The Tribune

Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

THE Bahamas is a place that was once dominated by colonial powers who used it to furnish their needs and desires. Our bodies were theirs and our souls, supposedly unsaved, because we were deemed not to have souls.

People were controlled through violence and coercion, which was either direct or indirect. Sex was also a tool used to control. We were treated as property and the destination was used to enrich those who were granted land titles in the islands.

Our art scene speaks to this history of illegality and exploitation, our history of piracy, slavery, emancipation and colonialism speaks to this, yet we seem to ignore all that is taught.

We were dominated for someone else’s pleasure and gain.

Women and men could be sexually exploited and had no recourse because they were someone else’s property. They had no rights. As time progressed, their rights developed, but never to the same degree of the rights of those who came to visit.

Visitors came to the Bahamas to improve their health and otherwise to improve their economic position. Sailors, as grandparents of old would say, would come and bother with the young women who were in the fields. And let’s remember that this was in the 20th century.

During slavery and even after emancipation, gendered relations were extremely controlled and commoditised. Women were units of labour, as were men. However, upper-class women were severely controlled by their inability to determine their own futures.

Yes, there were women who did not bow to this social pressure, but they were usually seen as odd, eccentric and were referred to in hushed tones or allowed to live in society but slightly outside of it.

This was usually so because someone gave them this space or they somehow created sufficient wealth to be able to survive. In the main, women were severely repressed by men, and black men and women were mostly seen as chattels, or property. Property has no rights. Without souls then, enslaved African bodies could be treated with disregard. This was arguably worsened after slavery ended and the former enslaved bodies began to ‘become’ people, yet they were more severely treated than before.

Laws were enacted to control their futures, and systems put in place to mitigate against generalised black success and empowerment. Women were also controlled by those laws. They were told that they could not do the same jobs nor earn the same living as men, but neither could black men earn the same as white men. The country was built on a system of inequality.

As the Bahamas was not a plantation economy in the same way Barbados, Jamaica or Brazil were, it is often stated that slavery was not hostile, nor the abuse that bad.

Inequality was still obvious. The exploitation of black bodies was OK here.

What is also interesting in this scenario is the lack of challenge that is allowed to class structures and legal constraints in Bahamian history, especially during the 20th century.

As bodies asserted their rights to self-determination because they were now ‘free’, all kinds of other hurdles were created to dominate.

As Bahamian agriculture waned and tourism grew, a different, less hostile form of domination occurred. Tourism created an industry of pleasure where bodies needed to be consumed as a source of entertainment and pleasure. Of course all of this flies in the face of morality and decency, however, for centuries these were not seen as being open to black bodies.

Ironically, once black bodies were allowed to be moral and decent, they became even more determined to be controlled by these rules. Women were particularly controlled by these rules and the unequal way they were imposed on society.

Tourism development meant that many locals lived ‘richer’ lives, but they were also more controlled by what was seen as acceptable in other countries. Such was the case with the US style Jim Crow system, which operated here for decades until it was finally overturned in the 1960s. However, many of the colonial laws remained in place unchallenged. These sought to quietly control the population through unequal access to rights and representation. This was especially true for women. However, black women experienced this kind of control in particular ways that would usually cause them to fall outside of what would be determined as respectable.

Interestingly, as Bahamian tourism continues to develop and prosper while governments talk of Bahamianisation through foreign direct investment and wage-labour reliance of the local community, the inequalities this system encourages remain and in fact grow.

As tourists need more services in the pleasure industry, native bodies are used to provide that pleasure, and we think nothing of this. Our young people learn quickly that they will get better tips and presents if they allow their bodies to be used.

Exploitation has a very interesting way of normalising itself and those who are consumed at work often come home and dominate in their domestic spaces. Patterns do not change and they encourage their dependents to carry on this consumptive relationship with foreign direct investment.

Also interesting, black bodies continue to be controlled by colonial laws and outdated customs. Black males often suffer unfair and unequal treatment through the way the authorities interpret the Vagrancy Act. Black males though cannot be prostitutes, but black women can. Ironically, this also opens black women up to exploitation and abuse by the law. While tourism consumes through pleasure, many officials use their power to dominate through exploitation of legal inequalities. While women’s suffrage did a great deal to change the discriminatory ways in which women were treated, we still encourage women to be treated differently than men.

Many officials and offices still refuse to allow women to carry out business without their husbands. Often, their husbands must sign for them to get bank loans, their husbands must sign for them to have surgeries. Expatriates often complain about having to have their husbands with them to go to government offices because officials will not do business with them as married women without male consent. Is this inequality?

In 2015 in Nassau, a woman can be a maid in a hotel and continue to be exploited through low wages, hard labour and the demands of the pleasure industry, but that exploitation is preferable to being unemployed. A man can have a similar relationship with that industry, but we do not see that as exploitation. Both of their bodies are consumed by a system that sees them as mere units of labour/pleasure. It does not need them to be overly educated, in fact too much education is discouraged. All the while young bodies are being controlled by unequal access to education that perpetuates their inability to move beyond certain social barriers that can only apparently be overcome through illicit means – and we wonder why there is so much crime, and we say that murders are down when in fact crime has risen.

If young boys are less educated than young girls, especially in lower socio-economic groups and are more exposed to violence and illegality but less able to access the law, is that inequality? Tourism is a fantastic industry to promote development, but it often does not promote local empowerment. In fact, it consumes those who are structurally less equal. However, tourism is not bad – a highly gendered and unequal system that encourages exploitation is the culprit.

(Kamala Kempadoo, Mark Padilla, Polly Pattullo, Emilio Pantojas all work to show tourism’s exploitative underbelly, many others work to show how the legal system and culture exploit working class communities)