Race & Politics in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

A few years ago my company—Media Enterprises—published a new edition of Race and Politics in the Bahamas, under license from the author and the University of Queensland in Australia.

Originally published in 1981 and long out of print, Race and Politics was a groundbreaking book because it offered a straightforward examination of the racial polarisation of the day. It was written by a Bahamian-born British-Australian lawyer and academic named Colin Hughes, who liked to describe himself as a ‘Welsh Conch’. 

Hughes was born here in 1930 because his Welsh father, John Anfield Hughes, was a colonial civil servant. Colin was educated in the Britain and the United States, married an Australian woman, and made a name for himself as a political scientist in Australia, where he died in June at the age of 87.

In a 2011 online interview he describes his background as “slightly complicated”. His grandfather was a coal miner. His father applied for a teaching job in the Bahamas, and later became chief out island commissioner and head of immigration and labour matters in the colony. 

John Hughes helped run the Contract, a scheme which provided migrant labour to American farms during World War Two. He was posted to the West Indies Labour Organisation in Washington DC.

At the end of the war, Colin joined his parents in Washington as a high school student. His father then got a job at the United Nations consolidating labour reports, but later returned to the Bahamas and went into business.

After completing his Phd in London, Colin passed the bar exam before returning to Nassau in 1954. He practised in the law firm of McKinney, Bancroft & Hughes for a couple of years, before marrying an Australian woman and taking a job at the University of Queensland.

“I was interested in politics but was on the wrong side of white opinion in Nassau”, he said. “I was concerned with starting a reform party that was neither white nor black, and even thought of myself as a possible candidate in a bye-election on Eleuthera at the time.”

That project was the short-lived Bahamas Democratic League, started by Tribune publisher/editor Sir Etienne Dupuch in 1955. According to Sir Etienne’s daughter, Eileen Carron, “my father and Colin’s father were very close friends, and dad was close to Colin because the latter was keen on politics and political systems. If Colin had remained the party might have lived, but as dad was not a political animal, the BDL eventually died a quiet death.” 

As a political scientist, Hughes was deeply interested in electoral politics - both here and in Australia, where he was in charge of the Electoral Commission for a time.

In the mid-fifties he was secretary of the Bahamas Democratic League, which started out as a sort of multi-racial reform society, “more concerned with policies than office.” However, the crescendo of attacks from Bay Street on the one hand and the newly formed Progressive Liberal Party on the other led to a decision to contest the 1956 general election as a party.

Under the chairmanship of Sir Etienne, the BDL initially focused on issues like opening gateways in the Collins Wall (that separated the black population of western Nassau from the mostly white residents of the east), ending racial discrimination in hotels, and redistributing seats in the House of Assembly.

The PLP ran 14 candidates in the 1956 general election, while the BDL hoped to retain the seats of Sir Etienne and his half-brother, Eugene Dupuch, and perhaps pick up a third. Meanwhile, the ruling Bay Street group presented itself as “the backbone" of the country.

In the event, Sir Etienne and PLP leader Henry Taylor were both defeated. The all-white Bay Street group took 21 seats, while the PLP won eight, although the votes were divided almost evenly between the two groups. 

Crooked Island candidate, Eugene Dupuch, was the only BDL member of the House. And the result made it clear that reform efforts would now be led by the PLP, which had undergone a transition of its own from the original moderate leadership to the more “radical” (in the context of the times) leadership of men like Lynden Pindling, Milo Butler and Randol Fawkes.  

Significantly - as historians Michael Craton and Gail Saunders pointed out - the 1956 election marked the first time that an organised party - the PLP - began acting as "a coherent parliamentary opposition”. This led the ruling Bay Street merchant-lawyer group to organise itself as the United Bahamian Party two years later. Party politics had been born.

But despite this historic development, the 1956 election produced little change in the colony’s social and economic relationships. In fact, as Colin Hughes noted, the roles that one might have expected of the UBP and PLP at this time were ironically reversed.

It was the governing UBP that wanted constitutional advancement and freedom from interference by the governor and the Colonial Office in London. The PLP, meanwhile, wanted British support for the electoral reforms that were necessary for the Bahamas to become a functioning democracy.

Hughes gives an excellent account of Bahamian electoral politics and the racial polarisation that prevailed through the 1970s. His concluding chapter sums up Doris Johnson's “quiet revolution" as “the transfer of power from the colonial power and its local allies, the Bay Street Boys, to an independent black government.”

He writes that race was always more significant than class in shaping political conflict and party competition in the Bahamas. And he was proven correct in saying in 1981 that “it is quite possible that (the PLP’s) combination of middle class leadership and working class electoral support can survive another decade or so."

He ends with the observation that most Bahamians will find their place in the modern world “through identification with the man who fought and won the racial battle, which was the (country’s) most significant chapter in (a) long story.”

But Hughes was writing before the full extent of the Pindling government’s collusion with foreign drug gangsters became known. And at least a decade before the regime was displaced in another major political transformation.

Colin Hughes was professor of political science  at the University of Queensland, and the first Australian Electoral Commissioner in the 1980s.

Comments

[Simon Rodéhn]

A reawakening Larry. Thank you again for the leads.

[Dr. Julius Theophilus]

Greetings Fellow Bahamians.

Let us not delude ourselves. Ninety percent of the wealth in The Bahamas is still controlled by a few who happen to be white and while most of them may be racist white Bahamians, it is of no concern to me for a number of reasons.
There is absolutely no excuse for Black Bahamians not to thrive in our wonderful country today unless they simply do not want too.

Crime and stealing seems to be an obsession with quite a few Bahamians as example in our high rate of murders and the amount of monies that is alleged to have been stolen by members of The Previous Government from the very people who elected them.

Character, strength and virtue define a Man's foundation and these traits seem to be lacking in many Bahamians today regardless of their hue. Education is paramount, moral fiber is essential and taking responsibility for one's behavior is essential for the growth and success of any Human Being in a progressive society.

There are white Bahamians and expatriates who will forever and always allow their ignorance to define them with respect to their racist demeanors but frankly that is not my business. My business is to ensure that as a Bahamian I set an example for ALL Bahamians by taking responsibility for my actions and live a life that exudes character, strength and virtue which today in The Bahamas seem to be lacking in our society.

Challenge: Let all Bahamians strive to take responsibility for our actions and regardless of our HUE, let us live a life that exudes character, strength and virtue which I assure you will become contagious and make our Bahamian Society one in which we all can be proud of and every Man regardless of Hue enjoy the benefits of his or her hard work.

God Bless THE BAHAMAS.

[Christopher Merrett]

It is very sad to hear of the death of Colin Hughes. I have a much-prized handwritten letter from him about his schooldays at GHS in the 1940s. He was the most astute historian of the Bahamas in spite of the wider scope of the work of Michael Craton and Gail Saunders.
But his contention that race rather than class was a more important factor in Bahamian history ultimately proved wide of the mark: the middle class has consistently betrayed Bahamian workers and the saga continues. Nor were the Bay Street Boys always the allies of the colonial authorities - as Hughes correctly noted.
Perhaps the death of this eminent Bahamian historian and commentator should be marked by a more nuanced and realistic view of the past. The persistence of historical myth is damaging to any national psyche and now is the time for revisionist history.

Christopher Merrett