The Tribune

PUBLIC monuments play an essential role in the commemoration and celebration of significant national achievements, events and heroes. They are like visual storybooks crafted from granite, marble, bronze and various other stone and metal.

They are also crafted from the proverbial blood, sweat and tears of a people, as well as other intangible but as enduring material such as a people’s hopes, dreams, failures and values.

In a 2021 US Library of Congress blog entitled, “History in Our Backyards: Monuments and Memorials”, Kaleena Black instructs: “Monuments and memorials can reflect values, important stories, and power, and they serve as reminders that history is not just in books, but all around us. As public historian Edward Linenthal writes, ‘our choices about who gets remembered, what gets remembered, where acts of remembrance take place, and how we express the significance of remembrance is as much – or more – about the future than the past’.”

Most countries create monuments to celebrate independence and anniversaries such as jubilees, centenaries and bicentennials. To celebrate independence from British rule in 1973, a statue depicting a young black female holding an unclothed baby was commissioned in 1974 by the late Oscar Johnson.

The bronze statue, located at Prince George’s Wharf, represents the role women played in our history and celebrates national qualities such as resilience. Independence Highway on New Providence is another public marker.

At independence, Delta Airlines granted the country a granite monument bearing the coat of arms and national motto, which was placed at the entrance to the Nassau Botanical Gardens. Prince Charles laid the cornerstone for the Central Bank on July 9, 1973, as part of the celebrations.

In this Jubilee year, a significant milestone, it is telling that we have failed to create a notable public monument commemorating our freedom from colonial rule while celebrating our accomplishments.

This is more than a missed opportunity. It is a glaring lacuna in our national consciousness. It represents a failure to commemorate our history and to bequeath such a monument for future generations.

It is a sad indictment of what is missing in our national spirit in the present moment. It is an indictment of our priorities and what is desperately lacking in our sense of history. It is an indictment of the public and the political directorate.

We should collectively plead guilty without equivocation or the ritual lame excuses we sloppily offer after glaringly failing to rise to the historical moment.

While there have been a number of notable public and private celebrations, what will be remembered beyond the festivities? What tangible monument will future generations look to? Will the series of festivities seem like a blur?

When a teenager or young adult reaches their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, what public monument will they take their children and grandchildren to in order to teach them about our history? Or, will they mostly vaguely recall the parties we held?

Emancipation Park in Kingston, Jamaica, with the iconic figures of two freed unrobed slaves, one male and one female, celebrates the emancipatory spirit of the Jamaican people.

Replete with ceremonial fountains, native fauna and flora, and West African Adinkra symbols, the Park also celebrates the African heritage of the majority of Jamaicans.

In the heart of Kingston, Emancipation Park, a safe green space, daily used for recreation by many residents of Jamaica’s capital, is also the site of numerous cultural and civic events. The Park is a source of pride for Jamaicans.

The Pompey Museum and Pompey Square suggest what is possible in terms of public monuments and spaces. Many Bahamians and tourists have visited both.

Monuments and memorials are basic elements of historical and cultural commemoration. Why have we failed such a basic test of nationhood during this jubilee? It constitutes a tragedy of indifference and ineptitude.

When travelling and surveying the public monuments of a country, one gets a sense of a people’s history including what is deliberately and meticulously ignored, obscured or hyped.

Many of the statues to Confederate heroes in the United States were erected sometime after the Civil War as a way to rewrite history, to obfuscate the pernicious legacy of slavery, and to lionise those who were determined to keep slaves in bondage to serve their racist and economic interests.

The Atlanta History Center notes: “While many Confederate memorials of the 1860s through the 1880s were erected to mourn and honour Confederate dead, most Confederate monuments were created during the Jim Crow era beginning in the 1890s.”

The Center notes: “While conducting research on Confederate monuments, pay close attention to the speeches and writings of those in power when monuments were erected. Many explicitly express sentiments of Lost Cause ideology.

“Lost Cause ideology, an alternative explanation for the Civil War developed by white Southerners after the war’s end, seeks to rationalize the Confederacy. It claims that slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War.

“Instead, it claims the primary motivations for secession were threats to the US Constitution and the principle of states’ rights. It deliberately leaves millions of people out of the story, ignoring the agency of enslaved Black people in their liberation and denying the diversity of political sentiment among white Southerners.”

Winston Churchill’s quip about writing history is often misquoted. He is reported to have actually said: “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.”

The colonisers are no longer responsible for our monuments. We are! That a freed Bahamian people have failed to create and erect various public monuments is inexcusable.

What is commemorated or memorialised in monuments, whether sculptures, friezes, murals or types of displays, is a way of writing history and a proposal to future generations of how we tell our stories and who is included in the diverse narratives of a nation.

In the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa and Asia, there are many public monuments related to colonial history and times. One has to be careful in the wholesale removal of such monuments.

Some of them need to be preserved and contextualised in order to be honest and more complete in recording the sweep of history, including the wounds, scars and scabs of that history. One has to study the context of a statue or monument and its place in history.

The statue of Christopher Columbus at the entrance of Government House has courted controversy for years, especially from those who would like it removed because of the history of subjugation surrounding Columbus’s journeys to the West Indies.

Because Columbus’s journey to the Bahamas was a monumental moment in world history and Bahamian history, the narrative of this history, with its many dimensions, should be retold with attention to at times curious and intriguing details.

Sir James Carmichael Smyth was Royal Governor of the Bahamas during Pompey’s 1830 rebellion. The abolitionist governor left the colony in 1833, in great part because of the disdain of the local white elite and oligarchy.

A story in the 2017 Bahamas Handbook on Pompey suggests the need for deliberation in thinking about our public monuments.

The story notes that, “According to Dr [Keith] Tinker, in appreciation of the Governor’s pro-Emancipation views and his efforts to ameliorate slave conditions and improve the general treatment of slaves, various people of colour collected a considerable amount of funds which were used to sculpt a statue of Christopher Columbus, as a gift to the colony.”

The story continues: “It was intended to be placed in the public square at the entrance to the Houses of Parliament in Nassau but the local elite objected to a statue paid for by blacks to be erected in such a prominent location. Instead, it was placed at Peck’s Slope at the entrance of Government House.

“…The local elite commissioned a statue of Queen Victoria for the main public square. History is filled with ironies. Though Victoria was praised by slaves for emancipation, it was actually King William IV who signed the declaration of Emancipation.”

Though the statues of Columbus and Queen Victoria may be relocated and replaced with other figures, they should be preserved, with the history of both placed in historical context.

Alongside these, a new generation of statues and monuments will celebrate a broader Bahamian history and spirit. In this regard, in commemoration of the Jubilee, the Grand Bahama Port Authority has succeeded where the Government of The Bahamas and the country have failed.

The Authority recently renamed Churchill Square to Independence Square. It has erected a sculpture by Grand Bahamian artist Antoine John, of the hand of Sir Lynden Pindling holding the mace of the House of Assembly, an iconic reminder of Black Tuesday and its role in the fulfillment of majority rule and independence.

Despite our collective failing to create a Jubilee monument, we may still have an opportunity to get it right, more of which, next week.