Gambier Homecoming Festival Address

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

Thank you for inviting me to this opening ceremony of the Annual Homecoming Festival on Gambier Day (August 3) and for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you.

I have lived many places in the Bahamas -- from Inagua to Andros, from Chippingham to Hawkins Hill, and places in between -- but for most of my life my family and I have been living right here in the Gambier neighbourhood.

I cannot lay claim to a connection with the founding fathers of this Village. The boat that brought my African ancestors landed somewhere else. But I can claim to be a resident and a neighbour for nearly 40 years. We are one.

And so I am proud to see the flowering of awareness and the determined efforts to take hold of, to conserve, and to celebrate our cultural and historical heritage here in Gambier.

I congratulate all who were instrumental in getting this Festival onto our national calendar, especially Mr. Wisdom whom we are honouring this evening.

Thank you, sir. And since I suspect that you could not have done it without the help of someone very special, I should like to say, Thank you too, Mrs. Wisdom.

And I thank you for the gracious manner in which you have always received Joan and me on these occasions.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

What we are about this evening and for the next few days is a celebration of our culture, and I should like to recall the words of two men who were 19th century contemporaries.

“Human culture is the art of revealing to a man the true idea of his being, his endowment, his possessions, and of fitting him to use these for the growth, renewal, and perfection of his spirit. It is the art of completing a man.”

Those words were written by Bronson Alcott; and this is what Thomas Carlyle said:

“The great law of culture is, let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions . . . ”

Every branch of human culture is influenced and shaped by many elements including geography, climate and history.

I say branch advisedly because all human culture is shaped by another powerful element, and that is the human spirit, the human essence that is shared by all mankind, the thing which gives meaning to the words: We are one.

So any particular culture is a variation of a broader human culture just as there are variations on a musical theme. We all recognize the grand theme when we see it and we are fascinated by the multitude of variations of which it is capable.

When we hear a form of Asian music, for instance, we recognize it as music. The same when we hear African music, or Middle Eastern music or European music, or our own Caribbean music.

We want to appreciate and enjoy them all. So I don’t entirely agree with Thomas Carlyle about casting foreign influences. But we must certainly be wary of what he calls the noxious adhesions, the ones that poison the best that is in us, that tend to disfigure the best that we are.

I’m talking about the influences that encourage us to poison our bodies with drugs, to exchange our traditional Bahamian manners for the crude behaviour and the language of the American hood, to exchange the beauty that we are capable of creating for sheer ugliness, to reinforce the self-hatred that the slave master used to control the slave.

So while we appreciate all that the world and human history has to offer that is positive, we must reject the negative -- and every culture has its negatives. And we must also be honest and determined to deal with the negative aspects of our own culture.

We must root out ugly homegrown habits before we come to accept them as a necessary part of Bahamian culture. They are not. They are nothing but weeds.

We are fortunate inasmuch as our Bahamian culture has benefitted from the rest of the world. For instance, some of the chords in our theme speak of the European experience in political and economic development.

But we are ever conscious of the powerful influence of our African heritage and the sometimes overwhelming and confusing history of slavery.

The founders of Gambier Village were not slaves in this community, but like tens of thousands before them, they were in shackles for the long and tortuous middle passage journey. They were part of a society that was largely constructed around slavery and that was disfigured by it.

That experience can no more be eliminated from our psyche and consciousness than the terrible experiences of other peoples that continue to shape their outlook and their destiny. And why is that so? Simply because we are human.

The Jews are a good example. But one difference between the Jews and us, at least in most of Western society today, is that there is a strong movement to exorcize all the demons of anti-Semitism -- in language and in art. Some go so far as to advocate making the denial of the Holocaust a crime.

By contrast, many of the roots of prejudice against Africans and their descendants in the West are still very much in place. You are familiar with some language used even by people who regard themselves as liberal -- expressions such as “black-on-black violence”.

Did you ever hear anyone talk about on white-on-white violence? And do you wonder why it never occurs to them to examine the reason for this?

Then there is the persistent stereotyping, as if all African Americans, for instance, think or act alike, or see themselves in precisely the same way, or use the same language as the criminals and pimps in the hood.

During the controversy over the Don Imus insult to some very fine African American women, there were those who were all too ready to blame the rap artists instead of the racist culprit. They even blamed the overt racism of a German soldier on the rappers!

The one that irritates me most is the assertion by so many, including some so-called conservative intellectuals (black and white) that disadvantaged African Americans are to blame for their state because other people have survived slavery and are doing just fine.

The truth is that no other people in the history of humankind have suffered anything like the middle passage slave trade and the enslavement of black Africans in the Americas.

It was, in its totality, unprecedented.

It was unprecedented in that it was based on race.

It was unprecedented in its intensity, in its brutality and in its duration.

It was unprecedented in that the slaves were cut off from their land and from their kinfolk, from their language, from their culture and from their religions.

It was unprecedented in that for generations they were not only treated as inferior but systematically brainwashed into believing that they were inferior.

Never before nor since has a race of people been subjected to such a sustained onslaught of misery, terror and dehumanization as Africans in the New World; and much of it continued after slavery.

What is remarkable, therefore, is not that many of them act as if they have been traumatized; after all, they are only human. What is remarkable is that they have survived at all. This brings me to the message I should like to leave with you this evening.

People of African descent must, like the Jews, demand at least an acknowledgement of the injustice inflicted upon them. But more importantly, they must celebrate the fact that as a race they survived their prolonged holocaust.

Some of the descendants of black Africans in the New World -- in America, in South America, in the Caribbean, and in The Bahamas – still wallow in self-pity and make excuses for their failures.

It is time to stop that. Many of our forebears rose above that -- and they were far worse off than any of us. They had higher mountains to climb and wider rivers to cross. But they climbed, and they crossed, and they left us a goodly heritage.

The slaves suffered great indignities, but the great shame of slavery is neither for them nor for us to bear. The shame belongs entirely to the slave masters, and to those who attempt in any way to sanitize this awful history.

The people who survived the worst that the world could inflict, the people who established the Village of Gambier and Fox Hill and Adelaide and Carmichael -- our African ancestors -- were neither cowards nor quitters. If they were, we would not have been here.

There was nothing inferior about them. They were a most remarkable people, a courageous race, physically and psychologically powerful; and the wellsprings of their spiritually ran deep.

They knew that it was important for them to nurture the next generation, to establish communities so that they in turn could survive -- even in a hostile environment.

Do we have any idea of the difficulties they had to overcome? Of the courage and determination they had to summon up?

This precious legacy, this patrimony, this inheritance is now ours. It is for us to pass it on to future generations, to remind them of the courage and sacrifice of our noble ancestors.

We must teach our young people pride in their heritage, and inspire them to build on what our forebears established, not to destroy it with excessive use of alcohol and drugs, and crime, and bad manners, and slothfulness, and disrespect.

We must teach them to become all that they were created capable of being, to expand to their full growth, to overcome all the obstacles, to resist all the noxious adhesions.

We must teach our young men and women how to respect each other, how to honour their elders, and how to uphold the dignity and the rights of others.

We must teach them that the art of completing a man is not about how much weed they can smoke, not about how much bad language they can spout, but about assuming responsibility, and conducting themselves with dignity as their forebears did.

We must teach them to get in touch with the wellsprings that made Gambier Village possible. We must teach them that it is not smart, not Bahamian, to adopt the vulgar language and behaviour of some in the American hood.

The success of the nation depends upon the success of Gambier Village and other villages, towns and communities throughout these islands. The nation begins right here. If we allow our communities and our families to go to hell, the nation will certainly follow.

But if we honour our ancestors, treasure our cultural and historical heritage, and build strong communities, strong families, then there will be no limit to what we can achieve as a people.

Indeed, we are one.