On Tourism (29 January 2004)

I want you to do me a favour. Take a minute and write a short paragraph describing The Bahamas.

Done? Good. Now let me guess: you wrote about the beautiful blue water, the white sandy beaches, the coconut trees, and the warm and friendly people. (Those people who didn't pick any of these things skip two paragraphs and read on.)

Now tell me how many times you went to the beach in the past year, how much of that gorgeous water you swam in, how many coconuts you ate from the shell, and how many people you were warm and friendly to on the way to work this morning.

We are living a myth. It's not our own myth. It is a myth created beyond our realities by people who live in cold cities with industrial economies, who dream of endless sunshine and warm water and sand that's as white as a wedding. Most of us live out of sight of the sea, and have to drive or catch bus to get anywhere near it. Most of us relate more to our fruit trees and our shade trees than we do to the coconut palm — we rest in the shade of silk cottons and ficus, we grumble at the dirt dropped from our beautiful and troublesome poincianas, and we snack on jujus and guineps far more than we feast on fresh coconut these days. Our coconut water is as likely to come from the food store as from the shell; and as for the sun — well, very few of us spend more time out in it than we have to. And as for the friendliness of the people: well. Warm and friendly we may be, but we're also stressed-out and overworked and underpaid and forced to sit in more traffic than is good for any human.

Tourism created the myth. We sell it, but we don't live it. In the words of Marion Bethel: in our air conditioned service, we are blessed waiters of grace divine.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

In 1994, I had the good fortune to travel to Washington D.C. with the Bahamian contingent to the Smithsonian's Festival of the Americas. For those people who weren't able to go, or who were too young to register that event, it was not unlike last year's Heritage Festival, only bigger.

The main players on that trip (let no one fool you) were the tradition bearers, groups and individuals who weren't normally the kinds of people who performed for the public, but who were chosen because they practised Bahamian culture almost unconsciously at home. Thus people such as the Johnson Family of Cat Island were selected to go, because they had developed a specific kind of singing style in New Bight that excited the researchers; people such as Kingston Brown of Andros, Cecile Dunham of Spanish Wells, Samuel Collie of Mayaguana and Pearl Hart of Nassau were picked because the way they did what they did (thatch roofs, make quilts, build boats, and dance the quadrille) was unlike anything that appeared in hotel floorshows in Straw Market stalls. What the Smithsonian Institute was looking for were people who lived Bahamian culture.

It is no surprise, then, that the majority of the tradition bearers who went to Washington were people over sixty-five years old; many of them are now dead. It may be some surprise that it was what these people did on the Mall in Washington — the tents in which the music and dance were performed, the porches on which the stories were told — that attracted some of the largest crowds of that week. (The other thing was Junkanoo). What the Americans wanted to see was lived culture, not the stuff that was packaged for tourists.

Now you may say: but those people weren't tourists. They were Americans at home in their capital, and what they liked in Washington they might not like here.

And I would say you're wrong. Washington D.C. is a tourist town. Many of the people who pass through are visitors, domestic tourists who want to see, touch and feel their own history. They are not consuming sun, sand and sea; they are consuming heritage. They consume it in Washington. They will certainly consume it here.

As I write, the Ministry of Tourism is hosting its First Annual National Tourism Conference. It's not a conference for hotels and hoteliers; it's a conference for us all, because the Ministry has recognized that it isn't enough any more to promote sun, sand and sea. Lots of people have that, and many countries with beautiful seas and beaches are also far more exotic and exciting that the Bahamas. The fact that we're close to the USA still helps us a little; but our proximity is counterbalanced by the price of our product. These days, it's often just as cheap — or cheaper — to go further, and tourists get more bang for their buck: in those more far-flung destinations, they get some culture as well as a beach.

We have to change our approach to the way we do tourism, and we have to change it now.

You see, people will pay for the very things we think we need to hide away. In the same way that the Americans in Washington flocked to hear the old people sing for them, tourists in the Bahamas will pay to visit Bain Town, Grants Town, Fox Hill, Gambier and Adelaide. They will purchase rides on mailboats, and brag about travelling the "native" way. They will buy our home-grown grits and go home with jars of cornmeal they watched the farmer grind and fan for them, and they will spend good money to rake their own salt. Unlike many of us, visitors would prefer to eat Bahamian bananas from the packing house than perfect yellow crescents with blue stickers on them; they would be charmed with tangerines or grapefruit from the tree.

There is no need for us to clear more bush, build bigger resorts, or create more theme-park hotels to draw the tourists here. All we need is to know ourselves, and to open our way of life to them. It is that way of life that is our richest resource; it is that we have to market in the global marketplace, where our prices are higher than other people's, where our proximity makes us too familiar. Who we are makes us unique. It is our selves that we have to offer to the world.

And the world will come.