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The planners and the plotters
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Fewer than one in 10 of all Jamaicans now alive were among those present half-a-century ago, so it will probably come as a considerable surprise that at that time Jamaican history was not taught in Jamaican schools.
John Maxwell
There were no Jamaican history or geography books or any other Jamaican textbooks for that matter.
At school I learned more about Lake Taranaki in New Zealand and the Battle of Hastings than I knew about Kingston Harbour or the Maroon Wars.
George William Gordon and Paul Bogle were footnotes in the Gleaner's so-called Geography and History of Jamaica (GG&HJ). That was mainly a timeline of the destruction wrought by British governors and Caribbean hurricanes, interspersed by the odd slave uprising or Maroon War, which were matters of unavoidable but insignificant note. Bogle and Gordon were small-time agitators, according to the GG&HJ and they got no more than they deserved.
The Maroons were lavishly slandered, producing a tradition which persists to this day.
On March 19, 1953, according to Hartley Neita's 'This Day in Our Past' in the Gleaner, the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Jamaican history be taught in schools. This resolution owed much to a novel by a Jamaican author, Vic Reid, published in New York and London in 1949. In this novel, for the first time for most people, it appeared that George William Gordon and Paul Bogle were not troublemakers and criminals, but heroes in search of justice.
And although Jamaican history began to be taught in schools after 1955, when Norman Manley became head of government, most people were still unaware of Bogle and Gordon's real status. That was why, in 1959, my then wife and I drove down to the Kingston Parade at midnight on October 25, where I vandalised a statue of Dr Lewis Quier Bowerbank, who was the Lady Macbeth to Edward John Eyre's Macbeth, in the murders of Bogle and Gordon.
For me and a few others, it was an insult to Jamaica that a statue of this traitor should occupy the place of honour in the central park of Jamaica's capital, while his victims were buried en masse in the yard of the Morant Bay Courthouse.
When I smashed the statue I also painted on the pedestal the date '65 - to remind people what the action was about. A little later Norman Manley built a new Parliament building and named it Gordon House.
Oddly enough, last week was also the anniversary of the publication of Vic Reid's New Day. I was entranced by his prose and, as a trainee reporter at the Gleaner, I sat at his feet, almost literally, every Saturday night for a year and whenever I could thereafter.
By 1954, Vic was editor of Public Opinion and I was his political reporter, raising hell about the profits and the pollution of the Caribbean Cement Company and campaigning successfully for the abatement of the toxic dust and unsuccessfully for the reduction of the extortionate price charged by the company, which I believe, set back development in Jamaica by half-a-century.
At that time, Jamaica was in a nationalist ferment: Evon Blake, editor/publisher of Spotlight, a monthly magazine, Mayor C G Walker and two ethnic Jews - Wills Isaacs and Leslie Alexander - were campaigning for an end to the de facto apartheid in Jamaican life. Alexander was later to demand that the Government of Independent Jamaica bring home the body of Marcus Garvey and do appropriate honour to that hero.
Democracy in practice
Despite the failure of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) 1944-54 government, democracy was alive in Jamaica, in forums like the Jamaica Agricultural Society, the Jamaica Union of Teachers and other inheritors of the debating club, traditions which had nurtured people like Marcus Garvey and Ken Hill.
In the first 10 years of adult suffrage, the JLP had formed the Government, and, then, as after independence, had no vision of what an independent Jamaica could be or do. One would have imagined that vanity alone would have provoked Bustamante to authorise at least the teaching of Jamaican history in schools, but that didn't happen. Instead, the JLP, between 1944 and 1955 and between 1962 and 1972, behaved as if they had simply inherited the British overlordship.
When the PNP swept to power in 1955, Norman Manley was ready to transform Jamaica. He invented the Central Planning Unit, and enacted laws which changed the whole complexion of Jamaica, including laws to protect the rights of Jamaicans to their beaches, laws to protect the environment and laws to liberate small farmers from penury, and laws to attract foreign investment to Jamaica.
Part of Manley's success was based on the democratic nature of the People's National Party (PNP).
I will never forget my first PNP Annual Conference, at Edelweiss Park - PNP headquarters, which had also been Garvey's headquarters. Public Opinion and City printery were sited in a couple of the ramshackle, wooden buildings inherited from Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and People's Progressive Party (PPP).
That first conference I walked into the session devoted to the delegates. There, in the ramshackle schoolroom which hosted the conference, one of the world's most eminent barristers was subjecting himself to questioning, sometimes very rough, by portworkers, ragged-trousered 'cultivators' and other feisty card-carrying members of the working-class.
So when he became the head of government, Manley knew his people and what they wanted. His laws and new institutions galvanised small farming in Jamaica, attracted small 'screwdriver' industries, and promoted the interests of the Jamaican manufacturers, from shoemakers to the Matalons. He and Noel Nethersole created the Bank of Jamaica four years before Independence, something unheard of in the British Empire till then.
It was an electric age.
The key to it was that the people knew that in Manley and his party they had a voice, and a sense that a century after Bogle and Gordon they were at last discerning the possibility of coming into their inheritance.
All that came to a screeching halt in 1962 when the JLP, almost by a fluke, won the elections to launch Jamaica into Independence.
Some of us thought the lights had gone out in Jamaica. The prime minister, the white knight who had ridden to the succour of the disinherited in 1938, banned books about black power and socialism, took away the passports of those who visited Cuba, banned all marches by the unemployed and the Rastas, who came under particularly heavy pressure in those days. His enemies, he said, he would "shoot from top to bottom" and he threatened to jail and deport journalists and shut down dissident newspapers.
Which was why, on March 1, 1972, Jamaica breathed the most enormous sigh of relief; BMWs and Mercedes Benzes stopped at bus stops to pick up workers - helpers, mechanics and schoolchildren. Brotherhood was in the air like hay fever.
A shadow of the same atmosphere pervaded much of Jamaica a year ago, when Portia Simpson Miller became prime minister.
She had promised to harvest the wisdom of the people, to promote co-operation and volunteerism, to remake the ghettoes and to put love back into the relations between the Jamaican people.
Rewriting the Scenario
Norman Manley had the benefit of his groundings with his people. Apart from annual conference, Manley could be found planting trees - he swung a mean pickaxe - talking to fishermen about co-operation and advising small farmers how to get money and tools. He knew what they wanted.
I thought Portia Simpson Miller also knew what the people wanted; she, too, was always "'mongst de sufferer dem".
Her programme promised hope as Norman and Michael Manley's elections did. And both Manleys began to rewrite the Jamaican scenario, to bring the Jamaican worker into centrestage.
Portia, it seems, wants to do the same, but somehow she has not yet been able to deliver.
Jamaicans have been waiting for the prime minister to summon them to duty and responsibility, to plumb the real strengths and assets of the people and to guide them into productive, co-operative and peaceful endeavour.
I expected, for instance, reading her speeches, that she would already have instituted the town meetings which would form the basis, we were told, of a new kind of national community planning, in which ordinary people would be able to make a difference.
Instead, it has been business as usual, and the carried forward Patterson style and legacy is stifling whatever life and spirit seemed to be left in an exhausted and demoralised people.
The eminent, almost aristocrat Norman Manley, found no difficulty in talking to the humblest Jamaicans and exposing himself to the most critical assaults in public. Patterson, whose great claim was that he was one of us and not 'in your face' like Michael Manley, vaporised the dreams of black Jamaicans who thought they wanted to be just like him.
Portia Simpson Miller is in serious danger of doing the same thing.
A week is a long time in politics. A few days after his election in 1955, N W Manley was on a plane to New York to find one of the world's most eminent planners at the UN and to bring him to Jamaica to set up the Central Planning Unit (CPU). When George Cadbury found the right people - Arthur Brown, the Mills brothers, Gladstone and Don, and a host of other brilliant people - he left. Out of that CPU have come, among others, the longest-serving finance minister in Jamaica's history and the prime minister of Barbados.
We have not needed to import talent for half-a-century. We've been exporting it in the Harry Belafontes, Colin Powells, Bob Marleys and Bill Morrises of this world.
The talent, the knowledge, the wisdom and the will to work and to volunteer, to share and to co-operate. are still there. But the prime minister urgently needs to mobilise all that talent, commitment and drive.
We, too, need to rewrite our scenario, and the JLP, sad to say, cannot do that because it does not understand what is necessary. We need to deal with globalisation, global warming and climate change, HIV/AIDS and human rights.
The Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), successor to the Central Planning Unit, is now drawing up a new long-term national development plan and the Ministry of Justice is undertaking a fundamental review of the Jamaican justice system. Instead of calling upon all the talents and the society as a whole, these fundamental reforms are to be written by the usual suspects, the air-conditioned elite.
Questions like land reform and the protection of basic environmental and other human rights are left to those who don't understand the need and can, at best, only sympathise with the yearnings of the disinherited.
The elite are interested in 'wealth management'. The rest of us are concerned with the management of misery, destitution and violence, of drought and water shortage, of malnutrition, gastrointestinal disease and stunted children, of teenage prostitution and what, 40 years ago, I called the "Acres of Hunger" represented in thousands of acres of idle land and the hundreds of thousands of idle people.
Portia, more than anyone else in this country, should understand what is necessary.
She and her party need, as Norman Manley said in 1967, to "disenthrall" themselves - to throw off the shackles of mental slavery and to liberate the creative genius of this country. They need to clean house, retire the superannuated and put the brown-nosers out to grass. They need to recruit masses of the young, whose world it is at this moment.
When Norman Manley took the job he said that it was the last, toughest job of his life. He was then, the same age as our prime minister is now. He was also older than most of his generals. Portia is younger than most of hers.
There is a nation desperate to be called to service, if only she would lead.
Copyright © 2007 John Maxwell
[email protected]
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Fewer than one in 10 of all Jamaicans now alive were among those present half-a-century ago, so it will probably come as a considerable surprise that at that time Jamaican history was not taught in Jamaican schools.
John Maxwell
There were no Jamaican history or geography books or any other Jamaican textbooks for that matter.
At school I learned more about Lake Taranaki in New Zealand and the Battle of Hastings than I knew about Kingston Harbour or the Maroon Wars.
George William Gordon and Paul Bogle were footnotes in the Gleaner's so-called Geography and History of Jamaica (GG&HJ). That was mainly a timeline of the destruction wrought by British governors and Caribbean hurricanes, interspersed by the odd slave uprising or Maroon War, which were matters of unavoidable but insignificant note. Bogle and Gordon were small-time agitators, according to the GG&HJ and they got no more than they deserved.
The Maroons were lavishly slandered, producing a tradition which persists to this day.
On March 19, 1953, according to Hartley Neita's 'This Day in Our Past' in the Gleaner, the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Jamaican history be taught in schools. This resolution owed much to a novel by a Jamaican author, Vic Reid, published in New York and London in 1949. In this novel, for the first time for most people, it appeared that George William Gordon and Paul Bogle were not troublemakers and criminals, but heroes in search of justice.
And although Jamaican history began to be taught in schools after 1955, when Norman Manley became head of government, most people were still unaware of Bogle and Gordon's real status. That was why, in 1959, my then wife and I drove down to the Kingston Parade at midnight on October 25, where I vandalised a statue of Dr Lewis Quier Bowerbank, who was the Lady Macbeth to Edward John Eyre's Macbeth, in the murders of Bogle and Gordon.
For me and a few others, it was an insult to Jamaica that a statue of this traitor should occupy the place of honour in the central park of Jamaica's capital, while his victims were buried en masse in the yard of the Morant Bay Courthouse.
When I smashed the statue I also painted on the pedestal the date '65 - to remind people what the action was about. A little later Norman Manley built a new Parliament building and named it Gordon House.
Oddly enough, last week was also the anniversary of the publication of Vic Reid's New Day. I was entranced by his prose and, as a trainee reporter at the Gleaner, I sat at his feet, almost literally, every Saturday night for a year and whenever I could thereafter.
By 1954, Vic was editor of Public Opinion and I was his political reporter, raising hell about the profits and the pollution of the Caribbean Cement Company and campaigning successfully for the abatement of the toxic dust and unsuccessfully for the reduction of the extortionate price charged by the company, which I believe, set back development in Jamaica by half-a-century.
At that time, Jamaica was in a nationalist ferment: Evon Blake, editor/publisher of Spotlight, a monthly magazine, Mayor C G Walker and two ethnic Jews - Wills Isaacs and Leslie Alexander - were campaigning for an end to the de facto apartheid in Jamaican life. Alexander was later to demand that the Government of Independent Jamaica bring home the body of Marcus Garvey and do appropriate honour to that hero.
Democracy in practice
Despite the failure of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) 1944-54 government, democracy was alive in Jamaica, in forums like the Jamaica Agricultural Society, the Jamaica Union of Teachers and other inheritors of the debating club, traditions which had nurtured people like Marcus Garvey and Ken Hill.
In the first 10 years of adult suffrage, the JLP had formed the Government, and, then, as after independence, had no vision of what an independent Jamaica could be or do. One would have imagined that vanity alone would have provoked Bustamante to authorise at least the teaching of Jamaican history in schools, but that didn't happen. Instead, the JLP, between 1944 and 1955 and between 1962 and 1972, behaved as if they had simply inherited the British overlordship.
When the PNP swept to power in 1955, Norman Manley was ready to transform Jamaica. He invented the Central Planning Unit, and enacted laws which changed the whole complexion of Jamaica, including laws to protect the rights of Jamaicans to their beaches, laws to protect the environment and laws to liberate small farmers from penury, and laws to attract foreign investment to Jamaica.
Part of Manley's success was based on the democratic nature of the People's National Party (PNP).
I will never forget my first PNP Annual Conference, at Edelweiss Park - PNP headquarters, which had also been Garvey's headquarters. Public Opinion and City printery were sited in a couple of the ramshackle, wooden buildings inherited from Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and People's Progressive Party (PPP).
That first conference I walked into the session devoted to the delegates. There, in the ramshackle schoolroom which hosted the conference, one of the world's most eminent barristers was subjecting himself to questioning, sometimes very rough, by portworkers, ragged-trousered 'cultivators' and other feisty card-carrying members of the working-class.
So when he became the head of government, Manley knew his people and what they wanted. His laws and new institutions galvanised small farming in Jamaica, attracted small 'screwdriver' industries, and promoted the interests of the Jamaican manufacturers, from shoemakers to the Matalons. He and Noel Nethersole created the Bank of Jamaica four years before Independence, something unheard of in the British Empire till then.
It was an electric age.
The key to it was that the people knew that in Manley and his party they had a voice, and a sense that a century after Bogle and Gordon they were at last discerning the possibility of coming into their inheritance.
All that came to a screeching halt in 1962 when the JLP, almost by a fluke, won the elections to launch Jamaica into Independence.
Some of us thought the lights had gone out in Jamaica. The prime minister, the white knight who had ridden to the succour of the disinherited in 1938, banned books about black power and socialism, took away the passports of those who visited Cuba, banned all marches by the unemployed and the Rastas, who came under particularly heavy pressure in those days. His enemies, he said, he would "shoot from top to bottom" and he threatened to jail and deport journalists and shut down dissident newspapers.
Which was why, on March 1, 1972, Jamaica breathed the most enormous sigh of relief; BMWs and Mercedes Benzes stopped at bus stops to pick up workers - helpers, mechanics and schoolchildren. Brotherhood was in the air like hay fever.
A shadow of the same atmosphere pervaded much of Jamaica a year ago, when Portia Simpson Miller became prime minister.
She had promised to harvest the wisdom of the people, to promote co-operation and volunteerism, to remake the ghettoes and to put love back into the relations between the Jamaican people.
Rewriting the Scenario
Norman Manley had the benefit of his groundings with his people. Apart from annual conference, Manley could be found planting trees - he swung a mean pickaxe - talking to fishermen about co-operation and advising small farmers how to get money and tools. He knew what they wanted.
I thought Portia Simpson Miller also knew what the people wanted; she, too, was always "'mongst de sufferer dem".
Her programme promised hope as Norman and Michael Manley's elections did. And both Manleys began to rewrite the Jamaican scenario, to bring the Jamaican worker into centrestage.
Portia, it seems, wants to do the same, but somehow she has not yet been able to deliver.
Jamaicans have been waiting for the prime minister to summon them to duty and responsibility, to plumb the real strengths and assets of the people and to guide them into productive, co-operative and peaceful endeavour.
I expected, for instance, reading her speeches, that she would already have instituted the town meetings which would form the basis, we were told, of a new kind of national community planning, in which ordinary people would be able to make a difference.
Instead, it has been business as usual, and the carried forward Patterson style and legacy is stifling whatever life and spirit seemed to be left in an exhausted and demoralised people.
The eminent, almost aristocrat Norman Manley, found no difficulty in talking to the humblest Jamaicans and exposing himself to the most critical assaults in public. Patterson, whose great claim was that he was one of us and not 'in your face' like Michael Manley, vaporised the dreams of black Jamaicans who thought they wanted to be just like him.
Portia Simpson Miller is in serious danger of doing the same thing.
A week is a long time in politics. A few days after his election in 1955, N W Manley was on a plane to New York to find one of the world's most eminent planners at the UN and to bring him to Jamaica to set up the Central Planning Unit (CPU). When George Cadbury found the right people - Arthur Brown, the Mills brothers, Gladstone and Don, and a host of other brilliant people - he left. Out of that CPU have come, among others, the longest-serving finance minister in Jamaica's history and the prime minister of Barbados.
We have not needed to import talent for half-a-century. We've been exporting it in the Harry Belafontes, Colin Powells, Bob Marleys and Bill Morrises of this world.
The talent, the knowledge, the wisdom and the will to work and to volunteer, to share and to co-operate. are still there. But the prime minister urgently needs to mobilise all that talent, commitment and drive.
We, too, need to rewrite our scenario, and the JLP, sad to say, cannot do that because it does not understand what is necessary. We need to deal with globalisation, global warming and climate change, HIV/AIDS and human rights.
The Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), successor to the Central Planning Unit, is now drawing up a new long-term national development plan and the Ministry of Justice is undertaking a fundamental review of the Jamaican justice system. Instead of calling upon all the talents and the society as a whole, these fundamental reforms are to be written by the usual suspects, the air-conditioned elite.
Questions like land reform and the protection of basic environmental and other human rights are left to those who don't understand the need and can, at best, only sympathise with the yearnings of the disinherited.
The elite are interested in 'wealth management'. The rest of us are concerned with the management of misery, destitution and violence, of drought and water shortage, of malnutrition, gastrointestinal disease and stunted children, of teenage prostitution and what, 40 years ago, I called the "Acres of Hunger" represented in thousands of acres of idle land and the hundreds of thousands of idle people.
Portia, more than anyone else in this country, should understand what is necessary.
She and her party need, as Norman Manley said in 1967, to "disenthrall" themselves - to throw off the shackles of mental slavery and to liberate the creative genius of this country. They need to clean house, retire the superannuated and put the brown-nosers out to grass. They need to recruit masses of the young, whose world it is at this moment.
When Norman Manley took the job he said that it was the last, toughest job of his life. He was then, the same age as our prime minister is now. He was also older than most of his generals. Portia is younger than most of hers.
There is a nation desperate to be called to service, if only she would lead.
Copyright © 2007 John Maxwell
[email protected]
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