Bahama Pundit

Who Were the First Bahamians?

by Larry Smith

•Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles by Dr Julian Granberry was published in 2004 by the University of Alabama Press. It is available in Nassau bookstores.

When Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 – after sailing the ocean blue - there were some 3,000 native Indian groups living in the Americas.

But the only Indians that Columbus himself saw were the Tainos of the Caribbean - including the Bahamian Lucayans - a society that the Europeans completely destroyed in a few short years.

Although Columbus and his brothers were men of their times, the brutal subjugation of Taino societies really began in 1502, under the direction of Nicolas de Ovando. Within two decades they ceased to exist as a separate population due to forced labour, warfare, disease, emigration and outmarriage.

And the whole regional culture officially expired in 1797, when the British deported the last independent group of Indians from St Vincent to Central America.

On Why Free Trade Isn't Free

by Nicolette Bethel

There's a lot of talk these days about free trade, market forces, and so on. Even I've talked about it. How can we not? The world is changing, has changed, and unless we change with it, we'll be left behind.

Half a century ago, when colonies were becoming countries and the world's leaders were no longer exclusively of European descent, becoming a nation was the most important step you could take. Gaining a voice on the world stage, being able to apply for membership to international bodies, being able to create and express one's sovereignty -- these were the things people fought for, these were what nations celebrated.

Half a century ago, though, the greatest forces were not economic, but ideological. The world was divided into two major groups. On the one side were the communist countries; on the other, the so-called "free" world.

A Hurricane Across the Green Fields of Life: How the 1918 Flu Affected the Caribbean

by Larry Smith

“So vast was the catastrophe...that our minds, surfeited with the horrors of war, refused to realise it. It came and went, a hurricane across the green fields of life, sweeping away our youth in the hundreds of thousands and leaving a toll of sickness and infirmity which will not be reckoned in this
generation.” -- Article in the Times of London on the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The Purple Death (or Spanish Flu) was born in March 1918 in the American midwest. A second, more deadly, wave of infection began in August of that year - probably in France - and continued into 1919.

This outbreak rapidly engulfed the world, killing more than 50 million people in a few months at the end of the Great War. And it is now known that the Purple Death (so named because it turned patients blue as they died) was a bird flu, similar to the one threatening us today.

Our Duty to the Environment

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

As this hurricane season produces more storms and more powerful ones, the debate on whether global warming is a contributing factor has also intensified.

There have been 22 named storms so far with 12 developing to full hurricane force, and the season still has five weeks to go.

Hurricane Wilma, having devastated Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, surged across Cuba, Florida and the northern Bahamas as Alpha was just getting started in the south. (Incidentally, the Cubans can teach others a lesson about preparedness as they have evacuated 300,000 of their citizens away from exposed areas).

Wilma at one point was the strongest hurricane ever recorded with winds up to 175 miles per hour and capable of gusts up to 185. It is chilling to imagine the damage a ferocious storm like that could do to life, property and the natural environment in a direct hit on the Bahamas.

On Immigration

by Nicolette Bethel

Much has been said of late about immigrants, especially illegal ones. By "illegal immigrants", by the way, we really mean people who come here on boats, not jets, people who sail here from the south, not the north, and people who speak a different language and who worship a different way from us.

In other words, we mean Haitians. Or Jamaicans, if we're feeling really expansive.

Send them home, we say. Even those who were here all their lives. Even those who were born here. If they illegal, they gattie go. We're a small country, after all. No space. No resources, not like our neighbours to the north. We are not the USA and Canada, with all that money up there ready to give away to the poor and tired of the world. After all, they pay no taxes, and they crowd up all our services. We cannot afford to be magnanimous. Suffering is not our business; send them home.

A Primer on Bahamian Education

by Larry Smith

This past summer scores of experts from around the country sat down in a hotel ballroom at great expense to figure out how to “transform” our failed education system. It was the first major re-evaluation of Bahamian schools since a national task force was set up in January, 1993.

What happened at this four-day meeting has implications for the 50,000-plus students in our public schools as well as our entire future as a modern society. But we have yet to receive any kind of report. To help put this critical issue into perspective, here is a primer on Bahamian education.

Protecting the Consumer

by Larry Smith

There are serious concerns about new consumer laws the government wants to enact this year to comply with free trade initiatives. But the government won't listen to the people who make the economy work.

Critics say the laws – as presently drafted – will dilute due process and politicise the marketplace by giving politicians the right to act as judge and jury over trade disputes.

The proposed laws set impractical standards for the supply of goods and services, they say, while exempting the public sector from similar scrutiny. That alone should be enough to make them a laughingstock.

Threat of a Superflu Pandemic

by Larry Smith

"The year 1918 has gone...a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all--infectious disease."
1919 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ever since the Huns crashed the Roman Empire’s 800-year party in the 5th century AD, Europeans have been terrified of invaders from the East.

But today’s invader could be even deadlier than Attila the Hun. It’s name is H5N1. It is an avian flu that has already caused the death of millions of birds – and about 60 people - in the Far East. And it has now spread to Turkey, Romania and Greece.

It is not just Europe that is threatened. Experts say the world could soon face another pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu (or Purple Death) of 1918 which - according to latest estimates - killed more than 50 million people in a few months at the end of the First World War.

That’s because scientists have found that the 1918 virus was also a bird flu, one that had mutated so that it could pass from person to person. They discovered this by actually reconstructing the extinct virus out of bits of tissue from 87-year-old autopsies.

Conjuring a Constitutional Crisis

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

There was an attempt to conjure up a constitutional crisis out of the recent manoeuvres around the office of Leader of the Opposition. But, clumsy though they may have been, those activities came nowhere near creating a constitutional crisis.

It is one thing to take advantage of a political opponent’s embarrassing situations but it quite something else to alarm the public with irresponsible talk about constitutional crisis.

No constitution can be so comprehensive and perfectly drafted as to avoid all possibility of running into serious problems at sometime or other. When that does happen, those responsible for sorting it out must rely on the spirit of the document, conventions, useful precedents and good old common sense.

The Dangers of Disorderly Development

by Andrew Allen

By some standards, Abaco has come into its own. Anyone visiting the island for the first time in a few years will be shocked at the level of growth it has recently experienced. The famed traffic light in Marsh Harbour, long a somewhat unnecessary curiosity, now increasingly serves an actual purpose, as the surrounding area develops into a real city centre.

In local government terms, Abaco’s three District II Councils and various town committees are allotted some 20% of the local government budget for the entire country, reflecting the island’s population growth.

New resorts, a harbour full of boaters and new restaurants everywhere you look signify an economy on the move. But if you blink too much you are likely to miss the signs of corresponding public investment growth in Abaco.

To put it mildly, the much-vaunted resilience of an economy driven by repeat visitors and second home owners has not been matched either by public investment in infrastructure or by robust management of local affairs and resources.

Politics & Disorder

by Andrew Allen

At breakfast and lunchtime on any given weekday, the long-term parking lot at Nassau international Airport becomes a hive of business activity, as groups of entrepreneurial ladies set up tables and umbrellas and unload an assortment of delicacies from their vans and station wagons.

Long lines of patrons, which seem to include a solid majority of airport workers and managers, as well as curious tourists, attest to the generally high quality of the foods on offer.

Inside the adjacent domestic terminal, an outsize, generally empty ‘café’, with shabby décor and mediocre service does a comparatively meager business. In fact, given the costs associated with its ‘concessionary’ lease, it is a wonder that the poor establishment has managed to remain in operation at all in the face of the competition from the parking lot.

It is fair to assume that those who originally conceived the design and management of the airport did not anticipate that the concessionary tenants, whether vendors of drink, food or perfumes, would have to contend with unlicensed, unregulated competitors who could just pitch camp and operate rent-free and hassle-free from the parking lot.

Like so much else in The Bahamas, the original plan for the airport would have been designed after a model conceived elsewhere. And in the places where Bahamian government planners would have seen and wondered at the model (North America, England etc.) it actually works. An informal vendor at Heathrow or O’Hare would last little longer than a man with a rucksack in an Osama bin Laden outfit.

The Effie Knowles Saga

by Larry Smith

This is a story about unusual Bahamian connections...a tale that begins in the 18th century and still spins today. A story about Indians, lawyers and land sharks...and a glimpse of the life of one little-known woman of Bahamian descent who made good in the United States, but left open a pandora's box of island intrigue.

**********

Florida lawyer Effie Knowles is something of a celebrity in Bahamian real estate and legal circles these days, although she has been dead for 20 years and few people have ever heard of her.

Her parents were Bahamian emigres. She was born in Key West in 1892 and died in Miami in 1984 at the ripe old age of 92. Her grandfather – James Alexander Knowles was born on Long Island in 1839 and moved to Key West. Florida did not become a US territory until 1821 and for a long time Bahamians looked on the Keys as northern Out Islands.

At the height of the Depression, the 1930 census puts Effie living with her widowed mother (Julia), two sisters (Laura and Beatrice) and a brother (William) in Miami. All five were described as white and literate, and Effie - a lawyer - owned the house. All are now dead.

But their legacy lives on - a legacy that stretches back to the earliest land grants in the Bahamas. In fact, Effie’s claim to more than 12,000 acres on several Bahamian islands has generated enormous controversy lately, with some describing transactions involving this estate as “the biggest land fraud in our history”.

On the Taste of Sand

by Nicolette Bethel

The ostrich is a lovely bird. Big. Flightless. Beautifully feathered (as we should know, as many of their feathers adorn Junkanoo costumes). Fast.

And much maligned.

Ostriches, according to legend, ignore danger by burying their heads in the sand. (The fact that they do not do this in actuality is neither here nor there; what matters today is that people think they do.) So, according to legend, instead of running or fighting when they're threatened, they simply stick their heads underground and wait for the problem to go away.

The ostrich, not the flamingo, should be our national bird.

I'm not talking about the size of ostrich eggs, or the fact that an ostrich can outrun even Tonique Williams-Darling (they can apparently clock up to 31 mph in speed), or even the fact that an ostrich could be turned into a great Junkanoo costume. I'm talking about the head-burying thing.

On PetroCaribe & Poverty

by Larry Smith

“The (days of relatively inexpensive energy) are behind us and we’re now dealing with a very different environment...We all need to be more thoughtful in how we use energy.”
--US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman

While State Finance Minister James Smith argues for alternative fuels and greater efficiency to tackle rising energy costs, Vincent Coleby, chairman of a government advisory panel, wants to make petroleum cheaper for Bahamians.

But according to Minister Smith, cutting gasoline taxes is “off the table”. And cutting retail and wholesale margins will simply postpone hard choices that the country has to make.

Mr Coleby’s Petroleum Usage Review Committee was appointed in June to look at margins, transport costs, royalties and rentals in the local fuel industry.

At a College of The Bahamas panel discussion last week, Mr Coleby said we could get lower prices by subscribing to Petrocaribe - a regional political and trade pact proposed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

On Merit

by Nicolette Bethel

Connections, they say, are everything in The Bahamas. They tell you who you are, where you stand in society, what you can do, how high you can climb. The person with connections is rich indeed. The person without --

Well, let's say they better have a Green Card.

There are many people who believe that a society built on connections is a corrupt society, one in which social ties lead to success. When who you know is more important to your positioning than what you know and how well you know it, a society cannot grow, cannot change. It's a sad truth, these people claim, but it's a truth anyway. The society built on connections is one that's bound to fail.

The PM & Opposition Politics

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

The governing party and its allies are obviously enjoying the goings-on in the opposition in the run-up to the FNM’s convention in November. In the House of Assembly last week PLP members, including Prime Minister Perry Christie, took aim at the way the FNM’s leadership contest is developing.

That is what opposing political parties do, and in this particular case the process has not been a text-book example of what should happen. But political activity is seldom by the letter and that is why each major political event has an anatomy of its own.

While attempting to score points, Mr. Christie and his colleagues should bear in mind that the Bahamian electorate is more sophisticated, exposed and informed than ever before.

The idea that a political party can or should at all costs avoid internal debates and contests is simply foolish and can never lead to progress, only atrophy. A political party must demonstrate that it is willing to take the risks associated with democratic process.

On Sin and the Refugee

by Nicolette Bethel

Okay, I admit it. The two, sin and refugees, don’t normally go together. At least, not officially. Sin is sin, and refugees are, well, they’re just unlucky.

But last month's events along the Gulf Coast of the United States, and the social fallout that has followed, seem to suggest something different. There's a subtle battle of terminology that's been going on under the surface, in the background, upstage, behind the main action played out by FEMA and the President and the Mayor and the Governor, and it's this: nobody's all that sure what exactly to call the people who have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent floods.

Some people want to call them "evacuees". Some people want to call them "victims". Some people want to call them "survivors". Some people want to call them "displaced". What is pretty clear, though, is that many people — most prominent among them prominent African-Americans — are resisting calling them refugees.

Jesse Jackson's one of those who think that "refugee" isn't the right word. Al Sharpton's another. Both believe that to apply the word "refugee" to the New Orleans evacuees is racist. Both justify their positions by making reference to the fact that the victims of Katrina who have been pushed from their homes are citizens of the United States of America. The very obvious implication: Americans are Americans, and not refugees.

ZNS & Opposition Politics

by Andrew Allen

Given their likely ramifications, it is understandable that the events within the FNM governing council were on everyone’s lips for most of last week.

Everyone, that is, with the exception of the good people at ZNS, whose keen-eyed newsmen seemed to remain blissfully unaware that anything newsworthy had taken place in the official opposition at all.

When one tries to imagine the public broadcasters of Britain, Jamaica or Barbados failing to give coverage to such an important event within the opposition party, the scale and context of the failure becomes clear and, frankly, embarrassing.

The difference, of course, lies in what Carlton Smith, the corporation’s Deputy General Manager, admitted only a few weeks ago: that our national broadcaster, despite 12 years of competition, is so compromised by political associations that it “cannot work in the public interest” in terms of giving fair and objective news coverage to Bahamians.

On What Government's Supposed to Do

by Nicolette Bethel

I spent most of the end of August watching the coverage of what happened in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I'm sure I wasn't alone. It was a hard story to watch, but compelling. For people in Abaco and Grand Bahama, the devastation was frighteningly familiar; for those of us in Nassau, it's instructive. Because there but for the grace of God go we.

The biggest problem, as I see it, wasn't the geography of New Orleans, or the intensity of the hurricane. Both of these are facts. They're facts with which the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the federal government of the USA have lived forever. History has shown all of them what floods and storms can do to the city, and studies predicted just this eventuality. For people to claim that what happened in New Orleans was beyond their imagination is inexcusable; what happened was not only imagined, but predicted.

The problem lay with the failure of government at every level it existed.

A Petrocaribe Backgrounder for the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

On Thursday, a panel at the College of the Bahamas will discuss policy options for the Bahamas in the face of rising energy costs.

Participants will be independent MP Pierre Dupuch, ex-Shell Bahamas manager Vincent Coleby, hotel association chief Earl Bethel, Marlon Johnson of the Small Business Association, and Rupert Pinder, a business lecturer at the college.

It was just over a year ago that Tough Call presented the first balanced review of Venezuela’s proposed oil deal for the region, known as Petrocaribe. Until then, all we had to listen to were political rantings about high gasoline prices.

One of our main points a year ago was the glaring lack of information, combined with the fact that the government had no thought-out energy policy: “If Trade & industry Minister Leslie Miller is so sure of himself, why doesn't he enlighten us on the details of his so-called 'energy policy' before embarking on such far-reaching negotiations?” we wrote at the time.

Clearly, the reason we were kept in the dark is because the minister himself didn’t have a clue how the scheme would work, and didn’t care so long as it gave him an effective political soapbox. In fact, it was only recently that wiser heads in the government forced the appointment of an advisory body to research the whole issue of fuel costs.

Of Early Elections & Crocodile Tears

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

Despite the usual predictions of an early election it is not at all likely that Bahamians will be going to the polls any time before 2007 or late in 2006 at the earliest. A quick glance at the electoral calendar will reveal that since the abolition of the seven-year parliamentary term elections have been held roughly every five years. The last seven-year term (it used to be called the “the seven-year itch”) was 1949-1956.

The earliest election since then was in 1968, a year and four months after the historic polls of 10 January 1967 which ushered in majority rule. That was because of the death of a member of the ruling party, Uriah McPhee, at a time when there was a one-seat margin in the House of Assembly.

The PLP government headed by Lynden O. Pindling decided to go back to the people in a general election rather than risk a by-election. The PLP had governed well beyond the expectations of many during its 15 months in power with some ministers turning in stellar performances.

Notable among them were Cecil Wallace Whitfield as Minister of Works and Warren J. Levarity as Minister of Out Island Affairs with responsibility for agriculture as well as public works in the Out Islands.

These two ministers (both of whom were to become founders of the FNM) had worked with lightning speed to bring much-needed amenities to neglected communities in New Providence and the Out Islands. So, from a razor-thin margin in the House, the PLP went to an overwhelming majority in the 1968 election winning 29 of 38 seats.

The Bahamas DNA Project - Finding Our Ancestors

by Larry Smith

Are the Long Island Deans descended from the Queen of Sheba?

Do the Sweetings of Green Turtle Cay trace their heritage to a Roman soldier?

Are the Eleuthera Neely's related to the tall "blue men" of the Sahara?

Do the Hope Town Malone's descend from Irish royals?

These and other fascinating questions are now being answered by the Bahamas DNA Project, which is slowly filling in the gaps of Bahamian family history. Whether black, white or in-between, if you have ever wondered who your ancestors were, this research will lead you to them.

Launched in 2004, the project is the brainchild of Peter Roberts, a Bahamian professor at Georgia State University, where he has worked as an archivist for the past 18 years. Professor Roberts interned at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, and part of his studies focused on African retentions in Bahamian culture.

The Dangers of Disorderly Development

by Andrew Allen

By some standards, Abaco has come into its own. Anyone visiting the island for the first time in a few years will be shocked at the level of growth it has recently experienced. The famed traffic light in Marsh Harbour, long a somewhat unnecessary curiosity, now increasingly serves an actual purpose, as the surrounding area develops into a real city centre.

In local government terms, Abaco’s three District II Councils and various town committees are allotted some 20% of the local government budget for the entire country, reflecting the island’s population growth.

New resorts, a harbour full of boaters and new restaurants everywhere you look signify an economy on the move. But if you blink too much you are likely to miss the signs of corresponding public investment growth in Abaco.

To put it mildly, the much-vaunted resilience of an economy driven by repeat visitors and second home owners has not been matched either by public investment in infrastructure or by robust management of local affairs and resources.

The Internet's 10th Anniversary

by Larry Smith

There’s been lots of hype lately about the 10th anniversary of the World Wide Web.

But the Internet has existed in one form or another since 1969, and was conceived even earlier. In fact, there are more Internet birthdays and inventors than you can shake a stick at.

Yet for most of us the Internet did appear 10 years ago, when a start-up company called Netscape introduced a commercial browser to surf the Web. And it was Netscape’s explosive public offering in August, 1995 that marked the birth of the Internet age.

Like the development of radar in World War 2 - the Internet’s roots go back to the darkest days of the Cold War. In a sense, it was Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev who launched the Internet in 1957 when he sent Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, into Earth orbit.

On Jobs

by Nicolette Bethel

It's a hallmark of every political campaign, no matter what the party, no matter what the time, that the next government is Going To Create Jobs. It's been a hallmark of campaigns ever since the Company Vote was removed in time for the 1967 election (it was still around in 1962, Universal Suffrage notwithstanding; it was a benefit of the 1964 Constitution, which made Roland Symonette our first Premier. History is important.) When you've got One (Wo)Man, One Vote, it appears to be imperative to getting elected.

Well, fine. I'm not going to argue with that. I'm not a politician, after all. I don't have to please all the people all of the time (thank the good Lord above).

But.

Controlling Arms & the Means of Production

by Andrew Allen

Foreign Minister Fred Mitchell was onto something important when he recently highlighted the unwillingness of the world community to attach as much importance to the trade in small arms as is attaches to the drug trafficking and international crime in which these arms are a fundamental factor.

Tragically, the most important members of the world community have either consistently failed or actively refused to accept the trade in small arms as a multilateral security matter worthy of the kinds of rules and responses that have been mobilized against the drug trade, money laundering or, more recently, terrorism.