Bahamas, The
Independent state in the Caribbean, consisting of an archipelago of about 700 islands extending from Florida to the eastern tip of Cuba.The Bahamas may be best known as the setting for one of the most charged events in history: the “discovery” of the New World by European explorers. The exact place that Christopher Columbus first landed in the Americas has long been debated. Many sources have long believed it to be Long Bay; other possible sites may be San Salvador Island, Cat Island, Samana Cay, or one of several other islands in the Bahamas. But historians agree that Columbus and his crew were in the waters of the Bahamas when they came ashore on the morning of Friday, October 12, 1492. In this way, the Bahamas became the backdrop for the cultural encounter that would eventually bring Europeans, Africans, and Asians to inhabit the Americas and the
West Indies.
European Colonization
The first known inhabitants of the Bahamas were the Lucayans, an Arawak people who appear to have settled several islands between 500 and 600 C.E. Although some historians have hypothesized that the name
Bahamas comes from the Spanish baja mar (shallow sea), it appears to reflect a much older Lucayan word for what is now Grand Bahama Island. Like many Arawaks, the Lucayans supported themselves with subsistence agriculture and fishing and were known as a peaceful people. In 1559 the Spanish explorer and theologian Bartolomé de
Las Casas wrote that the Lucayans had outshone all other nations “in gentleness, simplicity, humility, peaceful disposition, tranquillity and in other virtues.” But the Lucayan population, like many other indigenous groups in the Caribbean, was completely destroyed within fifty years of its first contact with Columbus and the outside world.
A journal entry Columbus made within days of first landing in the Bahamas betrays his intentions toward the people who already lived there. He noted that “when your Highnesses so command, they can all be carried off to Castile or held captive in the island itself, since with fifty men they would all be kept in subjection and forced to do whatever may be wished.” Instead of enslaving the Lucayans in the islands that were already their homes, the Spanish government approved a plan to relocate these “idle people” to the Spanish colony at Hispaniola (now
Haiti and the
Dominican Republic). The Lucayans were eventually wiped out through a combination of the new European diseases to which they were exposed and the harsh treatment they received as slaves.
The Spanish kept their colonial claim to the Bahamas, but they did not view the islands as useful enough to establish a separate colony. Instead they focused on islands with greater mineral wealth. Puritan migrants from the English colony at
Bermuda established the first European colony in the Bahamas on Eleuthera in 1647. These colonists were seeking the same religious freedom as the Puritan settlers in Massachusetts, and chose the name Eleuthera after the Greek word for freedom. A second settlement followed in 1666 on another island, which the new migrants named New Providence. After several battles over the territory with
Spain, England's rights to the Bahamas were upheld, and the Bahamas remained a British crown colony until the late twentieth century.
Slavery in the Bahamas
The earliest English Bahamians were generally small-plot farmers, occasionally supplementing their farming income by piracy and looting shipwrecks. The islands were known as a key base for Bluebeard and other pirates through the first decades of the eighteenth century. Most of these white colonists were not large landowners, so African slavery developed more slowly in the Bahamas than in several nearby islands. But it did develop, gradually changing the Bahamas into a majority-black population.
The first black Bahamians were free immigrants who arrived when Bermuda decided to banish all of its free blacks, and some of its more “troublesome” slaves, to Eleuthera. As late as 1788, the black population on Eleuthera was still mostly free. But in other parts of the islands, most of the earliest black Bahamians were
Yoruba,
Kongo,
Igbo, Mandingo,
Fulani, and
Hausa West Africans and their descendants who had been stolen from their homes to serve as slaves for the English planters. By 1734 more than a third of Bahamians were black slaves, and another 5 percent were free people of color. The first Bahamian slave laws had been passed in 1723, restricting the mobility and rights of black Bahamians. In the text of those laws the terms Negroes, Indians, and slaves were all used interchangeably, indicating clearly that even black Bahamians who were not enslaved were also not completely free.
In the late 1700s the Bahamas became a popular refuge for British Loyalists from the American colonies who chose to flee as the revolution approached. Many of these were Southern slaveholders who brought their slaves with them, and as a result, the black presence in the Bahamas also grew rapidly. By the 1780s blacks formed the majority of the Bahamian population.
While some early visitors described what they felt was the comparatively decent treatment of Bahamian slaves, black Bahamians were certainly no more “content” to be slaves than any other enslaved individuals. The persistence of advertisements for runaway slaves (maroons), and the existence of maroon settlements designed to harbor those former slaves safely, make this clear. The first Bahamian slaves often served as domestic or farm help for their owners, who usually could afford only one or two slaves. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century there were several white Bahamians wealthy enough to own hundreds of slaves, sometimes spread out over several farms. The great majority of Bahamian slaves continued to serve as domestic and field workers, with smaller numbers employed as salt mine workers, mariners, tradesmen, or midwives.
Emancipation and Economics
The abolition of slavery in all British territories in 1834 freed 10,000 black Bahamians, who were thus ready to find a new role in Bahamian society. During the period of apprenticeship that lasted until 1838, former slaves were obligated to remain on their former owners' land in return for some form of payment that was agreed to individually. Even after apprenticeship had ended, many black Bahamians chose to remain employed as farmers and fishermen, the occupations most Bahamians had traditionally pursued. Those who were able to learn a craft or receive a higher education were quick to take advantage of these opportunities as well. In this way, some newly emancipated slaves were able to lay the foundation for the black middle class of tradesmen, teachers, ministers, doctors, and lawyers that would continue to grow.
In the 1860s, during the American
Civil War, the economy of the Bahamas experienced a short windfall when the islands became a key strategic site for the pro-slavery Confederacy. The southern states avoided President Abraham Lincoln's blockade of their own ports by diverting activity through the Bahamas instead. By this time, the town of
Nassau on the island of New Providence had emerged as the Bahamas' key city and port, and it was there that the activity was centered. The bulk of the fortune made from the blockade running went to a small group of white Nassau merchants and ship owners, but some blacks did benefit from the boon as workers in the warehouses and at the docks. Once the war ended, however, many Bahamians returned to agricultural occupations, and by the 1890s the most important economic activities for most Bahamians included sponge fishing and sisal farming. Sponging, in particular, became the mainstay of the country's economy, and going “on the mud” to collect the sponges became the primary occupation of thousands of Bahamian men.
By the turn of the century, a new economic trend had begun to change the fabric of Bahamian society. The advent of the railroad in southeastern Florida led to a tremendous economic boom in that region, and with work so plentiful, between 10,000 and 12,000 people emigrated to Miami between 1900 and 1920—approximately one of every five Bahamians. The trend slowed somewhat after the United States placed quotas on the number of immigrants who could come from the Caribbean, but even so, this migration created a permanent connection between the Bahamas and the United States. From this point on, there would also be cultural, economic, and psychological differences within many Bahamian families between those who chose to live abroad and those who chose to stay at home.
At home, similar divisions arose between Bahamians who chose to remain on more rural islands and those who migrated to New Providence and Nassau to seek better economic opportunities. In the 1920s another temporary economic boon flowed from the United States to Nassau. Just as Confederate blockade runners had used Nassau in the 1860s, so Prohibition runners used the port to circumvent the 1919 law that had made alcohol illegal in the United States, once again creating a demand for labor in a host of related industries. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, economic growth dried up once again and many Bahamians returned to sponging. But this time, a series of hurricanes, the effects of overfishing, and finally a deadly bacterial disease that spread through the sponge beds led to the sudden demise of the country's most stable industry. Within a few years, tourism replaced sponging as the basis of the Bahamian economy.
The development of the tourist industry in the 1940s and 1950s led to even more urban employment for black Bahamians. As hotels, restaurants, airports, and casinos were built in Nassau and the newer city of Freeport, new jobs opened up for taxi drivers, porters, cooks, domestics, and waiters. Yet these positions only heightened the basic inequalities that remained in the Bahamian social system: black Bahamians served white tourists in facilities they were forbidden to use themselves, and in a style that most of the country could never afford. These social inequalities stemmed largely from the political inequalities that still existed.
Blacks in Bahamian Politics
Although the Bahamas were 80 to 85 percent black, by the middle of the twentieth century they were still governed by the same small group of white elites who had always been in power. This group of politicians was nicknamed the Bay Street Boys, after the Nassau thoroughfare where many of them owned businesses. The islands' political districts were drawn in such a way that white voters were represented in disproportionately large numbers, but it was also true that black Bahamians had never organized a viable political challenge to the existing leadership. This changed in 1953 with the formation of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP).
The PLP modeled itself after the Peoples National Party (PNP) in
Jamaica and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the United States. Like them, its primary goals were to ensure equal representation, economic opportunities, and rights for black Bahamians. Lynden Pindling, a London-educated lawyer, quickly became the party's first leader, and in 1956 the PLP won six seats in the House of Assembly. That same year, with the PLP's influence, the assembly passed an Anti-Discrimination Resolution forbidding segregation in public places—a major step forward in the Bahamian political struggle, and the first mark of the PLP's influence.
In 1958 Nassau hotel owners granted a white-owned tour company a contract to carry all of the passengers traveling between the airport and hotels. When black taxi drivers called for a work stoppage in protest, many blacks in other tourist industries chose to stop work in support of the strike. The result was a general strike that shut down the entire tourist industry for nineteen days—and that ended in victory for the taxi drivers. The PLP had supported the strike, and the effort was a powerful sign to black Bahamians of just how much power they could hold.
The passage of the law granting women the right to vote in 1961 gave blacks even more hope as the size of their electorate doubled. But when the next general election was held in 1962, even though the PLP won 44 percent of the vote, it won only eight of the thirty-three available seats as a result of the unfair districting. It became clearer than ever that the time for equal representation for black Bahamians was long overdue.
The issue reached a dramatic crescendo on Black Tuesday—April 27, 1965. On that day, a debate on the redistricting question in the House of Assembly had again ended with white representatives stating that they were unwilling to consider reapportioning the seats fairly. Pindling, by then one of the PLP's assembly members, rose at the end of the debate to state that he did not want to be part of a government that did not represent its people fairly. Declaring that the true authority belonged outside with the people, Pindling took the wooden mace that had been the symbol of parliamentary authority in the Bahamas for 165 years and threw it out the window, where it broke in half in the middle of the crowd that had gathered outside. Predictably, the act met with shock and charges of blasphemy by white assembly members, but the drama reflected the changing tide in Bahamian politics. Two years later a new redistricting act was finally approved, and when the PLP finally won a majority in the April 1967 general election, Pindling became the country's first black prime minister.
With an elected black leader, the new government moved quickly to increase educational and other spending in black areas and to limit the role of foreign capital and labor in the country. In 1971 Pindling also announced that the government of the Bahamas would seek independence from the United Kingdom within the next two years, following the example already set by many other West Indian nations. This idea was met with hesitation by some white Bahamians, many of whom both cherished their symbolic ties with Britain and also were fearful that black Bahamians had not had enough experience to be capable of self-government. The island of Abaco, the only part of the country that was not predominantly black, went so far as to unsuccessfully petition Parliament to let Abaco remain an independent Crown colony. But for most Bahamians, it was clear that the time to petition for independence had come. In a general election held in September 1972, Bahamians voted to support a petition for independence, and in May and June 1973 the British House of Commons and House of Lords, respectively, voted to accept it. On July 10, 1973, the Bahamas became an independent country.
Bahamian Identity
The three decades since independence have brought challenges and advances for the Bahamas. The country's reputation as a tourist paradise has grown, and currently about three million visitors travel to the Bahamas each year, accounting for 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product. The Bahamas has also developed into a major financial services center. These industries are unable to support the entire country, however, and in an economy that has few other robust industries, unemployment has often hovered as high as 25 percent. In the 1980s the Bahamas were affected by increases in drug addiction and crime that were connected to an increase in illegal drug trafficking through Bahamian ports, a problem that reached even the highest levels of government.
Pindling, often praised for his charismatic leadership, continued to win reelection throughout the 1970s and 1980s. But his image was irrevocably tarnished after a 1983 investigation charged his administration with corruption related to the drug trade. The PLP managed to hang on to power in the 1987 election, but in 1992 the Free National Movement (FNM) came to power, and Hubert Ingraham became prime minister. Ingraham and the FNM were reelected in 1997, but the PLP regained control of the assembly in May 2002 and Perry Christie took over as prime minister.
Despite political and economic problems, the last thirty years have been key in forming a strong national Bahamian identity. National traditions such as the junkanoo festival celebrate the country's connection with its slave and African past. Many contemporary writers and artists are choosing to embrace their specifically Bahamian and African cultural legacies. The foreword to the 1973
Bahamian Anthology describes Bahamian literature as a combination of “the lexicon of Europe, the tonal textures of Africa and the syntax and special peculiarities of the Caribbean and the Americas.” Noted black Bahamian playwright Winston V. Saunders describes the new consciousness of Bahamian identity in this way: “Culture in the Bahamas today is an amalgam of our British heritage, our African heritage, and the effects of our closeness to North America. Our language is English … Our courts follow the English system … We wear [English and European fashions] with consistency … Marry the above with the practice of obeah, the gyrating movements of the ring-play, the pulsating rhythm of junkanoo and the goatskin drum, the hand-clapping jumpers, the use of bush medicine … and you almost have a Bahamian. The final touches come in the form of the American jerry curl, the American afro, American television.”
As Saunders says later, “Our paintings, our Sunday sermon oratory, our plays and our batik fashions, our straw-works and our Smokey Joe stories, our brightly painted homes and our satirical cartoonists—all these and more attest to the vibrancy of the Bahamian people.” The Bahamas that met the world in 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing, was a country filled with just such vibrant, richly multicultural citizens, ready to display their pride in what one Bahamian poet has called their “beautiful and blessed land.”
See also
Afro-Caribbean Migrations to the United States;
Maroonage in the Americas;
Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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