The Tribune

MANY Bahamians enjoy Priscilla Rollins’ song, “Independence Morning, It’s like a Baby Borning”, a catchy tune which has delighted audiences since 1973. Ms Rollins captures much of the enthusiasm and excitement of a new day for the country. But the Bahamian nation is much older than 48 years. We are centuries older.

The analogies we create and refine about nationhood, including various metaphors and similes, play an essential part and instructive role in our national storytelling, history, aspirations, mythologising and symbolising.

In “March on Bahamaland”, Timothy Gibson employs two master metaphors from nature, including the extraterrestrial sun and the terrestrial shoal of our brilliant hues of green and blue waters.

Born at Savannah Sound, Eleuthera, in 1903, Mr Gibson traversed the archipelago as an educator and a keen observer of our natural heritage. One imagines the music he conceived and committed to composition from the sounds and colours of the Bahamian waters, flora, sunrises and sunsets.

He worked alongside his brother, CI Gibson, on Cat Island. He also served as an educator at Buckley’s and Scrub Hill, Long Island, at Georgetown, Exuma, and at a number of schools on New Providence, including Western Junior on Hospital Lane.

In this lyrical summons to national struggle and transcendence, the son of Sound, masterfully mixes his rich metaphors: “Steady sunward, tho’ the weather hides the wide and treacherous shoal.” He utilises the image of the sun three times in the National Anthem.

His metaphors are embedded in our consciousness and soul. Every fisher, most Family Islanders and city dwellers on New Providence, surrounded by the ocean, has experienced the wide and treacherous shoals that must be carefully navigated. We are enriched by sunsets daily drenching themselves in the ocean.

On independence morning we celebrate the dawn of a sovereign, independent state, not the beginning of The Bahamas, whether our peoples, our history or our resilience, including our triumph over the subjugation of colonialism and slavery.

The Bahamian nation and experience are exceedingly older than the 48 years following independence from Great Britain. A deeper appreciation of our rich history is diminished when we say, “Happy birthday” on July 10. It is more accurate and more meaningful to say, “Happy Independence!”

HISTORY

Geologically, The Bahamas has an extraordinary history. The oldest known macrofossils are stromatolites, which date back over three billion years and are rare in the world’s oceans. On the margins of the Exuma Sound, “the Bahamian stromatolites are living relatives of Earth’s oldest reefs.”

At a One Bahamas event in 2010, former Governor General Sir Arthur Foulkes, who was taught by Timothy Gibson, recalls the many hundreds of years of our history and the emergence of Bahamians as a unique people.

“We are Bahamians, and we have woven a single, rich cultural tapestry of threads from Africa, Europe and Asia, threads spun and coloured in the Americas and the islands of the Caribbean.

“We are now one people, One Bahamas, proud of our music, proud of our songs and dances, proud of our folklore, proud of our works of art…

“Most of all, we celebrate the rich diversity of the Bahamian people who have come to this gateway to the New World to form a microcosm of that New World.”

In a 2013 speech to the Rotaract Club of East Nassau, Sir Arthur reminded the country of our legacy of parliamentary democracy, one of the oldest in this hemisphere:

“The House, established in 1729, did not confer the status of a modern democracy on The Bahamas. That was a long way off; but the population, including the black descendants of slaves, recognized the possibilities that this institution offered, and that is why it became, and remains, the ultimate objective of political activity.”

At independence, we celebrate national sovereignty, not the birth of the broader Bahamian enterprise and experience.

The Bahamas, like other Caribbean jurisdictions, assimilated the contributions of many cultures into a new Bahamian and Caribbean culture, forging something new out of what Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott described as “fragments of epic memory”.

The gathering of these fragments began centuries ago and continues to evolve, a gathering, cutting and pasting captured in Junkanoo.

RESILIENCE

A brilliant and evocative video produced by a talented team of young communications professionals at the Office of the Prime Minister, celebrating our 48th anniversary, features Shadelle Major playing “March on Bahamaland” on the violin.

An accomplished violinist, Ms Major, dressed in our national colours, offers a soulful rendition of the National Anthem, musically juxtaposed with images of resilience of Bahamians in response to Hurricane Dorian and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The setting for her playing of our Anthem of resistance and struggle is the Queen’s Staircase, known as the 66 Steps, hewn out of solid limestone rock by our slave ancestors. The Steps served as a direct passage from Fort Fincastle to the City of Nassau.

The Steps were renamed after Queen Victoria. The historic irony is that though Victoria was praised by slaves for emancipation, it was actually King William IV who signed the Declaration of Emancipation.

The emancipation of slaves was not mostly about these ancestors being benevolently freed. The larger, more compelling narrative is that of centuries of struggle and resistance, including by Bahamian freedom fighters over generations. Today, one of Ms Major’s instruments of resilience, resistance and redemption is the violin.

The enduring work of decolonization, resistance to the legacy of white supremacy, and new ideas for nation-building and economic and social equality to move forward in this generation, hopefully, triumphantly, continues.

There are many more redemption songs to be composed and performed by Ms Major and successive generations, who will help us to write and to sing these songs of freedom.

In her person and her talent, Ms Major invites Bahamians, especially young people, to realise, in the sentiments of Derek Walcott, that the fragments which constitute the Bahamian nation belong equally to each of us, no matter one’s circumstance of birth, creed or ethnicity.

The violin, the goat skin drum, the cello, the clarinet, the cowbell, the church organ, the saw from rake ‘n’ scrape all belong to the Bahamian imagination and experience.

Years ago a white Bahamian politician foolishly and ignorantly declared that he could not truly celebrate the history of the Clifton National Heritage Park because this was not his heritage.

His was an historic and prejudicial amnesia. He did not understand the diverse heritage represented at the Park. Moreover, by blood and by lifeblood and by shared history, we have an intertwined history, the glories and tragedies of which are enmeshed in our collective and individual Bahamian souls.

BELONGING

The musical and operatic expressions of The Bahamas are shared rhythms of nationhood and belonging. This includes Junkanoo, which the late composer Cleophas Adderley described as operatic. He introduced the Bahamas National Youth Choir to a global musical treasury.

Our archipelago of talent includes the operatic bass-baritone Randolph Symonette, who performed on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera. It includes E. Clement Bethel’s, “Sammy Swain”.

It also includes the brilliant lawyer, Eugene Dupuch, known as the humorist Smokey Joe, who played the saw with a violin bow. He was a musician and storyteller, who possessed an eloquent quill and mind.

On July 10, 1973, a friend recalls the lowering of the Union Jack and the rising sun of a new Bahamian national standard. She observed many in the crowd stood to cheer, including a young white woman.

A black man in the crowd jeered her and told her to sit down. If he thought he was going to find support, he was bitterly disappointed as the white Bahamian triumphed: “This is my country too!” She was roundly cheered and supported as he sulked with disappointment and surprise into his shell of prejudice.

We can with exuberance and delight, resonate with Priscila Rollins at the triumph of independence. But we have a more expansive, pregnant, oft-untold and still unfolding narrative sweep of several centuries, which includes Shadelle Major’s new generation.

Even as we listen to the delightful lyrics of Ms. Rollins, we should ever remember that we have greater and more wisdom, stories, experience, examples of excellence and many more roads trod than our 48 years of sovereignty. Happy Independence, Bahamas!