On Land (25 August 2003)

Over ten years ago I attended a lecture being given at the College of The Bahamas by Eris Moncur. His topic was, not surprisingly (as it was the Quincentennial year), the site of Columbus’ landfall. Now I’m not going to debate that now; anyone who knows Mr Moncur even slightly knows what his view on the matter is. What I am going to raise is something he said, somewhat in passing, in that lecture. It was this: Bahamians are millionaires.

Now many of us are fond of thinking of ourselves as “poor”: “So-and-so like to take advantage of poor people,” we say, or “The government job is to help poor people get ahead”. I am not entirely sure what the cut-off point for wealth is; I suspect that poverty is something we own, while wealth belongs to the other guy. Be that as it may (and that’s certainly fodder for another column), I want to argue Mr Moncur’s case, because I agree with him. Many, if not most, Bahamians are extremely rich.

Now understand me: I don’t necessarily mean take-it-to-the-bank-and-deposit-it kind of rich. In fact, the kind of wealth Mr Moncur and I are thinking about here may leave a person cash-poor; we’re talking about land. And specifically, I’m talking about generation property, an imperfectly understood but extremely valuable Bahamian resource.

Now I understand that many people will disagree with me. Many people regard generation property as a trouble and a nuisance rather than a source of wealth; indeed, when I carried out fieldwork in Long Island, where the tradition of generation property is prevalent, that was the common refrain. How, people asked, could they get around the difficulties posed by generation property? Let’s look at the problems. First of all, it’s impossible to generate cash quickly from generation property. You may own half of Exuma, for instance, but you can’t use that ownership as collateral to get a bank loan. Part of the problem is that individuals are not outright owners of generation property, and another part of the problem is that the custom is extra-legal — it may be recognized by the courts, but is not covered in law, and so cannot be used to generate cash. So how, exactly, does generation property make you rich?

Well, the short answer is that cash is not the only form of wealth, or even the most important form of wealth that exists. The long answer is that generation property, for many of us, represents something even more basic than cash; it represents power. And it represents, for those of us who are lucky enough to be connected with it, the foundation of our identity, the core of what makes us Bahamian.

For those people who may not know what generation property is, it is the system of owning land communally. In most cases (though the system varies according to families and islands), anyone who is descended from the original owner of the land, or who carries his name, has the right to live on the land in question. This right is passed on to new generations at birth. The best-known example of Bahamian generation property is that of the former estate of Lord John Rolle in Exuma. Lord Rolle was a wealthy Loyalist who, when he left the American mainland, moved many of his slaves to the estate in Exuma awarded to him by the British crown. When the cotton plantations failed, rather than bear the expense of resettling the slaves, Rolle cut his losses and left the plantations to those slaves and their descendants. To this day, anyone who is named Rolle, or who is descended from the Rolles, has the right to go to Rolle land in Exuma and claim a piece.

Generation property is found throughout the Bahamas, but is most prevalent in the central and southern islands that were settled by the Loyalists during the American War of Independence. At that time, King George of Britain granted large tracts of land in the Bahamas to those people fleeing the conflict, those families who wished to remain loyal to the British crown. These estates were settled by these refugees, who brought their slaves with them, and were used initially to grow cotton. However, when cotton failed and Emancipation came, as it did within a generation or two, the landowners did one of two things. If they could afford it, they cut their losses and abandoned the plantations, moving to Nassau or even back to Britain or the USA. Others, who couldn’t afford it or who chose otherwise, remained on the land, and intermingled with the former slaves. In both cases the land was passed down from generation to generation, from parents to children, often as an undivided estate, the property of all of the descendants of the slaves, the slaveowners, or both.

The system of generation property explains why, when one visits many of the southern islands, one comes across settlements that bear the name of families, from which those families hail. The names of these settlements generally indicates the existence of generation property, and most of the people who live in these settlements, or who are descended from there, are likely to have rights to the land in the vicinity.

The custom sounds wonderful, and has been, as I have already stated, a source of our power and independence. People who have land will never starve and will never be homeless. This is recognized throughout the Caribbean, where, after Emancipation, freed slaves banded together and scraped up enough cash to purchase their own tracts of land, which became their own versions of generation property. However, in most cases, the best land in other Caribbean countries remained in the hands of European plantation owners. In the Bahamas, huge tracts of land are owned by Bahamian families.

This fact may be all well and good, but there is one major drawback for Bahamians of the twenty-first century, most of whom now live in Nassau and Freeport: we don’t live on our land, and our land can’t generate cash for us. There are many cash-poor, land-rich Bahamians in New Providence and Grand Bahama. And so for many of us, generation property is a burden, a source of strife, and not the valuable resource that our ancestors intended it to be.

I am going to argue that the failure here is not the institution of generation property. It is our own failure; it is a lack of imagination on our part. We have been schooled by years of living in a world that regards land as a resource to generate cash, and where any other use of it is seen as worthless. This attitude has led us to denigrate the custom of generation property, and to value private land, which we can buy and sell at will, far more. It has prohibited us from grappling seriously with the custom and writing it into our laws, and (perhaps not incidentally) it has also led many of us to divest ourselves of our generation property when we can — either through ignorance of the land’s value, as happened in New Providence in the early twentieth century with generation property, or through collusion, manipulation of the existing law, and greed. Today, as the government is promoting the Bahamas abroad as an excellent place to own a second home, the temptation to sell our birthright is strong. After all, a cool million in cash is worth far more than any number of acres of inaccessible land on some remote island, isn’t it?

I am not so sure. I happen to believe that land, not money, is true wealth. This is a conviction that is too deep in me to shake. And as Nassau grows more and more crowded, the prospect of having land on some distant island to which I can activate a claim at some point grows more and more attractive. What’s more, I don’t believe that this conviction of mine come out of thin air. After all, it is the way in which my ancestors administered their property for almost two hundred years; and I believe that it lies at the core of the independent spirit of the Bahamian.