Fixin’…Tiger Bay? 

Well, well, well. Your Eyewitness sees there is yet another attempt to “clean up” Tiger Bay by the authorities – this time led by Priya, the new, energetic Minister of Local Government!! Recognising that “new broom sweep clean but old broom knows the corners”, he wishes her well, but cautions that “dew cyaan full wha’ rain na full”!! What are some of those corners that should be known?? First and foremost, that the character of Tiger Bay – even as it adjoined the staid, middle-class Kingston community, has a long and colourful history!!
As your Eyewitness has written, this phenomenon of lumpen elements ain’t new – being around ever since England’s industrial revolution disgorged millions of peasants into cities like London. They huddled in slums like Devils Acre around Westminster Abbey – as described by Dickens: ‘there is no district in London more filthy and disgusting, more steeped in villainy and guilt, than that on which every morning’s sun casts the sombre shadows of the Abbey’.
Our 1838 post-Emancipation Tiger Bay in GT duly followed the example of the “Motherland”. As one historian wrote, the denizens rejected “the Victorian social norms of modesty, dignity, orderliness, productivity and decorum, and exhibited counter values of gregariousness, bravado, loudness, ribaldry, rowdiness, aggression and coarse vulgarity”!! In 1905, they terrorised the entire GT by burning and looting the stores of the White Europeans. They were called “centipedes”!!
Fast forward five decades when Sparrow belted out one of his biggest hits – “BG War” – following our Black Friday, Feb 16, 1962 when the PNC burnt down half of Georgetown as their opening salvo to remove the PPP Government. “Well, they drop a hydrogen bomb in B.G./ Lord have mercy, they drop a hydrogen bomb in B.G./ Lord have mercy, Riot in town mama/ Ah hear the whole place on fire, From Kitty to the waterfront all that/ Burn down flat, flat, flat.”
But he cautioned: “Ah doan care if the whole a BG burn down/ But they will be putting me out me way/ If they tackle Tiger Bay/ An bun dung de hotel/ where all me Wabeen does stay”!! “Wabeen”, of course, being “girls of the night” with their attendant retinue of pimps and “choke and robbers”! Decrepit as it always was, Tiger Bay became a veritable urban jungle after the Burnhamite destruction –  when even the “Johns” dared not check out any “Wabeens”.
Priya should know that when the PPP was allowed back in 1992, Janet arranged for them to get houselots in the new development schemes in Tuschen, Sophia and Mocha. Many refused to leave a home they’d gotten used to and the area regressed even further into the shacks she’s cleaning up.

…with historical awareness
One of the titbits your Eyewitness has picked up in mankind’s millennia-long efforts to “clean-up” cities, efforts gotta be made to accommodate activities that not everyone might see as “kosher” – but yet they’ve persisted. Gotta be a reason, no?? Take the activities of who we nowadays call “working girls” – Sparrow’s “Wabeens”. It’s been called –  for good reason – the “oldest profession”.
In Europe – notably in Netherlands – they legalised the profession and created “Red Light” districts where the Working Girls could ply their trade – behind red glass windows –  in districts like De Wallen in Amsterdam. These have become some of their most famous tourism destinations!!  If we decide to go down this path, we obviously gotta enact laws to monitor and prevent some of the associated vices – like TIPs and Pimps – who give the profession a bad name.
Too revolutionary??

 … gender bias
A 19th century magistrate Henry Kirke, in his book, “25 years in British Guiana”, wrote: “The black women are as strong as the men, taking the average I should say they were stronger and quite ready for a fight at any time…I remember one woman who was called the Tigress of Tiger Bay was a match for any three policemen and was a terror in the neighbourhood”!!