By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 17, 2019 – I generally listen to Wendall Jones’ ISSUES OF THE DAY show on LOVE-97 radio on a daily basis and consider it to the best news talk show in The Bahamas, primarily because Wendall is a very knowledgeable veteran journalist who engages his call-in audience in intelligent discussions on the various issues.
I often send Wendall an email with a comment on an issue that I feel I could make a pertinent contribution, as I did this morning when the topic of discussion was the fate of the Haitians who have been displaced by the total obliteration of the Mud shanty town populated by Haitian nationals in Abaco; however, I sent the email around 12: 50 p.m., and it was probably too long for Wendall to read on air before the show’s sign-off at 1:00 p.m. and entertain responses that it may have generated.
Consequently, because I consider what I had to say in my email fully deserves to be included in the discussions about the plight of Haitian migrants in The Bahamas – legally and illegally – here’s what I said in my email:
“The extreme level of xenophobia that exists among Black Bahamians against our Haitian brothers reveals a frightening lack of knowledge about the history of the Haitian people and the proud African heritage that they share with Black Bahamians who can trace their ancestral roots to Mother Africa.
When I became involved in politics in The Bahamas as Black Power Advocate, I was a young journalist working with The Tribune in the early 1960s and one of my “heroes” was the great Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Black insurrection against Haiti’s French colonizers. Another one of my heroes was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who subsequently established the first Black independent country in this hemisphere in 1804.
It’s unfortunate that far-too-many internal revolutions in Haiti have reduced that country today to being the poorest country in this hemisphere. Haitians are a proud and hard-working people, and I have advocated in editorials I wrote as Editor of the Nassau Guardian and Freeport News, at different times, that an organized effort should have been made to legally absorb Haitians into our society through a system similar to THE CONTRACT, under which Bahamians legally worked in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Their current displacement as a result of the ravages caused by Hurricane Dorian could be a good starting point to begin a serious discussion on the possibility of implementing my suggestion.”
Let me add to the suggestions I made in that email to Wendall Jones by responding to an argument made by one of the callers to the show that The Bahamas’ population is too small to accommodate too many Haitian migrants. Many Bahamians may not be aware of the fact that if all of the islands of The Bahamas were grouped together as one landmass, our country would be roughly the same size as Jamaica, which has a population of slightly less than 3 million compared to The Bahamas’ estimated 400,000 population, more than 240,000 of whom are packed into New Providence.
When you consider the fact that Andros – the island of my birth, which is the largest of islands of The Bahamas and 27 times the size of New Providence – has a population of less than 10,000, clearly the conclusion can be reached that there is a lot of room in The Bahamas for a “massive influx” of immigrants.
What’s more, without question, Bahamians ancestrally have a great deal more in common with Haitians than Europeans and Filipinos, two ethnic groups that have been successfully integrated into Bahamian society; so why is it that there is such a strong objection from Black Bahamians to the assimilation of our Haitian brothers and sisters – our fellow Africans in the diaspora – into the population of The Bahamas.
Many natives of the Philippines came to The Bahamas as domestics to work in the homes of well-to-do Black families, but a good number of them came to the country as medical professionals, and based on their posts in social media they are a very cohesive seamless group that Bahamians can learn a “thing or two” from as far as the elimination of social class barriers are concerned.
Of course, Europeans in The Bahamas are the beneficiaries of a status in life that Black Americans describe as “white privilege,” which whites established as their right going as far back as the slave trade when the sun never set on the British Empire, and France, Spain and other colonial powers of that era transported slaves from the African continent to North and South America, The Bahamas, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean countries.
It is within this context that the vituperative comments about Haitians in The Bahamas on the ISSUES OF TODAY show were extremely disappointing.
