National Identity, Tourism and The Fergusons
NATIONAL NARRATIVE
The Fergusons of Farm Road filled a large gap in the national consciousness for popular fiction. When the voice of the narrator finally enters the first episode after the lengthy sermon he says
And so begins the story of Brother Ferguson and his family. In a sort of way this is the story of all of us – our strength, our weakness, our faults, our trials and our triumphs: of the things that make us what we are. This is the story of the Fergusons of Farm Road.36
As far as this writer is aware, The Fergusons was the first national narrative ever provided to the Bahamian people in a popular format. The programs tagline was that it was a “true to life drama of a Bahamian family.” The additional aim of the program then was to define Bahamian-ness through the lens of this fictional family; “the things that make us what we are.” The underlying promise is also that by listening to The Fergusons the audience would come closer to knowing themselves. Notably absent from this is description is any mention of “what we do,” and as we can see from their occupations, what Bahamians did was cater to tourists. It seems that a goal of the Ministry of Tourism was to wrap Bahamian national identity around the goal of good service through a Christian ethic. It was as if they were saying: We are Bahamians, we are Christian, and this is how we do things. To say that the national identity was both Christian and traditional was an inventive way for the government to take the paradoxical stand of being pro-tourist and Anti-American at the same time.
SUCCESS OF THE PROGRAMME
Whether or not The Fergusons succeeded in its pedagogical aims is difficult for the historian to determine. However the producers, in this case Clement T. Maynard, Minister of Tourism at
the time was pleased at the results. In his 2007 memoir he reflected that “each promotional effort was effective for a short time only, and continuous occasional reinforcement was required.”37 The Fergusons was for him another “promotional effort” that did its job and then gradually became ineffective. In line with his assessment, the Ministry continued to fund the show for at least a year and then they left it to its own devices, shifting their resources in other ways to “reinforce” their message. The Fergusons continued independently for another two years, remaining popular with locals until the end, then it simply vanished into the silence from which it came.