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Published: April 1st 2008
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I didn’t make it to the Huey Lewis concert on Sunday night. My eye was still a little uncomfortable, and just as I had suspected the tickets started not at $79 but $99. I had a beer at the casino bar and watched the craps for a while, then had an early night.
As you can see from the comment on yesterday’s post, I now have my camera back. Thank you, Beth-K. And as for the shots of people you left on the camera, with their heads cut off, nice touch! It’s good to know that someone is reading the blog.
Today I did not go back to the Registrar’s Office. I decided to wait until after meeting a couple of the contacts in the offshore sector that I had lined up. After speaking to them, I’d have a better idea of what sort of approach I should make to the issue of Headless Ltd (2008) and whatever else might be involved.
In the meantime I have been driving around the island of New Providence with James, a somewhat disaffected Bahamian. As he drives (erratically, like everyone here) he gives me a potted history of the islands, and specifically New Providence, the island on which Nassau is to be found. Until 1973 the Bahamas was a British colony, so he’s pretty acerbic when he mentions the British heritage of his country.
To me, ‘Bahamas’ is a by-word for exotic luxury, the kind of place that rock stars hung out, where millionaires went on holiday. And if you speak to its present residents about the 1950s, 60s and 70s, many of them say that the place was better then: cleaner, more vibrant, more characterful; less crime, less delinquency, less drug addiction. This is the story I heard several times at last Friday’s tea party, that the Bahamas is not quite what it was, that standards are slipping.
That, though, is the opinion of white residents. James, I should say, is black, and this is more significant than I thought. I met him at a diner this lunchtime. He is a lawyer by profession, but works for a drugs rehabilitation program these days. Many of the island’s white residents have never seen the island, he told me, after I explained that I was here to learn more about the islands. The real folk, he said, live ‘over the hill, behind the wall.’ So that’s where we are going.
If you’ve been to Nassau by ship, you will have disembarked at the harbor and found yourself on Bay Street, a low-rise shopping street full of liquor stores and jewelry shops which you immediately think must be the usual rough/cheap area that you tend to get adjacent to city train stations and ports. But no, despite its skid row air, Bay Street is the main strip in Nassau. Apparently, young men are constantly trying to sell you drugs all along Bay Street. I’ve been up and down every day since I arrived, often several times, and no one has so much as passed me a joint.
Parallel to Bay Street (which runs along the north coast of the island) is Shirley Street, after which the terrain rises steeply for a couple of hundred yards. Here can be found the elegant Governor’s Residence, looking down on the harbor.
This is as far south as most tourists will get. Almost all the hotels are on the north side of the island, close to the beaches. In any case, the kind of place where you are advised not to look anyone straight in the eye (as James advises me as we go over the hill) is probably going to have a hard time selling itself as a half-day bus tour destination.
We are ‘over the hill’, and soon we pass ‘behind the wall’, a division running north-south formed by the old walls of a private orchard and fruit garden built in colonial times for the British Governor. This is where the island’s poor have traditionally lived. And poor in the Bahamas traditionally means black.
I was shocked at how deep the poverty here appears to be here. Wooden-board houses, rusty tin roofs, tiny, tumble-down shacks. We snake through a winding side-road and see a weird kind of semi-rural, semi-urban wasteland-cum-junkyard of badly repaired hovels, the odd bit of a dead car here and there, scowling young black men laying about in the sun. Some of the wooden shacks are no bigger than a garden shed. Here and there are massive black SUVs and Hummers with their windows blacked out.
“See that,” James says, pointing to one of the sheds. It has no windows, just wooden shutters. He explains that in the past these sheds would have had a palm leaf thatch roof. “My grandma lived her whole life in one of those.” He slows the car. “You remember when your Prince Charlie comes and graciously gave us independence?”
I don’t remember (I was six years old), but I know that he came, in 1973.
“Well, it was about a mile thataways,” and he points up towards the hill. “And in those days nobody down here had water or electricity. That’s what you Brits did for the people of the Bahamas. Nothing.”
He goes on to deliver a short but memorable lecture on modern Bahamian politics. The gist of which is that millionaires and hotels merely gave the Bahamas the opportunity to work as chambermaids and bell hops. The Brits also gave the islands a culture of corruption, and a tradition of official aloofness. (If the government wants to ignore you, he tells me, they just “tune you out”; there’s no sense of moral imperative here, politics is an incredibly cynical affair. And it’s all the fault of the Brits.)
“What about offshore?” I ask.
Finally he stops the car. To our left is a hut house nestling under a tree. It has a small veranda and an old woman sits on it. The place is stained dark with mildew and damp, and looks ready to sag in on itself, as it couldn’t possibly get through another of the ferociously humid summers they have here.
“What about offshore?” he says.
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