Decolonisation of the Bahamian Mind

BAHAMIAN APPROACH TO HISTORY: FIRE > READY > AIM...! 

How do we Bahamians de-colonise our minds, in a manner and by a method that does not corrupt our history, whilst reprioritising our historical personalities appropriately, by some disciplined measure?

By Professor Gilbert Morris

Nassau, The Bahamas

I began this year with a post-called: “Decolonisation of the Bahamian Mind”.  It was the result of conversations with friends and Caribbean colleagues over the holiday....who concluded with me that ideas, concepts, vision and strategies mean nothing if our people’s thoughts were aligned against their own interests.

First amongst these interests is to remove from their minds a thinking inferiority.  Second, to remove the feverish orientation toward and prioritisation of what is foreign.  Third, to remove markings, signs and monuments on the Bahamian landscape that prioritises enslaver and colonial personages, hovering over our daily lives, infecting our children with their pride-of-place paramountcy.

As is typical, we leapt over the thinking part straight to the monument removal; essentially because the thinking part is hard work and one finds soon enough, we are hideously poor at disciplined conceptualisation, rooted context or discerning relevance.  Now so many delight in removing monuments...no doubt inspired by events in America and elsewhere!

Well, its simple...requires no thinking...and one gains an adrenaline rush to have achieved something in a country where Turtle’s achieve more in a day!  Unfortunately, that’s a short term “feeling good” neuro-stimulant that does nothing to change our situation or to cultivate a resolve to create or own a Bahamian future.

Had we taken time to think, we’d know that removal of statutes from a place of prominence is not - can’t and shouldn’t be imagined as - elimination from history: Christopher Columbus is part of our history, without whom any discussion of that history would amount to idiot babbling.  This is a crucial understanding that demands we locate him - with scholarly discipline - in the structure of a Bahamian historical narrative that is intellectually honest, and not the product of flailing gum-clicking, Jungaliss analysis.

Had we taken time to think, we’d notice that our lazy, reactionary approach to national pride - which is so impotent it hasn’t prevented D Grade national averages, elephantine Debts, Criminal Slaughter of our own, Skullduggery and backward tribal politics - such that we’ve done far more damage to our heritage than Columbus ever could.  This admission and a reflective national conversation would have shown us that we never bothered to think how to de-prioritise Christopher Columbus and what he symbolises, yet claim or monetise the motherhood of the Americas for our direct benefit, whilst locating Columbus at a level of our cultural meaning that removes him as the hood ornament of our history driving toward a Bahamian future.

What a thinking deliberative period would have confirm to us additionally, is the  historical manner in which we speak of Christopher Columbus as if he knew us.  He didn’t.  He couldn’t!

When we speak of him we speak of an aboriginal atrocity he initiated, informed by a reform of Dr, Martin Luther King Jr.’s clarion that: ‘Injustice in any period is a threat to justice in any period’.  This “period” break in the colonial hegemony in The Bahamas - between the aboriginals of these islands and ourselves - inhabits ‘enigmas of arrivals’, thousands of historical wedges, cultural drips, slippages and anthropological bleeding points, as these islands magnetised then metastasised a myriad of cultural nuances from the surrounding near abroad.

This Bahamas was a way station, a pastoral colony, a private haven (still), and was crucial to the economic establishment of the Carolinas - and was a direct contributor to the American Revolution as a nexus of risks and allegiances, and so a geostrategic default territory...yet also - lest we forget and forget ourselves - a direct beneficiary of the Haitian revolution, and a contributor to the rise of Canada in the salt, Cod and Molasses trades; amongst many other things.

What is the true and proper psychology of a people of this rambunctuous history, and how do they de-colonise their minds, in a manner and by a method that does not corrupt their history, whilst reprioritising their historical personalities appropriately, by some disciplined measure?

Let us note for good measure, that every demand peters out to conundrums, which undermines the demand itself: So, does the demand to remove monuments, apply to lawyer’s wigs, to knighthoods, to QCs, to The Commonwealth, Anglican Church and the Queen?

Or does our voices of defiance trail off to shameful silence when the true implications of what we demand comes into view?

Moreover, how would such a people (Bahamians) - now rightly, if only lately enthused - employ this moment of nascent awareness to plow into a future that corrects the terrors of failure they inflicted on themselves?

That is a question that should be answered before we rush out in our typical unthinking bossiness - being as our grandparents say: “too fast” - and so constrain ourselves to contemplate organically what it means to de-colonise our minds from our over-churchified plantation thinking; to repriortisation of Columbus’ and other egregious monuments; to the plastic culture we sell in our plantation tourism model; to our vapid reprobate politics; our education, economic and strategic failures; to our obsession with what is foreign; to our slavish devotion to other people’s things...which permits foreigners to find one skullduggerer, who freely sells the country out for second hand BMWs, trips to Walmart and grinning selfies!

Source

Bahamians Should Be Critically Concerned about The Level of Criminality in The Bahamas

Some members of the Royal Bahamas Police Force (past and present) have been accused of working on the opposite side of the law and in engaging in misconduct in the investigation and prosecution of criminal cases

The Bahamas Crime Crisis

The Police, Crime And Criminality

By Charles Fawkes

Nassau, The Bahamas

07/05/2004

HOUSE OF LABOUR:  Given the revelation of the Lorequin Commission of Inquiry regarding the alleged criminal conduct of individuals of the Defence Force and the shortcomings of the police force, Bahamians should be critically concerned about the level of criminality in The Bahamas.  Bahamian workers these days are living behind barbed wire fences, steel barred windows and doors because of the fear of crime- despite the high profile of the police and their high-powered public relations campaign.

Crime in The Bahamas continues to climb despite mounting national concern, the introduction of stiffer penalties for offenders and increased police visibility throughout local communities.  The crime figures for this year are expected to continue the upward spiral and all indications are that crime will continue to mushroom.

In almost every area of serious crime, the trend continues to be a movement upward – upward in terms of both quantity and severity.  Most social analysts do not wish to accept the quarterly figure that the police some times use to justify their approach to crime as correct.  Statistics can be manipulated unless the whole picture is given.

The crime issue has been the subject of widespread public debate and will continue to be an issue of national importance.  Before coming to power the PLP had foreshadowed taking a heavier hand in the control of crime and in the administration of justice.  From subsequent debates in the House of Parliament, many politicians seemed prepared to deny convicts all civil liberties and to transform The Bahamas into a police state in the name of combating crime; and, on this wave of alarmism, support could be galvanized for laws with stiffer penalties for criminal offenses, for capital punishment and for the enforcement of archaic laws mandating the beating of convicts as part of sentencing.

Despite all of these perceived crime-fighting initiatives, there has been no noticeable impact on the crime crisis.  As a matter of fact, a more daring and open element has been added to criminal activity in recent years and even some members of the police force (past and present) have been accused of working on the opposite side of the law and in engaging in misconduct in the investigation and prosecution of criminal cases.

While crime continues to escalate and officials persist in suppressing crime statistics, the gloom of rampant social and economic hardship are overtaking Bahamian communities and strangling the hopes and aspirations of law abiding citizens.  These communities are becoming incubators for infectious criminal mentality and a social decadence that touches every strata of Bahamian society.  The more people know about the crime problem, as it exists in The Bahamas, the more intelligently they can approach the question of solution.  Holding back the crime statistics the way it is practiced now runs counter to this idea and is a tremendous disservice to the public who, in the end, are victimized by the epidemic.

“Varnished Brass”, a book by John Gregory Dunne has these opening lines: “What most people do not understand about policemen is that they are bureaucrats and, no matter how dedicated, all but the most exceptional adhere to that most fundamental commandment of any bureaucracy – “protect your backs”.

There are, however, fundamental facts about police work that most people do not understand and seem to forget.  One of these facts is that in our class divided society, policemen like all workers are exploited.  They are also used as instruments of coercion and enforcement by the ruling class.  We know that the ruling class in societies like our own consists of the monies interests for whose benefits the laws are passed.  Because of their special role, the police are usually the object of the anger and the frustration of the people,  when the real oppressors are the members of the ruling class who make the laws and in effect give the orders.  Given what has been said, when things go sour for the rulers as we are now witnessing, the policemen are the first to be sacrificed and thrown to the wolves.  It is because of occupational hazards like these that policemen even more than other “bureaucrats”, adhere to the bureaucrat’s commandment – “protect your back”

It is also true that because of the nature of his work, we tend to think that the policeman is different from other workers.  He is not.  Conditions in society, which affect other workers, also affect the policeman.  He has a wife who goes to the food store and must decide what will be cut from the shopping list because her budget is too small.  He has a child with promise attending a government school, but he knows that his dreams for his child and the profession that he has in mind for it may not materialize, unless he can get him or her into St. John’s College, Queen’s College, or similar schools.  It is to the private schools that senior police officers and the other privileged members of society send their children, and average workers are killing themselves trying to send their children to such schools.  It should be obvious by now that the average policeman faces the same obstacles that stem form class and privilege as his fellow workers.

The typical rank and file policeman is tired of paying rent, but even with their combined salaries, his wife and himself still have difficulty saving the down payment for a home of their own.  He like the average worker also has a car, which it seems is always in need of expensive repairs, but he has to scrap the money, for the car is absolutely essential for family transportation.  The policeman or policewoman like every other worker must also contend with the emergencies which make demands onto heir inadequate salary, so he or she is denied luxuries and has to scuffle just to meet medical and dental bills.

What makes the policemen’s plight even worse, is that in neocolonial countries such as The Bahamas, they work under an archaic and repressive colonial system that gives a minimum of expression to the aspirations of the rank and file.  In some cases, it is very dehumanizing.  Most policemen despite all this talk about a ‘new police force’ and devolution are concerned, that the colonial masters have not left.  The same rigid, hierarchical system, which our former English masters, established in the colony to keep the native policeman in his place, still exists.

In The Bahamas, rank and file policeman constantly complain of favoritism and victimization in the department but have few avenues for redress.  Many would leave the force immediately, if they were not trapped by a contract and if there were other jobs available.

Finally, it is true that most policemen are honest and try to do the best job they can.  However, with the recent charges of brutality as dishonesty, it is easy to think otherwise.

 

Charles Fawkes is President of the National Consumer Association, Consumer columnist for the Nassau Guardian and organizer for the Commonwealth Group of Unions, Editor of the Headline News, The Consumerguard and The Worker’s Vanguard.