The Tribune

The most important area of domination [is] the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceive themselves and their relationship to the world. 

-- Jason Hickel

By SIMON

AUTHOR, and chronicler of Bahamian culture, Arlene Nash Ferguson, wrote a book about Junkanoo entitled, I Come to Get Me: An Inside Look at the Junkanoo Festival. The name of the book was inspired by the young men who referred to their involvement in Junkanoo as, “I come to get me.” For these men and generations of Bahamians, Junkanoo expresses their identity and sense of belonging.

Nash Ferguson, along with a treasury of other historians, writers, artists, and documentarians, have preserved and retold Bahamian stories and history through art, film, literary works, cultural festivals, and other platforms. They have worked diligently to deconstruct and demythologise various colonial tropes and stereotypes about Bahamian stories and history.

Like those young men finding themselves and their identity through the rituals and heritage of Junkanoo, the ongoing decolonisation of a people requires us telling our stories from within, with all the beauty, warts, and inconsistencies.

While tourists may experience Junkanoo as an enjoyable extravaganza, Nash Ferguson, exclaims that Junkanoo is not primarily a parade or competition. It’s not primarily entertainment to be monetised. She insists that Junkanoo is about a triumphant people celebrating their history and culture.

Junkanoo is an essential part of the history of struggle and transcendence for slaves and freed slaves in the Bahamas, a cultural expression that helped unite various tribal groups into one people. No other country in the world has preserved or developed Junkanoo as The Bahamas has. It’s associated with no other country as much as ours, done with so much operatic brilliance.

A milestone in the ongoing discovery and unfolding of a deeper Bahamian sense of self and society, was the release last year of the textbook Towards a Common Loftier Goal. The new history text was launched during a ceremony at the historic Southern Recreation Grounds in Nassau, commemorating the 60th anniversary of Black Tuesday.

The text is a key part of the history curriculum for secondary schools. Minister of Education and Technical & Vocational Training, Glenys Hanna Martin, enthused at the launch.

“The history curriculum, as you’ve heard, had to be updated and modernised for the first time unbelievably in 43 years…It’s my hope this text will cause our young people to have a deeper understanding of our history and the shaping of this collective space we call The Bahamas.”

Like her father, the late Arthur Hanna, the former Minister of Education, who played a pivotal role in the creation of the history textbook, Glenys Hanna deeply appreciates the imperative of documenting and telling our history from a Bahamian perspective and imagination.

A national story is woven together by multiple narrative threads. Such threads bear the names and personal narratives of peoples spanning the globe. One of the most pivotal events in our history was the achievement of majority rule, our Second Emancipation, a watershed moment in our nationalist struggle and consciousness.The leaders of that revolution include many who were first generation Bahamians or who enjoyed Caribbean parentage, including Sir Lynden Pindling.

The Pindling name has become thoroughly identified with The Bahamas, even though it’s not a common name in the country. The Bahamian family and experience are constituted by an alphabet soup of nationalities and family names. The researching and telling of our stories are an ongoing enterprise, requiring a certain passion and critical patriotism and honesty that eschews historical revisionism and falsehoods in the service of narrow political agendas.

Some years ago, after returning home from a trip to a sister Caribbean country, a former prime minister enthused that he had learned during his visit overseas of what a wonderful talent we had in such a world-renowned historian as Dr. Gail Saunders. Dr. Saunders was already a scholar celebrated regionally and internationally. Her prodigious work at the Department of Archives over many decades helped to preserve and catalogue invaluable archival material.

Decades before the Clifton heritage site seized the popular imagination and became a political battleground, Dr. Saunders was working to study and protect its ruins and artefacts. She is one of the foremost authorities on Bahamian history, who worked tirelessly over many decades to preserve artefacts and historic documents.

Yet the prime minister of that day, who had been in political life for decades, was surprised by Dr. Saunders’ reputation. (She should have been knighted in her lifetime.) The ignorance of that politician speaks to a certain mindset. 

Because of her extraordinary research efforts and writing, including the two-volume Islanders in the Stream, co-authored with Michael Craton, we are able to better understand our place as islanders in the stream of Bahamian history. To date these volumes are the most comprehensive single record of our history from aboriginal times to the twentieth century.

Even before Gail Saunders began her lifetime of research and service, others were telling Bahamian stories in literary form. One was Sammy Swain, a Cat Island folklore story that was popularised by E. Clement Bethel’s opera. The story was magically told by Sir Etienne Dupuch in serial form in The Tribune. Another, lesser-known work, Blackbeard, A Romance of the Bahamas, is an epic poem by Henry Christopher Christie.

How is it that generations of Bahamians are not as familiar with these texts as they are in other world stories? To lose one’s stories, or not to know one’s history, is akin to losing one’s soul. Thankfully, there are new generations of Bahamians working to pass on and recreate Bahamian narratives.