14 January 2002

Mr. Speaker, I intend to take some time this morning and I beg your indulgence and that of the House to speak in tribute to the life and times of Sir Gerald Cash who is an important figure in the history and life of this small country of ours.  I have been trying to get to the House of Assembly since I first joined the Progressive Liberal Party in 1975 and so I believe I have some sense of what being dedicated to public service is.  And further as I am sure every Member of this House knows, in our culture it is at a time of death that we often find the barest revelations of what we are as a people and how we relate to each other.  If a politician wants to succeed in this Bahamas, he ought to attend the funerals.   And the more I go to them, the more I see their cultural and sociological importance.

That said Mr. Speaker, I am proud to be here to pay tribute to Sir Gerald.  He is a man that I have known and admired for all my conscious life.  His sister Ruth reminded me yesterday in this place as we were speaking to the Member for North Andros of how close in fact we were and are as two families; mine and hers.  And it defined something that is special to our country.  The Social Anthropologist Dr. Nicolette Bethel in describing our society as an oral society would have a wonderful laboratory in this present occasion.  Because it comes home so true that part of how we define ourselves in this society is by our parochial and familial connections.  In other words, who is your Ma and who is your Pa and where you come from.

It is not always right that that should be so, because in a modern and complex society we can’t know who every one is and we have to move toward a more objective criteria for recognition but it is a fact that today with a population of just over 300,000 we still define ourselves and interrelate on the basis not of objective criteria but by our connections to one another.

Miss Cash reminded me that my mother’s maternal ancestors were from the Pond and so were Sir Gerald Cash and her family, and throughout his lifetime and throughout my lifetime that is how I have sometimes been defined.  Other times, I am defined as Valley Boy and that signals another connection.  But to a certain generation, I am an eastern boy with roots in the Pond.  That was Sir Gerald Gash.

Sir Gerald followed in the footsteps of his father to this place and excelled to the highest heights.  He was at the top of the heap.  He retired from public service in 1989 as the Governor General of the country, a role for which he had obviously trained himself, and for which he was well and impeccably prepared.  That was obvious in his bearing, and in his demeanor and in the way he carried himself.  Some sniped, that he was too English and formal.  But when he left the office of Governor General, he was the model of a Governor General, the Governor General’s Governor General and a standard after which all would pattern themselves.

Sir Gerald’s friends often teased him that he had patterned himself after the English actor Charles Boyer and I had the occasion to see Charles Boyer once in a movie, the classic English gentleman and there was an uncanny resemblance.  But my godmother Setella Cox teased him about this once and he responded in that characteristic neutrality:  Now Now Setella, he said, never mind all that!

When majority rule came in 1967, there were some who said and perhaps continue to say that it was not clear on whose side he was on.  But the evidence is clear for all to see, by the minority report that he signed in this place, following the adoption of a report of a House Select Committee to look into racial discrimination in the country sponsored by Sir Etienne Dupuch, and I would beg the indulgence of the Speaker as I read a passage from the book ‘Pindling’ by Michael Craton that describes what happened on the night that resolution was passed in this House (pp 57-58)

And how did Sir Gerald express his view of the effort to end discrimination in The Bahamas?  Here is what his Minority Report said: “While I cannot disagree with the resolution as a first interim report.  I am certain that the resolution in itself is not the solution to the problem of racial discrimination in public places.  I am convinced that legislation should be enacted to ensure the public of their rights to protect those rights.  I do advocate and would support such legislation.  The resolution does not do this and is merely a record of this Honourable House which is not in any way binding on hotels, theatres and public places.”

Mr. Speaker, knowing what I now know about how difficult it is when you are a public man to do what you believe to be correct, as insignificant as that Minority Report now seems in its few lines, I am certain that it was an act of courage.  And this must have been all the more so because Sir Gerald was no doubt seen by the then establishment as part of them.

Indeed, if the published record is to believed, Sir Gerald served on the Executive Council.  The Executive Council was the forerunner of the modern Cabinet of which all of us on the front bench are now a part.  The Government before 7th January 1964 was governed by a constitution and series of letters patent issued by the Royal Court in the United Kingdom.  The Royal Governor was at the top, now Governor General, the Legislative Council was next, now the Senate and then the House of Assembly that has been sitting since 1729 at the bottom later replaced this.  The Executive Council advised the Governor on the exercise of executive authority in the country until the Premier, later Prime Minister and a Cabinet replaced this.  It is said that Sir Gerald served there from 1958 to 1962.  That means that he was during colonial times, a man at the very peak of influence, a part of the establishment.  He had followed his father W.E.G. Cash into the House of Assembly.  And he served in every body of Governance.  Even when the constitution changed, he served in the Senate, for a time as its President, then Deputy Governor General and then Acting Governor General and then Governor General.

As he progressed the Queen honoured him.  He received an O.B.E.  And when the Queen came in 1977 to open Parliament, he was the Acting Governor General and so he received the knighthood for personal services to the Queen the K.C.V.O. (Knight Commander of the Victorian Order) and later when he was confirmed in the position of Governor General, he was knighted for a second time with G. C. M.G. that is awarded to all those who become Governor General which I believe is Grand Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

Now to many of us these may no longer take on the significance that they once did but the fact is that this remains the honours system in the country.  And one hopes and certainly if I have anything to do with it, the honours system will change but what the honours tell you, and I do not wish to derogate at all from their significance, is that he was man who received the highest honours from his country.  No higher honour can be given to any Bahamian.

Mr. Speaker, I talked at the start about the fact that during my lifetime, I thought Sir Gerald was someone to be admired.  One thinks how he was a man who kept this counsel no matter what public barbs were thrown at him.  His face was impassive, his countenance inscrutable.  It was he who informed me that as Governor General he did not vote because a Governor General could not be seen to involve himself in partisan political activities.   He was meticulous about it.  Even after he left office.

And as I say before he got the office he was often criticized because no one knew where he stood but he kept up his countenance and even demeanor.  I admire him for it.  He ended up serving in the post of Governor General longer than any other Bahamian.

He was also a successful member of the Bar.  And up to the time of his illness spent mornings at the office.  He was a good conveyancer.  And this learning of the law he took to the office of Governor General because those who dealt with him as Governor General tell the story of how meticulous he was in reading the Cabinet papers and orders that he had to review or sign.  He would often send some papers back or offer advice to the then Government about how to approach a particular matter.  And no doubt it was sound advice since he had been at the very top for so very long, and perhaps with the exception of the late A.F. Adderley the father of the Hon. Paul Adderley was the only Black man to have served on the Executive Council.

It always interested me as a young politician in waiting to observe the relationship between himself and the younger PLP politicians.  This was all the more so when often there was an ambivalence expressed in private on their part, but despite whatever private thoughts they had, he was still their Governor General.  And I often wondered if it had something to do with the fact that when many of the former leaders of the country came home from law school, Sir Gerald presented their petitions at the Bar: Lynden Pindling, Arthur Hanna, Loftus Roker, Paul Adderley, Orville Turnquest.

I asked him about that one day and he told me: Well Fred in those days, I was the only one who could do it.  And he never mentioned race but I knew well what he meant.  He was the only one.

So you can know Mr. Speaker how proud and what an honour it was for me to have Sir Gerald attend my own call to the Bar in the United Kingdom at Gray’s Inn in 1986.  He was in London, I believe for the first time since he had been called to the Bar then, himself to receive his honour from the Queen.  And afterward, he attended the reception put on by the Inn for the newly called.

While standing at the reception, an older Englishman walked up to introduce himself and seemed to be showing off a bit to the younger lawyers about his tenure at the Bar.  And so he said in conversation with Sir Gerald:  “I have been at the Bar since 1953, when were you called? ”  Sir Gerald puffed on his ubiquitous pipe and said: I have been at the Bar since 1945.  The man was almost speechless.  I felt proud and said to myself in Bahamian parlance: that will hold you.

I think that on balance, Bahamians felt proud of who came to represent them as their Governor General or Head of State.  Impeccable demeanor, impeccable manners, and a man for all people who had come from amongst us and had become what many a young boy or girl wanted to become and still want to achieve.

He was not a politician like Sir Milo or Sir Lynden.  They had a different role to play.  They were the mass mobilizers.  They moved the people to revolution, to change the social order.  He was a man of the status quo and so after the revolution was over, he served as Governor General in the early years of our Independence, just after Sir Milo died, helping to stabilize our sense of ourselves.

I cannot make enough out of this because, the Government of the day despite the revolutionary talk of many of its members opted for I believe for political reasons to go with the model of Independence that we have.  If I remember the time correctly Mr. Speaker in the run up to Independence, there was a great public debate and not a little anxiety throughout the country about how we would fare after becoming an independent country.

And so we chose for the model of our Independence to remain as a constitutional monarchy.  So that all the organizations of the state remained virtually the same.  The new state was the old state in form, but the personnel had changed.  As this generation looks to where we ought to go, you know Mr. Speaker that I am an advocate of a republic with an elected President.  That is my personal view.  But when we chose the model that we did for Independence who could better represent us in that model than the man about whom we speak today.  He knew the role well.  He prepared for the role and he did us proud in it.

He was acting Governor General in August of 1976 when the events immortalized in Eddie Minnis’ song Show and Tell took place in this House of Assembly.  Those events which led to the defeat of the Government’s bill for Public Disclosure led to the House of Assembly being prorogued and Sir Gerald reading a speech from the throne that lasted not even a minute.  Perhaps the shortest speech from the throne in our history.  But he was there and many of us remember it.

Mr. Speaker, a great friend of Sir Gerald is my godfather Levi Gibson.  And one of the most happy and enduring memories that I have as a younger man, perhaps one of the last times that I felt like a kid was a trip that I took with Sir Gerald and Mr. Gibson to Long Island.   He never missed a Long Island Regatta.  And the people of Long Island loved him.  I believe he had started going there as Governor General with Mr. Gibson and he continued afterward.  Joining us that summer was the Chief Justice Telford Georges and his wife.  And we had a great time in Long Island.  People coming up him welcoming him to the island and showering him with tributes and affection.

And so it is clear Mr. Speaker, even though I may have gone on for some time that there was an obvious affection by me for Sir Gerald, the public man and the private man.  He has done much in the way of public service to commend the example of his life to every Bahamian.  Each man or woman does his part.  As Shakespeare says “All the World’s a stage.  We have our exits and our entrances.  And each in his time plays many parts.” Sir Gerald has played his part.

Mr. Speaker, at a reception that was held in my honour last Friday in London by Sir Peter and Lady Ann Heap who chairs the Friends of The Bahamas in London, a Member of Parliament in the UK who has Caribbean ancestry was asking me about The Bahamas and she discovered that there are only 300,000 people who live here.  She asked me a question that I thought was interesting.  She asked: So there are only 300,000 of you, do your people have a sense that they are a country, a nation?

No Foreign Minister of The Bahamas should hesitate to answer that question in the affirmative and I did but not without thinking about how 30 years after the fact we are still seeking to define ourselves.  We are still defining who we are as a people.

It is a fact Mr. Speaker that this has been a separate jurisdiction since the country was first settled in the mid 17th century.  And except for a short time when we were captured by the Spanish, and except for a brief time when the US Armed Forces occupied us in the 18th Century, the country has been separately and jurisdictionally discrete from any other.  We were a colony but our Parliament has generally run our affairs.

There was a change in 1973 when we embraced the nomenclature Bahamian.  Article one of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas reads: “The Commonwealth of the Bahamas shall be a sovereign democratic state.”  And we sought to legally define who Bahamians are in the constitution of 1973.  We defined it in such a way that had the constitution been in existence in 1900, as late as even 1945, many who became Bahamians in the circumstances of their birth before 1973 would not be Bahamian if those same circumstances obtained after 1973.

It is interesting to note.  Stephen Dillett who many embrace as the first Black member of the Bahamian House of Assembly was I am told actually a French African in the parlance of his day, in other words he was Haitian and in today’s Bahamas would not have qualified to sit in this House.

While the population of this country swelled following the war of 1776 in the US and the Black population outnumbered the white population for the first time in our history after that migration, the chances are that many and some say most families in this country can't trace their ancestry beyond the 1900s and at best into the mid 19th century.  Many can, but a great many families are here because during the 20th century there was migration from the southern Caribbean to The Bahamas.  They came here looking for work, and married into the 50,000 or so souls that lived in The Bahamas during the early 20th century.  Those patterns of migration continue.  And many of today’s Bahamians have at least one parent who was not born in The Bahamas.  So we are very much like the United States: a nation grown strong and defined by immigration.

Sir Gerald Cash and his generation saw that migration. They saw the intermarrying.  They saw the country grow economically, and how its wealth grew by migration.  And during it all, the generation of leaders before us, even though many of them by definition were first generation Bahamians, by the constitution they wrote, they sought to codify who Bahamians are in terms of themselves, so that legally a Bahamian was not only someone born here but someone who had at least one parent who was Bahamian.

Smokey 007 was never more wrong and yet correct when he sang when you born there, you born there, implying that someone born here is Bahamian.  But in a legal sense that is not so.  At least one parent must be Bahamian born.  And as we review our constitution one suspects that there will be attempts to continue to redefine just what a Bahamian is.

A man Bahamian clearly is Sir Lynden Pindling and Sir Milo Butler. A Bahamian is Sir Roland Syomonette and Sir George Roberts.  A Bahamian is Dame Doris Johnson and Janet Bostwick.  But it is clearly not a static, nor purely legal concept.  It is a dynamic and ongoing process that embraces as Professor Rex Nettleford has often said: the rhythm of Africa with the melody of Europe.

Sir Gerald fashioned himself after the men whom he saw as leaders in his community, and however he fashioned himself is part of our Bahamianess.  Many of them were the colonial leaders of the day, including the colonial governor.  It as Bahamian to dance to Junkanoo drums that I often saw him do, as it is to march down to the Anglican cathedral in a few hours and sing to the strains of Charles Wesley’s best hymns, accompanied by the pipe organ.

Bahamian is also an economic concept as is the whole business of jurisdiction and sovereignty.  By defining ourselves in a legal way that is recognized by all the world, there are certain rights and privileges that are reserved for that particular group. And when we concede the entry of new ways of doing things, new economic activities, it is always against the backdrop of the fact of the jurisdictional legal point of what is a Bahamian.  Our economic well-being and survival as a country depends very much on how clearly defined we are as a people.

What is the lesson for us?  What is the answer to the British MP’s question?  I believe we are a country.  I believe we are still defining ourselves.  The very processes and arguments that we are undergoing in the conduct of our foreign policy Mr. Speaker are part of the process of defining this nation.  It is a nation, a landmass that has given rise to a certain quality of life for ourselves and our children that we would like to protect and further and leave for our children and their children.

If we are not a nation, then why do we have our flags flying at half-mast?  Why do we sit in this Parliament?  Why did Sir Gerald live and give the public service that he did?  And the same can be asked for all the sacrifices that were made by the many leaders who went before us.  And even those in our time.  We are here because we are the dramatis personae in the current play on the stage.

I am especially proud to be standing almost in the same spot as the Honourable Arthur D. Hanna, one of the architects of our independence who used to stand so often in this place, when I was a young reporter sitting in the gallery, he would say: My country right or wrong!  My country right or wrong!

Sir Gerald was the Governor General of an independent Bahamas, a separate jurisdiction, and a legally defined people.  And he never shirked from that role or responsibility.  He never forgot that he was a Bahamian.  When we cross over the water, they ask us for our passports, and at citizenship it says Bahamian, and you cannot pass if you do not have a visa.  That is a fact of life.

It has taken me some time to get to my point Mr. Speaker and I thank you for your indulgence.  I am proud to serve in this place where Sir Gerald stood, and I take from his life’s example when he signed that minority report this lesson.  When it is your time up to the plate, to borrow a metaphor from baseball, when it is your time at bat, you have to perform.

And we have been brought here, each trained by our families and each with our individual histories to bring our individual consciences and beliefs to the business of government.  We were sent here in the hope and the expectation that we will be able to help define this state called The Bahamas in such a way that the life that we know will be protected and enhanced, not given up for a 30 pieces of silver.  This generation of Bahamians, the most well trained of all must at its time at the plate perform and do what it knows to be the right thing.

That is what I take from all of this.  It is my time now, and I cannot shirk from my responsibilities.

As we say farewell to Sir Gerald and his life of service, and wish his family all the best and keep them in our prayers, I leave you with these words of the Bahamian poet Pat Rahming:

Thank you Mr. Speaker!