Years ago when I first started travelling up and down the Caribbean, I was always amazed by the fact that whether I was in a big country like Trinidad, Jamaica or Guyana or a smaller one like St Kitts, Dominica, St Lucia, St Vincent or Tortola, I always found that some of the best jobs in both the private and public sectors were held down by Bajans.
Bajans were commissioners of police, chief education officers, CEOs of leading companies, heads of the best secondary schools, top doctors and lawyers; the list went on.
Words cannot express how proud it always made me feel when the mouths of complete strangers in such elevated positions opened and out flowed the unmistakable and inimitable accent that announced those people as being “from Buhbadus”.
In time, as my journeys took me beyond the Caribbean, I continued to be shocked by this phenomenon of Bajans, both by birth and descent, of all colours, classes and creeds, in leading positions across Canada, the United States, England, Cuba, Africa, wherever.
I soon realised that the saying about wherever you go in the world you will find a Bajan needed to be amended to state that you will find a Bajan in power at some level or another.
In 1982, at the end of the Falklands war between Britain and Argentina, I found myself jetting across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound for a mere four-hour flight from Barbados to London on board a Concorde aircraft. One day later I was among some 200 British soldiers on a military plane for an almost 19-hour flight from the Brize Norton airbase to the Falklands, off the southernmost tip of South America.
At last, I figured that in these frigid, barren, sparsely populated islands of white sheep and white men and women, the likelihood of me finding a Bajan, dead or alive, was totally zero. That was until during a tour of the little town’s little museum, where the guide showed a portrait on a wall and told me to read the inscription. I almost fell over from shock when I read that it was one of the first governors of the Falklands who had come “from Barbados”.
What is unique about all this Bajan achievement over all the years in all corners of the globe is that it existed before there was any such thing as free secondary or tertiary education and before there was any university campus, UWI or otherwise, on the island.
So can somebody, anybody tell me what has become of that rich intellectual heritage of Barbados and the Barbadian when I can pick up my newspaper and read of the intention of a company to apply for a work permit for a non-national to fill the position of store manager, because of no suitable responses to an advertisement for the position? And, similarly, by a school for a position as science teacher?
This is nothing new, and in the recent past the list of such published intentions to fill positions by non-nationals because Bajans supposedly could not pass the test ranged from pastry chef to bar manager to accountant to customer service training manager to insurance underwriting manager to restaurant manager to, of all things, nanny/housekeeper.
And the list goes on.
• Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.