National Identity, Tourism and The Fergusons
THE PROGRAMME
Audio of twenty-nine episodes of the show was discovered in January 2009 at the ZNS archives of their Grand Bahamas Station in Freeport. The reel-to-reel tapes that were used to record these programmes is now extremely fragile and the station is currently engaged in the process of transferring them to CD. Before this the only surviving record of the content of the programme came from a collection of scripts that were in Ms. Thompson’s possession. The scripts themselves are written in Bahamian Creole English and until the audio from ZNS becomes available, they are the essential blueprints to understanding what it was that Bahamians listened to nearly forty years ago.
The Fergusons were presented as a typical middle-class family. The father, Ezekiel Ferguson was a taxi-driver by profession and a preacher by calling. His wife, Mina, was a part-time straw vendor and housewife; the eldest of three sons, Samuel also worked in the tourist trade, fielding questions behind the counter of a nameless hotel. The neighbor and lovable villain of the series, Miss Lye, was a working-class street vendor who also relied on tourist dollars to pay the bills. Thus it is clear that the economy of the main characters was dependent on tourism, as could be expected. This was not far from reality either, as at the time more than 70% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the country came from Tourism.27
RELIGION ON FARM ROAD
The first episode of The Fergusons of Farm Road is as good a place as any to begin an analysis, especially as it differs structurally from what was to become formula in future installments in significant ways. The first episode does not start with the characters engaged in their tourist related trade however, or, as all future episodes do, with the god-like voice of the narrator, but rather begins with Ezekiel Ferguson in the midst of a fiery sermon at the Church of the Risen Redeemer, on First street the Grove. 28 While at first this may seem a strange creative decision, a look at the content of the sermon makes it clear that the device of the sermon was an opportunity for the Ministry of Tourism’s message to come through undiluted.