Once, during an interview with artist Stan Burnside, he told me how he and his late brother, Jackson Burnside, would often lament the fact that their country failed to acknowledge the "incredible gift" of Junkanoo and use it to its economic advantage.
A founding member of the One Family Junkanoo group, Burnside said: "In Junkanoo, you have an incredible opportunity, and I can't overstate that. [It is] an incredible gift. Tourism was just given this gift in their war to create and sustain the attraction called The Bahamas, and the gift is just sitting there, and they won't shoot it. They won't use it. You know? They're in the war, getting weapons from everywhere and the weapons are not as powerful as this gift right here, and they're just leaving it there, sitting. And for some reason they seem to be afraid [to use it]."
A few months later, newspaper pages erupted with the findings of a study by Dr. Nicolette Bethel, head of the department of psychology, sociology and social work at The College of The Bahamas. Titled "The Economic Impact of Junkanoo in The Bahamas", Bethel's four-year study (it began in January 2009 and ended in May 2013) reveals that Junkanoo each year operates at an astonishing loss.
The bad news
According to the report, Junkanoo expenses - that is the cost of food, materials and overheads - amount to somewhere in the region of $8 million to $10 million per year. In addition to that staggering figure, Bethel believes there is at least another $10 million being lost in unpaid labor.
"There is one element to Junkanoo that we overlook tremendously, and that is that it is a result of hours and hours of unpaid labor. People are working in the shacks, but they're not paid for that work. Now if you want to make it an industry, they should be able to be paid. So that represents some $10 [million] to $11 million dollars, annually, in labor," she said in an interview.
To calculate the figure, Bethel and her students visited a Junkanoo shack over an eight-week period. They used an average of $10 per hour - a rate higher than minimum wage "because Junkanoo is a labor-intensive activity, so it shouldn't be minimum wage", but lower than the average national hourly wage of $13.50 because of the Junkanooers' young ages and earning potential. The team observed Junkanooers spending an average of 20 hours per week, over 17 weeks - the length of time that Bethel believes most Junkanoo shacks take to prepare for the parades.
With an idea of the tradition's monetary losses, Bethel sought to uncover its gains - an endeavor easier said than done. The only measurable source of revenue from Junkanoo is ticket sales, which fluctuate, along with sponsorship.
"The Junkanoo groups have sponsors. Other sources might be exchanges in kind... They do a number of things that one would associate more with a volunteer group, those kinds of fundraising activities, rather than taking a business-like approach. That's the gap. Everything is done very much from the voluntary model as opposed to a business approach, saying 'These are our costs. These are what we have to cover. These are what we're going to create as revenue streams'. That doesn't seem to happen," she explained.
Tallying up the only numbers she had - those of the ticket sales - Bethel found the number that Junkanoo groups stand to make, on average, each year. Four-hundred thousand dollars is what's currently being pulled in each year by ticket sales to cover about $20 million in costs.
The better news
Bethel believes the situation is fixable, not least because the tradition has managed to survive against all odds, apparently out of Junkanooers' sheer love for the rush. Still, she's recommended several action plans to prepare for the days when love may not be enough.
Marketing Junkanoo and making it more accessible to tourists is at the fore.
"There's almost a hands-off, non-involvement from the Ministry of Tourism. Junkanoo is never promoted to tourists. Junkanoo is used in the promotion of The Bahamas, but Junkanoo itself is not promoted to tourists." she said.
Officials have told her that the main reason for this is "that nobody is traveling on Christmas day, so the Boxing Day parade isn't going to be sellable to tourists". Countering that, she argues in her report that there is a spike right after Boxing Day in tourist arrivals. This, she believes, could be beneficial to the New Year's Day parade.
"Junkanoo has 76 percent occupancy, by our calculations," she said. "That means that 24 percent of the tickets don't get sold. These are available for the tourist population. And even if you don't want Bahamians to pay more than $45 or $50 a head, you could charge tourists $100 a head because they don't have the opportunity to see it more than once, and they will pay."
Bethel thinks a chat about the current local ticket prices is worth having, too. Current prices for Junkanoo tickets have been capped off by the government at $45 in a move she believes to have been unwise. In her research, the professor found that one third of the people she interviewed, who were largely from a young, financially-dependent, student demographic, were willing to pay up to $50 for a Junkanoo ticket.
"If there's a third of the population out there who's willing to pay more, capping the tickets at less than they're willing to pay does not make economic sense. So that's the first thing. The ticket prices are currently too low, and that's a Cabinet decision," she said.
She also mentioned the lowest available price of a ticket for the Boxing Day or New Year's Day parade - $5. This is half the price of the lowest available ticket price for a Junior Junkanoo parade.
Another starting point for additional revenue is the Junkanoo practices. Bethel believes practices should be ticketed events, citing the fact that vendors who sell refreshments at the practices stand to make substantial sums of money - she knows of one such vendor who has made up to $10,000 over two nights - while the Junkanoo groups do not gather any revenue. This method of making quick money has been touted by the Bahamas National Festival Commission as the reason why so many Bahamians stand to benefit from the Bahamas Carnival; few know that the opportunity already exists in the Junkanoo community.
A key point Bethel hopes to highlight is the need for groups to set aside their differences and take the Junkanoo reins out of the government's hands.
"The Junkanoo community, over the last 20 years, is waiting for the government to take the lead in providing these solutions. That's where they make their mistake. It's not the government's job to do that," she said.
She added: "The difficulty that's happening right now is that the generation of leaders who forced the government to take note and invest in Junkanoo are dying. The people coming behind them never had to fend for themselves, so there is a learned helplessness in the community that has to be conquered."
Bethel has emphasized the need for the Junkanoo groups to operate "as a cooperative" for the benefit of the tradition itself. A lack of trust among groups, and even among separate shacks within the same group, has proved to be one of the most difficult hurdles to revitalizing what has been called a dying breed in recent years.
With the professor's study confirming what many had already suspected - that the tradition is indeed at risk - Bethel hopes it will also serve as a wake-up call to preserve a national treasure. Echoing Burnside's sentiments, she said: "In Junkanoo, people are making music and dancing and carrying costumes all the same time. This is unique... What we have failed to do is recognize the uniqueness and make the most of it."
Perhaps, in so doing, the country might preserve what Burnside has called the "fragility of Junkanoo".
"Junkanoo is something that we should treasure," he said, in that earlier interview. "We should try to never do anything that will put it at risk. I feel that we shouldn't take for granted that the Junkanoo artists are always going to come to Bay Street and produce what they produce."
"The Economic Impact of Junkanoo in The Bahamas" has been published in Volume 20(1) of the International Journal of Bahamian Studies and is available online through The College of The Bahamas.
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