On Development

We are living in an exciting time.

The government of The Bahamas is bruiting about some of the most radical ideas since the ideas of majority rule and independence. We're talking about land reform, for one thing, about the reconceptualization of the city of Nassau for another. Whole islands are being surveyed for long-term development plans. We are promised billions of dollars in investment, and there's some conservative excitement out there in the air. The Bahamas is poised on the brink of a wonderful future.

There's only one small problem that I see: the Bahamian people are not talking about it.

All the discussion is happening at a governmental level, between politicians and government officials and consultants. This is not to say that the government is not interested in broader discussion; given this government, that would be an absurd suggestion. No; what it is to say is that we, the population, are waiting for direction to discuss the ideas.

Now this is a problem. We're talking about development here; and development, no matter what our past experience might be or what our education has taught us, is not something that should be imposed upon anybody from above or beyond.

Consider the root of the word. It comes from the Old French, and is made up of two bits, des (undo) and veloper (to wrap up). It means, quite literally, to unwrap; and unwrapping implies that something is there already.

That something is us — our culture and our people. But all too often, what we call development has nothing to do with unwrapping and everything to do with covering up.

Let's take mega-resorts for example, or land we lease to cruise lines for their use. We call these development; but in neither of these cases has our culture been truly honoured. Those resorts rise upon our horizons like pink elephantine dreams; and 3000-passenger cruise ships loom off the coasts of settlements a tenth that size. Neither of these have much to do with unwrapping who we, the people who live here, are.

I think that this is because all too often we approach "development", and its opposite, "backwardness", from a perspective that is not our own. The yardstick we use to measure ourselves is yet another part of our colonial legacy. All too often, we use material indicators to decide how far we have come — how new our cars are, how little we now sweat (because every interior space is air conditioned), how chic our clothes are, how Floridified our malls. It doesn't hurt that we get Hollywood movies on their first release, or that we can watch American television until our lives run out, or our office buildings have sophisticated cooling systems and no functional windows at all, or that we wear silks and wools and stockings and ties to work, despite the fact that outside the temperature and the humidity have risen into the 90s. If Atlantis and the cruise lines allow us to live this life, all the better. We must be developed!

But we need to be careful, especially now we're talking about developing ourselves still more: about opening up whole islands, about redesigning the city of Nassau. Because as revolutionary as these ideas are, unless we approach them with a very firm idea of the kind of development we want or need, we run the risk of developing ourselves right out of a country. Because the people we are consulting about these developments are not Bahamians. And we Bahamians are not talking about these developments at all.

Now let me confess. I'm excited about these ideas. The things I'm talking about are more radical than any idea I've heard in my adult life, and I like that; the last ideas of this magnitude were generated in the 1950s when people started to think Black Bahamians could and should govern themselves, and in the 1960s when we imagined that we could exist in this world without Mother England holding our hand. Redesign Bay Street from Fort Charlotte to Fort Montagu? Create development plans for whole islands? These are wonderful, risky ideas, and I applaud them.

What worries me is that we the people are not involving ourselves in the ideas. Too many of the main actors, the people who are doing the design and leading the conversations, are not Bahamian. We've hired consultants to lead this development for us; and that seems just fine with the rest of us.

But it's not fine. It's not that I think that the hiring of outsiders is a bad thing in itself. In fact, fresh eyes are often useful in designing plans of the magnitude that we're talking about here; a stranger to a landscape can see all sorts of wonders that a native overlooks every day. But what's not fine is that the rest of us seem happy to sit back and be driven.

I don’t expect for the government to spend all its time holding town meetings and consulting ad nauseam. I don't happen to believe that that is really its job, anyway. Members of the government are our representatives. It's up to us to tell them how we want to be represented.

Because after all we are the people who have to live here after the consultants have gone, the people on whom the "development" will have the real impact. We need to turn on our brains and engage ourselves in the process; we need to inform ourselves, read, imagine, and contribute to the plan. We need to write, to speak, to discuss, to question; we need to catch the dream and join the game.

Because development should be an unwrapping, an uncovering of what is already there. And what's there is us.

Let's start unwrapping

On Imagination

Last weekend I had the pleasure of going to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Now I'm a fan in general of Harry Potter; I've read all the books, and now I've seen all the movies. The fact that he's a wizard doesn't bother me in the least. I don't mix him up with reality. I don't think that Rowling's wizarding world is an extension of devil-worship. No; I'm perfectly capable of using my imagination.

And I don't think that children are any less capable than I am. If anything, they're more able; anyone who's talked to a child lately will know that the way in which they view the world is a wonderful and magical way.

I know this well. I grew up on books brimming with myth and magic, and wouldn't trade that childhood for the world. I read every children's book that appealed to me; and the kind that did so were books in which life was not as dull and plain as it is in the real world. In the worlds of my childhood, carpets flew, people traveled through space, animals talked and toys woke up after the lights were turned off. There were ghosts and imps and centaurs and fauns and winged horses in my life. Monsters inhabited dark corners, and fairies lived at the bottom of other people's gardens. Our garden had a plaster pirate that I just knew used to come to life after dark; his footsteps shook the ground each night, and I kept my eyes screwed shut until the sun came up, because I knew that if I didn't I'd see his eyes, paint and lacquer though they were, peering at me through the windows.

I read every colour Fairy Book I could get my hands on. The Bible stories that kept me most occupied were the ones where cool things happened. David and Goliath was fun but expected; what I really liked was when Baalam's ass turned around and spoke to him, or when Hezekiah made the sun stand still. I believed in Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, in ghosts, chickcharnies and magical cats, in rabbit holes and magic mirrors, in Middle Earth, tesseracts, and Narnia.

A wizard who went to boarding school would've filled the most ordinary centre of my imagined world.

Now I know that there are people who believe that Harry Potter and his ilk are evil and bad for children. They endanger the soul; magic and witches and wizards, even good ones, are the spawn of the devil.

I believe exactly the opposite. I don't think that anything that so captures the imagination of a child, or of an adult for that matter, is negative, especially not when what captures that imagination is so obviously a morality tale, a struggle between good and evil. We are inundated with images and stories in our society in which there is no struggle at all. Evil has already been crowned unopposed; every movie that glorifies killing, every tale that emphasizes greed and revenge and jealousy and selfishness trains the imagination in the ways of violence and hate, and runs up points in hell.

But Harry Potter does none of those things. I believe that J. K. Rowling's creation is so very successful, so very popular, because she has given children what generations of writers have not: new and positive doorways for their imaginations. Rowling doesn't play by the "rules". Good people die in her books; magic doesn't get you everything you want; people act for the benefit of other people, and sometimes suffer for it; and good and evil struggle with one another on every page.

She's given children back the world I knew when I was growing up: the world of the moral imagination. It didn’t do me any harm. And I doubt it will damage any of our children either. If anything, it will help them.

You see, I think that it's more dangerous to stifle a person's imagination than it is to feed it, especially in a world where the moral currency centres around sex and strength and power. It's that, and not books like Harry Potter, that are the spawn of the devil.

The devil, old people used to tell me, finds things for idle hands to do. How much more does he find for idle minds? Our jails are full of young men with active, agile minds whose imaginations have been taken over by criminality because they were not given the freedom to think outside of prescribed limits. On the one hand, we raise our children on rules and regulations, on Biblical precepts and preaching; on the other, we feed them the sounds and visions of violence, intolerance and greed.

I believe that there's a whole lot of room in this world for ideas that feed the moral imagination. After all, that's what our uncles and grand-aunties used to do for us in the evenings on the island when they told us Ol' Story. They told us tales about talking goats and rabbits, about gaulin women and worms and snakes and mirrors that turned into rivers and old people who had the power to reward the good and punish the bad. Moral tales that exercised our imaginations.

You see, J. K. Rowling understands what the old people knew. A moral lesson learned through the exercise of the imagination stays with a person for far, far longer than any lecture or preaching can ever do. I believe that our imaginations are one of the greatest tools for a moral life that we have. It is time we encouraged and fed them.

So here's to Muggles, and Quidditch, and Firebolt flying brooms. Here's to Harry Potter. Here's to the moral imagination.

On Government

Let me ask you a question. When you hear the words Civil Service, what comes to mind?

You don’t need to answer that. I'm not going to, beyond suggesting that what comes to my mind is something similar to the old American joke about Army Intelligence. What I want to talk about today is the function and purpose of our civil service.

Because it doesn't work all that well.

Oh, it moves along. It floats, as does a log on the ocean; we've set it up so it can't sink easily, rather like a flat-bottomed boat. But it doesn't move with any kind of efficiency or speed, and it doesn't really get anywhere much.

Now that surprises and frustrates many people, myself included. In fact, although I'm sitting in a position that is a part of the civil service, I spend a lot of time wondering whether the existence of that position — or even of my whole division — makes all that much sense. It's not that I don't think that my division and its officers are incapable of doing good work. On the contrary; they're some of the most dedicated people I've come across in quite a while. It's not that I don't trust the government to do anything good. On the contrary; the government — and civil servants — regularly do many good and necessary things without fanfare, and keep the country going despite all the odds that work against them.

No. It's the system that's the source of my frustration. It's the entire set-up of the civil service, the hierarchy of the whole, the centralization of crucial activity in a few key areas, the limitations placed upon individual civil servants by the clauses of General Orders. It's the system, and there's a good reason why.

The civil service as we know it is a colonial tool. It was designed to get the most out of the administration of far-off colonies, and during colonial times it worked very well. You see, the British learned early that if you give a subjugated people a measure of power you achieve three main purposes.

First, you make people feel important, because they have a hand in governing themselves. (The British gave internal governance only to those people they figured could handle it without sowing the seeds of revolution and breaking away from the empire.)

Second, you give people just enough power so that they can occupy themselves lording it over other people, and never think of getting rid of you.

And third, you save yourself money and headache because you can pay the locals smaller wages than you would pay colonial officers sent out from England, and you don't have to worry about little issues like tax collection and the granting of licences. You get the people on the ground to do the dirty work for you.

You see, the civil service (as we know it) was never designed to run a country. Rather, it was created to provide imperial powers with middle managers who were trained just enough to be able to take care of little crises without difficulty, but who would have to refer to the imperial power for anything that was important or great.

It is for this reason that our system is so centralized — financed by a Consolidated Fund, into which all full government agencies deposit their revenue and to which all agencies turn to get their revenue re-dispensed to them again, and governed by a very few civil servants at the very top.

It is for this reason that our system is so hierarchical. Very few individual civil servants, no matter what his or her level in the system, can make any major decision without referring it to the servant above.

It is for this reason that independent action is extremely difficult to carry out in the civil service; very few members of the service have the autonomy to perform their duties without having specifically been directed to do so.

We must always remember this. The system we inherited at independence was designed by an imperial power to provide local government in distant colonies. It was never designed to govern. It was a tool used by the British Empire to manage on-the-ground activities from afar.

So when we groan about the deficiencies of our civil service, or even especially of the civil servants themselves, we need to understand that the problem cannot be solved by changing the people in it, or by making some cosmetic changes. The problem can only be solved by redesigning the government from the ground up — by recognizing that what we have can never meet the needs of a prosperous and growing independent nation. It can certainly not cultivate the vision and the independence and the daring that allows us to develop further, because it was never designed to do so.

But we have a country to govern, and not a colony. It is time we examine our system of government from the ground up. We need to recognize that if we wish to be a first-world nation, we must make for ourselves a first-world government.

We Bahamians are free. We deserve a government designed to serve our freedom.

On Paradise

Last week I wrote about fact and fiction, raising the question of how we know what's real and what's not, what's fact and what's fancy, and how much we rely on books to form our "knowledge" about the world.

This week's article stems from that, but takes it in a different direction.

This week I want to write about paradise.

It's an idea we hear a lot when we talk about the Bahamas. But I suspect we don't think enough about it when we hear it; we take it for granted, but we don't really question it. But we should.

My good friend Ian Strachan, whose writing every thinking Bahamian should seek to read, has put out a book called Paradise and Plantation, on tourism and culture in the Caribbean. Of course, his main focus is on The Bahamas, because ours is a culture fully steeped in the idea of paradise. You'll notice, though, what he links paradise with. In Ian Strachan's world, the idea of paradise is the flip side of the plantation.

I think I agree with him. It's not that I believe that tourism is a bad thing in itself; but I do believe that there's something fundamentally unhealthy in having a unidimensional tourist product, one that's designed to sell an environment, to push an idea.

You see, as I've discussed before, ideas and images often have a kind of power that we don't expect them to have. We are used to thinking of the world in terms of "real" and "not-real"; in the "real" world are things, the stuff that matters, cars and houses and people and cash. In the "not-real world", though, are ideas and words and thoughts. And these, unlike sticks and stones, can never hurt us.

That's where we go wrong.

It's ideas and words and thoughts that define the "real" world for us, that give us the values we place on the things we spread around that world. Let me see if I can give you a couple of examples.

Example number one. You find yourself on a stretch of beach. The sun is blazing overhead, the air is hot, the sky is the kind of blue that burns. You do one of two things: you spread out your towel and lie down on it, hoping that when you get up you will have changed colour or soaked up some health; or you take your towel, put it on your head, and go looking for the nearest shade.

The first reaction is the kind you might have if you thought of the stretch of sand as a beach in paradise. The second is what might happen if you regarded it simply as a piece of land you have to cross, a rough and sandy hell.

Example number two. You invite a stranger into your home. You ask him to sit down, and you offer him a cool drink and something to eat. You do one of two things: you go to the kitchen, take out the switcher you made earlier that day, serve up a bowl of fresh conch fritters (full of conch), and hand it to him with a smile and a friendly chat. Or you hand him a menu, limp back to your station (it's been a long and tiring day), and prepare to be tied to his table until he's finished his meal or you're finished your shift.

In the first place, the stranger is a guest, and you are the host. What you do for him is simply an extension of your hospitality. In the second, the stranger is a tourist, a paying visitor, and you are a server.

In each scenario, we've got the same situation, maybe even the same instance, but there are two different ways of looking at it. One is through the eyes of a person who came looking for paradise; the other is through the eyes of the person who lives there. And in the differences between them lie the seeds of inequality, of discontent.

The problem with the idea of paradise, you see, is that there are no people in it. There are beaches and hotels and shadows that slip in and provide you with drinks and food when you need them and disappear when you don't. "Paradise" isn't just a place; it's a feeling, an extended rest, a neverland where you go to not do work. Oh, there might be natives in that paradise, but they aren't really people. Rather, they are imagined as modified happy savages, who go about their business in a simple, rather childlike way, but who don't have the same cares and hopes and fears and responsibilities that real people have to worry about.

Because, you see, the idea of paradise wasn't invented by us. How could it be? Our experience doesn't really lead us to regard these islands as earthly Edens. Those of us who toil in the fields or out on the sea have a healthy respect for the constant sunshine and those turquoise waters; the one can burn up all our crops (as is the case this year, with this drought), and the other can turn on us and drown us anytime it gets ready. Most of us don't see paradise, anyway, when we look around us; we see the heat off the road, the mosquitoes, the prickles, the sand in our shoes chafing our toes, the salt itching our skins. No; paradise is the invention of someone who lives far, far away.

It's a con, and a very old one at that. It's the ultimate advertiser's trick; and the first advertiser to use it was Columbus himself. When he wrote "These islands are very green and fertile and the breezes are very soft," he was creating the very first sales pitch for the Bahamas. It was all very well and good to get Ferdinand and Isabella to invest in his future trips. But it was an idea, an image, and its purpose was to sell.

So we must be very careful of using it to sell ourselves. We can employ it to bring the visitors here, but we must be wary of buying the myth. For when we do, we run the risk of implicitly accepting the idea that Bahamians are not really people; that we are "natives", and our purpose in paradise is to decorate the place, give it an "island" flavour. We run the risk of believing that we purpose of our existence to supply all the "real" people's needs.

It's a dangerous idea, after all. If we believe it, we will continue to invite people in to take over our best beaches, to set the prices on the property we owned, to turn us from hosts into employees and servants, and to recreate the plantation in a land that's free.