The Tribune

By Canon S Sebastian Campbell

THE National Heroes Committee was launched in 1991 to primarily rescue our first Bahamian Governor General Sir Milo B. Butler from the graveyard of obscurity.

He died on January 22, 1979. Before demitting office, he was acclaimed as a national hero and given the privilege to sit while addressing the Speaker of the House.

At his funeral he was hailed as a champion’s champion, as one whose Christian belief inspired him to risk his personal welfare and thus champion the cause for the black majority and the downtrodden in a society where racism was the archenemy of development, enhancement and upward mobility of the entire country.

His fight to dismantle racism in the Royal Bank of Canada alone was hailed as a fight only one with a champion’s spirit would take on.

The day of his funeral, the country stopped. It was a national holiday and he was funeralised at Christ Church Cathedral, followed by a procession east on Bay Street to St Matthew’s Cemetery. Thus reversing the normal east-west flow of traffic then in place on Bay Street.

Now here it was 12 years after his passing and he was forgotten. Fred Mitchell and Loretta Butler-Turner joined hearts and hands and established the National Heroes Committee. From that first meeting in 1991 under the fig tree they asked for a holiday to forever keep the memory of Sir Milo B Butler alive.

One year later I was recruited to give leadership. My most important qualification being that I was no politician, free of all political ties and thus able to unite forces in the way forward. The first Red Mass was celebrated on January 22, 1991 in Rawson Square in the shadow of Sir Milo’s bust.

We were under the threat of arrest if we dared be a public nuisance. The police showed up in good numbers for the Red Mass.

This spanned the rule of all three prime ministers we have had to date. Our present prime minister became an honorary member of the Heroes Committee and attended events as Leader of the Opposition and then as Prime Minister.

Over the years, the message remained constant but the objective of the holiday moved form honouring Sir Milo alone to that of honouring all our heroes.

At the death of Sir Lynden Pindling, then prime minister, Hubert Ingraham supported our idea of the holiday.

He said: “Sir Lynden O Pindling is the greatest Bahamian who has or will ever live.”

Mr Ingraham moved the initial legislation to have the second Monday in every October be declared National Heroes Day and to put the National Honours System in place. However, both bills died when Parliament in 2002 was prorogued allowing for the general elections.

The National Heroes Committee congratulates and thanks the government of Prime Minister Perry Christie for the fortitude in finally bringing all this into law.

Thus allowing this transformational church development that was born with the Majority Rule Day holiday. The National Honours System in now passed into law, but we yet await it being enacted.

I remind us of all the planks in our campaign to date, for fear we forgot:

• A national holiday called National Heroes Day

• The elevation of Majority Rule Day

• Our own system of National Honours to replace the outdated colonial system of honours.

• Images of Bahamian heroes on our money, thus replacing the Queen. (We still have a way to go with one such image on one of our notes raising a question mark in our national mindset).

• The establishment of a National Heroes Park, with the hope that such a national treasure could be duplicated throughout our islands.

• To have Afro-Bahamian history made mandatory teaching in all our schools.

• To have October declared National History Month

• Appropriate names of our heroes given to government buildings, parks, road ways and other public places and spaces.

We await with bated breath the establishment of the cultural commission and/or the honours committee to continue all this.

Five years into our existence we were convinced that neither the government nor the public were taking us serious, so we did two things:

We unofficially declared Discovery Day, National Heroes Day and begged the people to make a spiritual change, and they themselves dubbed it Heroes Day.

We initiated an awards ceremony on the Friday closest to Discovery Day, and with our agreed upon yard stick, made our own declaration of National Heroes, with the right to be called ‘Honourable’ for life.

Five hundred plus years after our contribution to the New World, 50 years into Majority Rule and 43 years into our independence, we must go off age. We must shed our parasitic mindset honouring foreign exploiters, masters of mass homicide, buccaneers, pirates and exploiters. Through education we can rid ourselves of our mental shackles and thus come into our own, and prove we do not need European adventures like Christopher Columbus of Sir Francis Drake to be role models.

The psychologists tell us we all need a measure of self-esteem in order to live healthy, purposeful and fulfilled lives. Self-esteem encompasses not only the individual but the wider community as well. It is in this wider community, called the Bahamas, where we must work and provide role models; immortalise those role models for all time; to make it known that we have local role models, great role models of moral excellence after whom we can model your lives.