International Journal of Bahamian Studies
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Slave-owners’ Compensation: The Bahamas Colony
Full text linkThis study uses descriptive statistics to provide an overview of the compensation received by former slave-owners who were compensated for the loss of their property in the Bahamas colony, that is, their slaves, after Emancipation. The data used for this study is from the University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-ownership Centre. This paper answers four questions: What was the amount of the compensation received by former slave-owners in the Bahamas colony in 1834? What was the distribution of the compensation? What is the 2017 price equivalent of the compensation paid? What would be the investment value of the compensation in 2017 using prevailing interest rates? It is shown that 1,057 awardees received £126,848.70 for 10,087 slaves in 1834. There were six different types of awardees based on the type of ownership. The 2017 equivalent of the total compensation using prices, equates to £11,588,494.36 and in terms of investment value, equates to £342,031,365.63
Do Teachers Influence High School Students’ Creativity? The Experience of University Students in The Bahamas
Full text linkThis paper identifies linkages between the experiences of high school students in The Bahamas and their creativity. University students were asked to reflect on their time in high school and recall how their teachers responded to their expressions of creativity demonstrated in their responses to questions, solutions to problems and public contributions to discussions and debate. Of 640 participants, almost 90% thought that authority figures influenced their creativity, and not necessarily in a positive direction. Around 25% of the participants claimed not to have offered “bright” ideas in class for fear of being ridiculed. Students from public schools had lower self-reported creativity scores than those from private schools. Students from homes associated with domestic violence were at a higher risk of reporting negative teacher responses to their creativity (“bright ideas”) than those students from other homes
Learning Gender-based Attitudes in The Bahamas
Full text linkGender based violence continues to be a source of concern in The Bahamas. Structural inequality between the sexes is present in the law and cultural attitudes can work to circumscribe the expectations of women. Such attitudes are reinforced through messages from various sources. This paper presents the results from an Internet-based survey of 1,279 participants to examine how Bahamian citizens learn their attitudes towards women. The most important influence on Bahamians was the participant’s mother. She, in turn, was influenced by the messages she received from faith-based sources. Official governmental sources of information and the opinions of politicians and school teachers appeared to be less influential. This disparity suggests that within The Bahamas, changes in attitudes towards women will require a more enlightened message to be taught and reinforced by faith-based organizations
The Sacred Space of Saint Paul the Apostle, Lyford Cay
Full text linkSaint Paul the Apostle, Lyford Cay, is the most westerly Catholic parish church on the island of New Providence, The Bahamas. It was established to meet the spiritual needs of Roman Catholics most removed from the island’s city, Nassau, when a new community was being developed. The paper will demonstrate how the church building blends the “modern” style of architecture of the mid-20th century as well as Church tradition in its Bahamian architectural context
Literature Inside The Tree: Teaching The Tempest in The Bahamas Department of Correctional Services Facility at Fox Hill
Full text linkThis paper seeks to assess the utility of a Shakespeare Behind Bars programme at The Bahamas Department of Correctional Services Facility at Fox Hill. It argues that, consistent with Kidd and Castano’s (2013) findings, students engaged in literary analysis practice ”Theory of Mind” and cultivate the means to narrate their own history. Students, we found, refracted their life experience to the play, reading the text in terms of social ostracism, the influences of their life course, imprisonment, and reform. They tended to relate most closely to those characters whom they saw as having learned from incarceration and who were committed to a new life course. Their insights provided a perspective on the play to which we instructors would not otherwise have had access
Historical Continuum in Bahamian Literary Thought
Full text linkThe works examined in this paper include Patrick Rahming’s “Slave Name”, written in the Bahamian post-independence era; Obediah Michael Smith’s “Wax Paper People” (2003), and Patricia Glinton-Meicholas’s “No Vacancy in Paradise” (2001). I place these works on a continuum of discursive engagement with weighty questions of ontology, existentiality, and the still profound deliberations on the issue of freedom, arguing that these works reflect an ongoing engagement with how history has shaped, and continues to shape the Bahamian identity, and the Afro-Bahamian identity more specifically
The Bahamas in International Intrigue: Lighthouses and Cay Sal Bank
Full text linkBy the early 19th century after a series of wars with France, Spain and the United States of America, Britain jealously guarded every inch of her West Indian colonies. The United States of America’s request for cession of strategic plots of land in The Bahamas for lighthouses was considered by Britain with mistrust. Relations between Britain and its former colony had been strained since the War of Independence and the War of 1812. The ideology of the Monroe Doctrine sought to expand United States territory and economic power but Britain did not want that expansion to be into her sovereign territory.
Of further concern to Britain was that one of the areas requested, the Cay Sal Bank, of strategic importance to the United States of America, was at the time contentiously claimed by both the British colony of The Bahamas and the Spanish colony of Cuba
How to Choose and Work with Lawyers and Clients: A Bahamian and Caribbean Perspective
Full text linkApart from the substance of a transaction or dispute, what factors should inform the decision to choose or work with a particular lawyer or client? This article, born of a series of conferences on the subject, deals with conflicts of interest, lawyer-client communication, attorney-client privilege, retainers, due diligence, engagement letters and whether lawyers can engage in alternative business structures other than partnerships. These are all pressing topics relating to law practice as we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21st century
The Politics of Space: A Reflection on Remapping
Full text linkSea bathing shall be permitted at or from the public property between the western boundary of the British Colonial Hotel and Nassau Street between the hours of 9 a.m. and 12 noon and 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. only. (“Sea Bathing Rules,” 1938)
Finally we’re inside
The gated community
Finally with Massa inside
The gated community
Savages singing the blues
Safe within the pink wall
(Manoo-Rahming, 2010, p. 79)
Place and space are vital ingredients to Caribbean success in tourism. Space and how we live in it is historically and politically or geopolitically determined beyond our lives. The Bahamas and Puerto Rico share a particular resonance as their spaces are being repacked and re-commercialized as parts of an elite geographical zone where the rich come to play and stay but avoid the crowds. So, public spaces, the coast and beaches, are being taken as privately owned and rezoned spaces for high-end enjoyment. In the last two decades, this privatization of space has taken over in Puerto Rico and The Bahamas in disturbing and interesting ways. Many locals buy into the offer of jobs in exchange for international development or Foreign Direct Investment as government eases its way out of governance in the wake of climate-change-powered super hurricanes and the resultant green gentrification. So, while small coastal communities succumb to the dream of progress couched in land sales and increased land prices, local access to regular lives disappears under high-end gated communities and private islands