By Latrae Rahming – History is never simply a record of what happened. It is always a negotiation between memory and meaning, between facts and the stories we tell about ourselves. In every society, history functions as both mirror and compass. It shows us where we came from and it helps guide where we want to go. But in The Bahamas today, there is a troubling trend: the politicization of our own history. The urge to tell Bahamian history in ways that suit political parties or individual leaders is dishonest, and it is dangerous.
The danger lies in believing history can be told in ways that serve politics. Both PLP and FNM have done this. The PLP, the country’s longest-serving political organization, naturally highlights Majority Rule, Independence, education, and Bahamian ownership. These are genuine achievements. But if we the PLP give into the temptation of leaving our failures, history becomes propaganda.
The FNM has done the same, casting itself as the defender of accountability, the guardian of sunshine governances, while downplaying its own missteps in financial management, land policy, and crisis response. In both cases, history becomes a weapon, not a shared inheritance. Once history is turned into a weapon, truth is the casualty.
I have no interest in carrying water for the selective version of the PLPs history, though I recognize its accomplishments. Nor do I accept the FNM’s attempts to retell its own record as one of unblemished heroism. To love our country’s story is not to whitewash it. Loyalty to the Bahamian experiment does not require suppressing its shadows.
Revisionist history does not happen in isolation. Politicians have erased dissenting voices from the independence movement, presenting it as unanimous. They have glossed over economic failures that left heavy debts.
We must also examine if some historians, often supported by partisan interests, have written accounts that read like campaign literature. Or whether a sections of the media have amplified official versions rather than offering critical investigation. Even the public plays a role when we accept comforting myths that flatter our leaders and ourselves.
Now more than ever, we have a responsibility to empower Bahamians to tell our story with objectivity and clarity. An honest history does not flatter. It educates. It does not only reassure. It prepares.
The purpose of history is not to make us feel good about ourselves but to make us wiser. Wisdom comes only when we confront the full range of our past: the victories and the humiliations, the courage and the cowardice, the policies that lifted thousands and those that left others behind.
The Bahamian people cannot be treated as children who must be shielded from complexity. We must be trusted with the whole story, in all its brightness and its darkness. Anything less insults our maturity.
We cannot rewrite Bahamian history simply because it makes some uncomfortable. The temptation to sanitize is strongest during national celebrations, when leaders are painted as saints and the divisions of the time are ignored. But erasure is theft. It robs future generations of the ability to see how choices were made and mistakes avoided.
Consider slavery and colonialism. These were dark, painful chapters, marked by exploitation and injustice. Yet it is precisely by grappling with those truths that we understand why freedom was so hard won and why justice remains fragile.
To acknowledge the injustices of the past is not to weaken national pride. It is to ground it in reality.
If students hear only a triumphal story of independence, tourism, and culture, they will be unprepared to see the deeper patterns of inequality or corruption that persist. If instead they are taught a fuller story, including victimization and hardship, they will be better citizens, equipped not just to celebrate their country but to improve it.
The goal is not to dwell in darkness but to learn from it.
Politicizing history treats memory as a commodity. Instead of a shared inheritance, it becomes a partisan prize. If Bahamian history continues to be rewritten, our children will inherit competing myths. One glorifies the PLP, another the FNM, and the truth is lost between them. When people cannot agree on their past, it becomes harder to agree on their future.
Great societies have confronted their own dark chapters. The United States continues to wrestle with slavery, South Africa with apartheid, Germany with the Holocaust. Facing these truths has strengthened, not weakened, their moral foundations. The Bahamas must show the same courage.
The way forward for us as Bahamians must be that we demand that history in The Bahamas be taught and remembered with fidelity to the truth, not to political convenience. Schools
must protect the independence of scholarship. Politicians must resist claiming ownership over the national story. The media must investigate rather than repeat. Citizens must ask uncomfortable questions about the past.
If we succeed, the next generation will inherit a national memory that is robust and resilient, anchored in truth. If we fail, history will become an extension of party politics, truth will be fragile, and unity impossible.
The politicization of Bahamian history is a creeping danger. To tell history in ways that suit politics betrays the very purpose of history itself.
We cannot give in to the seduction of selective memory. We cannot protect ourselves from discomfort by erasing the inconvenient. We cannot flatter ourselves by pretending our all of our leaders were always noble and our choices always wise.
Bahamians deserve a history that is honest and unsparing. They deserve a history that empowers them, not manipulates them. They deserve a history written in the service of truth.
Only when we tell our story with objectivity, without fear, and with clarity will we understand ourselves, and only then will we have the wisdom to build the future our children deserve.
