On Carts and Horses (22 January 2004)

Now that the silly season is over, the year has been spared, the halls undecked, the paychecks spent and the A-groups robbed, it seems a good time to lay out something I've been thinking about for quite a long while. I touched on it last week in my article about the sport of Junkanoo, but I didn't elaborate; so here's the elaboration, for what it's worth.

These days, when we think or talk about Junkanoo in public we have a tendency to think and talk about things that are in fact incidentals. If we describe it to people who have never seen it, chances are we'll talk about the costumes. We may mention groups and performance, and we'll probably talk about the way in which all of Bay Street rocks when a big group comes down the road.

We talk about the costumes. Or the B-52s. Or the brass section. Or the choreographed dancers. Or the bellers. Or the bleachers, for heaven's sake, or the tickets, or the way in which the fans respond. Rarely do we talk about the heartbeat of the thing.

Rarely do we talk about the rhythm drum.

Now this seems odd to me, because it is the lead drum and the rhythms it plays that lie at the core of the whole thing. Without the rhythm drum there is no Junkanoo at all; all the rest is Carnival or Mardi Gras. All the rest — the spectacle and the performance, the bass and the brass, even the tickets and the bleachers and the attendance of the public — all these are frills, layers placed upon that core heartbeat that ties the festival to Africa through the conversation between the skin of the goat and the skin of the man.

Let me put it another way. You are putting together a demonstration of Junkanoo. What is it you need? If you present a lead costume or a dancer piece, all you have is sculpture. Costumes need to be danced before they come alive; all the tricks in the world can't breathe soul into them. And to what do they dance? Cowbells need a rhythm to play off; horns and whistles need a beat to give them purpose, B-52s need a pattern to anchor and brass combos are optional.

Without the lead drum, the tenor, the drum of middle pitch that is often substituted by the tom-tom, there is no Junkanoo.

So why are that drum and the role that it plays so rarely discussed?

I'm going to argue here that it's because we Bahamians have developed the habit of putting carts before horses. We have developed the habit at looking at end products and assuming that they are all that there is, rather like looking at icing and mistaking it for the cake. We have not recently cultivated the ability to identify the core of an issue. Rather, we tend to be easily distracted by frills and baubles, and, in getting caught up in these, miss the heart of the matter.

We have taken over the carts; the horses are left a long way down the road.

Junkanoo is not the only place where we see this tendency. We find it also among the parents who invest their money in book bags and footwear and neglect to buy the books; among the union executives who earn more than the President of the leading tertiary educational institution and believe that they are not yet making enough; and in the debates that take place about pay raises and benefits for workers in the tourism industry and others. I have not heard a discussion situating these debates in the whole of the Bahamian economy; rather, our focus is on the frills and baubles once again, on asking how the surpluses generated from the tourism industry can be used to pay the workers in the industry, rather than to enrich the working population at large.

Here's what I'm thinking when I say that. Tourism is our major industry. Surely its revenue must finance the entire nation of the Bahamas. Two of the most crucial services that any government must provide to its people are education and health; a third is security. It is these services that equip successive generations with the mental and physical tools that sustain the nation over time, and the orderly society in which to provide them.

It would seem to me, then, that if the country is being enriched by a successful tourist product, then some of that revenue ought to be channelled into these areas and not into the hospitality industry alone. I have no problem in the idea of offering salary raises to workers in that industry if the industry itself can afford it; but I do question the idea that those raises should happen in a vacuum. Why should someone who began working in the hospitality industry with little more than a high school diploma, someone who has not invested substantially in the training or educating of himself earn a higher salary than a teacher or a nurse with a first degree, or a policeman who places himself regularly in the line of fire?

Carts before horses. We are taking care of the luxuries before we deal with the essentials.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we pay no income tax. Now while I am not a proponent of income tax in this country — I happen to believe that there is a particular genius in the idea of taxing a population that consumes far more than it makes — I have to admit that when the government deducts a certain amount of money out of one's salary, it forces one to think, even tangentially, about one's place in the larger society and one's responsibility to the state. When people employed in the hospitality industry grow richer, we all grow richer; the benefits accrue through the taxation system to all. And those benefits may be channelled into those areas that really need them; the horses can be taken from behind the carts and put in their rightful places.

But we don't have income tax, and there's not much chance that we'll get it in the near future. So how do we start finding the horses?

Think of the rhythm drum in Junkanoo. Education, health and security are the rhythm drums of our society; without them we cannot function well. It's time we focussed on the most important elements in our lives, place the horses and carts in the right order and leave the frills and baubles alone until we have dealt with everything else.