On Slavery (17 November 2003)

Well, there's a dirty word for you. Slavery — something that we would like to forget, or to deny, or to lock down in our history books and sanitize forever. We really don't like to talk about it. At all.

But we need to talk about it. Because even though it was abolished in 1834, it reminds alive and well today. And if we think we've left it behind, we've got to think again.

Now let me make something clear. This is not going to be a diatribe about race and racism. We have been raised to think of slavery as something that has to do with black people — Jemimas and Toms — all working on a plantation for a master, subjected to his whims and fancies, never free to go anywhere without his leave or direction. Now this form of slavery did indeed exist, and was most insidious. The enslavement and the dehumanization of people based on physical appearance and geographical origin was probably the most disruptive method of slavery, and the most complete; whole societies were built upon the social and economic structure of the slave plantation, and the legacy of that error remains with us today, among the descendents of both the masters and the slaves. But what I am going to talk about today is something a lot less easy to categorize, and therefore much harder to fix.

You see, the slavery that existed on plantations in the Americas is not the only form of slavery that there is. Nor, ironically, is it necessarily the most destructive. Slavery is the owning of a person by someone else, to the extent that nothing the slave owns is his or her own; but slavery does not always involve the physical brutalizing of another human being. It is possible for a slave to be spiritually free; and it is equally possible for a "free" man to have enslaved his mind.

I once had occasion to interview an artist who told me that Bahamians were never slaves. When our bodies were enslaved, our minds were free, and we created Junkanoo as proof of that abiding freedom. Junkanoo is the product of a free spirit, of an unshackled mind. And he was right; students of Bahamian history will realize that although Bahamians of all backgrounds struggled with poverty and lack of education throughout most of the past, the one thing we had was our independence — not our political independence, perhaps, but our independence of spirit. We believed in ourselves, because we knew we could survive in any circumstance. We ourselves were living proof; every day we wrested food from the land and sea around us, and we did not die.

We were indeed never slaves — then. But now?

I'm going to argue that although slavery ended officially in the British Caribbean 170 years ago next August, in 2003 we Bahamians are as much enslaved as were our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. And the worst thing about this is that we have enslaved ourselves.

I heard a story recently about the Abaco citrus farmers who packaged their oranges and shipped them to Nassau. The oranges sat in the food stores and rotted; no one bought them, despite the fact that they were home-grown, and the price was lower than the imported ones. So the citrus farmers exported their oranges to Florida, where Sunkist placed little stickers on each one and re-exported them to Nassau. People bought them then.

Then there's the story about the Bahamian filmmaker who applied to various agencies and government departments for assistance in making a Bahamian feature film, which would use local crews and talent in crucial positions and might offer them all a chance of doing what they loved for pay. No one took him on; no one gave him the time of day, and he was faced with the choice of letting his dream die, of moving to the USA, or of making the project with no help at all. While all of this was going on, the same government agencies opened their arms to international filmmakers who wanted to use Bahamas as a location, and allowed them access to the country and its citizens without setting basic criteria for the hiring and payment of Bahamians on the set.

And then there's the story about the VIP who was given the best parking spaces, the softest seats, the largest meals, and the most obsequious behaviour possible, but who was never told to his face when he made a mistake. Other people spent all their time smiling at him, kowtowing to him, and worshipping him while he was looking; but the minute he turned his head he was ridiculed, criticized, and hated.

All these are slave stories. All these stories speak of people who have sold themselves into captivity, who believe that other people — Americans, other foreigners, people elected to lead — are better than the ordinary Bahamian. All these stories speak of people who have given up their integrity and dignity for apparent material gain, whether it be oranges from "America", American film dollars or connections with the rich and powerful. But in each case the gain is illusory. We pay more for oranges we could've bought directly from the growers; we prostitute ourselves to be abused and disrespected; we create a class of servants and a class of masters where there is no need for either. We no longer have to be slaves, but we have chosen to behave as slaves anyway. Our plantations are not tracts of land on remote islands; they are hotels, churches and government ministries, and our masters are ourselves.

Here's a newsflash. Slavery ended 170 years ago. Surely by now it's time for us to do what the late great Robert Nesta Marley told his Jamaican fellows thirty-odd years ago: to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, and to recognize that none but ourselves can free our minds.