Bahama Pundit

Who Were the First Bahamians?

by Larry Smith

•Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles by Dr Julian Granberry was published in 2004 by the University of Alabama Press. It is available in Nassau bookstores.

When Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 – after sailing the ocean blue - there were some 3,000 native Indian groups living in the Americas.

But the only Indians that Columbus himself saw were the Tainos of the Caribbean - including the Bahamian Lucayans - a society that the Europeans completely destroyed in a few short years.

Although Columbus and his brothers were men of their times, the brutal subjugation of Taino societies really began in 1502, under the direction of Nicolas de Ovando. Within two decades they ceased to exist as a separate population due to forced labour, warfare, disease, emigration and outmarriage.

And the whole regional culture officially expired in 1797, when the British deported the last independent group of Indians from St Vincent to Central America.

On Why Free Trade Isn't Free

by Nicolette Bethel

There's a lot of talk these days about free trade, market forces, and so on. Even I've talked about it. How can we not? The world is changing, has changed, and unless we change with it, we'll be left behind.

Half a century ago, when colonies were becoming countries and the world's leaders were no longer exclusively of European descent, becoming a nation was the most important step you could take. Gaining a voice on the world stage, being able to apply for membership to international bodies, being able to create and express one's sovereignty -- these were the things people fought for, these were what nations celebrated.

Half a century ago, though, the greatest forces were not economic, but ideological. The world was divided into two major groups. On the one side were the communist countries; on the other, the so-called "free" world.

A Hurricane Across the Green Fields of Life: How the 1918 Flu Affected the Caribbean

by Larry Smith

“So vast was the catastrophe...that our minds, surfeited with the horrors of war, refused to realise it. It came and went, a hurricane across the green fields of life, sweeping away our youth in the hundreds of thousands and leaving a toll of sickness and infirmity which will not be reckoned in this
generation.” -- Article in the Times of London on the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The Purple Death (or Spanish Flu) was born in March 1918 in the American midwest. A second, more deadly, wave of infection began in August of that year - probably in France - and continued into 1919.

This outbreak rapidly engulfed the world, killing more than 50 million people in a few months at the end of the Great War. And it is now known that the Purple Death (so named because it turned patients blue as they died) was a bird flu, similar to the one threatening us today.

Our Duty to the Environment

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

As this hurricane season produces more storms and more powerful ones, the debate on whether global warming is a contributing factor has also intensified.

There have been 22 named storms so far with 12 developing to full hurricane force, and the season still has five weeks to go.

Hurricane Wilma, having devastated Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, surged across Cuba, Florida and the northern Bahamas as Alpha was just getting started in the south. (Incidentally, the Cubans can teach others a lesson about preparedness as they have evacuated 300,000 of their citizens away from exposed areas).

Wilma at one point was the strongest hurricane ever recorded with winds up to 175 miles per hour and capable of gusts up to 185. It is chilling to imagine the damage a ferocious storm like that could do to life, property and the natural environment in a direct hit on the Bahamas.

On Immigration

by Nicolette Bethel

Much has been said of late about immigrants, especially illegal ones. By "illegal immigrants", by the way, we really mean people who come here on boats, not jets, people who sail here from the south, not the north, and people who speak a different language and who worship a different way from us.

In other words, we mean Haitians. Or Jamaicans, if we're feeling really expansive.

Send them home, we say. Even those who were here all their lives. Even those who were born here. If they illegal, they gattie go. We're a small country, after all. No space. No resources, not like our neighbours to the north. We are not the USA and Canada, with all that money up there ready to give away to the poor and tired of the world. After all, they pay no taxes, and they crowd up all our services. We cannot afford to be magnanimous. Suffering is not our business; send them home.

A Primer on Bahamian Education

by Larry Smith

This past summer scores of experts from around the country sat down in a hotel ballroom at great expense to figure out how to “transform” our failed education system. It was the first major re-evaluation of Bahamian schools since a national task force was set up in January, 1993.

What happened at this four-day meeting has implications for the 50,000-plus students in our public schools as well as our entire future as a modern society. But we have yet to receive any kind of report. To help put this critical issue into perspective, here is a primer on Bahamian education.

Protecting the Consumer

by Larry Smith

There are serious concerns about new consumer laws the government wants to enact this year to comply with free trade initiatives. But the government won't listen to the people who make the economy work.

Critics say the laws – as presently drafted – will dilute due process and politicise the marketplace by giving politicians the right to act as judge and jury over trade disputes.

The proposed laws set impractical standards for the supply of goods and services, they say, while exempting the public sector from similar scrutiny. That alone should be enough to make them a laughingstock.

Threat of a Superflu Pandemic

by Larry Smith

"The year 1918 has gone...a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all--infectious disease."
1919 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ever since the Huns crashed the Roman Empire’s 800-year party in the 5th century AD, Europeans have been terrified of invaders from the East.

But today’s invader could be even deadlier than Attila the Hun. It’s name is H5N1. It is an avian flu that has already caused the death of millions of birds – and about 60 people - in the Far East. And it has now spread to Turkey, Romania and Greece.

It is not just Europe that is threatened. Experts say the world could soon face another pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu (or Purple Death) of 1918 which - according to latest estimates - killed more than 50 million people in a few months at the end of the First World War.

That’s because scientists have found that the 1918 virus was also a bird flu, one that had mutated so that it could pass from person to person. They discovered this by actually reconstructing the extinct virus out of bits of tissue from 87-year-old autopsies.

Conjuring a Constitutional Crisis

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

There was an attempt to conjure up a constitutional crisis out of the recent manoeuvres around the office of Leader of the Opposition. But, clumsy though they may have been, those activities came nowhere near creating a constitutional crisis.

It is one thing to take advantage of a political opponent’s embarrassing situations but it quite something else to alarm the public with irresponsible talk about constitutional crisis.

No constitution can be so comprehensive and perfectly drafted as to avoid all possibility of running into serious problems at sometime or other. When that does happen, those responsible for sorting it out must rely on the spirit of the document, conventions, useful precedents and good old common sense.

The Dangers of Disorderly Development

by Andrew Allen

By some standards, Abaco has come into its own. Anyone visiting the island for the first time in a few years will be shocked at the level of growth it has recently experienced. The famed traffic light in Marsh Harbour, long a somewhat unnecessary curiosity, now increasingly serves an actual purpose, as the surrounding area develops into a real city centre.

In local government terms, Abaco’s three District II Councils and various town committees are allotted some 20% of the local government budget for the entire country, reflecting the island’s population growth.

New resorts, a harbour full of boaters and new restaurants everywhere you look signify an economy on the move. But if you blink too much you are likely to miss the signs of corresponding public investment growth in Abaco.

To put it mildly, the much-vaunted resilience of an economy driven by repeat visitors and second home owners has not been matched either by public investment in infrastructure or by robust management of local affairs and resources.