THE cover image on the first volume of Dr Gail Saunders’s history of The Bahamas, Islanders in the Stream, is an 1859 oil painting by Winslow Homer, entitled, The Gulf Stream.

The painting is in the extraordinary collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which describes the work on its website: “Homer based this dramatic scene of imminent disaster on sketches and watercolors he had made during winter trips to The Bahamas in 1884 and 1898, after crossing the Gulf Stream several times.

“A man faces his demise on a dismasted, rudderless fishing boat, sustained by only a few stalks of sugarcane, while threatened by sharks and a distant waterspout. He is oblivious to the schooner on the left horizon, which Homer later added to the composition as a sign of hopeful rescue.

“The Gulf Stream also references some of the complex social and political issues of the era – war, the legacy of slavery, and American imperialism – as well as more universal concerns with the fragility of human life and the dominance of nature.”

Dr Saunders is a living national treasure. Her choice of the Homer painting for the first volume and the title of the two volumes, Islanders in the Stream, is a powerful and fecund metaphor for the centuries of journeying amidst perilous circumstances by the evolving Bahamas nation.

Like the rudderless fishing boat, The Bahamas has often been a nation buffeted by nature, human vagaries, and imperialism and slavery by dominating powers. The few stalks of sugar cane suggest our limited natural and human resources.

The schooner in the distance may be a sign of hope. But the man and The Bahamas, are often woefully and tragically oblivious to new possibilities on the horizon.

We have typically not been the masters of our own fate and destiny, especially as a small archipelago whose waters and history are – ironic pun intended – at the “liberty” of the American colossus and hegemon.

For centuries, and still we are an extraordinarily vulnerable nation. In the last many years, a series of category five storms have reminded us of just how vulnerable: the Great Recession of 2008, a series of natural storms, including the atomic-like blast of Hurricane Dorian and a recent global pandemic.

Now, our low-lying archipelago faces catastrophic climate change, one of the greatest threats in human history.

In the time of independence in 1973, we were exposed to the shocks of a terrible recession and spiraling global oil prices. Tourism, our main industry, ironically, exposes us to external shocks but is also an economic lifeline that helps us to chart our way in the global economy.

Boats, like nations, are vulnerable both in harbour and on the open seas. To be properly berthed and to weather storms and to survive, they require a sense of direction and purpose, mooring and anchorage, navigation and points of reference.

Adrift

On the eve of half a century of national sovereignty, The Bahamas is wildly adrift in the stream of international affairs and history. This is not a commentary on a single major political party. It is not a critique solely on any part of society, whether the media, the religious community or business.

We are all collectively responsible for the dire state of our Bahamas. We are floundering, acting mostly as a purposeless nation, directionless, generally devoid of ideas for a more fulsome future, and with scant sense of history and moment.

We are not alone. Much of the Caribbean is in the same metaphorical boat decades after independence and now in the early years of the third decade of the 21st century.

Our elites, be they political, economic, religious or social, are mostly without a sense of greater national purpose or understanding of where we are and who we may become.

From political debates to commentary in the media to discussions about topical issues, and even interventions by various academics, the void is deep and stultifying.

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Motley understands the current moment, including the void and the possibilities.

For years, Barbados, once a jewel of the Caribbean, has been in decline, meandering, with ever mounting and unsustainable debt, a collapsing infrastructure, a directionless national elite, and a nation seemingly with little sense of purpose.

After the country’s 2018 general election, Motley began the arduous task of trying to impart to her country a new purpose and sense of direction, while fixing long-term infrastructural problems and addressing a host of socio-economic challenges. How successful she will be is unknown. But she is trying.

In an interview with Vogue, the 56-year-old Caribbean internationalist and firebrand charged: “I know that when you have power, when you have access to make a difference in people’s lives, you need to do it. It’s not easy, and it’s certainly not for the faint-hearted or the lazy, because what we’re trying to do is to give people a different sense of themselves and who they are.”

She explains: “There is an assertion of Caribbean identity. We are moving into a second generation of those who were born after independence. We now know what it is to determine our own fate, and there is a new confidence that is reflected in everything from our music to our school curriculums.”

Motley deeply appreciates that her country’s and the Caribbean’s challenges are worsened by an international order often rigged against small states. She also knows that many of our underlying challenges are deep-seated, internal, cultural and historic, including our social conservatism on various issues.

Royal visit

The recent visit of Britain’s Duke and Duchess of Cambridge must be seen in this wider context. Motley pressed Barbados to republican status because she understood how critical it is to repurpose Barbados and reset its course, and which too, was drifting aimlessly in the stream of history.

Barbados has begun a new journey, though it will take many more years. The Bahamas is mostly paralysed and living in a bygone past, lacking greater self-confidence or a more vigorous sense of national pride and identity.

Representing the British monarch as Barbados became a republic and launched a new chapter in its history, Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, gave voice to a new direction for the Caribbean. He was more articulate on the matter than the political class and leaders in The Bahamas regardless of party. And his words were more progressive.

He said to his Barbadian audience: “From the darkest days of our past, and the appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our histories, the people of this island forged their path with extraordinary fortitude.

“Emancipation, self-government and independence were your way-points. Freedom, justice and self-determination have been your guides.

“Tonight you write the next chapter of your nation’s story, adding to the treasury of past achievement, collective enterprise and personal courage which already fill its pages.

“The creation of this republic offers a new beginning, but it also marks a point on a continuum – a milestone on the long road you have not only travelled but which you have built.”

In 1973, a 24-year-old Prince Charles represented his mother at our independence celebration. If he returns to The Bahamas next year, half a century later at 74, he will meet a country and political class that still overwhelmingly wants to retain the monarchy.

Changed

The world has changed dramatically. The British royal family is trying to modernise and must be increasingly uncomfortable with foreigners and people of colour being their loyal subjects.

When Prince Charles’s son and daughter-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited last week, they likely left with the impression that it may take more decades before The Bahamas can culturally and historically summon the desire and will to embrace a greater sense of nationhood, self-worth, dignity and pride.

It is good that we can welcome guests like the Cambridges. But, we should meet them as friends and equals, not as our future sovereign and his wife. Parts of the show on Bay Street, celebrating our culture, was well-done.

Sitting next to the Duchess of Cambridge was the regal Arlene Nash Ferguson, who undoubtedly explained the history and meaning of Junkanoo, including as a festival invoking emancipation, dignity and striving for transcendence over colonialism and slavery, and the enduring aftermath of both.

But there were also jarring moments, as the heir to the throne watched a Junkanoo group belt out the imperial ode, “Rule Britannia”, as Queen Victoria watched from her marbled imperial perch in Parliament Square, her statue grandiloquently larger than the bust of Sir Milo Butler, a Father of the Nation, who helped to remove many shackles of British rule.

Victoria’s rule began in 1837. One hundred and eighty five years later we are still reveling in pledging allegiance and a certain obsequiousness to her successors, seemingly in perpetuity.

Written in 1740, the British song was originally a poem, heralding the God-given imperial rights of a major slave-trading power:

“When Britain first, at heaven’s command,

Arose from out the azure main,

This was the charter of the land,

And Guardian Angels sang this strain:

“Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons never, never, never will be slaves.

“The nations not so blest as thee

Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall,

While thou shalt flourish great and free:

The dread and envy of them all.”

Sadly, some did not realise why such a song should not have been played. Some, still do not understand the revulsion by many that such a triumphalist paean to white and colonial supremacy and superiority would be played by a Junkanoo group performing for an heir to the British throne, still immersed in the trappings of empire.

This blindness, this lack of historical sense, this lack of perception of how toadying we look to the region and the world is one of the reasons why we are islanders so terribly and disappointingly adrift in the stream of modern history.

• More next week