Generation Property: a consideration of customary land tenure in The Bahamas (Nassau, 2000)

In The Bahamas, land ownership is tightly knitted with the idea of family. In the first place, the majority of land owned by Bahamians is located on those outlying islands of the archipelago known colloquially (and for years officially) as the Family Islands. The very name suggests an imagined kinship relation between the centre of the nation (New Providence, the site of the capital) and the peripheral islands. Craton suggests the attachment to the idea of ‘Family Islands’ may be more than sentimental. In his reading, the reference to family helps restore ‘the structures of kinship and community which are fading and being lost’ in the whirl of urban life (Craton, 1987: 108). While there is value in this interpretation — almost three-quarters of the Bahamian population now lives in either Nassau or Freeport, the two cities — there is more to it. Most urban Bahamians are immigrants from the islands, or descendants of such immigrants, and many still maintain some contact with relatives who remain ‘on the island’. These relatives, moreover, often occupy land that is not owned by them alone but collectively by the kin group as a whole. In this regard, then, the ‘Family’ islands are both where one’s family hails from, and where one’s family land — one’s generation property — is found.

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