Dear Sir,

I would like to respond to two letters that appeared in your paper on February 15 and March 26, both by Bermudian researcher Jonathan Land Evans.

Mr Evans took issue with a statement attributed to home affairs minister Michael Fahy, published in your paper on February 8, which read: “I fully accept that in the Sixties and Seventies that Government manipulated immigration law to maximise votes ...”

According to Mr Evans, Mr Fahy has not responded to his challenge to “clarify and substantiate” the offending statement. Further, he states, a Pati request submitted to the immigration ministry for “documentary evidence” supporting the minister’s comment has yielded “the record requested cannot be found” response.

In light of the above, Mr Evans says: “We must, I think, conclude from this that senator Fahy in fact had no evidential or other factual basis for his categorical statement.”

While Mr Fahy may not have produced a specific document to back up his specific statement — and I agree with Mr Evans that he should have responded — this does not mean that manipulation of laws, immigration or otherwise, did not take place before, during or after the period in question.

And if Mr Evans thought that Mr Fahy’s statement was “surprising”, I would be interested to hear what he thinks of the following statement made by a former governor, Sir Peter Ramsbotham, in 2001 during an interview for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme:

“We changed ... what had been the vexatious point, constitutionally, which was called the Commonwealth vote. Young white people, who had been in Bermuda for more than three years, had the vote at the elections just because they were Commonwealth and white. This had virtually deprived the black opposition party of ever really getting enough votes to get power. For thirty years, you’d had a one-party dictatorship there. So we eliminated the Commonwealth vote over a period of time.”

In five sentences, a former governor stationed here from 1977 to 1980, during the most turbulent of times, has conjured up a link between the ingredients of race, colonialism, immigration, residency and votes as a recipe for the undemocratic retention of political power.

You see, Mr Evans, there is no one document that can be produced, by any one government ministry, with or without Pati assistance, that will evidence the fact of systemic white supremacy, which produced an oligarchy that has enacted legislation throughout Bermuda’s history to ensure the dominance of the affluent white, pro-colonial vote.

But let’s stick to the 1960s and 1970s ...

• Fact No 1: “The foreign-born population as a whole increased by two-thirds during the 1960-70 decade”; described as “heavy immigration, most of it by whites ...” [1970 census]

• Fact No 2: “Most of the white foreign-born are from the United Kingdom ...” [1970 census]

• Fact No 3: The Parliamentary Election Act 1963, which introduced universal suffrage, with a retained “plus vote” for property owners, also contained provision for the right to vote after three years’ residency for British subjects, who did not possess Bermudian status, and increased the voting age from 21 to 25.

• Fact No 4: The increased voting age, just in time for the 1963 General Election, effectively disenfranchised nearly 1,900 black Bermudians. [Age statistics from the 1950 census]

• Fact No 5: “The Commonwealth residency vote without question works to the advantage of the ruling United Bermuda Party” with Sir Peter estimating “about 2,200 non-Bermudians ... eligible to vote” in the 1976 election. [“How the expat vote benefits the UBP”, The Royal Gazette, August 1, 1979, page 3.] Unlike Mr Fahy, who, incidentally, applied for his Bermudian status in 1994 during our “one-party dictatorship”, Sir Peter had an intimate, first-hand knowledge of the “manipulated” laws and immigration policies designed “to maximise votes”.

And to take this discussion out of the abstract, so as to show how this overall state of affairs stood to benefit Mr Evans’s family as compared with mine:

In the 1963 election, Mr Evans’s father, who was white, foreign-born and from the UK, had two votes — one regular vote and one “plus” vote — while both my parents, who were black, born Bermudians, married and working, were disenfranchised because of the voting-age increase to 25. [1963 Parliamentary Register, Bermuda Archives]

In the previous election in 1958, Mr Evans’s father was registered to vote in two parishes — Paget and Pembroke — while my grandparents, whose ancestry can be traced back to pre-emancipation, had no vote whatsoever. [1958 Electoral Register, Bermuda Archives]

It matters not that Mr Evans’s father may have been granted status before the two elections cited; the point is that even if he hadn’t, he would have qualified under the 1963 Act in any event. It is an inescapable fact that the white, foreign-born, expat was “accommodated” by our legislation and by our practice of racial discrimination; and thereby gained economic advantage, leading to the acquisition of civil and political rights over and above the Bermudian-born, disenfranchised majority, who were “persons of colour”. So, in my view, Mr Evans can scarcely chastise Mr Fahy for “recklessly” besmirching the “good reputations” of the present Bermuda Government and its “political predecessors”. Sir Peter has given us the unpleasant and inconvenient truth in a nutshell. Truth, in my opinion, can never be regrettable; but it is the continued state of denial that truly diminishes all of us.

LEYONI JUNOS

Ps (after reading Mr Rob Corday’s letter in your issue of March 29.) The Wooding, Pitt and Clark reports are all heavily referenced in Mr Evans’s book, Siren Songs: a history of Bermuda from 1960 to 1980, so I think it is safe to assume that he has read and studied them quite thoroughly. But, although he cites paragraph 5.13 of the Pitt Report at footnote 650, he is careful to omit the commission’s conclusion that “the faster growth of the white population stemmed from highly selective immigration”.