Bahama Pundit

Election 2012: What just Happened?

by Larry Smith

For the past three general elections Michael Pintard and David Wallace have put together sketch comedies lampooning the key personalities and issues in the campaigns. These side-splitting performances have played to sold-out audiences in Nassau and Freeport.

The current version is called Election 2012: What Just Happened? It explores the events and issues surrounding the most recent campaign, and effectively impersonates leading members of the PLP, the FNM and the DNA.

Pintard, the losing FNM candidate for Cat Island, San Salvador & Rum Cay in the last election, took some barbs himself. For example, recalling an actual stump speech, David Wallace (the Hubert Ingraham impersonator) declared dramatically "Pintard, I'm sending you on a mission! Only it's a one-way mission, heh, heh."

Christie ("who had the shuffle kicked out of him in 2007"), was brilliantly impersonated by Will Stubbs. It's relatively easy to imitate HAI because of his speech impediment and the fact that he actually has a sense of humour. But it's a rather more complex task to attempt the same with Christie. Nevertheless, Stubbs managed to pull it off brilliantly.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate Bran McCartney, impersonated by Tawari Rodgers, was only a bit player, which belied the DNA's key role in Ingraham's demise.

Both Wallace and Pintard are losing FNM candidates (although Wallace won West End and Bimini in the 1997 FNM wipeout of the PLP). Pintard, who lost in May by only 85 votes to now Deputy Prime Minister Philip Davis, conceded that the play had been delayed this election cycle because it had taken him longer to heal.

Arguably, the star of the show was Marquita Whymns, who (among other characters) portrayed the archetypal Haitian-Bahamian matriarch, Marie, cleverly massaging both Obie Wilcombe and Pakeshia Edgecombe. After assuring both Grand Bahama candidates of unswerving loyalty, she turned to her dissolute Bahamian husband and declared "We deliver same as repatriate".

The three-hour performance on Saturday (at the so-called National Centre for the Performing Arts) was sold out and the audience appeared hugely entertained by even the most banal jokes. The opening scene - featuring the "roads dem, dig up, dig up" - proved especially energising. 

Aside from a few technical difficulties, like delayed musical prompts and a non-functioning stage curtain, the performance is well worth the $25 ticket price. Extra shows are being scheduled for this Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so you still have a chance to get in on the action. 

 

40th Anniversary Celebrations off to Poor Start

by Simon

The kick-off event of the 40th independence anniversary was announced recently at the Cabinet Office.  It was a bumbling and incoherent affair provoking many questions while providing few considered answers. 

Two days later, Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans for the centenary commemoration of World War I by the United Kingdom.  What a study in contrast between the envisioning and planning of the two commemorations by the respective heads of government and policymakers. 
  
In a carefully-crafted address at the Imperial War Museum, the transcript of which is available at 10 Downing Street’s website, Cameron articulated the vision and values intended to guide the commemoration.

Characteristically, Prime Minister Christie has failed to do likewise on at least two occasions.  He failed to do so at the announcement of the committee spearheading our 40th.  He failed again at last week’s announcement of the renaming of the newer Paradise Island Bridge in honour of Sir Sidney Poitier, and related activities.    

Jumbey Village – Montage of a Dream Deferred

by Simon

Edmund Moxey’s contribution to the social, cultural, economic and political advancement of Bahamians found magnificent expression in Jumbey Village.  The new documentary on the creation and destruction of Jumbey Village chronicles some of our post-independence history. 

Some of the dreams of Ed Moxey became manifest.  Still, many of his dreams were deferred, like a raisin in the sun, calling to mind the memorable poem by Langston Hughes.  In his book-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hughes asks in, What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

Sir Durward Knowles -- Driven by the Stars

by Simon

There is still at 94 both an irrepressible humour and twinkle in the eyes of Sir Durward Knowles.  They are permanent features of his exuberant spirit and dedication to squeezing out of life every measure of joy.

The title of Sir Durward’s biography is Driven by the Stars.  He has been driven by a constellation of lodestars and virtues, among them extraordinary generosity, sportsmanship and a passion for national unity.  In turn, he has become a guiding star for others.

Quite a bit has been written about Sir Durward’s contribution to sports and his exemplary philanthropy particularly in the areas of physical and mental disability.  Athletic prowess and disability may seem incongruent, but not to Sir Durward.

In both areas the champion athlete and champion of the disabled has sought to empower others, no matter their physical or mental capacity or disability, to be driven by their own stars, overcoming limits to achieve more than one ever dared imagine.

Running Hot on Culture

by Larry Smith

We Bahamians are considered such philistines around the region. They laugh at us for stooping so low as to blow up our own culture, and that's not a joke - it actually happened in 1987, when the government demolished Jumbey Village with explosives.

The village was an offshoot of a community festival launched in 1969 by musician and parliamentarian Ed Moxey. An earlier and more 'cultural' version of the fish fry, it featured music and dance performances as well as displays of arts and crafts, and produce, and was aimed at locals as well as tourists.

In 1971 Moxey persuaded the Pindling government to let the festival take over a former dump site on Blue Hill Road and build a permanent facility. In the period leading up to independence in 1973, there was a lot of buzz about a popular enterprise promoting Bahamian creative arts.

"We put the homestead site up and in '73 we had a meeting with all the teachers. And they agreed right there that all the teachers in the system would donate a half day's pay and every school would have a function...and we came up with $100,000 in the space of three months," Moxey recalled.

"We put up a special cabinet paper, cabinet agreed, and when I pick up the budget, everything was cut out. Everything." Moxey told University of Pennsylvania researcher Tim Rommen in 2007. "That was a little bit too much. Village lingered, lingered...just kept on deteriorating until they came up with this grandiose scheme to put National Insurance there. And when they ready, they blow the whole thing down."

An Invitation To: We the People – Part 2

by Simon

Mohandas Gandhi’s moral wisdom, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,” is a variation on a theme which finds expression across many cultures and religions.

It is also paradoxical wisdom which might inform the moral education of students in the public and private school systems including in regard to community service programmes.  Though fairly ubiquitous in secondary schools these programmes tend to fail the grade in terms of vision and scope, as well as priority and organization.

The quality of community service programmes vary widely from the mandatory to the episodic, from individual to group projects to what actually constitutes a service project.  While most programmes are well meaning, the majority lack sufficient oversight and a service-learning component.

While just about everyone in the education field lauds service programmes in our schools, most are poorly designed and in need of clearer guidelines and more vigorous support from education leaders and related stakeholders.

The National Museum and Political Satire in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

He is 93 now and too frail to pilot a boat, but he can still step up to a lecturn and deliver a sprightly speech, peppered with amusing anecdotes.

Listening to Sir Duward Knowles these days is like opening a time capsule planted 64 years ago. That's when he, his new wife Holly, and two other 20-something Bahamians set off on a road trip across the continental USA, with their boat in tow, to win a world championship sailing event in Los Angeles.

For Knowles, that unprecedented event was both the beginning and end of a long and distinguished sailing career. Even winning a gold medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, one suspects, did not compare with that glorious victory at sea in 1947.

"You don't know what it was like back then for an island boy to become champion of the world," he told scores of well-wishers during a recent ceremony at Centreville House to turn over his two Olympic medals and the 1947 Star Class trophy to the Antiquities, Monuments & Museums Corporation.

Thanks for the Memories

by Larry Smith

It was the days of wine and roses all over again.

A couple dozen middle-aged folks sitting beneath a moonless sky savouring one of Pat Rahming's rare musical excursions; and singing along to "a passing breeze filled with memories", like the pensioners we all thought we'd never be.

They are not long, those days of wine and roses. But in the company of relatives in the Ebenezer graveyard, we entered for a time into the misty dream of the 1960s, when Pat honed his personality performing folk music while studying architecture in Montreal.

The San Salvador Museum and A Dictionary of Bahamian English

by Larry Smith

COCKBURN TOWN, San Salvador - This is an island of monuments, although none are particularly grandiose and some are positively insignificant and difficult to find. There are at least five markers commemorating the landfall of Columbus, for example.

The locals don't pay much attention to them, but the 400 visitors who stay at Club Med each week certainly do. This is the most historic place in the Bahamas because it was the site of that momentous first encounter between the Old and New Worlds in 1492.

In fact, it was yours truly who broke the story that confirmed San Salvador as the landfall island in 1983 - via the Reuters and Inter Press Service news wires. That's when archaeologist Charles Hoffman excavated Spanish trade goods dated to the contact period at the very site of the Lucayan village adjacent to the Long Bay beach where Columbus was believed to have come ashore.

Repatriating & Cultivating Bahamian Talent

by Simon

There are significant reserves of Bahamian capital, human and financial, currently abroad. That capital has been attracted to various overseas opportunities and markets able to utilize and often better reward such potential. This has resulted in a brain and financial capital drain on the country.

None of this is unique to us. Yet, The Bahamas must devise its own strategies to repatriate these resources, providing opportunities for such capital to be rewarded. Just as we target foreign direct investment and qualified international talent, we should do likewise with both Bahamian investment potential and talent resident abroad.

Of necessity, our greater, though not singular, emphasis is on attracting foreign direct investment to help capitalize our growth and development. Our developmental equation also requires world-class Bahamian talent.