On Self-Reliance

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege and pleasure of travelling to Cherokee Sound, Abaco, for the rededication of the old schoolhouse there. For those of you who don't know the story, it's an inspiring one. Cherokee Sound is a small settlement, isolated from the rest of Abaco by the fact that until the 1990s the most efficient way to get to it was by boat. Only recently has the settlement been connected to the rest of Abaco by a road, and that, together with the changing economic fortunes of the entire Bahamas, has made it a very prosperous settlement.

In the middle of the settlement is an old building — the Old Schoolhouse, built of limestone with walls easily two feet thick, with buttresses on the side like any good church, and shutters and a roof made of wood. It was built, as near as anyone can tell, during the late 1800s, making it well over a century old. Ten years ago it was decrepit, in much the same shape as too many buildings of that age; the roof was falling in, the doors falling off, and the walls had settled so much that cracks were appearing and some of the buttresses were crumbling. The Ministry of Works marked it down for demolition.

But there was something about this schoolhouse that the Ministry of Works — that indeed most Bahamians — didn't know. For all the isolation of its community and the insignificance of the settlement, this schoolhouse — under the leadership of its mid-century schoolmaster, Mr. W. W. Sands — had turned out some of the best minds in the country, among them Mr. Patrick Bethel, educator extraordinaire.

And so several members of the community decided that they were not going to allow the schoolhouse to go the way of so much Bahamian history — demolished and forgotten. Instead, they formed the Old School Restoration Committee, and embarked on a bold programme of fundraising.

Two years ago, they began the restoration. Thereafter, they worked by faith, holding homecomings and other festivals to continue to raise money, and donating their time and energy to the project. They worked fast; by the time they had almost finished, the Ministry of Works had just got around to sending a representative to the settlement to deliver the demolition order.

Two weeks ago, finally, they rededicated the schoolhouse in the memory of W. W. Sands, and opened its doors.

The entire project cost some $120,000-odd. Of that, $33,000 was donated in kind — labour given freely by carpenters and contractors to the community. Fifteen thousand dollars or so was provided by the Bahamian government through the National Museum; the rest was raised by the people of Cherokee Sound.

I sat in the schoolhouse — air-conditioned, freshly painted, glowing with burnished wood — and thought about several things.

I thought about how rare it is these days for we Bahamians to invest our own money in old things. For some reason we seem to believe that new is better, and so we leave a trail of the half-used and the falling-down in our pursuit of fresh paint, rebar, and concrete blocks that are far skinnier than they used to be.

I thought about how seldom we Bahamians take it upon ourselves to honour our own. For some reason we seem to believe that it is the government's job to do this for us, and so we wait upon the mercies of the politicians.

And I thought about how often we Bahamians ask others — foreign investors, permanent residents, the government — to do for us what we used to do for ourselves.

The irony is there are few people on this earth who have mastered the art of self-reliance better than we Bahamians. Our country is not much more than bumps of limestone, covered with a little vegetation and hiding a little water, scattered across a beautiful but treacherous sea. The fact that we have survived for almost 400 years in this environment, and survived well, is a testament to our ability to rely on ourselves.

We often believe that the things that gave us this ability are things that belong in the past. Not so. During the 1990s, I had the good fortune of spending some time doing fieldwork on Long Island. The man who was my main contact, the multi-talented Orlando Turnquest, is simultaneously a farmer and a musician. He is a core member of the rake-n-scrape group known in Nassau as Thomas and the Boys, and he has worked in various capacities, from a Batelco technician to a taxi driver to pinch-hitting as a road engineer. And on his farm he grows every kind of food any healthy person might need, as well as plants for medicinal and cosmetic purposes. In addition to his crops, he keeps sheep for mutton and he fishes for his protein. A trip to the food store is a luxury for him, not a necessity; he, like many people in Long Island, Cat Island, Eleuthera, Abaco, Grand Bahama, Andros, and any other Family Island I could name, learned how to survive from his father and grandfather. He has the gift of self-reliance.

These are the kinds of Bahamians we used to be. Our ancestors were poor, but they were independent. We are rich, but if anything should happen to our neighbours, we will starve.

I believe that material wealth has made us lazy, has made us complacent. We have become accustomed to being handed things by governments anxious to make up for the deprivation suffered by most of us pre-1967. New generations of Bahamians who have been provided with free education, free health care, free social services, and any number of other freedoms have not learned the art of self-reliance.

The result: we run the risk of losing one of the fundamental markers of our identity: self-reliance, the ability to survive no matter what. We come from hardy stock; but privilege is making us soft.

So it's time, I think, for us to learn from the people of Cherokee Sound, who saw a need and filled it, without waiting for approval or support or anything else from the government. It's time for us to re-learn how to do what they did — how to reclaim our histories, honour our own, and make our nation into a showpiece for the world.

On Self-Esteem

There is much talk these days about productivity and quality. In the House of Assembly, parliamentarians are debating a Bill to govern standards in the marketplace. Pundits who are following the state of Bahamian education worry themselves about the performance of our students in our schools. Our Prime Minister expresses much concern on a regular basis about the quality of the work and the training of Bahamian workmen, and so on.

The general consensus appears to be that we Bahamians are not productive enough, that we don't perform to the best of our abilities in the workplace, that our standards are lax, that what we produce is not of the highest quality.

The concern is not misplaced. It's a global economy in which we exist, and we Bahamians have got to learn to be competitive to survive. But the concern is misdirected.

You see, the real problem we face is not that we don't value productivity or quality. We understand both extremely well. One need only examine the average Bahamian's wardrobe and shoe collection to know that we recognize quality, and are willing to pay for it; and we are quick to notice (though not as quick to complain) when the service we are receiving is less-than-adequate. If you disbelieve me, you stand in any line — especially ones in government offices — and count the times you hear someone say to his or her neighbour, or even to the person behind the counter, "Yall gotta do better than this."

The real problem is that we don't think we're worth it.

You see, I believe that it's wonderful to talk about productivity, quality, standards. I've done it myself. But it's a bit like preaching about morality. We can talk about it and sing about it, and praise the Lord about it — as we do — but until we take it in and make it mean something to us, we will never live in a society that is safe and loving and moral.

Because the problem is that while we can say the right words, and nod our heads and listen and even say a few Hallelujah, Lords, a few Amens, unless we esteem ourselves enough to take action, they are going to mean nothing at all.

And it's the esteeming ourselves that's hard.

Now I'm not talking about self-protection, or self-preservation. Even the person who hates herself is capable of both of these; in fact, many people who don't think very much of themselves are very good at self-preservation. It gives them a chance to compete with other people, and when they win they have a momentary sense of value, they feel good for a little while because they have proven their own worth. (They have to prove their own worth because they're not terribly convinced of it.)

I'm talking about self-esteem.

The word esteem has a number of meanings. Among them are things like the condition of being honoured, a feeling of delighted approval and liking, and to regard highly. To have self-esteem is to honour oneself, to regard oneself highly. And it's not just a feeling; you can tell the people who have esteem for themselves apart from those who don't because of the way in which they behave.

You see, our productivity, our attitudes, even our aspirations and our desires reveal how much we esteem ourselves.

Let me give you an example.

Once, long ago, I had the great fortune of teaching one of the brightest and most interested group of young people I have ever come across. I first met them in ninth grade. They were intelligent, exuberant, and a lot of fun to be around (they also had the reputation of being the most difficult class of students in the school). But what was most interesting about them was that of the ten students who placed at the top of the class term after term, nine of them were girls.

I knew this was not because the girls were substantially smarter than the boys. It was a dead heat, actually; and the best questions and the best answers I got from the class consistently came from a group of boys who were making barely passing grades. I asked why they weren't working harder, and they told me that however well they did, they just knew that the girls would beat them. So they decided not to try.

Their problem: a failure of self-esteem. They were barely passing because they didn't want to try to excel. And they didn't want to try to excel because they had convinced themselves that they were never going to excel; somewhere in their minds they had already categorized themselves as not-good-enough, not-smart.

Where did they get that idea from? It's too much to go into now, but let me generalize a little and say that the lack of self-esteem is very common in societies that have had a history of oppression or subjugation. Part of the strategy in keeping the conquered down is making them believe that they aren't good enough to rule. We have changed our rulers, changed our names, changed our economics, and changed our lives; but we have not changed our minds about this. Too many of us still believe that we're not good enough.

Now I'm happy to say that these boys have almost universally grown out of that sense of not being good enough, and are excelling in all the fields they find themselves. But I'm afraid that there are far too many of us, male and female alike, who keep the fear of not being good enough with us for all our lives.

And it's that, more than anything else, I believe, that affects our productivity. It's that that affects the quality of our work. It's that that affects our attitudes and our output and the standards to which. Water rises to its own level, they say. And as long as we believe that we aren't good enough, that we've gone as far as we can go, that we are doing the best we can with what little God gave us to work with, we are setting that level very low.

On Democracy

There are days when I believe that there's such a thing as too much democracy.

Let me give you just one example. When I was sixteen I attended a school that was founded on basic democratic beliefs. It outlawed hierarchy. Our teachers were there to guide us, to give us the benefit of their experience, but they were not to be our superiors; to underscore this fundamental belief that everyone was equal, everyone, from the Director of the college to the gardeners and the cleaning ladies, was called by his or her first name.

But it was not governed democratically. In fact, when we first arrived, the Director sat down with us and explained to us that although the college was based on democratic principles, there was such a thing as getting a job done, and there was such a thing as division of labour. Our job was to get the best education — not just academic — that we could, and to do so not for our own selfish edification, but to make the world a better place. His job was to govern. If that made him a dictator, he said, then so be it. He would be a benevolent dictator.

And by and large, he was. Benevolent, that is, and a dictator. And things got done.

In 1995, I returned to that college as a teacher. It was still democratic in name. But the division of labour was no longer working as it did. Students no longer had a say in the running of the school. On the other hand, every minor decision, it seemed, had to be sanctioned by every teacher. Consensus was the order of the day.

I have never wasted so much time in my life.

I remember one meeting, a beginning-of-the-year faculty meeting, which took nine hours to complete. We began one day, and finished halfway through the rest. Those of us who were responsible for student residence houses came back the next day and met some more.

The burning issue: what dates to schedule things like mid-term break, last day of classes, first day of classes after Christmas, end of the school year — things that could be decided by computer. We talked for nine hours straight, and nothing much got done.

Too much democracy.

Now don't get me wrong. I believe in democracy. I support wholly the idea that everyone should be equal before the law, equal in the eyes of the state, and equal before God.

I also believe that everyone should have a say in the way he or she is governed. I believe in it so passionately, in fact, that I am uncomfortable with the easy principle of the simple majority; there is something fundamentally unfair in the idea that just because a decision is supported by more than fifty per cent of the population it should prevail. In a society where every individual is equal, numeric superiority is a quick-and-dirty way of making some more equal than others.

I also believe in consensus, which is the arrival at workable compromises by a group of people who have an equal chance to express their views. Consensus is one way of ensuring that those people who do not have a numeric majority have a chance to be heard.

And sometimes I believe in outright dictatorship. This is because I believe in the division of labour. Those people best trained or most skilled at a particular area should have more authority to make decisions in their areas. I don't necessarily believe that a businessman can make sensible artistic decisions, that a doctor is better equipped to make educational decisions than an academic, or that a musician can make structural decisions about the building of a house.

You see, if democracy is the best system of government known to humankind, it is also the most difficult. Government is not easy; good leadership has far less to do with the perks of position than with rendering the greatest service to the largest number of people. The greatest leaders recognize that being in the driver's seat that doesn't mean one knows the best route to get where one's going; there's always the possibility that someone very unlikely knows better. And so the best leaders keep their ears open to what everyone has to say.

And the best participants in a democracy are both educated and informed. They have to be, if they want the best government that they can get. In a democracy, all citizens are responsible for the quality of their own lives. This involves knowing what one's duties are, and doing them, and not meddling in other people's areas of expertise. It also involves speaking out about injustices, and doing what one can to address them, and not waiting for someone to come and take care of them for one. It requires doing what one can to make oneself and the whole society better, and not expecting some agency to do the job on one's behalf.

If one is a politician, one's responsibility is to govern — to represent one's people, to determine policy, and to concentrate on the big picture.

If one is a civil servant, one's responsibility is to turn policy into practice, and to serve the public to the best of one's ability.

If one is a citizen, one's responsibility is to know as much as possible about what is going on in one's country, one's island, one's own back yard, so that one can influence the politicians and the civil servants to make the best decisions possible.

There is no room in a democracy for apathy, for disinterest. We are all one another's keepers; what hurts my neighbour, be he white, black, Haitian, homosexual, Christian, FNM or PLP, hurts me. Democracy is hard to secure. If we believe in it, we must all work for it, making sure that the decisions we are making are both appropriate and right. Otherwise, we're better off with dictatorship.

Benevolent, of course.

On Christian Values

There's a parable that Jesus tells, about the Pharisee and the tax collector who go to the temple. The tax collector, overwhelmed with the knowledge of his sin, bows his head in the presence of God and prays bent over, humbled by his own weakness, asking for mercy. The Pharisee stands nearby, looking at the sinner in scorn. His prayer is different. It's a prayer of praise: Thank You, Lord, that I am not like other men.

I've been thinking a lot about that story lately. Everywhere I turn, I hear talk that the Bahamas is a nation "founded on Christian values". A year or so ago, before the Constitutional Commission began holding its public meetings, many discussions took place that invoked the inaccurate concept that the Bahamas is a Christian nation; being "founded on Christian values" is not exactly the same thing.

I for one am glad for the distinction.

Before you pray down hellfire/call my archbishop on me, let me explain. There are two main reasons for my gladness.

The first is obvious, but it receives too little airplay. Not everybody in this country is a Christian. Literally. There are enough Bahamians out there who profess different faiths — Rastafarians, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, and countless others — for the idea that the Bahamas is a Christian nation to give the lie to their citizenship. I'm very glad our Constitution does not do that. And I wouldn't talk about that other group of Bahamians — far larger than the public discussion would allow — who profess no faith at all.

The second is not so obvious, but it has a lot to do with the Pharisee and the tax collector.

You see, we talk a whole lot about Christianity in this nation. It's our national pastime; nothing appears to make us happier than to discuss our blessings, our evidence that God loves us oh-so-very-specially.

I once had taught a group of students who informed me that Hurricanes Michelle and Floyd did not do as much damage in the Bahamas as they did to South Florida because we Bahamians were the new chosen people of the twenty-first century. Now beyond the fact that being the Lord's chosen scared the pants off me (think of all the trials and tribulations visited upon the Children of Israel since God made that arrangement with Jacob), I'm not so convinced that how Christian we are had all that much to do with it. After all, the Lord was willing to spare the cities of the plain if there were even ten good men in them. And then there's always that little matter of building codes.

See, I don't buy the idea that the good Lord loves us any more than anyone else. And to claim it sounds awfully to me like praising God that we are not like other men.

There's another reason I'm glad that our Constitution talks about Christian values and not about Christianity itself. It's this: despite our penchant for discussing the rules and regulations about our faith, despite our declamations about what God thinks is right and what God thinks is wrong, despite our proclamations about how we are supposed to live and our heavy implications about what God will do to those who veer from the straight and narrow way, we rarely talk about Christian values.

I'm not talking about the stuff the Pharisees looked at when they made the measure of men and discovered that they were the greatest — how much they tithed, how often they prayed, what they did on the Sabbath, where they sat in the synagogues.

I'm talking about what God, in the form of Christ, actually did and said when He was around.

(Allow me to take a moment to apologize to all those Bahamians I mentioned above, who may not accept the idea of Jesus Christ as God. I am not intentionally excluding you from this discussion; but the fact is, the common Bahamian invocation of Christian values assumes His divinity.)

Jesus hung out with fishermen and tax collectors and whores and other women. He took the Scriptures that everybody knew, and interpreted them in a new and radical way. He healed on the Sabbath, broke bread with sinners, and lost his temper in the Temple. He preached humility and forgiveness, and reminded everyone, religious leaders included, that they were not free of sin.

He had a wealth of stories that challenged the religious norms of the day. He even recognized the Samaritans, who (like Haitians here, today) were outcasts in Roman Jewish society. He told his followers not to lay up treasures on earth. He advised people against judging others, and spoke about motes and beams and camels and needles and mercy and forgiveness and vengeance's belonging to God.

Christian values.

So much of our current discussion on our Constitution and its proposed amendments seems to have been come out of the pages of the Old Covenant, not the New. It's legalistic, not Christian; it addresses the appearance, and not the heart, which God judges. The beams in the eyes of those who are looking for motes run the risk of blinding us all.

So allow me to rejoice in the fact that the preamble of our Constitution reminds us of Christ's values, not of ours. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation. Judge not that ye be not judged. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, and soul.

And love thy neighbour as thyself.