This 'conflict between cousins' lacks a common enemy to broker peace

There have been conflicts between communities in Bermuda before and I am not talking about the perennial racial divide, but conflict within the black community itself.

Growing up, I heard stories about the fighting skills of the boys who lived over North Shore or the Billy Boys down St. David’s who would throw the bikes of outsiders overboard if you were unlucky enough to be caught, and how they call the youth of St. George’s ‘Townees’. You could never date a girl from ‘Bay’ — Hamilton parish that is — without a fight.

But these skirmishes rarely rose above a fist fight. The question is, when did this all change?

Even though we had these conflicts, it was never a question of been restricted to your own neighbourhood; we still went to each other’s parties up and down the country.

It has been said that all of this began when we dismantled country-wide high schools in  favour of so-called mega schools beginning with CedarBridge and now the new Berkeley, throwing together children from all areas of Bermuda.

Mega-school myth

But that is a myth because my generation went to an all-boys school, Prospect Secondary for Boys. Up the road was the girls’ version. Then there was the ‘hotel school’, the Technical Institute and Howard Academy — all of which existed on the edge of a conglomerate of Bermudian schools, where students attended from all parts of the island.

All these schools in one community without a hint of conflict except on the sports field and of course the yearly fight between my school and Tech; which must have been a very small affair because the rest of the school did not hear about it until the next day.

 None of this helps explain the bloody divide between black youth today but I have a theory; could it be that we need a common enemy to enforce the peace?

The common enemy for my generation began with the English teachers that government used to replace the Bermudian teachers who were kicked out of the system because they had no teaching certificate (most of the teachers from Britain only had the status of having served in the British military).

We would later be the black youth who rioted during the black power revolt in Bermuda and still later we were involved in the labour wars on the picket lines.

Our fathers and grandfathers had fought the British soldiers stationed at Prospect and later the American servicemen at the U.S. bases here.

Who can today’s black youth identify as the common enemy — unless it is us, their own community? If that is the answer, we had better talk about how we can bring about peace.