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.