By NICOLE BURROWS

MORE than 700 years ago, a “peaceful” people inhabited these islands we now call home. We imagine that they were, given their isolation, content with how they came to be here. We will never know the true extent of their own inner peacefulness, or the extent to which they were savage even unto themselves. But we know they lived alone simply and fairly easily with nature as their only limitation or adversary.

Then came the Europeans in their conquering European ways, hell bent on Catholicising the world of heathens who didn’t share their beliefs, via Christopher Columbus, a man looking for financial support from the Spanish king and queen to be a “discoverer” of the East Indies. He happened upon the peaceful people of the now Bahama Islands, discovering nothing other than the fact that these people already lived here.

Things were okay for five minutes until the “visitors” decided they didn’t want to visit anymore, they wanted to stay, they wanted to own the place and take what they could from it, hoard some of it and send the rest back to their people across the water. And all hell broke loose and the peaceful people were ultimately annihilated.

Pause for a moment and imagine you are one of the Lucayan people. You watch these massive ships roll up into your neighbourhood and people disembark who don’t speak your language. What do you do? Do you invite them ashore and become friends? Do you become so mesmerised by what they could bring you from their motherland that you totally miss the fact that they must want something in exchange for their “gifts”?

They bring disease and they threaten your people’s existence, but you don’t know it and you let them in anyway. And then one day you are outnumbered and they kill off most of your people when you finally reach your breaking point and retaliate, and they become the new owners of your once peaceful home.

Then more of Europe joins the party and they fight each other for this new place full of riches to call their home. People who were sent by Spain and eventually Mother England, and people who broke away from Mother England and wanted nothing more to do with her all wanted to escape to these islands you now call home.

Ironically, they all came and they brought Mother England’s mechanisms with them, the very mechanisms they were eager to leave behind. And when the original native inhabitants were no longer available to be enslaved, the European conquerors worked a deal with Mother Africa’s equally despicable leaders and purchased or traded for shiploads of human capital, the enslaved Africans, across a vast ocean.

Anyway, after many, many years of beating the dying horse of slavery, when these humans of African origin decided they wanted rights because they were people too, the Europeans left again. And in between all of that these islands had temporary “visitors” of all sorts, including the pirates and buccaneers, all general misfits looking for some quick money and easy living.

But by the time slavery became illegal and colonists of Mother England could no longer own other human beings, there was really not much left to be taken and there were so many of these once-enslaved African people left behind that the Europeans decided it was no longer in their interest to hang around like before, especially when they could settle other places with less headache.

Enough of them hung around until the former slaves proliferated and became a majority and decided they wanted ... deserved ... more rights and were going to fight to get them. Well, who fights a majority they once enslaved, right?

And slowly but surely the Africans became the majority in The Bahamas, organising themselves just enough to break free of their colonial rulers of the past. The existing citizens at this point are British and subjects of the British crown. But then the organised majority says we are Bahamians and we want to be free of oppressive English rule. So they give Mother England the middle finger, remarkably with no conscionable plan other than to take over, and to take the rules she once used to govern and tweak them for their own use.

But, then what?

What do you do when you’ve cut off the nose to spite the face? Where does the money come from now to support the nation you just created? Suddenly, you’ve just inherited responsibility for the lives of many people and you have no real plan in place to take them from this point to a successful future.

And you don’t scare off all the people who used to bring trade and industry to the islands so now you need to find new trade and industry. You clean out the few blossoming agriculturalists because “dis we tings” and “cause you in charge now, son”, and nobody could be more industrious than you. And the end result is that you close down farms on other islands, destroying what works in order that your loyal supporters get to open their own farms. And then that fails.

But you still need more money to run this new country. Back to square one. Drug trafficking is an option, but you can’t do that too boldly or the world and sister America will scorn you to kingdom come for your complicit behaviour. Still, everyone knows that behind the scenes something untoward is happening, when your people start becoming drug addicts and other versions of destitute and criminal behaviour is born out of abuse and depravity.

But wait. Those people you once kicked to the kerb, they have money right? Yes!

So let’s now invite them back over, the Europeans and now the Americans, call them tourists, cater to their every need, because The Bahamas is where people come to escape anyway, wait on them hand and foot because we already know how to do that since we were once slaves and tell them to come on over for a vacation. And let’s build a pink and purple eyesore high into the sky so even more of these visitors can come over.

Are we onto something? Let’s call this here escape route an industry! Tourism, which was just around on a very small scale, now becomes the sole focus of the future. You chuck all your eggs in this basket because the dollar signs are flashing in front of you and, you know, it’s cleaner than the drug money (which finds a permanent home in the economic background anyway.)

For decades, you pour your resources into this tourism and, behold, the new slavery is born. But it’s a catch-22, because your people can live better now with more money and ready access to American currency and things they love to have. But what is the trade-off? Boy we living good, ey? And it works for a while. Because your people, the used-to-be slaves, the ones you now have great responsibility providing for, now have money in their pockets all the time and they can buy things and travel the world and live higher than they did before.

Throw into that mix a greater dependency on foreign resources, to the exclusion of developing your own resources with that foreign money from tourism. Instead of taking the foreign money to develop your healthcare system, “cause Bahamians like to make babies”; schools, because all these babies need education; and industry, because something has to be left when the tourism money dries up, you focus on bringing more and more visitors to spend more and more money. You never stop to consider that one day these visitors will decide to go elsewhere for a vacation. Maybe they will get tired of you standing there with your two hands open all the time.

So what else have you got to give them? Oh - that’s right! Don’t just invite them to visit and sell them vacations. You could start selling your land! You have a lot of it. You can sell islands at a time if you want to, and these folks have the money to buy it.

And while you sell land, you can invite the folks to come and build their own hotels, too, as long as your people can get “jobs” catering to their new landowners.

So you sell the land, and you sell the rights to the land. It’s the new plantation. And before you know it you have many islands where the people still have to live like those 1492 Lucayans, and one primary island where the gap between the wealthy and the poor rapidly widens and the land becomes overpopulated.

Not only is the income gap widening, because the real property demand of your people outstrips the supply of your one main island, where you’ve concentrated the population for lack of a better plan, where legal and illegal immigrants have flocked to over the last couple decades, where your people from the island who don’t want to live like Lucayans have moved to in order to access some money, but now you’ve introduced an entirely new market of demanders.

Now, your biggest industries cater to the foreign visitor, the foreign worker, and now the foreign resident, most of whom live behind a gate somewhere and are shielded from the daily impact of the illegal immigration, poverty, low and no education, and crime, which are all a direct result of severe economic disparity.

For decades, your people have sucked on the teats of tourism; every two minutes you hear about how they must increase spending by cruise ship passengers, how to get guests to stay longer in hotels and experience more of the island so they spend more, how to find something new and different outside the hotels so more guests will come and spend more ... getting visitors to spend more money being the ultimate goal.

But the ultimate goal should have been developing your people, their education, their healthy lifestyles, their future opportunities. Instead, you gave them a giant udder to suck off of, but now the udder is gone, and the cash cow can’t produce like it once did. And the people are left looking around at each other going “what next?” When will the next udder fall from the sky, because we don’t know how to make nothing? We don’t know how to think. Who gon’ save us now?

Your people can’t afford to live, literally, because your tourism and your focus on tourism to the exclusion of everything else sensible has left them without property to live on. Shelter, food, and clothing are necessary for survival. If they can’t have decent shelter and they get sandwiched to the interior of one 21 by seven mile long island, what good is food and clothing? Are they all going to live on the streets now?

Because of their nation’s haphazard development, Bahamians, the 2015 variety, are in direct competition with foreigners for the land in their own country.

Real property in The Bahamas is not priced out of the range of Bahamians simply because The Bahamas has more people than land. The land in The Bahamas is priced out of range of Bahamians because foreign purchasers can afford to buy it at whatever the market rate is ... the same foreign buyers who come from countries where the people have been taught to think, can create things that the world needs and wants, where there is excellent public school education and decent public healthcare ... these are the people who can afford to buy property, land parcels, islands in The Bahamas.

So, tell me, how the hell can you be a Bahamian, how the hell can you be proud to be a Bahamian, when you can’t even afford to own the smallest piece of land in your own country?