Bahama Pundit

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.

Bring Home Bahamian Talent

by Simon

The Bahamas has various agencies dedicated to attracting overseas investments, including the Bahamas Maritime Authority which recently opened its third overseas office.  Today, the country enjoys one of the more successful international ship registries.  That success is measured by both gross tonnage and attention to high international standards. 

Our diplomatic missions also promote The Bahamas as an attractive destination for international business and foreign capital.  However, the country’s lead investment arm is The Bahamas Investment Authority. Its website notes:

“The proactive economic growth and development policies of the government of the Bahamas are guided by The Bahamas Investment Authority (BIA), established to "cut red tape and lay out the red carpet" for investors.   Operating from the Office of the Prime Minister, the BIA has been designated as a "one-stop shop" designed to simplify investing in The Bahamas.”

The attraction of such capital is essential to economic growth.  So too is the cultivation of another source of capital.   Just as foreign direct investment is critical to national development, so is tapping into a wealth of Bahamian talent overseas and the economic resources of this talent currently resident abroad.

The Underground Railroad of Bahamian Music

by Larry Smith

Last week I took a trip on the underground railroad of Bahamian music. Man, I was walking in Jerusalem just like John. I saw a number of signs, and all the guides remembered quite well. And sometimes, they even had fire and brimstone coming out of their mouth.

We embarked at the Doongalik station on Village Road. Jackson Burnside and Charles Carter were the conductors on a fascinating journey to excavate the memory of two great Bahamian musicians - the idiosyncratic guitarist Joseph Spence (who would have been 100 this year) and the obeah man Tony McKay (whose first album appeared 40 years ago, when Tough Call was a yoot-man).

One of the guides on this trip was 79-year-old Geneva Pinder. She described her Uncle Youngie as "the sweetest man...sitting with his pipe and singing with my parents. My grandmother was a Sunday school teacher on Andros and we had to sing from when we were little. My mom wasn't that learned, but she could rhyme."

Geneva's mother, Edith, was the sister of Joseph Spence, who died in 1984. And it was her rhyming - a musical form sometimes described as an ancestor of rap - that attracted the American folk artist Jody Stecher to Nassau in 1965, where he recorded Spence and the Pinder family in their Culmersville yard.

The City of New Providence

by Simon

Nassau is often used as a shortcut or synecdoche for New Providence.  There is a logic and history behind this:  For most of its history the majority of its residents lived in the City of Nassau and its immediate environs.  Understandably, they more easily identified with the town in which they lived rather than the expanse beyond the actual and imagined town-limits.

We call residents of Nassau, Nassuvians.  Yet, unlike Abaconians, Cat Islanders and Inaguans, what is the demonym for those of us who live at New Providence?