And I think he’s on to something.

The long term benefits would be the upgrade of an essential public good, more persons using the public transportation system instead of their 1 and 1/2 cars daily, a new company to be listed on the national stock exchange, a cleaner environment, savings to the average consumer on fuel, an efficient and reliable bus service along with a new industry complete with everything from administrative staffing, to mechanics, to bus drivers along with the creation of a private sector entity, financed with government bonds or backing — an entity that can actually pay off its debt to the government or other parties or being co-owned by the government via shares, while providing a useful and essential public good in addition to it being sensitive to individual livelihood.

via Caribbean News Now!: Commentary: Getting around in New Providence.

By the way, the link to the COB study he refers to is here:

http://nicobethel.net/uploads/transportation_report.pdf

A group of 90 leading academics, authors, journalists and human rights activists from around the world has called on France to repay the 17 billion euros £14bn “extorted” from Haiti in the 19th Century. In 1825 France demanded 150 million gold francs in compensation after the Haitian Revolution, through which the country gained independence.

via Repeating Islands.

Well now.

On the surface, there is not much to argue with here. The idea is interesting, arresting even, and exciting, given the names of the signatories, who include

American linguist Noam Chomsky, French philosopher Étienne Balibar, and the Euro MPs Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Eva Joly.

Here’s the question, though. To whom would this payment go, and how would it be remitted? Simply erasing the debt is not enough; there is also the long-term damage done to the core fabric of Haitian democratic society that resulted from the isolation of Haiti that occurred over the century following the revolution, not to mention the complete lack of national infrastructure in the country even today (a lack that the American occupation of the first decades of the twentieth century, an occupation that could be read as America’s own imperialism, did not rectify). This is worth a whole lot more thought. Discussion and thought.

But worth considering nevertheless.

• RT @shakesparadise
  Nassau. October. Affordable.
  http://bit.ly/cDQiLU
  http://bit.ly/9Enpc9 @shakesparadise
  @CariFringe #
• RT @keimiller The Thing About Losing Your Religion http://fb.me/FbKyq8yZ >> Loved this essay. Go read if you can. #
• RT @anniepaul athletes didn't put Ja on the map, its not a matter of 1 athlete winning a gold medal in 1945, music made Ja a 'brand' FIRST #
• Worth contemplating. I'm not Trini but hey big props to Lisa Allen-Agostini – http://allenprize.org/aboutus.htm #

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What’s the big deal?

Well, if you have to ask, you haven’t been seen the CRB. And you really don’t have any excuse; I’ve blogged about it, twice (or more). It’s not just that I finally finished the review that Nicholas invited me to do lo these many months ago. It’s also that I’m really stoked about who’s in the CRB today with me: Mark Dow, who’s got publication credits up the wazoo, the kind of credits that you have to don sunglasses to read.

And it’s a review of Sidney Mintz’s work, which makes me proud. Mintz made my anthropology — and my thought, and my national and regional pride too — what they are today.

So go on over and check it out. And while you’re at it, spend some time on the site. It’s worth it.

• RT @lordstreet: Playwrights Workshop presents A TRIPTYCH OF PLAYS at TTW from August 13th. Don't miss them!!!!!! (cont) http://tl.gd/30epl7 #
• OK Bahamas. Time for the revolution. Too long now we been ruled by drones. #
• RT @MoveOn Google: Say no to VZN to kill #netneutrality Don't be evil! http://bit.ly/dgxZdY #
• Uh … hello … anybody got any info re the BTC outage? #
• Reporting some BTC weirdness: We're sorry, all circuits are busy now. WTF? Did we flash forward? #
• Yes I am preparing to prepare semester plans. #
• Trying to get my head around the next 2 months. Back to work, Shakespeare in Paradise, wrap-up toto 5 & getting ready for toto 6 – no joke. #
• First week in forever I made NO tweets. Yes I'm still alive yo. #
• RTing Rob b/c don't hear from him much: RT @oppcabb must question my habits, such as squeezing empty cans before throwing them in the bin #

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• Hear hear! #
• Sustainability is a joke. Water in the desert. We should be smart as whips. #
• Nassau would shrivel to dust if we couldn't rely on barged fresh water from Andros. No way that 250000 ppl should survive on this lil island #
• Am being charitable & guessing that the barge couldn't make it across the Tongue of the Ocean this week #tropicalstormbonnie #
• No water in the tap this morning. TTL I was raised in the 1970s & know how to live without running water. #tropicalstorm #
• Olive Senior talks tomorrow @ COB. Lecture theatre in the Tourism complex. 7 PM. Reads Sunday at PopOp. #BWSI #
• More to the point. When leaving the meeting I ran into Olive Senior in town for #BWSI & she remembered me from Miami 1992. #
• We shall see. Time will tell & it longer than rope. Nuff said. #
• Not the greatest fan of resorts but I met with a rep of this group back in 2003 & they still spinning the same line:a truly Bahamian resort #
• Went to a very interesting meeting yesterday at Baha Mar – http://bit.ly/aEptVK – if they deliver what they say it'll be exciting. & fresh. #
• TriniBahamian poet Christian Campbell shortlisted for Forward Prize. Bigups to Christian!!! #
• Hailing all Caribbean artists: Go follow @Carifringe!! #
• I love the @CRB! Even if I am a delinquent. #

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It’s become fashionable for youngish Bahamians (people in the mid-30s range or so — people born since Independence, that is) to call individuals whose skins are cork-brown, tawny, biscuit brown, tan, paper bag brown, teabag, beige, coconut bark, gumelemi, tamarind, mango, eggshell, café-au-lait, milky tea, carnation, condensed milk, or thereabouts “white”. To be a “white” Bahamian, it seems, one has to be only slightly paler than the perceived “norm”; if your skin has sunset or sunrise tones, if your eyes are green or copper or amber or grey (or not), if your hair is curly or crimpy, or if it has a brown or gold-ish cast, or if it can get long on its own without external aids, you will be labelled “white”.

Well that’s all very well and good, but it’s not particularly accurate or helpful in the national context. Bahamian history, which is not taught in schools with any reliability or coherence, and so which the average young citizen picks up on the fly, from conversations and snippets of information only partially digested, particularly the most recent political history, is all about black and white. Race is part and parcel of our politics, our economics, and our collective psyche. But the “race” that has historical significance and the “race” that we appear to practice today are two very different animals indeed.

If, for instance, young Bahamians imagine that they can take their twenty-first century notions of black and white and translate them into what they may one day read about the history of this nation, they will never fully understand their country and its rich and difficult past. If they imagine that I am a white Bahamian, or that a person with light brown skin and curly hair is a white Bahamian, or that a person with one white parent, or a person with a “white” name is a white Bahamian, they will miss the significance of Majority Rule, of Independence, of the psychic power of the Progressive Liberal Party and the origins of the great divide between FNM and PLP. They will not understand the revolutionary importance of August 19, 1992 or the magnitude of the fact that this year, National Pride seemed to be a movement that started from the street, on Facebook and all Bahamians seem pleased to identify themselves with the colours of black, aquamarine and gold at this time of year. They will not comprehend the One Bahamas experiment of the 1990s, nor will they understand that, at least on the surface, that experiment has finally succeeded in 2010. And they will not understand, fundamentally, the challenge, the strength, and the revolutionary significance that being a product of the Caribbean (which, all protestations to the contrary, we Bahamians are) can bring to this 21st century, globalized world. Their concept of “race” erases both our history and its power.

Here’s the reality of the situation. The Bahamas, along with Bermuda and Barbados, was one of the handful of British West Indian colonial territories to include among its population a sizeable number of settlers of European descent. We are not talking, as many younger Bahamians appear these days to believe, about of people of mixed African and European heritage who appear to be white; we are talking about European settlers of the same kind as the people who settled the Thirteen Colonies of the United States. In the “Three Bs” of the British West Indian colonies, as on the American mainland, white settlers moved to Bermuda, Barbados, and The Bahamas with a view to creating societies of their own. Change came in the end to Barbados, where sugar eventually took over as the mainstay of economic activity, and the society took on the characteristics of a full plantation society; but in The Bahamas, as in Bermuda, the plantation system never thrived.

For the first 150 years of Bahamian settlement, therefore, African slaves composed a minority of the population. Young Bahamians learn about this period most fully, it would appear, in their history classes; when I grill my college students on our histories they seem only able to recall piracy and the Lucayans. It is this period of history that they are considering — the period from the earliest European settlement, in 1647, to the wake of the American revolution in the 1780s, which proved revolutionary for the entire Caribbean basin. But it’s not a period with which most of today’s Bahamians will have any actual connection through descent or otherwise, as during this time the population of African-descended peoples never exceeded the population of European descent. For those of us who believe that true-true Bahamians are, or must be black, the reality of the first 150 years of Bahamian settlement may provide a subtle shock. For that period, the demographics show that in fact The Bahamas was primarily a white colony, and not a slave-holding one.

Let me give you some idea. In 1670, the Eleutherian Adventurers were two-thirds European, and most of the non-white settlers were free people rather than slaves. In 1722, the population of African descent stood at 28% of the overall Bahamian total, the remaining 72% of the population being of European stock. Moreover, of the 28% of the Africans, many were free; thus the total of the enslaved population was remarkably low. By 1731, the black population had increased, thanks to the importation of slaves by Governor Phenney, to 32% of the overall population. The society and culture of The Bahamas at that time, therefore, must have resembled those of many of the Thirteen Colonies: with a sizeable European majority and a minority of people of non-white origin.

In a land without major plantations, slaves were used as household servants, boat crews, skilled labourers, and manual workers on the construction of homes and the like, and large numbers were not required by the Bahamian settlers. What was most interesting about the free population, though, was that it was not all white. There were a number of black and mulatto free settlers as well, and many of them were people of social and economic substance. Several, indeed, owned their own slaves.

By the 1770s, the investment of Europeans economically and culturally in the institution of slavery, and the normalizing of the idea of the right of Europeans to enslave Africans and people of other “races”, had led to a shift in Bahamian demographics, so that the population was divided equally between whites and non-whites. However, this change in designation might have been the result of new laws that had been passed defining who was white and who was not as well as evidence of a real increase in the non-white population. Even at this time, the overall percentage of slaves in the population was still a minority. Many of the non-whites — Michael Craton and Gail Saunders ¹ estimate up to 20 per cent of the total population — were free people “of colour”, people of African descent who were not slaves, or free people of mixed African and European heritage.

Towards the end of the century, when skin colour and origin had been transformed from aesthetic and cultural differentiators into  markers of a natural right of some people to assume dominance over others, this free coloured population were causing some confusion in the appropriate social hierarchy. Two laws were passed with particular significance to the resolving of this confusion.

The first was an Act in 1756 whose purpose was to define who was a “white” Bahamian and who was a person of colour. According to this law, only those persons who were “above Three Degrees removed in a lineal descent from the Negro Ancestor” could be called white. In other words, everyone who had a single parent, grandparent or great-grandparent of African descent was classified as not white, no matter what they looked like or how much money or education they might have. Despite appearance, custom, or connection to white families (as many people of mixed descent were the cousins or “outside” family of people of white Bahamians), these free people of colour were defined by this law as second-class citizens, and prohibited from sharing in “all the Privileges and Immunities of His Majesty’s White Subjects”.²

The second was an Act, passed in 1767 and amended in 1768, “For the governing of Negroes, Mulattoes and Indians”. This Act governed not only the activities of slaves, determining what they could do and how they could be punished — and for what — but it also limited very specifically what “Privileges and Immunities” were available to free people of colour. Of particular interest was the fact that the punishments prescribed for slaves offering violence to white Bahamians were exactly the same for those free people who were not white. To be precise, these punishments consisted of:³

• first offence: public whipping
• second offence: mutilation — the slitting of the nose, the cutting off of the ears, or the branding of the face
• third offence: execution

The only difference between the punishments given to a slave and a free person of colour were that free coloured settlers had the right to be tried in open court, presumably with legal representation before they were sentenced (and presumably they had the right of appeal), while slaves did not have that right; slaves who were guilty of giving offence to whites were to be presented to a special tribunal of five people, two justices of the peace and three freeholders. In addition, a free person could be fined £15 instead of being whipped.⁴ This wasn’t much consolation, though, because under the same law, the evidence and oaths of free coloured Bahamians were not considered binding or valid, thus making their ability to appear in court more of a facade than anything else. They were prohibited from gambling, selling liquor, and were restricted in what they could trade or plant. Most important, though, was the fact that they could, for certain crimes, forfeit their freedom; the punishment prescribed for any free person of colour (African, mulatto, or Amerindian) who harboured a runaway slave was slavery and deportation — a harsher punishment than that given to whites (who would be fined) or slaves (who would be whipped).⁵

Now although these laws were repealed in 1824 during the gradual movement of the British colonies towards freedom for all persons, their impact on the society and its definition of black and white, of coloured and non-coloured, was long-lasting. Indeed, it lasted well into the late twentieth century; even in 1967, the “majority” represented in “Majority Rule” was in fact the non-white majority, most of whom were defined as they had been defined two hundred years before by the 1756 Act — as having a single great-grandparent, grandparent or parent who was black — and for whom, although the laws had been changed, access to political power and equality under the government had consistently and systematically been blocked.

So. To call me or any other Bahamian of partial African descent “white”, then, is to deny this historical truth. Some of us who fall into this category may be in the business of denying it for ourselves; but that will not change the reality of our history, nor will it change the reality of the oppression meted out to those of us whose ancestors did not all hail from Europe for well over 350 years of Bahamian settlement. It will not change the facts on which the Independent Bahamas was founded, and it will not help to heal the wounds that linger from that difficult past.

I plan to continue this discussion, going further into the subtleties and complexities of this history, but for now: Please. Don’t call me white.

Came across this in my reading and thought not of the change in Durham, SC itself, but in the attitude and the social structure that wrought that change. We are trying something similar here with the various attempts at rejuvenating downtown, but we aren’t thinking big enough. To start, we need a municipality to govern the city of Nassau; beyond that, it mightn’t hurt to have true local government for the entire island of New Providence as well. It’s pretty clear to me that what we do have doesn’t work in the slightest right now. But read the excerpt and then read the whole article and think about it.

TEN years ago, Matthew Beason’s duties as a restaurant manager here included driving to the airport to retrieve a weekly shipment of duck confit and pâté from New York.

“We couldn’t even buy anything like that around here,” said Mr. Beason, who went on to open Six Plates Wine Bar, now one of many ambitious restaurants around Durham. “Now, virtually every place in town makes its own.”

Of the rivalrous cities that make up the so-called Research Triangle — Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham — Durham 10 years ago was the unkempt sibling: scruffy and aging.

“There was no one on the street at night, just the smell of tobacco drying in the warehouses,” Mr. Beason said.

Now, a drive around town might yield the smell of clams from the coastal town of Snead’s Ferry, steaming in white wine, mustard and shallots at Piedmont restaurant; pungent spice and sweet fennel from the “lamby joe” sandwich at Six Plates; and seared mushrooms and fresh asparagus turned in a pan with spring garlic at Watts Grocery.

The vast brick buildings still roll through the city center, emblazoned with ads for Lucky Strike and Bull Durham cigarettes. They are being repurposed as art studios, biotechnology laboratories and radio stations.

More important for food lovers, hundreds of outlying acres of rich Piedmont soil have “transitioned” from tobacco, and now sprout peas, strawberries, fennel, artichokes and lettuce. Animals also thrive in the gentle climate, giving chefs access to local milk, cheese, eggs, pigs, chickens, quail, lambs and rabbits.

via Durham, a Tobacco Town, Turns to Local Food – NYTimes.com.

• Patti – if you have the courage & a little madness you can tell the truth as you see it. #BWSI #
• Lynn – I'm still here. I'm still here. They haven't silenced me yet. #BWSI #
• Lynn – I try to tell the stories I have been taught not to tell. The ones I am scared to tell. #BWSI #
• Whenever I go by instinct the truth will come out. Christi – #BWSI #
• If you want to know whether or not you are authentic read your own writing – Christi. #BWSI #
• Helen K: How do we resist decolonization? Keisha – be honest #
• PGM – we are a euphemistic society. #BWSI #
• BWSI 2010! http://twitpic.com/26adj2 #
• Bahamas Writers’ Summer Workshop 2010. First public meeting/discussion @ the Hub is ongoing #BWSI #
• #BWSI Bahamians practice the politics of exclusion – PGM @oceantongues #
• RT @blottingpaper Hah! Hah! I've had enough of Americans testing my English. >> Comes from knowing too little of the world. #
• Larry Smith summarizes conditions in TCI: http://bit.ly/b5YuNr #

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Dis my Bahamaland. I tell you dat.

Offshore flooded caves, so-called ocean blue holes, are extensions of the sea, subject to the same heavy tides and host to many of the same species found in the surrounding waters. Inland blue holes, however, are unlike any other environment on Earth, thanks largely to their geology and water chemistry. In these flooded caves, such as Stargate on Andros Island, the reduced tidal flow results in a sharp stratification of water chemistry. A thin lens of fresh water—supplied by rainfall—lies atop a denser layer of salt water. The freshwater lens acts as a lid, isolating the salt water from atmospheric oxygen and inhibiting bacteria from causing organic matter to decay.

Until now, only a handful of scientists have ventured into blue holes, but in the summer and fall of 2009, a multidisciplinary cave-diving and scientific team spent two months studying them on Andros, Abaco, and five other Bahamian islands. Funded by the National Geographic Society in collaboration with the National Museum of the Bahamas, headed by Keith Tinker, the Bahamas Blue Hole Expedition was conceived by Kenny Broad, a veteran cave explorer and an anthropologist at the University of Miami. Under Broad’s wisecracking, driven leadership, with Brian Kakuk as dive safety officer and preeminent cave explorer Wes Skiles shooting film and stills, team members made around 150 dives in dozens of blue holes. They gathered data that promise to deepen our understanding of everything from geology and water chemistry to biology, paleontology, archaeology, and even astrobiology—the study of life in the universe.

Read more here:  Bahamas Caves – National Geographic Magazine.

Kudos to Dr Tinker, Michael Pateman, and all the others at the National Museum, my former colleagues. Hats off. Keep up the good work.