ONE OF THE PLEASURES of the Christmas season is renewing contact with family and friends from abroad, especially long-time absentees, and hearing their comments about modern Barbados.
Again in 2011, I did not speak to any who were not blown away by our female fashion divas, vast improvements in housing and motor stock, and physical changes which transformed the landscape.
The airport, ABC Highway, Hilton and Crane Hotels, Cave Hill Campus, Dodds Prisons and new buildings at Warrens amaze them.
Reflecting with pleasure and awesome wonder on the magnificent personal and physical developments, they also invariably advert to the loss of the sense and spirit of community, significant features of Barbados of our childhood and early adolescence.
There is a direct correlation between the growth and development of Barbados and loss of group and personal community. New lifestyles do not provide the same type of personal and group interaction which dominated yesteryear and contributed significantly to the mantra that raising a child was a village responsibility.
The villages of my childhood were classic communities within a larger community held together by a network of social relationships within a definitive geophysical area where residents knew each other and were truly each other’s keeper. The village, in the best meaning of the expression, was an active socializing agent.
A basic lesson of the social sciences is that society is dynamic, always changing, never static. Returning nationals always refer proudly to the fact that rapid modernization has been buttressed by groundbreaking economic, social and cultural progress, propelling Barbados from a sugar-dependent colonial economy to international acclaim on the threshold of First World status.
They simultaneously lament that the evolution of Barbadians from the villages to the heights, terraces and gardens seemingly fractured relationships between new generations and familial roots. A constant complaint is that many who have relocated from the villages do not visit relatives regularly.
I always make the point that on one of my visits to South Africa’s best known townships, Soweto, a Friday evening, as we approached, a pall of smoke hung like a blanket over the settlement. Residents were having a cook-up for upwardly mobile relatives who had relocated to suburbia but reconnected weekly with township family and friends.
It was an impressive demonstration of national progress, family and community loyalty seeing the latest marquee cars parked outside the shabeens (watering holes) and throughout the township.
I am asked but in no position to answer how many high-flying Barbadians today regularly visit the villages which raised them.
I grew up at Dodds and knew almost everyone in neighbouring Padmore Village by name and which house they occupied. After postings in London and New York I built a house in a pleasant neighbourhood of about 40 houses in Christ Church. Unlike my St Philip experience, in this smaller but far more diverse community, I know only about one third of the residents and where they live.
When my daughter worked in the British Virgin Islands, on one of our visits my wife took a day trip to St Thomas, a United States territory. Making a purchase in a store, the proprietor picked up her accent and asked if she was from Barbados. Confirming she was, he said so was his wife and he had spent a pleasant holiday there recently.
It transpired that his wife’s family is my immediate neighbour. Only a fence and hedge separate us. But meeting any family member anywhere I would not recognize them. Progress is a natural aspect of the human condition, synonymous with modernity and betterment. But it has glaring community short comings. Today we know car numbers, not names and faces.
Reflecting on the good old days growing up at Dodds and easy interaction with neighbours in Padmore Village, a real community habitat, I also reflect on the dynamics of progress and human behaviour.
Living in London in the 1960s, on a summer visit my parents, taking an early morning stroll, said a cheerful good day to our neighbours in their garden. Eliciting no response, they returned home shocked, perplexed and wondering how people in the so-called “mother country” who were allegedly on a “civilizing mission” colonizing Africa and the Caribbean were so utterly unmannerly.
In England such behaviour was usually explained culturally or as racist indifference to black people. For years my father spoke despairingly of that experience and vowed without fear of mitigation that First World status did not mean that its population was basically more civilized than that from the so-called Third World.
A schoolmaster who spent his working life, including working with British intellectuals at the Rawle Teacher Training College, preaching that there is no excuse for bad manners, that experience was indelibly embedded in his memory, confirming his children’s repeated reports from London.
• Peter Simmons, a social scientist, is a former diplomat. Email [email protected]
