The Tribune

By LARRY SMITH

A FEW years ago, my company — Media Enterprises — published a new edition of Race and Politics in The Bahamas, under licence from the author and the University of Queensland in Australia.

Originally published in 1981 and long out of print, Race and Politics was a groundbreaking book because it offered a straightforward examination of the racial polarisation of the day. It was written by a Bahamian-born British-Australian lawyer and academic named Colin Hughes, who liked to describe himself as a “Welsh Conch”.

Mr Hughes was born here in 1930 because his Welsh father, John Anfield Hughes, was a colonial civil servant. He was educated in Britain and the United States, married an Australian woman, and made a name for himself as a political scientist in Australia, where he died in June at the age of 87.

In a 2011 online interview he describes his background as “slightly complicated”. His grandfather was a coal miner. His father applied for a teaching job in The Bahamas, and later became chief out island commissioner and head of immigration and labour matters in the colony.

John Hughes helped run the contract, a scheme which provided migrant labour to American farms during World War II. He was posted to the West Indies Labour Organisation in Washington, DC.

At the end of the war, Colin joined his parents in Washington as a high school student. His father then got a job at the United Nations consolidating labour reports, but later returned to The Bahamas and went into business.

After completing his PhD in London, Colin passed the bar exam before returning to Nassau in 1954. He practised in the law firm of McKinney, Bancroft & Hughes for a couple of years, before marrying an Australian woman and taking a job at the University of Queensland.

“I was interested in politics but was on the wrong side of white opinion in Nassau,” he said. “I was concerned with starting a reform party that was neither white nor black, and even thought of myself as a possible candidate in a bye-election on Eleuthera at the time.”

That project was the short-lived Bahamas Democratic League, started by Tribune Publisher/Editor Sir Etienne Dupuch in 1955. According to Sir Etienne’s daughter, Eileen Carron, “My father and Colin’s father were very close friends, and dad was close to Colin because the latter was keen on politics and political systems. If Colin had remained the party might have lived, but as dad was not a political animal, the BDL eventually died a quiet death.”

As a political scientist, Colin Hughes was deeply interested in electoral politics - both here and in Australia, where he was in charge of the Electoral Commission for a time.

In the mid-fifties, he was secretary of the Bahamas Democratic League, which started out as a sort of multi-racial reform society, “more concerned with policies than office”. However, the crescendo of attacks from Bay Street on the one hand and the newly formed Progressive Liberal Party on the other led to a decision to contest the 1956 general election as a party.

Under the chairmanship of Sir Etienne, the BDL initially focused on issues like opening gateways in the Collins Wall (that separated the black population of western Nassau from the mostly white residents of the east), ending racial discrimination in hotels, and redistributing seats in the House of Assembly.

The PLP ran 14 candidates in the 1956 general election, while the BDL hoped to retain the seats of Sir Etienne and his half-brother, Eugene Dupuch, and perhaps pick up a third. Meanwhile, the ruling Bay Street group presented itself as “the backbone” of the country.

In the event, Sir Etienne and PLP Leader Henry Taylor were both defeated. The all-white Bay Street group took 21 seats, while the PLP won eight, although the votes were divided almost evenly between the two groups.

Crooked Island candidate, Eugene Dupuch, was the only BDL member of the House. And the result made it clear that reform efforts would now be led by the PLP, which had undergone a transition of its own from the original moderate leadership to the more “radical” (in the context of the times) leadership of men like Lynden Pindling, Milo Butler and Randol Fawkes.

Significantly - as historians Michael Craton and Gail Saunders pointed out - the 1956 election marked the first time that an organised party - the PLP - began acting as “a coherent parliamentary opposition”. This led the ruling Bay Street merchant-lawyer group to organise itself as the United Bahamian Party two years later. Party politics had been born.

But despite this historic development, the 1956 election produced little change in the colony’s social and economic relationships. In fact, as Colin Hughes noted, the roles that one might have expected of the UBP and PLP at this time were ironically reversed.

It was the governing UBP that wanted constitutional advancement and freedom from interference by the governor and the Colonial Office in London. The PLP, meanwhile, wanted British support for the electoral reforms that were necessary for the Bahamas to become a functioning democracy.

Colin Hughes gives an excellent account of Bahamian electoral politics and the racial polarisation that prevailed through the 1970s. His concluding chapter sums up Doris Johnson’s “quiet revolution” as “the transfer of power from the colonial power and its local allies, the Bay Street Boys, to an independent black government”.

He writes that race was always more significant than class in shaping political conflict and party competition in The Bahamas. And he was proven correct in saying in 1981 that “it is quite possible that (the PLP’s) combination of middle class leadership and working class electoral support can survive another decade or so”.

He ends with the observation that most Bahamians will find their place in the modern world “through identification with the man who fought and won the racial battle, which was the (country’s) most significant chapter in (a) long story”.

But he was writing before the full extent of the Pindling government’s collusion with foreign drug gangsters became known. And at least a decade before the regime was displaced in another major political transformation.

• Colin Hughes was professor of political science at the University of Queensland, and the first Australian Electoral Commissioner in the 1980s.

• What do you think? Send comments to lsmith@tribunemedia.net or www.bahamapundit.com