On Land

Over ten years ago I attended a lecture being given at the College of The Bahamas by Eris Moncur. His topic was, not surprisingly (as it was the Quincentennial year), the site of Columbus’ landfall. Now I’m not going to debate that now; anyone who knows Mr Moncur even slightly knows what his view on the matter is. What I am going to raise is something he said, somewhat in passing, in that lecture. It was this: Bahamians are millionaires.

Now many of us are fond of thinking of ourselves as “poor”: “So-and-so like to take advantage of poor people,” we say, or “The government job is to help poor people get ahead”. I am not entirely sure what the cut-off point for wealth is; I suspect that poverty is something we own, while wealth belongs to the other guy. Be that as it may (and that’s certainly fodder for another column), I want to argue Mr Moncur’s case, because I agree with him. Many, if not most, Bahamians are extremely rich.

Now understand me: I don’t necessarily mean take-it-to-the-bank-and-deposit-it kind of rich. In fact, the kind of wealth Mr Moncur and I are thinking about here may leave a person cash-poor; we’re talking about land. And specifically, I’m talking about generation property, an imperfectly understood but extremely valuable Bahamian resource.

Now I understand that many people will disagree with me. Many people regard generation property as a trouble and a nuisance rather than a source of wealth; indeed, when I carried out fieldwork in Long Island, where the tradition of generation property is prevalent, that was the common refrain. How, people asked, could they get around the difficulties posed by generation property? Let’s look at the problems. First of all, it’s impossible to generate cash quickly from generation property. You may own half of Exuma, for instance, but you can’t use that ownership as collateral to get a bank loan. Part of the problem is that individuals are not outright owners of generation property, and another part of the problem is that the custom is extra-legal — it may be recognized by the courts, but is not covered in law, and so cannot be used to generate cash. So how, exactly, does generation property make you rich?

Well, the short answer is that cash is not the only form of wealth, or even the most important form of wealth that exists. The long answer is that generation property, for many of us, represents something even more basic than cash; it represents power. And it represents, for those of us who are lucky enough to be connected with it, the foundation of our identity, the core of what makes us Bahamian.

For those people who may not know what generation property is, it is the system of owning land communally. In most cases (though the system varies according to families and islands), anyone who is descended from the original owner of the land, or who carries his name, has the right to live on the land in question. This right is passed on to new generations at birth. The best-known example of Bahamian generation property is that of the former estate of Lord John Rolle in Exuma. Lord Rolle was a wealthy Loyalist who, when he left the American mainland, moved many of his slaves to the estate in Exuma awarded to him by the British crown. When the cotton plantations failed, rather than bear the expense of resettling the slaves, Rolle cut his losses and left the plantations to those slaves and their descendants. To this day, anyone who is named Rolle, or who is descended from the Rolles, has the right to go to Rolle land in Exuma and claim a piece.

Generation property is found throughout the Bahamas, but is most prevalent in the central and southern islands that were settled by the Loyalists during the American War of Independence. At that time, King George of Britain granted large tracts of land in the Bahamas to those people fleeing the conflict, those families who wished to remain loyal to the British crown. These estates were settled by these refugees, who brought their slaves with them, and were used initially to grow cotton. However, when cotton failed and Emancipation came, as it did within a generation or two, the landowners did one of two things. If they could afford it, they cut their losses and abandoned the plantations, moving to Nassau or even back to Britain or the USA. Others, who couldn’t afford it or who chose otherwise, remained on the land, and intermingled with the former slaves. In both cases the land was passed down from generation to generation, from parents to children, often as an undivided estate, the property of all of the descendants of the slaves, the slaveowners, or both.

The system of generation property explains why, when one visits many of the southern islands, one comes across settlements that bear the name of families, from which those families hail. The names of these settlements generally indicates the existence of generation property, and most of the people who live in these settlements, or who are descended from there, are likely to have rights to the land in the vicinity.

The custom sounds wonderful, and has been, as I have already stated, a source of our power and independence. People who have land will never starve and will never be homeless. This is recognized throughout the Caribbean, where, after Emancipation, freed slaves banded together and scraped up enough cash to purchase their own tracts of land, which became their own versions of generation property. However, in most cases, the best land in other Caribbean countries remained in the hands of European plantation owners. In the Bahamas, huge tracts of land are owned by Bahamian families.

This fact may be all well and good, but there is one major drawback for Bahamians of the twenty-first century, most of whom now live in Nassau and Freeport: we don’t live on our land, and our land can’t generate cash for us. There are many cash-poor, land-rich Bahamians in New Providence and Grand Bahama. And so for many of us, generation property is a burden, a source of strife, and not the valuable resource that our ancestors intended it to be.

I am going to argue that the failure here is not the institution of generation property. It is our own failure; it is a lack of imagination on our part. We have been schooled by years of living in a world that regards land as a resource to generate cash, and where any other use of it is seen as worthless. This attitude has led us to denigrate the custom of generation property, and to value private land, which we can buy and sell at will, far more. It has prohibited us from grappling seriously with the custom and writing it into our laws, and (perhaps not incidentally) it has also led many of us to divest ourselves of our generation property when we can — either through ignorance of the land’s value, as happened in New Providence in the early twentieth century with generation property, or through collusion, manipulation of the existing law, and greed. Today, as the government is promoting the Bahamas abroad as an excellent place to own a second home, the temptation to sell our birthright is strong. After all, a cool million in cash is worth far more than any number of acres of inaccessible land on some remote island, isn’t it?

I am not so sure. I happen to believe that land, not money, is true wealth. This is a conviction that is too deep in me to shake. And as Nassau grows more and more crowded, the prospect of having land on some distant island to which I can activate a claim at some point grows more and more attractive. What’s more, I don’t believe that this conviction of mine come out of thin air. After all, it is the way in which my ancestors administered their property for almost two hundred years; and I believe that it lies at the core of the independent spirit of the Bahamian.

On Waste

I come from a line of obsessive-compulsives. I've got the tendency on both sides of the family. On one side is a collection of individuals who are probably some of the most meticulous in the world; if anything burns down, gets broken into, or blows up, it's not going to be their fault. On the other side is a group of people whose preoccupation with germs demands the frequent washing of objects and a proscription against breathing too hard on anything, even birthday candles. But neither side will throw anything away if there is any way of avoiding it. Food is given to dogs, cats, and birds. Cars are driven until they quite literally fall apart. Clothes are neatly put away until they come back into style. Books are kept, generally forever. Anything with print on it is saved — whether neatly, in scrapbooks, out of sight in filing cabinets, or (as is far more likely) on beds, on table tops, on the floor when all else fails. My family has a great fear of wasting anything.

Now I know this makes us somewhat unusual for the Bahamas, where "new tings" are always better than old ones, and where cars and homes and objects are often got rid of when something fresher comes along. Most of us, it seems, believe that newness is next to Godliness, and will go to great lengths to be in style. What happens to the outmoded is not our problem; if we think they can move it, we will put it out by the roadside for the garbage men to collect, and if not, we will tow it away ourselves and throw it in the bush. So imagine my joyful surprise when I moved to British Columbia, Canada, to find myself in a country that had made laws about waste that suggested that what I'd been raised to do was not as weird as it seemed.

In Canada, as in most of Europe, it is now illegal to throw away objects that can be recycled. My husband and I worked at a residential college where everyone was required to sort the trash; the institution could be fined according to the number of recyclables that were collected with the garbage. We had to separate out paper, plastic, cans and bottles, and we were strongly encouraged to compost vegetable matter. Certain objects had to be disposed of in a special manner; batteries, for example, were considered "hazardous waste" and could not be put in the regular garbage, but turned in at specific places. As housefellows — staff attached to a specific residence — we were responsible for seeing that the whole house recycled appropriately. A specific group of students carried away paper, cans and bottles every week, and the whole college composted.

Now from one perspective, this seems to be a lot of work for no good reason. Canada, after all, is a big country. You could, in theory, dump garbage in unoccupied land for centuries and still never have to be bothered by that waste. Yet Canadians have made it illegal to throw away anything that can be recycled for the simple reason that dumped waste matter has detrimental effects on the environment — leaking poisons into the air, affecting the atmosphere, or leaching them into the soil, where they contaminate the land and the groundwater. While the majority of Canadians are unlikely to be immediately affected by those poisons, the country nevertheless has taken a global perspective, and has created laws that change the activities of their citizens, not for the now, but for the future. Here we are, though, on an island that's about 120 square miles in area and we Bahamians throw away everything away.

Now there's been a lot of discussion lately on garbage. The government is on a clean-up kick and residents are being strongly urged to beautify their environments. Of special concern are abandoned lots in residential neighbourhoods — our unofficial dumps. The owners of these lots are being urged to clean them up, which is a good thing. But what we are not being told is what to do with the trash that we find on them.

The easy suggestion is that we find some way of moving that trash to the government dump. But I am not so sure that that is going to solve the problem. Because we have no national recycling policy, we carry everything to the dump, from hazardous waste to compost to patently recyclable objects. What happens to that waste, between our tropical downpours, bright sunlight and high temperatures, is a chemist's dissertation. Our bedrock is made of porous limestone, which means that impurities leach through the soil and soak into our water-supply. The freshwater lens that made New Providence inhabitable has no doubt been contaminated, and I am not convinced that the solution to that fact is to continue to deplete the Androsian wells. Canada, with all its land and water, has chosen to educate its citizens about responsible waste disposal. When are we going to do the same?

Before anyone imagines I am being alarmist, let me tell you about my trip to North Eleuthera this March. I visited both Spanish Wells and Harbour Island, two islands that are so small that to drive a car rather than a golf cart seems absurd. Yet on Spanish Wells not only did I see cars, but I noticed that the licence plate numbers are near a thousand, while on Harbour Island there appear to be nearly 500 cars registered. My question is this: when the owners of those cars grow tired of their vehicles, what are they going to do with them? For that matter, where are the owners of the more than 120,000 registered motor vehicles in New Providence going to do with them when they're finished with them? The mind boggles.

I believe that there is something cultural, something historical, that lies at the bottom of Bahamians' habit of waste. It is a marker of wealth to throw away what you no longer need, especially if that thing is still good; and many of us, whose parents and grandparents were raised in poverty, still revel in the knowledge that we have the luxury of getting rid of the old and buying the new. Waste, for us, separates the classes; you recycle when you cannot afford to get something better. What we need to recognize, however, is that this attitude towards wealth is an outdated one, and we need to throw it away with all the other things that have gone out of style. The richest countries in the world have adopted recycling as a way of life; globally it is a marker of poverty to throw things away indiscriminately. It is time we recognized that we are a high-consumption nation, not a poor one, and so we need to adopt the habits of our richer neighbours when it comes to waste disposal, rather than hanging onto the practices of our forefathers.

On a more practical level, it is time we also recognized the entrepreneurial possibilities of recycling. We have a paper producing company, which imports the pulp that it uses. Surely if someone set up a paper recycling plant, they could make and market that pulp from the mounds of paper that we discard annually. Other objects can be sold to recyclers in the USA and elsewhere for cash. It is a matter of exercising the imagination — something at which Bahamians are traditionally very adept. And it is a matter of choosing environmental responsibility over individual laziness.

It is not difficult to train children to be responsible, to think beyond their immediate surroundings and consider the impact of their actions on a wider level. It is far more difficult to impart a sense of responsibility to adults who have never been held accountable for their actions. But it is possible. After just three years of living in Canada, however, my husband and I learned the value of recycling. When we returned home it seemed somehow sacrilegious, evil almost, for us to put recyclables out on the road for Environmental Health to take away. If the two of us could be reprogrammed in just three years of living abroad, how long would it take us all to make recycling a Bahamian way of life?

On the Fourth Estate

Last week, I happened to watch a documentary on the Watergate scandal of thirty years ago. Now I remember Watergate. I wasn’t very old, but I was old enough to realize something big was happening; what I wasn’t, was old enough to understand why it was happening.

It was happening because two reporters, who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, had noticed something unusual and had followed it up. To be specific: Bob Woodward was covering a routine court case for the Washington Post when he heard one of the defendants tell the judge, sotto voce, that he worked for the CIA. Nothing more, nothing less. He followed that up, with the help of Carl Bernstein, and together they began digging. They took nothing at face value, and ultimately they revealed a cover-up that brought down the President of the USA.

Sixty years ago, in July 1943, Etienne Dupuch, the longtime editor of the Tribune, did something similar in the Bahamas. The philanthropic millionaire Harry Oakes was discovered murdered in his bed, in circumstances that remain confusing to this day. The Duke of Windsor, then the governor of the Bahamas, had begun a mystifying cover-up, which included contacting the Miami branch of the FBI, attempting to conceal certain facts of the case, and, apparently, framing Oakes’ scandal-mongering son-in-law. Dupuch found out about the murder and dispatched reports about it to the international press, thus thwarting, at least for a while, the royal conspiracy.

In any free democracy, the role of the press is fundamental to the proper functioning of the government. So fundamental is it, in fact, that the press has been dubbed “the fourth estate”. The idea is this. Democratic government is carried out by three “estates”: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. In The Bahamas, these three branches of power in our government are Cabinet, Parliament, and the courts. But these cannot function properly without the Fourth Estate: the press.

This is because the press — the voice of the people, and the voice for the people — is the only thing that can keep the government honest. Sorry as I am to impugn, even remotely, the reputation of politicians (believe me, some of my best friends are politicians), it remains a sad truth that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The ability to speak and have one's words heard and obeyed can turn the heads of men and women, and make even the most honest into thieves and tyrants. The role of the press, therefore, is not incidental to good government. It is fundamental to ensure that politicians' power never becomes absolute.

This is why, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, the press in a democracy “becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.” It is only through the press that the people who elected the government can know for sure whether their trust is being fulfilled or broken. What that suggests to me is that the media — newspapers, radio, television — have a duty to investigate impartially and honestly the activities of the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government, and to report on them to the people.

Let’s take a look at Watergate. The scandal itself was minor, a stupidity committed by a paranoid administration; what was most unthinkable about it was the cover-up itself, which involved the President, the Attorney-General, and elements connected with the CIA and the FBI, thus co-opting both the executive and the judiciary of the government of the USA. The activities of these people were kept secret from the legislature, from Senate and Congress. What Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post achieved was to put the truth on the street, and focus the attention of these bodies — and of the whole country — on the misconduct of the most powerful people in the nation. In this instance, the press kept the government honest.

In the Bahamas, a miscarriage of justice was thwarted in 1943 by Dupuch’s nose for investigation and swift action. By getting the news of Oakes’ death out to the world before the Duke of Windsor and his cohorts could stop him, Dupuch deprived the executive and the judiciary of their ability to organize a plausible cover-up of the real events (they did manage to cover them up effectively, but implausibly). By attending and reporting on the trial, the Guardian's editor Mary Moseley built on the foundation Dupuch had laid, and did not allow these bodies to create a scapegoat out of Alfred de Marigny. Between them, the two main newspapers in the country squeezed at least a small bit of justice out of a machine that appeared intent on allowing not one murder, but two.

In both cases, the strength of the press, its proper functioning as a Fourth Estate that demanded some kind of honesty from the three official branches of government, came from the quality of its investigative reporting. Woodward, Bernstein, Dupuch and Moseley were not feature writers or society columnists; they were newshounds, and they were trained to get at the truth of an issue by digging, finding facts, and confirming those facts with third sources (Woodward's mysterious "Deep Throat") — in other words, by backing up their stories with proof, not rumour. Without this sharp edge, the press becomes just another form of entertainment, and its function as the Fourth Estate is lost.

That is exactly what I believe to be the case with our Fourth Estate in 2003. I am concerned that our press — which has proliferated, rabbit-like, across media — has become a very blunt instrument. Investigative reporting, the identification of real stories, the impartial digging to find the truth, the leaving of one's desk and going onto the street to discover what the news really is, is a rare occurrence in this country. We have more than enough opinion to go around — there is no shortage of talk shows, no dearth of letters to the editor, no lack of columns like this one that are mouthpieces for a few literate individuals' personal thoughts — but we do have a real shortage of facts.

On the one hand, too many newsmen and women wait for the news to come to them; they set up tiplines and wait for people to call, they attend press conferences when they are invited, they report the news as it is handed to them. Too much of the "news", in fact, is free national advertisement, consisting of little more than the regurgitation of information provided by the subjects of the stories. Too many reporters attend press conferences equipped with tape recorders, from which they transcribe information verbatim, or else they acquire a copy of the press release. The tone of interviews tends to be either obsequious or shallow; tough questions, grounded in solid research, are not asked.

On the other hand, some members of the press go to the opposite extreme. Focussing rather irrelevantly on the private lives of public figures, they report wild rumour, sensationalize minor events, and create “news” which is barely more than printed gossip. As a result, many thinking people mistrust what they read in the papers; in fact, I know several who have stopped reading local newspapers altogether, but look to the international press for their information. But it is equally common for gullible people to trust everything they read in the newspapers. The government of the country slips between the gaps that are left. Without hard investigative reporting, the press creates the opportunity for our executive, our parliament, and our judiciary to do more or less what they please in relative obscurity.

In a democracy, investigative reporting is a fundamental requirement of good government. It is more important than ever that the Bahamian media take seriously their role as the Fourth Estate. We cannot expect the government to hold itself accountable to the people that elected it; that accountability must constantly be demanded by the press. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, after all, is for good men to do nothing; and without the truth, there is nothing that good men can do.