(Photo courtesy of the book by Michael Craton (2002) Pindling: The Life and Times of the First Prime Minister of the Bahamas: page 196) In 1990, then Prime Minister Lynden Pindling donned a bellman’s uniform, to deliver luggage in a hotel, in order to reinforce his message that service was not subservience. Whatever fork in the road there might have been decades earlier, a path had been chosen which locked the fate of successive generations in, for the foreseeable, indefinite future.Īfter national independence in 1973, there was really nothing left to do, but to make Bahamians feel proud about being a bellman or a maid in a hotel. Tourism and hotel work was there to stay in the Bahamas. But not for very long.Ĭivil rights and voting movements of the 1960s soon began to challenge the status quo, but in terms of the economic model, the die had already been cast. As tourism grew over the decades, this appeared to solve many economic and social problems for the country. When Bahamian labourers returned home to an already economically depressed country, the answer seemed to be domestic service on an extensive scale.ĭomestic service, low level hotel work and tourist related crafts like straw work, soon became the answer. Service was chosen more than four generations ago, when past colonial governors and governments saw that the negro population was growing exponentially, without any real employment prospects to look forward to.Īs the sponging industry declined, and farm labour employment ended in America for Bahamians in the early 1900s, mass unemployment and poverty rose.

Debates over this have only increased, as more and more mega style resort complexes rise up across Nassau’s landscape, while social and economic problems, among islanders, seemingly climb. Many contentious arguments have been made over the years, that the Bahamas seemingly traded one plantation type existence for another, when it made a tourism model, its primary economic model for the entire country.

Pindling by Michael Craton