On Patronage (18 March 2004)

In the opening of the film The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone is visited by Johnny Fantone, a young singer who is trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Don Corleone has already helped Johnny to get where he is in Las Vegas, having made his band leader the offer he couldn't refuse. Now Don Corleone agrees to help him break into movies. Everyone who has seen that film knows what happens next: the blood in the bed, the terror in the night. Don Corleone has ways of getting what he wants.

Now The Godfather is a movie, and what's in it may not be the exact truth. But what interests me today is not so much the glamour or the horror of specific incidents, or even the tragedy inherent in those who (like Michael Corleone) are destined to be Dons, but the circumstances in which mafia-like organizations arise.

Put at its simplest, the mafia is a system of patrons and clients. All of the major players in a mafia story begin as ordinary men. None of them are part of the core power structure of a society: the lawmakers, the law enforcers, the priests, the big-money businessmen, or even the press. Their goal is to control these agencies, to work them to their advantage. Aficionados of The Godfather II will know without my having to tell them that Don Vito Corleone began life as a peasant in Sicily who emigrated to New York when his father was killed. He was a humble man, without education or connections, an immigrant in a society that was often hostile, and he made a way for himself through a system of patronage, a system of building relationships with people by giving them what they needed and building up debts of favour so that when they are called to respond they can't refuse.

Now let's bring that home. In The Bahamas, even our core power structure operates according to the system of patronage. In our society, what still matters is not what you know but who. Ours is a society that functions uncomfortably like the Mafia.

The thing about this state of affairs is this. Patronage works best in situations where power is unevenly shared out in society. The Mafia started in those parts of Italy which were always under foreign rule. Sicily was conquered by one outside European power after another, and was treated in many ways like a colony of those powers, producing food to feed the soldiers but receiving nothing in return. The Mafia grew up in those places as a means of protecting the Sicilian peasants from the foreign masters. In time, though, those peasants became as much in bondage to their Sicilian godfathers as they were to the foreigners; perhaps even more, because their masters were Sicilian like them, and were there for good.

In a society where people are not equal, and where the possibility of equality is beyond the reach of most, patronage is the way in which many people get ahead. The only way one can make it in such a society, one has to get oneself noticed by a powerful person.
The advantages of that are clear. One gets hooked up, one is able to tap into the power system, one gets some stuff that one needs in a fairly quick time. But what strikes me as odd is that in the Bahamas we are a free and democratic nation. We have not inherited an inflexible social system where people are doomed to remain in the social slot into which they were born. On the contrary; the masses of the Bahamian people fought a remarkable battle against inequality and discrimination, and won, and many of us have been able to overcome poverty and lack of status and enter the upper echelons of our society in a few short years.

So what is the use of patronage to us?

The disadvantages of systems built on patronage are subtle, but fundamental. In the first place, the person using the quick-and-dirty connection ties himself or herself to the person who does the hooking up to some degree or another. This was something that Johnny Fantone found out, to his detriment, further along in his career; it was something that all the main players in The Godfather discovered, including Michael the Godfather himself. Not only are these ties detrimental to the person; they are also ultimately, destructive to the society that is based on democratic principles.

Why is this? Well, because true democracy takes work. In order to maintain a properly functioning democratic society, one that enshrines the principles of equality and justice for all, all members have to be informed, aware, idealistic. We cannot hope to benefit from the freedoms offered by a democratic society without having to give up something for them.

Take the debate on the state of homosexuals in our society, for instance. Either our constitution provides for equality for all Bahamians, or it does not. If we choose to discriminate against one group of people, the entire system fails, and our democracy becomes a sham. But if we commit to the ideal of equality, we have to make room for people whose actions we often find socially repugnant. The cost of the American constitutional amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech protects the rights of racists to publish and disseminate messages of hate, as well as it protects the rights of people of goodwill; the sword of democracy cuts both ways.

Patronage, I believe, allows us to shift blame, to avoid responsibility, to make ourselves comfortable because we have no real stake in our own fates. It's a kind of passing of the buck that works well in the short run, but which in the long run erodes our own identities and rots the core of our nation.

That's the thing about patronage. It may seem like a good system, but it has its costs. There's no such thing as a free lunch; there's no such thing as freedom, liberty, or equality when patronage exists.