A few days after Christmas, a drive-by shooting resulted in the death of four people, with an additional eight persons being wounded in the working class community of Fox Hill in Nassau, Bahamas. It has left many in Fox Hill—and the entire country for that matter—terrified about the increasing levels of horizontal (or black-on-black) violence in The Bahamas.
Sadly, there were 118 deaths in 2013 due to horizontal violence, an increase from 111 deaths in 2012 in a population of merely 300,000.
Some are calling to reinstate hangings as a way to stop horizontal violence. However, this offers no real solution for the problems of The Bahamas. Africans in The Bahamas, like Africans in cities such as London, Kingston, Port-of Spain, Chicago, New York, Port-au-Prince and all over the world where African people are located, find themselves grappling with issues like horizontal violence and many other problems that cause us to live lives of misery.
Our misery cannot be put on the backs of African youths who have just come into a world already set in its ways. Neither can our solutions be found by persecuting the youths.
The truth is, our society didn’t just start breaking down in 2013. Our society has been broken for over 400 years. African people living in the Caribbean and throughout the rest of the world were stolen from our homeland of Africa and forced into slavery. Slavery interrupted our lives in the most brutal and savage way and we have been struggling to recover ever since.
While many factors of oppression have attributed to the social breakdown of the African community, we must be clear that the social breakdown of the African community began with the first Africans being kidnapped from our homes in Africa.
During slavery, Africans in The Bahamas, and around the world, worked without any compensation under the most horrible conditions. Our forced labour built up the riches of the international ruling class. As a matter of fact, our enslavement gave birth to capitalism; which is a way of life, a social system that influences all of our relations. It is also a system that is motivated solely by profit.
Under capitalism, there will be no help for single mothers who are struggling to put food on the table because there will be no profit for the ruling class. Under capitalism, there won’t be community centers in every constituency to develop our youth because there will be no profit for the ruling class. And under capitalism, workers won’t be paid what they deserve because there will be no profit for the ruling class.
Africans in The Bahamas suffer with the lack of life-sustaining wages and livable employment, or lack of employment period. National unemployment rates are currently the highest they have been in the last ten years, with youth unemployment the highest of any group.
Sub-standard schooling, inadequate housing and improper or inaccessible nutritious and healthy food sources are all contributing factors to horizontal violence within our oppressed and exploited communities.
The solution for The Bahamas is not to hang, not to persecute our youth but to do the hard work of overturning this imperialist capitalist social system and of building a new society that is not based solely on profit. We have to get to work in building a new society based on equality and justice that will restore our communities and bring real peace on our streets.
Join the African People’s Socialist Party-Bahamas to revive and restore our communities!
Contact us today at apspbahamas@gmail.com.
