in the grand ol' USA. And it's a myth that's founded on a sort of reality. Examples of successes abound, from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump and John H. Johnson. We don't talk all that much about the failures.The idea of the American Dream (let's call it the A.D. from here on in) is a simple one, a strong one. No matter who you are, what you start with, the USA is the Land of Opportunity, the one place in the world where hard work and innovation can move you from nothing to something, can take you from zero to a million in the short space of a lifetime.What we don't talk much about is the Bahamian Dream.Thing is, it exists. More than that, it's a far more dramatic reality for the majority of Bahamians than the American Dream could ever be. To hook into the American Dream, we Bahamians would have to emigrate, fight for status, and then dive into that fast-flowing stream that is American business life to struggle with all the other hopefuls to try and come out victors. This doesn't mean that many Bahamians don't partake in the dream; every day young Bahamians leave this country to go (mostly) to the USA, where they believe the opportunities are greater and the possibilities for living out the A.D. more plentiful.But look at our Dream this way.The present black Bahamian upper class is comprised of people who were born into poverty, or of people whose parents were raised with next to nothing in their pockets. For some of them, they have gone from zero to a million in the space of three and a half decades — the precise time it's been possible for a Bahamian of any complexion, but especially of African heritage — to participate creatively and meaningfully in the economy. We can name our own successes: entrepreneurs like Tiger Finlayson and Franklyn Wilson and Myles Munroe and Neil Ellis spring immediately to mind.They are not alone. Between 1967 and now, countless Bahamians of eminently humble backgrounds and limited prospects have drastically improved their standard of living. Men and women who, when they were born, could look forward to little more than a basic education in one of the few public schools have become doctors and lawyers and politicians and preachers and stars.In June of this year, the Pompey Museum downtown reopened for the first time since the fire of Sepember 2001. In commemoration of the 170th anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in this part of the world, and of the 2nd centenary of the struggle against slavery in general, the first exhibit in that museum featured an actual slave ship that was recovered off the waters of Key West.If you haven't yet had the chance to visit the Pompey Museum and see the exhibition of the Henrietta Marie, know that it will close at the end of November. And know, too, that if you miss the opportunity to go, the point of this article is going to be blunted in some small way.You see, the Bahamian Dream is, to my mind, a far, far greater dream than the American one. It's not how far we can go that impresses me; it's how far we have come.The awful thing about slavery, I believe, isn't the condition in which a slave finds himself. It's the fact that there is no self. Slavery is the institution of taking from a human being the most basic thing that make him human: the right to own himself. The physical conditions that complement slavery are to some degree incidental. Many Bahamian slaves lived in conditions that we might imagine that slaves on the American mainland and the rest of the Caribbean should envy. Not all Bahamian slaves lived on plantations. Those who lived in Nassau might not even live with their masters; some were permitted to live in their own quarters Over the Hill, and they might even have their own plots of land that they could use to grow food.But their lives were not their own. Nor were their spouses, their children, or their labour. Their apparent material security was fragile. If their master died, or fell upon hard times, they could be sold into a completely different situation. There was no security, no room to plan for the future, no real hope, even, to place faith in the present.The Bahamian Dream is so powerful, to my mind, because as a society, we started not from zero, but from a negative number. To be a society based on slavery, and whose hierarchies perpetuated the inequalities derived from slavery for another 130 years, and to have created from that a society in which we can grow our own millionaires is a dream indeed.But let me not sound too smug, It's possible to have a society in which a group of people benefit from a change as fundamental as majority rule, but in which that group do not pass on the benefits to those who come behind. And I believe that, in some ways unlike the USA, we run the risk of becoming that kind of society. The achievements of the first generation of Independence were remarkable; but are we perpetuating them? As I write, too many young Bahamians are choosing not to return home because they are finding our society closed to their contributions. Could it be that the Bahamian Dream is as fragile as a slave's sense of self?

On the Speaking of English

It's about time, I think, that we recognize as a nation that the language we speak is not English.Not so long ago, a columnist in The Punch took a letter issued from the Ministry of Education to task for its poor use of English grammar. Of course, anything emanating from the government ministry charged with teaching the next generations must be perfect. But simply criticizing the grammar in the letter missed the real point.The real point is this. English is a foreign language to us Bahamians.I'm not aiming to be flip or insulting here; I'm deadly serious. The language we speak in this country is not English, but something quite different. Professors of linguistics call it a creole — Bahamian Creole, to be exact. They recognize that while it disguises itself as English by using English vocabulary as a vehicle, its structure and its rules are fundamentally different.I believe that we recognize that we have a different flavour to our language. We celebrate it in the few bits of vocabulary that we have retained from our pasts: words like jook (which is, as all true Bahamians know, quite different from stab), or yinna (which we sometimes express as y'all or you-all, and which distinguishes the singular you from the plural). But what we don't recognize is the fact that we speak a different language altogether.We don't recognize it for a number of reasons. One of them is the fact that we were so well colonized that the language we speak, which is completely legitimate, was (and still is) categorized as bad or broken English. Another of them is our national prejudice against our Haitian neighbours that leads us to associate creole with all the negative connotations we associate with Haiti.In linguistics, the word creole has a far more universal meaning. A creole is, quite simply, a mother tongue that originates from the contact between two or more languages. In the Bahamas, the language we speak, Bahamian Creole, is the language that was created in the slave societies that founded our modern one.During slavery, many tactics were used to maintain order. One of them was to avoid at all costs placing slaves of the same background together. As a result, many Africans were separated from people who were familiar to them, which meant that they were unable to communicate with one another except with the language of the masters. At first a basic language of communication was created to cover all those areas of overlap — a work language, one full of commands and concrete words, but one whose use was limited. Linguistics professors call this language a pidgin, and we still find pidgins today in the languages Bahamians use to speak to the Haitians they hire.Later, those languages expanded to include all areas of life, including abstract and philosophical ones, and they became the creoles we speak today. We use English words, but we retain the African grammar that our ancestors brought with them when they came.What is interesting about African languages is that they almost all have certain things in common that make them fundamentally different from European ones. The three most prominent are the creation of plurals, the creation of possessives, and the conjugation of verbs.In European languages, each of these tasks is achieved by modifying the word in question. You've got one DOG, but two DOGS; the bone that belongs to Mark is MARK'S BONE; and Mark GIVES that bone to the dog. If he did it yesterday, he GAVE it to the dog.In African languages, however, nouns and verbs remain the same. When Africans want to indicate possession, tense or number, they use other words to help, or they indicate it by context. How this translates into Bahamian Creole is like this. You've got one DOG, and Mark has two DOG. We know he has more than one because we said it already; he has two. (Duh). In our language, and in the African ones from which it derives, two dog is perfectly correct.The bone Mark owns is MARK BONE. We don't need to change the noun to show whose it is; the context tells us. Sometimes, if we want to emphasize it, or if we want to get rid of "bone", we say MARK OWN. Simple.And if we want to tell people what Mark did with the bone, we say MARK GIVE the bone to the dog. That remains the same, whether it's happening now or happened last week; if we want to indicate when Mark gave the bone to the dog, we say when it happened.But in English, we have to change the nouns and the verbs to do the same work. English, you see, may be the official language of our nation, but it is a foreign language to us.Hence the all-too-common awfulness of some of our published writings; hence the absurdities of overcorrection that we hear on the radio and the television. What we are witnessing are people trying to speak English correctly, but applying African rules. The result is a mangling of both our languages.Until we recognize that English is a foreign language to us, as it is for the Greek and Chinese and Haitian immigrants who settle our shores, and teach it as such (perhaps teaching also the formalities of Bahamian Creole at the same time), we will continue to be almost universally challenged by three very basic rules of that grammar: noun plurals, noun possessives, and the conjugation of verbs.And until we recognize this fact, we will continue to be plagued with the kinds of absurdities that appear in our newspapers and news reports with depressing regularity.

On Being a People

We need our artists.It's not enough to be a creative people; it's not enough to be a tourist destination; it's not enough to have majority rule; it's not enough to be the wealthiest independent country in the Caribbean. Without our artists, we are as poor as an Untouchable in Bombay.Poorer, probably. At least Untouchables know who they are.I had the pleasure this evening of attending a presentation being given to the National Cultural Commission on culture and tourism by the Director-General of Tourism. As usual, the discussion was lively. As usual, it was loud. But among the many jewels of the conversation that arose from the discussion was this. The Director-General told the story of a young Bahamian who was engaged to sing the Bahamian national anthem somewhere abroad, on live television, and who began the song with the words "Oh, say can you see."Now you may be thinking, oh, that's horrible; or you may be laughing as hard as you can; but chances are you're wondering what that has at all to do with artists. After all, what an artist does has very little to do with whether a young Bahamian knows the difference between the Bahamian national anthem and the American one. Right?Wrong.What an artist does is absolutely fundamental to the difference.Now understand that when I say "artist" I'm talking about much more than the person who sits in front of a canvas and paints (although if you've visited the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas lately you'll know how much that kind of artist can say.). I'm talking about visual artists, and sculptors, and Junkanoo artists, and musicians, and artisans, and dancers, and actors, and storytellers, and directors, and writers.We need them all.We need them all because without them, we have absolutely no touchstone to remind us what it means to be Bahamian. Who we are as a people depends almost entirely on the artists among us.You see, being a people in this day, age and place depends almost entirely upon our ability to tell a story, and to tell that story right. Ours is a society composed of many different people with many different backgrounds, origins, dreams, and goals. All too often, though, we go about our business unaware of our complexities. There was a time when the Bahamas was a white nation; black people were "natives", and made up part of the scenery and backdrop against which Real Life played out. There was a time, too, not so long ago, in which the Bahamas was for black people only; white people were considered interlopers, visitors, tourists. We're continually given the impression that The Bahamas is a Christian nation, as though atheists, Rastafarians, Muslims, Buddhists and Vodouisants are not part of us. We are always looking at only a piece of the puzzle. And many administrative decisions are made without taking our complexities into account.But our artists tell the real story; this is why we need them.There's a theory that claims that art holds up a mirror to nature, and by looking into the works of our artists we can see ourselves. There's a measure of truth to this theory. I can attest to it, having just come back from New York where I had the pleasure of seeing several shows, each of which reflected some little bit of the society that made it and the society it represented out to its audience.But there's another side to the theory as well. It's that nature is also a mirror of art. This is particularly true when we look at the mass media — at television and cable and satellite, at the internet, the music industry, the fashion industry. Art's both something to produce and to consume; and where there's a vacuum, stuff will rush in. The result is that without our artists, we cannot be a people. Rather, we'll be an extension of the people whose art we consume en masse — of Americans, of Jamaicans, of someone else.Hence the young Bahamian who sings the "Star-Spangled Banner" for the Bahamian national anthem.Hence the witness who, standing up in court, pleads the Fifth; or the Rasta who, though born and bred in Englerston, speaks with so thick a Jamaican accent that the pollsters ask him to show his passport to prove his eligibility to vote.As a people, we need our artists to examine us in all our differences and complexities and teach us back to ourselves. And we need our artists to be full-time observers of who we are. We need dancers who do not simply execute steps in time to music or interpret the words that are being sung in the song, but who can tell us a story about ourselves. We need writers who will go beyond the hibiscus and the banana and speak of the hurts and pains of all Bahamians, otherwise we will never know what it is that separates us and what unites. We need artists who (like the people in the current national exhibit in the National Gallery) can look at our warts as well as our beauties and be unafraid of placing them on display — and we need people who are willing to be challenged by looking at their work. We need actors who are able to dig into themselves so that they do far more than declaim the printed word with unnatural stress, but so that they become the people they portray so they can show us back ourselves.To be a people, we need to face our souls.We need our artists to spread our souls out for us to see.

On Being a City

I'm writing this from the Big Apple, the City that Never Sleeps — New York City. What strikes me most about being here, aside from the expected, like the vibrancy, the culture, the bustle — is the fact that New York's concept of itself as a city, is fundamental to all it does.And that set me thinking. Why doesn't Nassau have the same sense?The answer's obvious, but absurd: Nassau doesn't have a municipal government.The obvious reason is that Nassau is the seat of the national government, and therefore by default doesn't appear to need its own government.The absurdity of that is that Nassau, the capital city of The Bahamas, a city of almost 200,000 persons, has less administration than Freeport or Marsh Harbour or even than George Town or Deadman's Cay.We do have a number of Ministries, each of which has its head office in the capital city. We do have a parliament that is composed of elected officials, each of whom represents a specific constituency. Each constituency is carved out every five years by people who report to this parliament. The majority of the constituency lines are drawn on New Providence. Thus the residents of the city of Nassau, who make up two-thirds of the national population, are governed in segments that may or may not have anything to do with the needs of the city itself.Now it seems to me that there is the danger of a conflict of interest in this. The conflict need not be anything sinister; it may be as simple as a competing need. At this very moment, it's the fact that the northern Bahamas is devastated by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne. At the same time, plans have been set in motion for the renovation of Bay Street, a major facelift for the City of Nassau, which includes a permanent home for the Straw Market, among other things. One or the other of these projects has now got to be put on hold; one or the other of them has to be given priority. Both are important. But because the government that is responsible for the renovation of the city is the same as that which is responsible for the well-being of the entire country, they cannot be adequately dealt with at the same time; the self-same government is responsible for both.Now I am not saying that activities for Nassau should not be put on hold while the more immediate needs of the people in the Family Islands are met. What I am saying is that the current system of government we now have makes it an either/or situation when it doesn't have to be.You see, the city of Nassau suffers not only from not having its own government, but it also from not having its own budget. Utilities, services, works, and so on are dealt with by the agencies that are charged with running the whole country. Now in this case, Nassau generally comes out on top; the vast majority of the work done by the public corporations, or by the Ministries of Works, Health, National Security, Education, and so on, affects those of us who live in Nassau. In times of crisis, however, that money has to be diverted elsewhere. We have no provision to meet the needs of both.If Nassau were a municipality, money that should have a specifically local application for the city of Nassau (local licences, real property tax and so on) would not get mixed up with money that should go to the nation as a whole (customs duties, departure tax, and the like). Currently, however, the apportioning of all that money is in the hands of the national government. It was a system that didn't work all that well in colonial times, and it has no real reason to start working well now.Just imagine, for instance, what would have happened if Hurricane Frances had devastated Nassau as it did Freeport or as Hurricane Jeanne did Abaco. Now imagine that San Salvador, Cat Island, Eleuthera, Abaco and Grand Bahama also suffered as much damage as they have done. How long do you think it would take for the national government (which is also Nassau's local government) to get around to meeting the needs of the people on those islands?I'm not making this scenario up, by the way. In 1866 and in 1929, hurricanes devastated the capital while also affecting other islands. In neither case did the islands get the help they needed; Nassau had been crippled, and was unable to serve their needs. In fact, Nassau was so devastated by the 1929 hurricane that in 1932, when the Great Abaco Hurricane flattened Abaco worse than Jeanne did, the people there were left to fend and rebuild for themselves. Nassau could not help.There is no good reason why the needs of the city should be looked after by a government elected to see to the needs of the entire country. There is one powerful one; the creation of a government that is responsible for meeting the immediate needs of two-thirds of the Bahamian population will considerably weaken the clout of the average politician.It's a real reason, but not a very good one. As I am not a politician, I believe (perhaps naively) that politics should not supersede everything else. I believe that election to parliament and gives one a far greater responsibility than simply to get elected again in five years' time; it gives one the chance to do something fundamental, something seminal, for the long-term development of the Bahamas.I believe that there is no more fundamental thing than real local government, which includes the creation of the municipality of the city of Nassau. The parliament and the cabinet who creates that will allow the national government to get on with governing the nation, rather than meeting the needs of the city — even if that creation affects their members' power in the short run.

On Reciprocity

We all know the saying "There's no such thing as a free lunch". For some of us, it may be a rather cynical way of looking at the world. After all, what about things like altruism? Magnanimity? Salvation? If there's no such thing as a free lunch, well, there really ought to be.We anthropologists approach the saying from a rather different angle. The fundamental job of anthropology, you see, is to try and identify what is universal about the human race by examining its diversity. The anthropological study of economics is built around the idea of exchange, which we regard as a social as well as an economic transaction. And one of the few universal rules that anthropologists have discovered (it's right up there with rules like the universal incest taboo — all societies believe it's wrong to sleep with or marry close relatives — or the universal practice of marriage — which is a social and economic union between one or more males and one or more females) is the fundamental law of reciprocity.It's the law that says, well, basically, there's no such thing as a free lunch.You see, anthropologists regard exchange — the exchange of gifts, of goods, of services or of people — as being far more than simply the exchange of objects. Exchange, for anthropologists, is a social event. Simply put, economics is a marker of relations between people.Let me explain this with a few examples.1. A man sees a pair of shoes in a shoe store, fishes into his wallet, takes out some cash, hands it to the cashier, and walks away with the shoes in his hand.2. A homeowner hires an immigrant to weed the yard. The immigrant works all day in the hot sun, but when the time comes to be paid, the homeowner is nowhere to be found.3. A woman raises her children the best way she knows how. She works overtime, she puts them through school, she makes calls on their behalf, she struggles and struggles until they make successes of themselves.In each of the cases above, the exchange has a social component. In the first one, the social exchange is cut short. The man sees the shoes, picks them out (during which time he may or may not engage with the salesperson), pays for them (during which time he may or may not engage with the cashier), and leaves. The social exchange is neutral; the players involved in it are as indifferent as they can possibly be to one another.In the second, the social exchange is one-sided, uneven. A person is hired to do a job, but is never paid for that job. The relationship between the players is one of power and powerlessness; one person gets what he or she wants without paying for it.In the third, the social exchange is long-term. On the surface, it appears that the mother is giving far more than she is getting in return. However, what she is doing by investing her time, money and effort into raising her children is creating a social exchange that will last over time. Ideally, she will get some reward in the end, whether it be something as intangible as love and gratitude, or whether it be as concrete as her children's building her a house in which to live and taking over the paying of her bills.Exchange, you see, is far more complex than it would appear.So what does all of this mean on the ground?Well, think of it this way. The law of reciprocity covers three main kinds of exchanges, and these kinds of exchanges apply to different kinds of social contexts.Balanced reciprocity, where the value of the exchange is carefully calculated and paid for as soon as it takes place, is the kind of exchange that happens generally between acquaintances, or among strangers that we consider to be more or less equal to ourselves. It's the kind of exchange that happens every day in stores, in offices, at gas stations, and the fact that we fundamentally expect it to be basically a fair process is underscored by our outrage at the practice of price gouging.Negative reciprocity is where one person gets more out of the deal than the other. Usually it signals an unequal relationship. Stealing is the kind of negative reciprocity that occurs when one person, generally the thief, considers himself or herself to be situated in an inferior position from the victim; cheating is the kind of negative reciprocity that occurs when one person considers himself or herself superior to the victim.Generalized reciprocity best describes the kinds of exchanges families carry out with one another, and it's the kind of exchange on which societies are built. The practice of sacrificing our own desires for the welfare of other people, or the practice of giving without counting the cost fall into this category. In either case, what is more important than the gift itself is the creating of social relationships.So you see, lunch is never really free. Sometimes it's a rip-off; the giver has some food to off-load, and decides it's cheaper to give it away. Sometimes it's a bribe; the giver is looking for payback. Sometimes, it's a sacrifice. But it's never something that can be accepted and left behind.In this time of need and of giving, it's well worth remembering the anthropologist's law of reciprocity. In times like these, the only moral kind of giving is the kind we call generalized reciprocity, where the gifts are given as symbols of a social connection that exists and that is important. Let's give without expecting anything concrete in return — not favours, not votes, not thanks. Let's give very simply because we are all Bahamians, and when one hurts, we all hurt.

On Amnesia

I sat down to write on 9-11 with the commemoration activities for the World Trade Center bombing going on in the background. From time to time I would look up at the television or pull up a website and be reminded of the magnitude of what happened on September 11, 2001. Three years have passed, and no American — no citizen of the world — is allowed to forget that date.I couldn't help but contrast the American commitment to remembering with our own approach to significant dates in our history. We all know the saying unless we know where we have come from we cannot know where we are going, and we have become very good at mouthing it. But putting it into practice is a far different matter.I say this because we are nearing the end of 2004, a year which has — or should have — particular significance for Bahamians. When we talk about freedom, democracy, liberation, or any other lofty ideal that has basic resonance for post-colonial peoples, the significance of this year is fundamental. Let me explain why.August 1 marked the 170th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.January 1 was the 200th anniversary of the creation of the state of Haiti, a republic that was founded by slaves who fought, successfully, for their freedom against one of the greatest European empires of the time.September 29 is the 275th anniversary of unbroken parliamentary democracy in The Bahamas.Now I ask you.How many of us, besides the intellectuals and oddballs like myself, have any real awareness of these events?I'll wager you this. If I were to walk into any classroom in this country and ask the students there to explain to me the importance of September 11th, I would find no shortage of people who could do so, just as I suspect that the numbers of people who could tell me of the achievements of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks or Malcolm X would far exceed the numbers of people who could tell me about Cyril Stevenson or Milo Butler or Arthur D. Hanna.And I bet if I asked them, or anyone on the street, or regular callers to radio talk shows, or other average Bahamians — why 2004 was a significant year, they would have a similar difficulty. You see, we Bahamians are generally able to speak to the triumphs and challenges of our immediate experience, but when it comes to remembering the triumphs and challenges of the past, we are hard-pressed.Unlike our American neighbours, who approach the dates that are important to their history with a sense of reverence that subsumes everything else, we in the Bahamas practice a kind of collective amnesia that enables us to move forward at a rapid and bewildering pace, but that erases from our identities the memory of those things that make us who and what we are.The year 2004, you see, is a year whose significance goes far beyond the glory and devastation of August and September. In addition to the dates I listed above, there are others. For example:In 1844, the Nassau Guardian was established, which marks 160 years of unbroken press coverage in the Bahamas. The fact that 2003 was the centenary of the establishment of The Tribune has its own significance. For 160 years, Bahamians have had the opportunity of being fed news, of being served by writers who enable us to look at ourselves in all our aspects.In 1929, Nassau and Andros were struck by a hurricane even stronger and more devastating than Frances. Like Frances, the hurricane of 1929 parked over the capital for days — three days and nights to be exact — but unlike Frances, it was estimated to be a Category 5 hurricane. No building in the capital was unscathed. The impact on the Bahamian economy was far-reaching. The cost of rebuilding Nassau was such that none of the other islands that were affected by the various hurricanes that struck the Bahamas between 1926 and 1932 could adequately be supported. This fact, combined with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 and the resulting Great Depression, changed the demography of the Bahama Islands forever.It behooves us to remember these events. 275 years of unbroken parliamentary democracy, 200 years of the struggle against slavery, 170 years of emancipation, 160 years of consistent press coverage, 75 years since the devastation of the capital by the 1929 hurricane — these dates matter. They matter because they form the bedrock of our existence, whether we know it or not, and they matter because they tell us who we Bahamians are: a people born from slavery and colonialism, a people who have faced adversity and who have triumphed without outside help, a people who have plenty to celebrate in our past, our present, our selves.Next week we will celebrate. We will acknowledge our most recent athletic achievements, and we will use our celebrations to expand our local hurricane relief efforts even further. Let us do both with our whole hearts. But let us also take some time to look behind us, to mark our milestones, to reflect on our past and on our ancestors.And let us mark this date in our history somehow as well, or else our commitment to amnesia may mean that in five years' time the events of this year may have faded into the background as well. And to do that will serve none of us well.

On Selfishness

Just lately, I've noticed a tendency for us to become selfish, or, at kindest, self-absorbed. You'd think that material prosperity would make a people more generous, not less; surely the more one has, the more one would want to share. But it doesn't appear to work that way. The more we accumulate materially, the more we seem to demand.Here's why I say this. During the passage of the hurricane, which, when it hit the Bahamas, was a strong Category Four, I listened with some disbelief to the people who phoned into radio stations to complain that they had no water or no electricity or (I laughed out loud at this one) no cable service.What struck me was the fundamental selfishness of such observations. The people who called in to complain seemed to have no concept that Bahamians other than themselves have to put their own lives at risk in order to provide such services. And what struck me even more was that the response to these complaints was not the outrage I expected, but an encouragement of them, a discussion of the inability of our utilities to provide Bahamians with the kind of service that Bahamians had come to expect.It was a hurricane, for heaven's sake, a time when safety comes before comfort. Electricity is shut down to keep people from being unnecessarily electrocuted; water is turned off to avoid contamination. In the middle of an act of God, it would seem that prayer is a more appropriate response than gluing oneself to a television screen.I was reminded of the Americans who asked me, when I was a front desk cashier in a local hotel, whether I thought the travel agent would refund them their money because it had rained for the whole time they were in the Bahamas. Only I tend to forgive tourists more, because, well, they're tourists. And at the time I thought how I never thought I'd hear a Bahamian make such a complaint, because, well, Bahamians know better than to expect the weather to accommodate their whims and desires. But this last storm has proven me wrong.Then there were the people who took advantage of the heavy weather and the desertion of the streets to go and rob businesses, or the men who dressed up as policemen and used the storm to gain entrance to the homes of unsuspecting citizens whom they robbed.It takes a special society, to breed people who prey on others in the midst of misfortune. The nation that produces citizens who find nothing wrong with complaining that they are uncomfortable when others are losing their homes, or with pretending to offer help when all they are intending is harm is a nation in which selfishness rules, in which neighbours mean nothing.Contrast these attitudes to the defiance and the pride demonstrated by the man who must be the greatest leader this region has ever known, no matter whether one agrees with his politics or not — the man who brought first world health and educational standards to a country not 100 years out of slavery — Fidel Castro. In preparing his people for Ivan's onslaught, he declared that he would not accept aid from any country currently levying economic sanctions on Cuba. By being willing to suffer material deprivation for the sake of a principle, he demonstrated to his people that there are things more important than comfort in this world. It's a lesson we Bahamians would do well to learn.You see, self-sufficiency and independence are hard things to come by these days. It's far easier to be materially comfortable and financially dependent on someone else. But there's something to be said for the kind of independence that Castro preaches; for it's one thing to declare oneself politically independent, to have a flag and an anthem and a head of state. But it's quite another to demonstrate oneself willing and able to survive a storm and to look after oneself.We’re very good at waving our flags and donning our colours. But if we can't survive for long without electricity and running water, there's not much to be said about the ability of our nation to survive over time.And survival is the thing at which we Bahamians were once very good. Until only sixty years ago, we were one of the poorest countries in the region. Ours was not a colony that produced profits for Mother England; even white Bahamians were poor. Whatever "superiority" they asserted resided in the colour of their skin, not in the girth of their purses. Despite our poverty, however, we were rich: in selflessness, in community, in our abilitiy to survive. It's a part of our culture that's rapidly disappearing; but it's a part that we would do very well to preserve.You see, it's all very well and good to ask Caricom for help with the rebuilding of Grand Bahama and Abaco in the wake of Frances. But even our northern devastation pales in the face of the decimation of Grenada; and we must remember that Bahamians, by and large, are people with means, and Nassau escaped the worst of the damage. I believe that before we beg others for help, we must offer some ourselves.The good Lord said that it was is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. I begin to understand what exactly He meant. Now I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a Grenadian at this moment, with 90% of the capital damaged, including the hospital, the disaster management headquarters, the parliament buildings, the prison, and the Prime Minister's home. The magnitude of the rebuilding effort boggles my mind. I believe that even though we have suffered our own damages, as the richest nation in Caricom, we must have some obligation, to contribute at least something to the rebuilding of the capital there. I would be a far prouder Bahamian if, while we talked about helping Grand Bahama and Abaco, we spared a thought for and sent a coffer to Grenada and our other neighbours.

On Monkey See

My grandmother's house was built in the late 1860s out of materials salvaged from ships destroyed in the Great Bahama Hurricane of 1866. The house is made of wood, raised on limestone blocks. It weathered the five awful hurricanes of the 1920s, and stood. It weathered Betsy in 1965, and stood. It took David in 1979, Floyd in 1999, Michelle in 2001. For the last few years it has fallen prey to vandals, being unoccupied and the estate not fully settled.My grandmother's house weathered the 24 hours of Frances, and still stands. Not a shingle is gone from the roof. The damage to the outside is the result of termites and vandals.I'm writing this article because I have had the privilege of living in old houses all my life. I realize my experience is unusual for many Nassauvians. We urban-dwellers have developed the tendency to bulldoze things that bear the weight of history; we seem to prefer to pull down and rebuild rather than to shore up and restore. Why fight with termites and dry rot and having to replace wood as time goes by when it's just as easy to build something fresh and new?My grandmother's house is testimony as to why. Our ancestors knew what they were doing when they built their houses. And I'm not talking about the fancy houses downtown here; I'm talking about the clapboard houses that we see everywhere in the older parts of town. If those houses have had any basic care throughout their histories, and have not been used as quick-rent-earners by rapacious landlords, who take out more than they put in (and let's face it, some of us are guilty of this), chances are they are still standing now, when many newer houses have failed in some way.Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers knew what they were doing. They were building houses for themselves and their families to live in, not to sell to people they might not know at all. They cared about what they were building. It had to be strong, and it had to last. And so they took their time with their work. They took pride in it; and they were concerned about the quality of it.They didn't build their houses on mortgages from banks that hurry the process; they built them out of their own savings, and often with their own labour or that of their friends and neighbours. It might take them years of living in one room or two, years of working on the house until it was finished, but they made sure what they did was good and strong.And third, they knew what country they were living in.They knew that they were building for a land with torrential rain and regular hurricanes, some of them extreme.They knew that they were building for a country with a long, hot, humid summer, and they had no air conditioning to cool it down.And they did what any intelligent human being would do: they designed houses that fit our climate, our dangers, and our lives.Take a look at the houses our ancestors built. Drive through Grant's Town and Fox Hill and Bain Town and down Shirley and Dowdeswell and East Bay Streets, and look at the principles of building they used. Note the things they all had in common, even after the Second World War, when ordinary people began building with concrete and stone. Note what we Bahamians built before we started looking north and copying What The Americans Did.Our old houses have porches. They keep the people and the houses cool.Old houses are raised up on blocks. To get into my grandmother's house, you have to climb up six or seven steps; the floor of her porch is level with the top of her wall, nearly four feet off the ground, and floor of the house is one step up.Old houses have shutters on their windows. The push-out kind have a double purpose: they provide shade for the inside and protection for hurricanes.Old houses are built to let heat out, not hold it in: with have high ceilings and higher roofs, and ample cross-ventilation. My grandmother's house had a door at the front and a door at the back, and a passage down the middle. Most days when the front door was open (the back door always was) there was a lovely breeze wafting down the passage, no matter how hot it was outside.Our ancestors were the experts in building for the kind of country in which they lived. So why have we all but given up their ways? Why are we dying to inhabit the kinds of houses our northern neighbours do?Well, the old people have a saying: monkey see, monkey do. We have a penchant for copying the Big Guys, as though we have no technology worth anything ourselves. And so we have gone in for building low, squat boxes with low ceilings and roofs, high windows which give no breeze to any part of the body that really needs it, and nowhere for water to go but into the house itself. There's no cross-ventilation. Now that we can afford it, we do what the Big Guys do, and burn up fossil fuel air conditioning our places, rather than letting God do our air conditioning for us. And when hurricanes come along, instead of leaning out of our windows and pulling our shutters to, as Grammy and Granpa used to do, we line up for plywood (like the Big Guys) and lose our tempers when the lumber yards run out. And when we go too far (as, I'm told, Grand Bahama did for a time, by having different building codes from the rest of the Bahamian nation), we run the risk of suffering as the Big Guys do when hurricanes hit.Come on, Bahamians. We are people, not monkeys. Our ancestors were in this region long before the Americans even owned Florida. We're the experts here. The only reason we copy Americans is that we don't know how good we are. It's time to acknowledge our strengths, and to celebrate them. Not to do so isn't only injurious to our self-esteem; it's hard on our economy, and it impacts our very lives.

On Culture and Trade

FTAA. WTO. Globalization. These are all words that we're becoming familiar with. But what do they mean?This week I had the fortune of attending a meeting of the OAS that looked at the economic implications of culture. Turns out that the world is suddenly waking up to the fact that culture has an economic existence. The trouble is, it's also a world that's embarking on adventures in free trade.What does this mean? Well, three things that are most relevant to us here in The Bahamas. The first is that culture is no longer considered a luxury that eats up money and gives back little in return, which is how most countries in the world have regarded it for many years. Rather, culture is regarded as an engine of economic development, a means for the eradication of poverty. And this view isn't coming from cultural practitioners alone; economists are also pointing this out.In Mexico, where the meeting took place, for instance, culture accounts for 6.7% of the Mexican GDP, which is a serious chunk of Mexico's economy, which focusses on manufacturing and industry as well as tourism. In Brazil, culture generates 6% of the GDP, and 5% of all jobs. In the USA, culture produces 7.75% of the GDP, and is responsible for 5.5% of jobs. Whether or not culture is valued or supported, it generates income for its country.The second is that, at the same time as countries are beginning to recognize the economic value of culture, its contribution to the wealth of a country, the principles of free trade are threatening to weaken local cultures. This is because at the moment, the principle of the free market includes cultural products. Under the WTO agreement, and under the FTAA which follows WTO principles in the main, countries do not have the right to pass trade laws that give preferential treatment to their own citizens.To bring it home, what that means is that (for example) if The Bahamas signs on to the FTAA or the WTO, it will not be legal for the government, or any Bahamian artists to place limits on, say, the importation of foreign music or musicians. Limiting foreign acts because they are foreign will not be an option. Bahamian musicians are already marginalized in their own country, a nation that welcomes more than 4.5 million tourists annually; only a select few are able to find work in their own professions. The implications of free trade in cultural goods and services are such that their ability to do so will be even further curtailed.The third is that free trade implies a sort of open season on Bahamian products in the marketplace. Unless we are very careful and vigilant, things that we consider fundamentally and uniquely Bahamian — which may also be things that could be profitable in a free market — are vulnerable to being patented or copyrighted by people outside of The Bahamas. In the worst case scenario, we Bahamians will have to make, use or sell those things that we consider traditionally ours; in the best case scenario, we will not be positioned to make money from them in the international arena.Take the example of the Trinidadian steel pan, traditionally handmade in Trinidad, and a sizeable industry. Not long ago a company in Germany or Japan obtained the patent for the mass-production of steel pans, thus earning the right — in the global market — to produce Trinidadian steel pans in factories and thereby to corner the European market. While Trinidadian panmakers may still benefit from their hand-made pans, they have no claim to the profits that are made off the factory-produced instruments whatsoever.In the Bahamas, we are very cavalier about our cultural products. From those consumers who say that there's no value in Bahamian music, choosing instead to invest their money in American hip-hop or Jamaican reggae, to the people who regard all of our indigenous cultural wealth, from Junkanoo techniques to the various styles of plait, we have a healthy disregard to the wealth at our fingertips. Young people are not interested in mastering the traditional ways of doing things, opting for the faster, the easier, the flashier; straw vendors prefer the fast turnaround, buying mass-produced bags from China instead of supporting local Bahamian straw-workers.But know this. While we may not be aware of the potential monetary value of Bahamian culture, be sure that Americans and others are. If we are not careful, we will find ourselves like the Trinidadian panmakers — our Junkanoo trademarked by an American, our drums mass-produced in Pennsylvania, our straw-work marketed out of Miami. And the money from these things will be lining the pockets of others, and not of ourselves.So we need to wake up. We need to recognize the economic value of our cultural products. We need to find ways of preparing for the free market by protecting what we have, trademarking and patenting and copyrighting what is ours. We need to become more active on the international scene, negotiating, with other countries, for the exemption of cultural products from the free market.We need to know who we are and what we're worth. And we need to take the steps to let the world know we know.

On Performance

The recent visits of the Jabulani South Africa Troupe, which was well received by Bahamians in Nassau, Freeport and Harbour Island, and by the Yangzhou Chinese Puppet Troupe has put me in mind of a fundamental, and often overlooked, reality.Bridges are built by means of performance.Think about it. Here we had two groups of people from lands far away from our own. They mounted productions that they performed in pubic spaces, and the messages that they got across were understood by many in the crowd. In both cases, they were messages of joy, of pride. The Chinese shared with Bahamian audiences, the vast majority of them in Freeport, their ancient and complex culture, while the South Africans communicated their ride and joy in this their tenth year of democracy.And we understood them.Human beings, you see, have a universal language. It's a language that's currently underused here in the Bahamas, but it's rooted so deep within us that we can't escape it. It's the language of performance, and it's the one language that can be understood around the world.The language of performance is the language of human beings standing up before others and communicating their emotions, their thoughts, their philosophies, by the way they move in space, the way they face their audiences, the way they possess the stage they inhabit. Performance is the place where music, art, movement and literature can come together in such a way that together they communicate to large groups of people. To some degree, music and art and literature on their own are merely objects, commodities, unless they are accompanied by a person who delivers them. CDs, books and paintings, divorcable from their contexts, provide some insight into the people, the societies, that surround their creation. But when that message is delivered by living human beings, then it can be appreciated in its fullness.Now we Bahamians come from a society and a culture that is fundamentally rooted in performance. Only one generation has passed since children on the Family Islands would be entertained on a nightly or a weekly basis by ol' story told to them by their elders; not even that long stands between Nassauvians and their traditions of school plays, church hall concerts, recitations and festival performances.One of the greatest benefits of living in a society of performers is that everyone has the chance to demostrate his or her individuality. In performance, no one is anonymous; everyone is given a chance to express himself or herself, to know he or she is alive. Performance provides individuals with a chance to be noticed, an opportunity to be praised.You'd think every society would encourage its children to become involved in perfomance activities. But oddly enough, performance no longer seems a priority for the parents and elders of today.It's not that people are no longer moved by live performance. The recent successes of the Independence celebrations, of Michael Pintard's Woman Talk, and of the Jabulani and the Yangzhou troupes, give the lie to that. Even the fact that people are addicted to church services that feature preachers as riveting in their behaviour as any actor, and, at election time, to political rallies, reveals further that we Bahamians respond on a visceral level to orators, actors, dancers, politicians and other performers. But it is equally true that performance is no longer given pride of place in our everyday lives.This came home to me when the South Africans performed; they often called upon ordinary Bahamians to join them on stage. There was something very remarkable about those who did: they were either Bahamians of a certain age — thirty years old or more — or they were visitors to the islands who came with the intention of leaving inhibitions behind. The few young Bahamians who were pulled into the performance space appeared awkward and shy, and they went through the motions in an agony of self-consciousness that betrayed a longing to return to the anonymity of the crowd.And where, I ask myself, did this come from? How did we, a nation of natural performers, breed a generation of young people who would rather be invisible than face an audience? And even more important, have we begun to appreciate the level of culture loss that this would seem to imply?It's important we recognize that this change is not accidental. First of all, we have closed off all performance arenas. Our churches, which at one time hosted weekly recitations in their halls and required every child to participate, have brought that performance into the sanctuary and have turned services into shows in which only the initiated may participate. Our schools, which once put on regular plays, musicals, talent shows and beauty pageants seem to have deemed such activities frivolous wastes of time and money, and leave them for only special schools to do. Television and electric lights have replaced storytelling ; GameBoy and Nintendo have imposed a world other people imagined onto our youngest and most creative Bahamians. Even Junkanoo has changed. No longer is it acceptable to simply rush in the streets. Instead, young people who want to take part must become parts of large groups where their anonymity and passivity is not challenged.We have closed every door that affords our children the opportunity to face their fears and express themselves in a positive, public, individual way. We have become a nation of spectators. Our children no longer learn how to perform.It's time, I think, for us to reclaim this bit of our culture. It's time to recognize how fundamental performance is to our self-esteem, and to give it the respect it deserves.

On Tiefing

There's an old Bahamian proverb that goes something like this: "Tief tief from tief make God smile."Well, when He looks down upon The Commonwealth of The Bahamas some days, the good Lord must be grinning from ear to ear.I'm not just talking about your typical kind of tiefing here. We all know that certain material possessions are part of the public domain. From flowers on gravesides to toilet paper in offices to new-brand garden furniture, the owners are roving, ready to collect.No.I'm talking about intellectual property here. I'm talking about the tiefing of ideas.This is a concept with which I dealt often when I was a COB lecturer. As a teacher of English, one of my jobs was to assign research essays to students. The process worked like this: students had to go and uncover information about topics that interested them and then write an essay about it. But in so doing they had to be mindful of three things:1. Where they got their information;2. The author of that information;3. Showing where the information stopped and their own ideas began.This proved to be extremely difficult for many. For them, "research" consisted of going to a library or the Archives or the internet and copying verbatim what they found there. Or, better, it meant calling a Bahamian expert on the telephone and asking them everything they knew about a topic, and then writing that down.Sometimes they might be inventive, rearranging the ideas a little bit, quoting one or two passages and incorporating the rest into the body of the paper. Sometimes they would not be inventive at all, but would simply download the information wholesale and submit it as their own work.They'd be hurt and confused when I'd give them a zero for these essays and threaten to report them to the Academic Board.You see, there's such a thing as intellectual property. These days, it's the most lucrative kind of property there is. We live in the information age. Wealth no longer rests in the hands of the persons who own the factories, who move cotton or coal or steel. The Jet Age is long gone; the Concord has been grounded. No longer is it important how fast a person can get from point to point, whether a plane is capable of breaking the sound barrier or not. Even the ability to launch men and women into space is no longer a crucial skill. Whether or not we can travel light years or move at warp speed is immaterial; we can send data at the blink of an eye.Knowledge is most certainly power; and the person who "owns" information is in a powerful position indeed.This is why the stealing of intellectual property is punishable. In college, it's called plagiarism and can get a student expelled from an institution and blackballed by any other. In the real world, it can get a person stripped of his or her degree and fired from his or her job.It can get a person prosecuted for fraud. It can get a person sued, successfully, for breach of copyright, and ordered to pay the owner of the idea whatever a court decides is the appropriate payment.Ideas — and particularly ideas in written form — are in fact commodities that impart power to the owners. In the university, they are the way by which academics make their reputations, and shape their careers; in the marketplace, they provide artists with a way to earn their living. In today's world, those ideas themselves, not to mention the words in which they're expressed, belong to the people who dreamed them up and wrote them down.They are not public. They do not lie there simply for other people who haven't done much thinking about the topic to come along and pick up and present as their own.In the world of the information age, ideas are perhaps the most valuable property anyone can own. This is why stealing someone else's words, or their song, or their tune, or their design, or their movie script, or their dance steps, is so very serious.Here's what really interests me. When we take others' intellectual property and passing them off as our own, we are in fact saying that our ideas aren't worth very much at all. They can't be; otherwise why would we have to tief someone else's? What's more, when we steal others' ideas we seem to suppose that (a) what we're doing is not tiefing, (b) no one will notice that we've copied/downloaded/lifted the idea anyway, and (c) if someone should notice, nobody will care. This supposes that no one's ideas are worth all that much.In a small country like The Bahamas, this is a dangerous state of affairs. The more we go around stealing others' ideas, from their styles of music to their stories to their songs and their words and their designs, the more we are leaving our own ideas open to be stolen. And in this world of globalization, we become more and more vulnerable to that kind of robbery. What we have is valuable because it's unique. And the more time we focus on tiefing from others, the less time we spend guarding our own.After all. You know what they say. Tief tief from tief make God smile.

On Research

There are few things more confident than a Bahamian in an argument. And often there are few things more wrong.You don't believe me? Speak with a politician. Disagree with him or her, if you dare. Or read any newspaper. Listen to any talk show. Attend one of any number of churches. Provoke an argument, and listen.Do more than listen. Take a notepad with you. Jot down the things that the writers and the speakers tell you. Then go look those things up in the library or on the internet, and see what you find.I'll bet you plenty that you'll find, more often than not, that what you've just heard (and may have chosen to believe) is so far away from reality that it might qualify as old story.This is because we Bahamians have developed the habit of pontificating without researching our topics first.Before I go on, let me clarify what I mean by research. I don't mean collecting a range of opinions or arguments that agree with our own. I don't mean talking to a whole lot of people about the topic in question and cobbling their ideas together with ours. And I don't mean looking for documentary evidence that supports the answer that we started out with, even if it means having to chop up sentences to create quotes that work for us.What I mean is examining a topic with an open mind: approaching the subject with a question, not an opinion; collecting many different viewpoints and facts about the subject, reading through them, and getting some general idea of the range of opinions that exists on that topic.I mean approaching a subject with enough humility to admit the possibility that what we thought about it might just be wrong.As a people, we're really not good about research. Not even the people whose bread and butter comes from finding out, from seeking the range of facts about a particular event or issue — for example, journalists and teachers — make a habit of researching facts. Short-cuts are so much simpler. Rather than finding out as much as possible about a person or an issue, it's far easier to just ask a speaker for a copy of his speech, and then print it — errors and all — in the newspaper. Instead of questioning the "facts" in the latest textbook and seeking to verify them with independent investigation, it's so much easier to teach everything that's in the textbook, even when the information is irrelevant or wrong.We are a people who accept plenty at face value.We are a people who can be very easily conned.Let me give you some examples. Over the past week alone, listening to the radio and the television, I've collected the following so-called facts:The British Colonial Hotel building is over 100 years old (A radio news report).Haiti was never colonized, which is why the country is in the state it's in (A caller on a radio talk show).Homosexuality is unnatural and not found in the animal world (A sermon given at a recent family-values rally).I went off and researched each one, and discovered that not one is so. Here's what the research actually revealed:It's true that a hotel called the Colonial was built on the site of the present British Colonial in 1899. However, it burned to the ground in 1922 in one of the most spectacular and disastrous fires of its generation, and had to be rebuilt in time for the 1922-1923 season. The original hotel was wooden, and none of it remained after the fire. The new hotel was stone, and that is the building that still stands.The research also raised the following bit of information: the song "Do A'Nanny", which was made popular by Ronnie Butler in the 1960s, was in fact about the Colonial fire, and some of the original words included:The hotel burn down to the groundNo more dancing in this townEh-eh, do a nanny do.As for Haiti, she was most definitely colonized. Sainte-Domingue was the pride of the French Empire, and produced more sugar for France than any other colony. But some years after the French Revolution in 1789, the slaves in Haiti had their own revolution, when they rose up against their masters, expelled the French, and set up the first Black Republic in the New World.In fact, the reason that Haiti is poor is that the neighbouring slave-owning societies refused to trade with this new Black republic. In order to recognize Haiti as a country, the Europeans imposed such a fine on the nation that the government is still still paying it today.And with regard to homosexual animals, scientists have discovered many creatures who mate with partners of their own sex. In fact, some long-term studies of animal societies appear to suggest that whenever animal populations become too large, and overcrowding occurs, the incidence of animal homosexuality rises, which leads some scientists to argue that homosexuality is a natural response to overcrowding.Yes indeed. There are few things more confident than a Bahamian in an argument.Just do the research before you believe anything he or she says.