The question of Blackface

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High-fashion models in blackface, that is.Well, it's one model, actually, and it's causing quite a stir. Kate Moss was recast as a Black woman for the cover of the Independent in Britain. The paper was doing a special issue on the struggle of African woman. Here's how it starts:

It was still dark, not yet 4am. But outside Letenk'iel was moving already, rekindling the fire from the overnight embers. Inside the mud-walled hut, her husband Gebremariam coughed. Then as the first birds were heard, he swung his legs over the side of a bed made from rough rope strung across a wooden frame. He stood in the doorway and stretched. His wife was already at her morning chores.As the cold dawn light suffused the sky she sprinkled water from a squat earthenware jar across the mud floor and began to sweep the dampened earth with a brush of long grasses bound tightly together. The day had begun.

Later, after the narrative, which reveals the life of African women (not Kate Moss) as laborious, deprived, and unsanitary, come the numbers. Here's a selection:

Women: A world apartLife expectancyAfrica: 46UK: 80Chance of a girl going to primary schoolAfrica: 60 %UK: 100 %Minutes worked per dayAfrica: 590*UK: 413Female literacyAfrica: 53.2%UK: 99.9%

As usual, Africa is undifferentiated; west, north, south, central, east — all nations are lumped together as one. The numbers citing the plight of the continent are equally sloppy: they are presented as "Africa", and compared with a single country — "U.K." I imagine that if they were recalculated to include all of Europe, including the former Iron Curtain countries, they would tell a different story; but no one is talking about that. We're all focussed on the blackface.At least one paper (The Guardian) reacted with the kind of outrage that is appropriate: here's what Hannah Pool & Tomi Ajayi of that paper had to say.

What exactly is this picture of Moss-as-African-woman supposed to portray? I suppose it is meant to be subversive, but what does it say about race today when a quality newspaper decides that its readers will only relate to Africa through a blacked-up white model rather than a real-life black woman? What does it say about the fight against HIV/Aids if that is the only way to make us care? And, as a black woman (born that way), what does this trick say about me?...Blacking up has become acceptable in the same way that pole dancing is now sold to women as an empowering thing to do. Both assume that the thing they are poking fun at no longer exists - ie discrimination, racism and sexism. But of course they are wrong. If blacking up existed in a society where racism was not an issue, then it would not be such a problem. But then it would also lose its power to shock. After all, what is so shocking about a white person being made to look black if black and white are equal?And is it really so hard to relate to those who are different from us? I'm not from Iraq, but I don't have to dress up as an Iraqi war widow to care about what goes on there. As Robert Bianco wrote of the American TV show Black. White, in which two families did a "race-swap" for six weeks: "Black. White is based on two false premises, one more pernicious than the other: that you can understand someone of a different race simply by putting on makeup, and that you need that kind of understanding in order to treat people as the law and morality."And you know, there really are black women who could have done this job. Next time a photograph of an African woman is needed, they should call on Iman. Call on Alek Wek. Call on one of any number of black girls you can see on the street. Call on me.

What concerns me, however, is a little different. The dressing of Kate Moss in blackface and placing her on the cover is not the issue; it is a symptom of the problem, and not the problem itself. Global racism is institutional, and it is far deeper and more immutable than the aesthetic choices made for a magazine cover suggest. Its roots lie in science itself, in the misinterpretation and misapplication of nineteenth century speculation about evolution, in the wholesale adoption of those theories in the construction of a global power structure. The empires of Europe may have been dismantled, but the ideas that undergirded them still remain. The concept of social Darwinism may have been debunked, but its effects continue to shape what we understand as "civilization", particularly in Europe, which perfected these ideas. Africa is still a lump, a "dark" continent, an outline in a sea, a source of raw material for others' riches, and all the complexities and challenges of its daily life are smudged by that very charcoal.The thing is, the world is interconnected. Western wealth, politics and social advancement have deep roots in the exploitation of the third world, and especially in Africa, whose continent continues to supply megacorporations with the most lucrative minerals — oil, gold, diamonds, and so on — to the detriment of its people. The fact that Letenk'iel is still living as her ancestors did — or probably worse than they did, and in more poverty, as the European occupation of that continent disrupted communities and economies with as much efficiency as a Nazi camp, but more silently — is not coincidental to the fact that a major British newspaper paid a white supermodel, a photographer, and a series of special-effects staff megamoney to make a European woman look African. It is connected by a series of old and powerful inequalities that continue today.

CARIFESTA IX

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So I haven't written much on the thing that's been taking up all my time between waking and sleeping for the past two weeks. CARIFESTA IX Trinidad and Tobago has taken place, and it is winding down with far more energy than it began; and at some point, I will write something about it. But I read the following article today (thanks to my husband, who is an inveterate news consumer) and it struck a chord. But it also reinforced what I know to be true: that culture persists in being regarded throughout the region (with the exception of Suriname, who understands what culture can do for a country, presumably) as "light" fare, something not requiring heads of governments.From the Jamaica Observer:

Participation in CARIFESTA 2006, the ninth since its historic inauguration in Guyana in 1972, came from 23 of an originally expected 30 countries of the Greater Caribbean.Hosting the festival for the third time is estimated to cost Trinidad and Tobago approximately US$5 million (TT$30 million), all being borne by the government in Port-of-Spain.Culture and Community Development Minister Joan Yuille Williams had much praise for the "overwhelming responses" from participating countries in the delegations mounted and, as she reflected, "the inspiring performances being provided in various areas of our rich, diversified cultural life..."...Pity, I told her in our telephone conversation, that the region's media, in particular regional television, had not been incorporated by the local organisers and CARICOM's Regional Cultural Committee as an integral partner to ensure live coverage of at least some major events, including the normally very colourful "parade of nations" ceremonial opening of the festival....Apart from the host country, I cannot recall front-page prominence being provided by any of our leading newspapers monitored, even for the ceremonial opening event. When not sparse, news coverage has often reflected an unfortunate parochial orientation in reports on this grand multi-faceted, pan-Caribbean celebration of the ways of life of the indigenous and all "the peoples who came".from JAMAICA POLL, CARIFESTA CHALLENGES - Rickey Singh

I must say that for the first time in a long time, if ever, this CARIFESTA was well supported for The Bahamas by our media. We had ZNS and BIS with us, as well as a reporter from the Guardian. Perhaps the problem, though, is that culture doesn't count as "news" but as "features". That's worth some discussion, I think, but it's interesting.Anyway, Singh's article provoked my thoughts. I don't know whether CARIFESTA warrants the attendance of Heads of Government or not; that's something I'll have to ponder. But if anybody has their own thoughts, feel free.

On Making a Living Doing What You Love

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When I was a child and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would invariably answer, "A writer". The responses I got were various. “Oh, that’s nice,” some people said. They didn’t mean it one bit. Others laughed as though I’d told the greatest joke this side of Vegas. Others stared at me as though I’d just said something foreign, as though my tongue had not formed words that were English at all. And one person – my geography teacher – told me, “Oh, no, you’re too good for that. Writing will never earn you any money. Why don’t you think about being a lawyer or something like that?”But a writer I wanted to be.And here I am, all grown up, my answer still the same. What do I want to be when I grow up? A writer. But. Time is running out for me. Writing is a jealous hobby, difficult to do well, arduous when you want to make the right point, time-consuming, greedy. It’s too selfish to be a part-time thing, and I have to make a living.And making a living writing is something that is impossible in this country — at least for those who choose not to settle for journalism as the next best thing — no offence to journalists. I needn’t list the reasons that it’s impossible; I’m sure you can think of several yourselves. It’s the rare writer who can survive off his or her earnings, unless they are in advertising or journalism or the law. For those of us who simply love the language and The Bahamas, there is very little choice indeed.And so I teach others how to write. You know the saying: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I have always fought it; it suggests that teachers are failures, second-rate beings who can’t succeed at what they want, and so they teach. But more and more the saying rings true. It’s not that I am not capable of writing. But I cannot make a living doing what I love — doing what, I dare say, God called me to do — in the land in which I was born. And so, because I cannot (through no good fault of my own) write for a living, I teach.And I am not alone. I speak as a writer, because that is what and who I am. But there are hundreds of us, perhaps thousands, Bahamians, who have been gifted with the ability to create new realities out of thin air — people touched with the need to express themselves in movement, in colour, in line, in song, in film, in music, in performance, in the assumption of another character, in illusion, in the written or the spoken word. Only a tiny handful of us can do it, and that handful is struggling. The rest of us have to labour in jobs that are second best for people who do not understand us or what we do and squeeze our talents around the edges of our lives.And so what? You wonder. Why should this matter? Why should being able to make a living doing what you love be at all important?Well, first of all, because you love it, and because it’s not frivolous. Despite what many people imagine, the arts — which begin in self-expression, develop through social commentary, and conclude by illuminating the human condition — are really the foundation, and not the frill, of human civilization. A society that does not express itself artistically is simply a conglomeration of people who live side by side. Because there is nothing concrete to link one to another, they are simply a group of individuals walking down the same road together, but they could as easily be enemies as friends, and there is nothing at all to stop them from killing one another.And second of all, because it is the creative impulse that makes us human. I’ve said it before, but I’m not sure that we have fully grasped the concept yet; we’re too busy consuming what others have produced, and we don’t value either the process or the product of our own artists and innovators. As a result, the humanity of the Bahamian citizen has been compromised. We allow ourselves and our reality to be defined by other people, because we have made it difficult, if not impossible, for our creative artists to make a living doing what they love.In order for us to create a society out of this population we have living within our borders, art, self-expression and creation cannot be regarded as luxuries that can be sacrificed whenever the subject of money is raised. Every civilization worth remembering has made a place for its artists. It has supported them, by commissioning individuals to write or paint or sing for a living and for the state, or by allowing them to support themselves. We do not recall the greatness of Greece or Italy or Great Britain for their lawyers, for their newspapers, or for the number of items their factories turned out in a given year; rather, we remember them for their architecture, their literature, and their art.From Sophocles to Shakespeare, from Michelangelo to Picasso, from Confucius to Soyinka, from Homer to Walcott, the greatness of a civilization has far less to do with the apparently “necessary” professions than we imagine. Without the works of artists, teachers have nothing to teach, construction workers will have nothing to build, and retailers will have nothing to sell. You may counter by saying that others have already done the work for us, and that we don’t have to produce anything original of our own. But that is how we have built our society already, and what we have built is coming apart at the seams. The clothes we have put on were designed for other people, and we should not be surprised when what we have borrowed doesn’t fit us all that well.The time has come, I believe, for our society to place emphasis on allowing Bahamians like me to make a living doing what they love. Of course, this will mean starting to pay one another for their art. It will mean understanding that when we approach a writer to ask for a play to be written, or a director to produce a show for a purpose, or a musician to play somewhere, we will have to pay them for their action; but when we do, we will discover far more about ourselves than we knew before. And we will begin to create a community out of this group of individuals all walking along the same road together; and maybe, after some time, ours may become a civilization to remember.

CARIFESTA Report #1

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CARIFESTA IX is taking place in Trinidad and Tobago. I arrived with a group of five people to smooth over any bumps in the road on Monday night. Good thing, too — the first bump was the fact that there was a mix-up in our accommodation, and we found ourselves staying overnight in a hotel that we hadn't booked. Yesterday (Tuesday) we firmed up the accommodation, visiting each hotel the contingent is going to stay in, and touching base with the CARIFESTA Secretariat.Today we're heading out of town to go to Naparima to view one of the theatres in which the play is going to be performed. More later.

A different take on Guenter Grass

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Ever since the revelation that Grass was a member of Germany's Waffen SS during his youth, the jury's been out on his sin. And the jury that I've been reading has been leaning in favour of convicting him of having committed the unforgivable. I've seen references throughout the media to the news, and they're overwhelmingly condemnatory; the conclusion has been that Grass is a hypocrite, that his reputation can never be redeemed.Enter Marlon James.

Far more sensible has been the reactions from the Mayor of Gdansk himself who said, “By his actions, he has already paid for the mistakes of his youth.” That’s the crucial thing to remember here. Grass was SIX when Hitler came to power. OF COURSE he would be a member of the SS, what greater ambition would a child growing up in the very shadow of Hitler have? Grass says he kept silent on his past because he was ashamed. I see nothing shocking in this. I’d be more horrified if he wasn’t so ashamed of his past that he tried to hide it. As for all the people who are calling for him to return his Nobel Prize and whatever honour he has gotten please, spare me. Knut Hamsun never regretted his Nazi sympathies and he still has his. I would think that a man who was in the elite SS going on to become the very conscience of his nation, would speak to the very best of humanity, not the worst. There’s no getting away from the contradiction of a man forcing a nation to confront truth when he could not confront his own. But that again brings us back to the ever-wise Winterson: the man needs forgiveness. Lord knows he has mine.

I have to confess that my own perspective is far closer to James' own than any of the others I've read. In part it's because I agree with him about what heroism is, and I don't make the mistake of confusing human beings with God. In part it's because I think — again like James — that sometimes it takes far more courage and conviction to take a stand against what one once was than to have condemned it for all of one's life. And in part it's because I believe that the process of forgiveness and atonement and redemption — as unpopular as those ideas are these days — is a complex one that never really ends. As recovering addicts know, one is never cured of an addiction; one is recovering as long as one lives. It's the old idea of temptation, which new translations have airbrushed out of the Lord's Prayer; the strength of human goodness can't really be measured until it's tested by the strength of human evil as well.Some other links:Austin Bay BlogBooks, InqThe Elegant VariationWhat I'm finding interesting is that some of the more forgiving perspectives are coming from people who live with fear, discrimination, hate and prejudice on a daily basis, rather than from people who don't. People of colour, from so-called "developing" nations, people whose cultures' existences depend on the decisions of one or two leaders of (mostly) irresponsibly superpowers, tend to be more forgiving of Grass than those people whose cultures shape the world.Perhaps it's because it's reassuring for us to realize that evil can change. And perhaps it's disconcerting for others to note that behind every good deed may lie a fatal flaw.We may be forgiving because we grew up with that knowledge.

On the Milk Stand

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Something happened recently that went without much comment. A building that once stood at the northwestern corner of Mackey and Shirley Streets was bulldozed down to rubble. The reason? To create a turning lane. The building? A milk stand.Before I go on, let me say that I don’t have a problem with the bulldozing of the milk stand. Oh, I felt a twinge of regret at seeing it go. But this isn’t going to be a polemic on the evils of tearing down historic buildings to ease traffic congestion. I recognize the need for a turning lane right at that point, and I applaud the decision to make that corner more efficient for traffic. The decision was a pragmatic one, and it was a good one, as far as it went.What I do want to write about is our capacity for bulldozing that building without understanding — without even asking — what a milk stand is and why it’s significant for the city of Nassau. So I want to give a little history about the milk stand.Before I do, let me say that I am not a historian, so this article isn’t going to be giving dates and full names and all the written facts. I’m an anthropologist, and have the luxury of regarding history as one of a set of stories that people tell themselves and their children to make sense of the world, to make sense of themselves. All too often we live in blessed ignorance of our ancestors and their lives, their struggles and their needs. We Nassauvians are still fortunate enough to inhabit a city in which our forefathers’ stories are written in the very buildings we see around us, but we exist in such studied ignorance of what those stories are that when things happen to change that environment, we have no way of knowing what has changed.Here’s my version of the milk stand story.Once upon a time, there was a man named Harold Christie. Now he is incidental to the story of the milk stand, except in one respect — he invented the first Bahamian model of development-through-foreign-investment. Thanks to H. C. Christie, during the 1920s, when other countries in the region were struggling with post-war poverty, industrial unrest, and hardship, The Bahamas flourished. Part of this was due to the transhipment of liquor to the USA. But part of it, thanks to Christie, was the first Bahamian land boom since the Loyalists. Long before the UBP or the PLP or the FNM were ever dreamed about, Harold Christie was selling Bahamian land, water and climate to the first foreign investors to line the government’s coffers with gold.Enter Austin Levy, who bought huge tracts of land in Hatchet Bay, Eleuthera, to start a dairy farm. He started big by Bahamian standards, and grew huge. By the time the Second World War rolled around (and go look up the dates if your history education was faulty and you have no idea when that was), the Hatchet Bay farms were producing enough milk and eggs and cream to feed a nation.And feed the nation they did — the nation as it existed in the capital city. At the same time that bootlegging was making the city rich, the out islands were struggling. The poverty that fell upon them in the post-war years was not helped by the rash of hurricanes — rather like the ones we’re having now — that swept through the colony between 1926 and 1935. Out islanders were migrating to the city in droves, settling areas like the Valley and Englerston and the Grove and Chippingham. The city of Nassau, whose public infrastructure stopped at the ridge we call the Hill, was straining under the growing population. One major concern was sanitation. Most of those who lived in the Over the Hill area — our ancestors — lived in one- or two-room houses with no plumbing or electricity, and everyone washed and lived in the yard. The country was wealthy, but many people were poor. And by the time the Duke of Windsor came to Nassau as Governor, the poverty and the well-being of the average Bahamian were starting to become serious concerns.Enter Austin Levy with his dairy farm and a plan to create a healthier population by providing people with fresh dairy products to build strong bones and teeth and to keep the illnesses at bay. In those days, the Bahamian diet consisted of fish, grits, and what people grew in their own back gardens. Lobster was dirt-cheap, an everyday dish, and chicken (which you killed and cleaned yourself) was reserved for Sundays. Fresh meat was to be had only on high feast days like Easter; eggs were things that came out of chickens, and milk was something you poured from a can.So Mr. Levy built a dock on East Bay Street where he brought his produce, and he erected little stone booths at intervals throughout the city, placing them on intersections where people could get to them. From the 1940s until the early 1970s, the milk stands were places where you could go to get fresh milk and eggs, things most Nassauvians had never had before. They were distinctive for their rounded corners and their walls half covered in thousands of tiny tiles, and for their service windows and their little steps that allowed people to purchase what they needed as they passed.Thanks in part to Mr. Levy and his milk stands, Nassau’s population became better nourished and healthier. Now I’m not claiming Mr. Levy was a local or national hero; what was good for Nassauvians was equally kind to his pocket. And so in the demolition of the milk stand at Mackey and Shirley Streets, history is repeating itself in a strange sort of way. The stand was put up by a foreign investor whose kindness to us helped his own bottom line; it was taken down with the assistance of another foreign investor whose helpful nature is equally good for business. Making traffic move more smoothly at Mackey Street will not only ease congestion on our side of the bridge; the hope, of course, is that it will affect Paradise Island’s traffic jams as well. This is not to say that any of this is a bad thing. It’s simply to tell us a little more about who we Bahamians are.And so the story of the milk stand: a story of our past, a story of our selves.

Marlon James on the Great White Hope

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The man's got a point. I'm linking to his post because I agree with him about the movies, but I'm not sure I agree with him wholly about the African-European thing. He's correct, as far as that goes, but I believe that atrocity is a function of being human, not of wearing any so-called race or culture on your skin or in your heart. Violence and war warp minds — not that it takes a whole lot to warp human minds. What American soldiers do to Iraqi civilians, what terrorists plan for their victims, what the powerful of any nation do to the powerless — these are the actions of human beings. Not one of us is exempt.Which is why I agree with him about the movies (though it doesn't stop me enjoying some of them), and the oh-so-recurrent theme of the altruistic European navigating his or her challenged way through the near-savagery of the non-European.

White Guilt & the Middle East

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I was led to this article by my trawling through the blogosphere, and was reminded that Rick Lowe made a note of Shelby Steele's book White Guilt some time ago.Now I am familiar with Steele's work, having once been an avid subscriber to Harper's Magazine, and still having a fondness for that magazine, specially for its Index. And I admire Steele for being an African-American intellectual who doesn't parrot the party line.That doesn't mean I agree with him.In this article, he has a point. I would agree with him here, only I would substitute the word "bigot" for his word "anti-Semite":

The anti-Semite is always drawn to the hatred of Jews by his own unacknowledged inadequacy. As Sartre says in his great essay on the subject, the anti-Semite "is a man who is afraid. Not of Jews of course, but of himself." By hating Jews, he asserts that his own group represents the kind of human being that God truly wants. His group is God's archetype, the only authentic humanity, already complete and superior. No striving or self-reflection is necessary. If Jews are superior in some ways, it is only out of their alienated striving, their exile from God's grace. For the anti-Semite, hating and fighting Jews is both self-affirmation and a way of doing God's work.So the anti-Semite comes to a chilling place: He easily joins himself to evil in order to serve God.

But I would differ with him regarding the concept — implicit in his article — that white oppression is over, or that it is so incidental today as to be insignificant. I may be spouting liberal blahblah here, but I do not buy the argument that Israel is merely a defender of its territory. It's true that Palestine seems paralyzed by its victimhood, yes, much in the same way that African Americans and even some Bahamians use the idea of oppression to justify stagnation. But we cannot forget that Israel is the only nuclear power in the region, and that until this war, fought all battles with superior firepower. What is frightening to it is that for the first time in a generation its enemy appeared to be evenly matched with it.Further, I resist Steele's idea that this love of death is a particularly Muslim thing. Fundamentalist, perhaps; human, surely. The love of glory and honour in death being exhibited by today's suicide bombers is no different from the love of glory and death-for-God practised by white Europeans during the Crusades.What makes the difference now is the fact that the love of life comes from comfort and material wealth, and that, no matter what arguments are put forward, people who see them but don't share in them become desparate. I do not believe for one moment that Bin Laden wishes martyrdom upon himself. Rather, he is expert at turning the desperation of young men who have nothing — no identity, no homeland, no wealth, no future — into his very own weapon of mass destruction.We Bahamians should take heed. After all, there is not a huge difference between the plight of the Palestinian Arab or the young men who identify with him and the plight of the child of Haitian parentage growing up in today's Bahamas. White guilt is not the key here, though it may play some part in masking the real problem. At the bottom of this struggle is that good old Marxist bugaboo — class.

The Real Free Press

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Lynn Sweeting writes about true journalistic freedom here, on her blog. Here's some of what she has to say:

I was a reporter in that newsroom for about eight years. During the bad days of the “Pindling regime”, (Christ, was it really a regime?). As I recall there was an endless stream of English “editors” at that desk throughout. As I recall the paper lambasted Pindling’s government every single day. Still, one English man after another was still able to get a work permit. They put hell on the government every day in their editorials and in their front page stories, and as I recall their freedom to do this was never threatened. There were no arrests, no one was thrown in jail never to be seen again, there were no killings, there were no disappearances, the paper didn’t get shut down, and their work permits were not denied. As I recall they went to print with stories that put the PLP in a stinking light every day and that regime never disallowed them to do it.If we were not a free press then, and if they are not now, there is only the Tribune to blame. I was only there for a few years, but I can think of five or ten good and dedicated reporters and photographers from my time alone who were forced to leave their employ and even give up their dreams of real journalism, because there wasn’t a hope in hell of Going Further, there would be no training opportunities, there would be no chance of an upwardly moving career, there was no chance of ever reaching the editor’s chair, no chance of ever making a decent salary, no chance for advancement whatsoever.

Lynn's writing about the John Marquis controversy, which changes meaning as it changes reporters and perspectives.  Here's Oswald Brown on the subject, and here's more on the topic, this time from the Tribune itself. Below are some more links of interest.Bahamas Uncensored.comNassau Guardian OpinionWeblog Bahamas on the subjectBut Lynn, as always, has a voice that's unique.

On Inertia

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I’m in my third year of employment as a civil servant.  I started out in this profession, twenty-odd years ago.  I worked as a civil servant for three years, and left to enter the teaching profession.  Some people thought I was crazy; I was taking a pay cut, I was moving to apparently sub-standard working conditions (no air conditioning in the classroom, no secretaries to do work for me, no downtime — I was working in a small church school, where free periods were few and far between), I was leaving a job with Connections to go to one with None.I was as happy as a clam.Poor, yes, but happy.  The reason?  At the end of a day as a teacher, I had the sense that I’d got something done.  At the end of a week, that sense of accomplishment was palpable; at the end of a year, when students had shown what they had (or hadn’t) learned, it could be rewarding. And the pride I have in knowing that I shared in some small way in the achievements of a new generation of Bahamians is priceless.Twenty years later, I’m back in the public service.  My job is rewarding in a different way.  I’m never bored.  No two days are alike.  We’re living in an exciting time, a time of radical change.  There are tides sweeping through nations, especially little ones, and we have to be ready to ride them or drown.  It’s a good time to be a civil servant.The trouble is that the civil service isn’t ready to experience the good time.  The profession is governed by inertia.Now for those of you who don’t know what it means, here’s what Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has to say: INERTIA : indisposition to motion, exertion, or action : resistance to change.  These big dictionaries give you phrases to help you make sense of the words they define, and here’s what Webster’s gave: “social inertia, the tendency of animals to continue repeating the same action in the same place”.I couldn’t have said it better myself.The biggest problem with the civil service in The Bahamas is that it’s indisposed to action, resistant to change.  This is not unique to The Bahamas, by the way.  It is a fundamental tenet of bureaucracy.  It took me some time, for example, to get over my surprise that the Canadian bureaucracy is just as bad and the British bureaucracy is worse (whereas here, a who-ya-know or a well-targeted dollar can speed the process around here, there’s no way around those public servants).  But the problem is very real.The problem is simple.  Government is designed to protect the status quo.  (It is very often nothing to do with the party in power.)  Conservatism is hammered into the system from the ground up.  The System itself is god; there is no power higher than it.  Change itself goes in as change, and never comes out at all.Inertia.Now lest you think that I am advocating a complete doing-away with the structures that slow down movement, that absorb light and break it into a million tiny pieces, each darker than the first, that break up good ideas to make them “workable”, let me assure you that I’m not.  Governments are designed to manage the assets of nations.  They are set in place to curb the excesses of politicians, who are naturally enthusiastic and energetic people who want things to be done in a rush (because short periods of time in which to prove themselves).  In the Westminster system, the two tiers of governance are designed to complement one another and to ensure that countries survive from administration to administration.  Civil servants are permanent employees, people who are put in place to maintain stability.  They are supposed to guard the assets of the country, to take the long view, to think about what happens twenty years form now, while elected officials scramble to keep old promises or make new ones.  It’s not a bad system, on paper.The problem is that the world is moving too fast for it.  Paper is a wonderful medium, but it’s now obsolete.  In a world where — as someone involved in the mass media put it very recently — today’s technology can become obsolete next week, a system in which a single idea can take eight months to be decided upon is inadequate to meet the needs of our nation.  And a profession in which individuals still expect to remain employed for life, no matter how they perform or how much they actually achieve, is a dinosaur in a world where change is so rapid that universities have now taken on the challenge of preparing graduates to be able to switch careers twice or three times in a lifetime.The civil service as designed is crippling the development of The Bahamas. I’ve argued before that the version that we have in place was never intended to govern a free nation; what we have has grown out of an institution set up to manage the assets of an empire.  The system is too open to abuse by the malicious and too inflexible to accommodate creativity.  Good ideas are easy to kill; they can be buried in paper, or strangled by budget constraints.  Because inertia rules, change has to struggle to survive.The time has come to rethink our civil service — not to do away with it, because it is a necessary balance to the imperatives of the elected — but to dissect it, evaluate it, and rebuild it from the ground up.  It’s time for the civil service to be designed to achieve things — and not to maintain things as they have always been, world without end, amen.

On Emancipation

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In 1833, the British Parliament passed an Act to abolish slavery in the British Empire. As of August 1, 1834, all slaves throughout the empire were to become free to some degree — if they were under the age of six, they would become free immediately, but if they were over six, they were to be apprenticed to their former masters. Apprenticeship was finally abolished on August 1, 1838.It is partly for this reason that Emancipation Day is a holiday in The Bahamas. It is a holiday throughout the former British slave colonies of the Caribbean as well — and the reason that Jamaica, for example, chose it as its Independence Day. We don’t celebrate our holiday on August 1, although we remember the date; rather, we have chosen to make the nearest Monday the holiday.Here, then, together with hot weather, rain, and hurricanes, the summer months bring the twin holidays that commemorate our freedom. As a nation, we have the opportunity of remembering how far we have come, of honouring our ancestors who — slave and master alike — were dehumanized by the institution of slavery and indentureship.So far, though, we have not made the most of this opportunity. Oh, we celebrate all right. We have a Junkanoo parade on Independence Day, and two Junkanoo parades on the August Holiday weekend. We have cook-outs (what better way to party than eating?) But that’s about as far as it goes. Indeed, considering the amount of time we spend speaking of such things, it’s possible to imagine that if a Bahamian child didn’t grow up watching American television, they might be surprised to learn that Bahamians were once ever slaves.And yet.As I’ve written before, slavery is not over in The Bahamas. I’m not talking about the kind of “slavery” that people like to raise when making these kinds of statements — a “slavery” that assumes that every Black Bahamian is subordinate to and poorer than every White Bahamian, that assumes that all Whites were slaveowners and all Blacks slaves, that believes that Black Bahamian slaves were captured in African jungles and transported to The Bahamas on slave ships — an image of slavery that has more to do with history as outlined in the ABC miniseries Roots than our own story, which is far more complicated and interesting. No. I’m talking about the kind of slavery Bob Marley recognized in his own people when he wrote and performed his “Redemption Song” — the mental slavery that continues to dominate our society.What do I mean by mental slavery? It manifests itself in a number of different ways. There are the obvious — the concept that Bahamians aren’t able to do things very well, and the resultant habit of looking elsewhere for models and expertise; the preference for hiring consultants from abroad to give advice that Bahamian experts have already considered and rejected; the willingness to privilege outside plans for development over local ones; the general contempt for anything home-grown, and the overconsumption of anything from across the sea. But as common as these tendencies are, I’m thinking of other, smaller, more insidious actions and habits that show the residue of slavery in our everyday lives.The biggest one is the apparent reluctance of the ordinary employee ever to make a decision. Decisions, you see, require that one take responsibility for those decisions, and if one is wrong, one gets in trouble. The result — particularly in the civil service, but not only there — is that for too many people, there is only one way of doing something. How many of us have found ourselves in a situation where we make a request that is unusual, that takes a salesperson out of her comfort zone, that surprises her, forces her to think? The result: roadblock.Another one, though, that I get to see often in my line of work, is the tendency of many people who are possessed with a good idea to seek first and foremost the kingdom of Government Money. Despite the fact that we live in a society which welcomes millions of tourists every year, in which money flows like water, in which Bahamians as well as visitors are willing to spend good cash on things they enjoy, we seem to believe that our enterprise must first and foremost be supported by handouts from the public treasury.A third is the paralysis that I also witness, as a manager of a department and as a teacher of students, among people who seem to be waiting for someone to tell them What To Do. They can’t — or won’t — act unless they get an order or a clearance from above.All of these are examples of the mental slavery from which we continue to need emancipation. Emancipation, you see, only begins with the awarding of political freedom. It is true that on August 1, 1834, slaves were given the gift of themselves; they were able, for the first time since their enslavement, to own their bodies, their loved ones, their offspring, and their possessions. But the residue of slavery lingers still. The political and physical emancipation of the slaves didn’t mean that there was a corresponding psychic and mental freedom that came with it. That has to be worked on.So it’s August; it’s our freedom time. Massa’s long gone. It’s time for us realize that every Bahamian who refuses to make a decision, every Bahamian who seeks a handout, every Bahamian who looks outside the country for validation, every Bahamian who believes that what we do isn’t good enough, is in need of emancipation still.It’s time we emancipate ourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.

Some more on land — now Zimbabwe

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From time to time, we hear reports about Mugabe and his misrule of Zimbabwe. Now know that I was at Pearson College with the first student from Zimbabwe, Zobo Chimurenga, and I watched him conduct his own flagraising ceremony — alone — on Zimbabwean Independence Day in February 1980. Mugabe was for us then a hero, a man who had led his people to victory in a war of liberation.Mugabe's no longer a hero.What has dominated the news, though, is what a tyrant he is. Like many great leaders, it's said, corruption and paranoia have overtaken him and have turned him into a dictator who is destroying the very country he created. Like Castro.I've often wondered what the other side of the story is. I had some idea; one of my favourite ethnographies during my MPhil studies at Cambridge was Guns and Rain. But Rosemary Ekosso gives yet another perspective — the point of view of a fellow African.Well worth the read. And follow her links, too.Here's a bit of what she has to say:Zimbabwe: White Lies, Black Victims

Despite their pious claims, Britain and the others are not angry because Mugabe is a corrupt dictator. They sponsor corrupt dictators when it suits them. They are not angry because ordinary Zimbabweans are suffering under Mugabe. They don’t care about ordinary Zimbabweans. They were quite happy to herd them into reserves when it suited them.No, what they care about is the expropriation of white farmers. They express indignation at Mugabe’s cronies acquiring the land. That is a bad thing, of course. I myself come from an area where government or government-affiliated bigwigs are buying up all the prime sea-front locations because they can afford them. But in the case of Zimbabwe only 0.3% of people settled on land have acquired it through undue influence or corruption. So 99.7% of Zimbabweans got their land fair and square.So we agree that Mugabe is doing a BAD THING. The bad thing is not, however, the fact that he has taken land that should go to poor landless Zimbabweans and given it to his friends. The bad thing is that he has taken the land from white people.

Land or people?

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I found this article in Time more than interesting. It's discussing how Cuban-American exiles in Miami and other American interests that had their property confiscated during Castro's revolution have expectations of seeking reparations for what they have lost. And it's serious.I normally take the call for reparations from slavery sought by certain hard-line anti-colonial Caribbean and African intellectuals with a dash of salt — not because I don't think that we have a right to demand such reparations, but because I believe that we haven't a hope in hell of getting them awarded to us.Still, if Cuban-American exiles and the residue of the American corporations whose properties were nationalized half a century ago can consider demanding reparations from Cuba, then hell, I'll get behind the demand for reparations for slavery.After all, what's worth more — land or people?Cuba After Castro: Can Miami's Exiles Reclaim Their Stake?

For those who don't have a subscription, here's an excerpt:Castro, who turns 80 August 13 and is, say official communiques, recovering from major intestinal surgery, last week handed provisional power to his younger brother and defense minister, Raul Castro. At first, Miami's politically potent Cuban exiles exulted in the streets of Little Havana. But when the reality sunk in that Fidel is most likely still alive — and that his communist dictatorship may well endure under Raul even if he's not — it also reminded many Cuban-Americans that their once ardent hopes of reclaiming confiscated property could be, as one Pentagon analyst says, "a pipe dream." A report last month by the Bush Administration's Commission For Assistance to a Free Cuba warns, "No issue will be more fraught with difficulty and complexity" during the post-Castro transition — even if democracy is eventually restored on the island.That is no doubt just how the impish Fidel wanted it. His stunning and sometimes brutal expropriation campaign seized homes, businesses, farms and factories from tens of thousands of Cubans and scores of U.S. corporations, assets whose combined worth was $9 billion in 1960 and perhaps more than $50 billion today. ... When Fidel offered little if any restitution, the U.S. retaliated with an economic embargo against Cuba in 1962, which remains in place today.But 44 years later, as Cuban-Americans continue to clutch yellowing deeds and titles, the likelihood of ever recovering the actual properties has dimmed like a Havana brownout. ... Still, those exiles will clamor for some sort of compensation from a democratic transition government—payments the U.S., ironically, could end up bankrolling as a major aid donor.

Quick Question

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I've been looking for a three-column theme for some time.  I saw this one, Simplicity by Teli Design and liked it, simply because it's got three columns and it works.  But I like the red of the other, and I like the width of the blog entry column.I'm thinking of leaving this one up here for the weekend.  I'd love feedback from readers to let me know whether I should leave it as is or return to Bloody Contempt.Eventually, when I've got the time, I'll get it just right.  But for now, I've got to make do with the blog themes of Mama Bear or Papa Bear, I'm afraid.

On What Culture Isn't

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As an anthropologist, one of the most valuable things I learned was to judge other people's cultures by their own standards, and not by my own.  The reason for that is that all groups of people evolve ways of life that work, more or less, for them.  What we call “culture” is what results when a group of people adapt to their particular environment, and in many cases it's the outcome of trial and error and finding out what works best in a particular situation.Because of that, we tend to judge other people's customs according to the things that work for us, without understanding that every culture has its own unique adaptations.  What good for the goose, to quote Winston Saunders, ain't gat to be good for the gander.  The application of one's own morality and understanding to everybody else in the world is called ethnocentrism, and it's responsible for a whole lot of evil.The entire history of European imperial expansion and the colonial project that accompanied it is an excellent example of this.  Wherever they went, the Europeans carried attitudes they had developed in their own countries, and, because they were convinced of their superiority and of their right to global conquest, they imposed those attitudes on the people they met and subdued.  From Mexico to Chile, from Vancouver Island to Florida, from Bermuda to Venezuela, and from Morocco to Cape Town, they carried out a programme of “education” that taught the people they conquered that the way of life they’d always known was wrong and “backward”, and that the way of life perfected by the Europeans was correct and progressive.  To be modern, one had to be more like Europeans.  To be oneself was to be primitive, animal, and savage.These days, we’ve got rid of part of this thinking.  We are far less likely to state that “white is right”.  We are very likely to assert our Afrocentrism and our black pride, and we celebrate those things we think are evidence of our cultural uniqueness.  And we embrace our so-called “African” heritage uncritically, without examining its value or its integrity.The problem is, our reaction is superficial.  We have changed the language we use.  We have turned our faces away from much of what we imagine smacks of our colonial past without understanding that our culture is itself unique, an adaptation that happened when Europeans and Lucayans and Africans and North American “Indians” and Asians met on these limestone rocks in the sea.  We have not examined the full picture, have not read the whole story; we have simply torn the cover off the book, and think we know who and what we are.But.  The language we speak is European — in vocabulary at the very least, if not in grammar.  The desires and the ambitions we have are western, the religion we claim is Europe’s, and our social structure, our laws, our calendar, our schooling, our economy, our judiciary, and our entire mindset are the products of colonial domination.  Even when we wake up and recognize that many of the things we are taught as children — that money is good, say, or that the best kind of profession to have is one that makes you wear nice clothes and work in an air conditioned office with lots of people around who call you “Sir” or “Ma’am”, or that people who work in the yard with dirt on their hands are lesser beings and should be treated with contempt — our reaction is shaped by the complete transformation our histories underwent in colonialism.So those of us who choose Islam over Christianity because of its deeper roots in Africa, those of us who embrace communism instead of the decadence of capitalism and the corruption of democracy, even those of us who turn ourselves over to Rastafarianism, the only Caribbean religion, are all reacting within the confines of a model that has been fundamentally shaped by colonialism, imperialism, Europe’s view of us all, and slavery.  And until we engage with this fact and understand the depths to which we have been affected, we will never truly embrace ourselves.So what is the solution?  Well, I’ll tell you what it’s not.  It isn’t reacting in a wholesale fashion to colonization by throwing away everything we imagine to be the trappings of that experience.  The blackest of us is not African, and the whitest of us is not European.  The Bahamas has been cooking up different cultures since at least 1492, and those five hundred years have created an interesting and special stew.  It’s a stew in which classical music has been simmering — and developing — side by side with the vocal harmonies, the call-and-response patterns, and the polyrhythms of Africa.  It’s a stew in which the dances of the aristocracy have married the drums and the footwork of the servants.  It’s a stew where the straw arts of the Native Americans converse with the basketry of the Africans and the headwear of the Europeans, and where the oral arts of us all have pulled from Haiti and the USA as well as England and Africa.The answer doesn’t lie in claiming everything that appears “African” either, for nowhere is everything entirely good.  When Chinua Achebe wrote his classic novel, Things Fall Apart, his purpose was to criticize both the English and the Ibo people of Nigeria.  He condemned the English colonizers’ destruction of traditional Ibo society while at the same time criticizing those bits of Ibo culture that he regarded as wrong — the killing of twins, for example, the treatment of women, certain punishments given to wrongdoers.  Today, African women are speaking out about age-old traditions as well, from female circumcision to the deplorable habit of fathers and grandfathers to take their female relatives’ virginity.What culture is requires serious study, requires the recognition, naming, and celebration of all that is good about us.  And so we need to focus our eyes inwards, for the habit of looking beyond our shores for things that are “good” is a colonial one.  Not until we can name our strengths and address our weaknesses will we know what culture is; but in the meantime, we need to make sure we know what culture isn’t.

Stuff from around the region

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This post and its comments raise some interesting questions about Bermudian homophobia that could be floated here as well. (A Limey in Bermuda)Barbados makes plans to process and manufacture Sea Island cotton. (My Barbados Blog)Guyana-Gyal meditates on family and emigration. (Guyana)The Bajan Deputy Prime Minister calls for regulation of blogs and call-in shows. (The Nation)Barbados Free Press, an online newsblog, reacts to the DPM's comments. (Barbados Free Press)