Bahama Pundit

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? 

A Whole New World—Part 2

by Simon

Whether a city, an island, or a country -- a place is about more than its geography.   Every place evokes some history and is a potential wellspring of ideas, offering individuals and the collective imagination opportunities for renewal and transformation.  

New Providence and our capital City of Nassau are undergoing such a transformation in terms of physical infrastructure and cultural renewal.  In many ways, New Providence is becoming a whole new world that will be enjoyed by Bahamians and tourists.  Much of this is a result of one of the more significant infrastructural investment programmes in Bahamian history. 

This multifaceted and ambitious infrastructural programme is in response to a complex of challenges.  These challenges are posed by on-going and rapid urbanization including long-standing problems in terms of water distribution and clogged roads.

Over time, the new New Providence will boast dramatically improved public amenities, services and utilities.  It will also include enhanced venues for cultural and sporting events as well as a host of entertainment activities, domestic and international.

In Search of Ft Lauderdale's Identity

by Larry Smith

The connections between Florida and the Bahamas are more complex than some readers might imagine. In fact, Bahamians were among the first settlers of many South Florida communities - including Coconut Grove, Ft Lauderdale and Key West.

Growing up in Nassau in the 1960s, I clearly remember what an event it was to visit Miami and eat at the fabulous Burger King on Flagler Street. We stayed at cheap downtown hotels like the Patricia, the Alhambra or the Columbus, and shopped in mercantile palaces like Zayre, Walgreen's or Woolworth's.

I'm not sure what black Bahamians did in Florida during those days of cracker-barrel segregation. It was only in 1960 that sit-ins led by the Congress for Racial Equality made it possible for blacks to shop and eat in Burdines and other department stores. And it was not until the following year that a "white" hotel (the Biscayne Terrace) accepted black guests for the first time.

Miami was always the Bahamian metropolis. But since the 1980s, many white Bahamians at least, have preferred Ft Lauderdale to the overcrowded and increasingly Hispanic conurbation further south. Since I attended the University of Miami in the early 1970s, the area's growth has been explosive, but Miami is far more congested than the rest of South Florida.

Usually a Bahamian trip to Florida is planned for purely commercial reasons, with little time to stand and stare. But after settling our daughter into college last week, we decided to take a closer look at a community we really knew nothing about.

Saunders Beach Park

by Simon

The marauding band of casuarinas that invaded and colonized Saunders Beach many years ago are now defeated after years of occupation of one of New Providence’s more accessible beaches.  The casuarinas pillaged considerable sand, eroding this precious treasure for decades.

Happily, this invasive species is being replaced by broad-leafed sea grape trees, providing form and function, rendering aesthetic value and shade.  There are other fruits they will render in time, including memories. 

Many of us grew up going on Sunday adventures and reconnaissance exercises out west searching for coco plums to savour or out east to raid tamarind trees.  Now, generations of children growing into adulthood, will remember Saunders Beach for sea grapes, as if the sea itself was the orchard for this fruit bearing its name.

Middle-Aged, Middle Class Humanitarians Gather in Montreal

by Larry Smith

MONTREAL, Canada - This week I attended one of the world's greatest gatherings of downright decent, mostly middle-aged, and thoroughly middle class folks.

It was a tough call for an old cynic like me. To borrow a quote, I usually lump organized religion, organized labour, and service clubs together. But Rotarians do get points for having the most entertaining meetings.

More than 18,000 of them from around the world clogged the streets of Montreal for their annual international conference this week. Everywhere you turned there were earnest Africans, Asians, Latinos, North Americans and Europeans flashing their logo shirts, badges, pins, flags and business cards.

A Tale of Two Restaurants—The Great Bahamian Seafood Festival

by Larry Smith

Fifteen Nassau restaurants are showcasing special dishes and offering fixed price menus this week as part of the Great Bahamian Seafood Festival, which climaxes on Friday and Saturday downtown.

My assignment was to review a couple of them. Options ranged from the casual (Da Fish Fry and Traveller's Rest) to the opulent (Greycliff and the Bahamian Club). I settled on Seafront Sushi and Aqua at the British Colonial Hilton.

For purists, the ultimate seafood experience is Japanese. Sashimi and sushi both require a variety of high grade, very fresh, raw fish - anything from octopus to tuna. And it's damn good for your cholesterol level. Sashimi is thinly sliced raw fish served with garnishes and soy sauce. Sushi pairs the fish with vinegared rice, and other ingredients.

The Two Arthurs & Majority Rule in the Bahamas

By Simon

Eighteen PLPs, a Labour Party member and an independent constituted the parliamentary team who ushered in Majority Rule in 1967.  Eight are still with us: Arthur Hanna, Clifford Darling, Arthur Foulkes, Warren Levarity, Maurice Moore, Loftus Roker, Elwood Donaldson and Edmund Moxey.  Five of these left the PLP. Three remained.

Half or nine of these 18 PLP parliamentarians left the party, including a Dissident Eight.  Eventually, Edmund Moxey also left.  While the PLP remained in power for 25 years, the split among the core political leadership who ushered in Majority Rule came fast and furious.  

And it came faster than that of most majority rule parties in the Commonwealth Caribbean.  Despite an overwhelming parliamentary majority in 1968, the ruptures in that PLP Government came within approximately 24 months.

In 1970, a group of Free PLPs left a party that they concluded was increasingly more preoccupied with power and personalities, and less so with many of the principles and policies which inspired the struggle for Majority Rule.

One of the ironies of modern Bahamian politics is that their departure left an often perceived liberal and progressive PLP, more conservative and reactionary.  It left the party less tolerant of dissent and more prone to crush dissidence in the service of a cult of personality and a sense of an entitlement to rule. 

Searching for a New COB President – Pt. 1

In the opening chapters of 2010, two Caribbean intellectuals featured prominently. Following Haiti’s devastating earthquake in January, Sir Hilary Beckles, principal of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, penned the brilliant commentary, the Hate and the Quake. 

In early February, cultural icon Rex Nettleford died suddenly.  An intellectual and brilliant dancer, Professor Nettleford was still serving as a lecturer and vice chancellor emeritus of UWI when he passed away at 77.

These men were not singularly administrators. They were also academics whose visionary voices resonated in the academy and beyond.  Both men produced exuberant bodies of work, including a number of books.  Both proved to be beautiful thinkers, beautiful writers and beautiful citizens of the Caribbean.

Professors Nettleford and Beckles appreciated that the life of the community, both national and pan-Caribbean, requires a cultivation of the life of the mind, of the imagination and of the human spirit -- with a Caribbean flavour.  They dedicated themselves to these tasks through a fierce commitment to rigorous critical inquiry.