OSWALD BROWN WRITES
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 31, 2018 — My good friend Roosevelt “Roosie” Godet sent me a video of the memorial service for the late Bradley Roberts, who died on October 25 after a successful career as a politician and businessman spanning several decades, that opened up a floodgate of memories about the struggle for Majority Rule and an unpaid “debt.”
What many young Bahamians do not know and some who are old enough to recall do not “remember” is that Roosie Godet is one of the unsung heroes of the struggle for Majority Rule as a very active member of the National Committee for Positive Action (NCPA), an activist group in the PLP in the 1960s that was the “foundation” for then Opposition leader Lynden Pindling’s power base within the PLP. Other notable members of the NCPA were Arthur A. Foulkes, Warren Levarity, Jeffrey Thompson, George A. Smith, Eugene Newry, I.G. Stubbs, Bazel Nichols, Clement Maynard, George Sands, Dudley Gilbert, and Friday Butler.
Back then, Roosie was a very successful businessman as the owner of Godet’s Jewelry, located on the corner of Bay and George Streets. As one of the few black men with a successful business on Bay Street in the 1960s, Roosie Godet was also a very generous financial contributor to the party and to me personally to augment the “subsistence salary” I was paid while working with the PLP’s newspaper Bahamian Times in the mid-1960s
In fact, every time I see Roosie when I’m in Nassau, I thank him for the “financial lifeline” he often extended to me, and I shamelessly remind him of a “debt” I incurred in the early 1970s that I promised to repay and have not yet repaid. The last time I saw him several years ago, I jokingly reminded him that I had not forgotten that “debt” and he laughed and said he had “written that off” a long time ago. He insisted that he considered it to be a “gift” at the time, based on his first-hand knowledge of the operational struggles encountered by Bahamian Times in doing the excellent job it did promoting the PLP and the progressive cause.
To be sure, without the generous support of Percy Munnings, one of the major “numbers czars” in the country at the time, Bahamian Times would not have remained a viable publication. The first office of The Times was actually in a building on Wulff Road, near Mackey Street, that was owned by Percy Munnings, and he allowed those who established the newspaper – primarily members of the NCPA – to use it rent-free.
Bahamian Times was a bold publishing venture that became necessary after the PLP failed to win the 1962 general election, as had been highly anticipated, given the fact that women were voting for the first time. Its founding Editor was Arthur A. Foulkes, who became my journalistic mentor when I joined the staff of The Nassau Daily Tribune in May of 1960 as a “cub reporter.”
My respect and admiration for Mr. Foulkes, who was at then News Editor of The Tribune, increased tremendously as a result of the political decision he made in 1962 to be a candidate for the PLP in the Far East. I have written on more than one occasion about the pride that enveloped me when Uncle Arthur, as I still call him, and Arthur “Midge” Hanna became the PLP standard-bearers in the Far East, running against United Bahamian Party (UBP) candidates Geoffrey Johnstone and Pierre Dupuch.
Back then, with two party candidates running as a team, “districts” elected a senior and a junior representative, and under a devious policy called “plumper,” voters could give both of their votes to the same candidate. When the results of the Far East were tabulated, Arthur Hanna was elected as the senior representative with more than 100 plumper votes and Geoffrey Johnstone was elected as the junior representative. What made me angry as hell at the time was that Foulkes failed to be elected by far less than the 100 plumper votes received by Arthur Hanna for reasons that took me a long time to forgive those party colleagues who insisted that some supporters “plumper” Arthur Hanna because they wanted him to be the senior representative.
Of course, after he failed in his bid to be elected, Foulkes resigned from The Tribune, and along with other members of the NCPA started Bahamian Times. At the time, Arthur Foulkes was one of the highest paid members on The Tribune’s staff and he and his wife Naomi had seven young children, if my memory serves me right. Given this fact, I still consider that his decision to offer himself as a candidate in 1962 was a tremendous political sacrifice — after several others who were better situated financially declined to put their “good job on the line,” as one potential candidate supposedly insisted; hence, one of the reasons why I admire and respect Arthur Foulkes so much.
I would have joined Uncle Arthur at Bahamian Times in 1962, but he emphatically persuaded me not to leave The Tribune because Bahamian Times would not be able to afford to pay me the very good salary I was making at the time. However, I spent a lot of my spare time at the office of Bahamian Times and contributed some news articles while still at The Tribune before officially joining its staff in 1965.
After we won the historic January 10, 1967 general election, the new Premier Lynden Pindling arranged for me to go to London on a one-year journalism training course at the London Evening Standard (1968 – 1969). When I returned to The Bahamas in November of 1969, however, Uncle Arthur had been fired as Minister of Tourism a couple months earlier, after an acrimonious division developed within the leadership ranks of the PLP, just two short years after the euphoria of the January 10, 1967 election victory.
Although I became Editor of Bahamian Times on my return to The Bahamas, my tenure in that position was short-lived after I sided with the faction that later broke away from the PLP and became known as The Dissident Eight, which subsequently joined forces with moderate members of the former United Bahamian Party (UBP) to establish the Free National Movement (FNM) in 1972 following meetings held at the late Jimmy Shepherd’s Spring Hill Farms in Fox Hill.
Of course, I became the founding Editor of The Torch of Freedom, the FNM’s newspaper, but it soon became clear to the Dissident Eight that it was impossible to convince black Bahamians that some members of the UBP who had been their oppressors over the years during their struggle for majority rule now had their best interests at heart. As a result, 1972 was the beginning of the FNM’s two-decades-long struggle out of the dungeon of political obscurity, which they finally emerged from because of the dynamic leadership of Hubert Ingraham, another PLP dissident, who in the 1980s questioned the leadership of the PLP under Sir Lynden Pindling, in the same manner that the Dissident Eight did in the early 1970s.
Under Ingraham’s leadership, the FNM first became the Government of The Bahamas in August 1992, and Ingraham went on serve as Prime Minister for two consecutive terms before losing the May 2, 2002, general election to the PLP. He returned as Prime Minister from May 2007 to May 2012.
For virtually all of the FNM’s years in the political wilderness after 1972, I was essentially in self-imposed “political exile” in the United States. To explain why I previously lived in Washington, D.C., for more than 20 years before initially returning to The Bahamas in 1993, it is necessary to clarify why I have that long-overdue “debt” with Roosie Godet that was included in the “floodgate of memories” unlocked by that video Roosie sent me on the memorial service for Bradley Roberts.
In December of 1972, while my then wife-to-be Camille, who was visiting Nassau for the Christmas holidays from Washington, D.C., and I were headed to Paradise Island to see a Nancy Wilson show, I stopped by Roosie Godet’s jewelry store. He had already closed for the evening, but when he saw it was me, he opened the door and let me in.
Being the romantic individual that I have been told I was back in those days, I proposed to Camille by telling her to look at the rings on display and to choose one. Of course, I did not have anywhere near the amount of money the ring she picked cost, so I asked Roosie if I could pay him for it later. Camille and I were married in June of 1973 and I relocated to D.C. in 1974; however, we to got divorced in 1978.
I still have not paid Roosie for that ring, and I must make a concerted effort to do so the next time I visit Nassau.
