Tosh, left, and Bennett-Coverley
Amina Blackwod Meeks, Contributor
Do you remember Satan?
Do you remember Satan?
Dat guy nuh dead...
De guy a trod eart still
Fulfilling his pledge to deceive the world.
THE LIVING voice of Winston Hubert McIntosh, known to the world as Peter Tosh was violently silenced on the night of September 11, 1987.
And with it went one of the most uncompromising opponents of the system of apartheid, a vocal and insistent defender of equal rights and justice, a poet, philosopher, song-writer and singer who was first and foremost a black man, proud of his African origins and concerned about the welfare of his race. That was the reason for his art.
On September 11, 1973, the democratically elected socialist Government of Chile was violently ended in a coup d'etat.
In the blood-letting that followed, Chile also lost some of its best artistic sons and daughters. Among them Victor Jara, a singer/song-writer committed to democracy for the people and a society of justice for all. He was tortured, beaten and then riddled with bullets in the boxing stadium Estadio Chile.
On September 12, 1954 Jamaica gave birth to Michael Smith, the man whom many would credit later with giving birth to dub poetry. He was, according to fellow poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, "on the threshold of consolidating a rapidly rising international reputation as a poet" when his life was violently ended by stones in Stony Hill square on Marcus Garvey's birthday, August 17, 1983.
On September 15, 1889 the poet Claude McKay was born in Clarendon, Jamaica, and later was to play a key role in that period of artistic and spiritual renewal in the United States known as the Harlem Renaissance.
On September 12, 1977 a student leader, writer, symbol of black pride, leader of the black consciousness movement and anti-apartheid activist was murdered in detention in South Africa, his head had been smashed into a wall after he had been beaten and chained crucifixion style for more than 24 hours. It has been almost one year since the United Nations World Conference Against Racism.
It was the conference where the transatlantic slave trade was finally declared a crime against humanity by 168 nation-states in the General Assembly of the United Nations.
It is the conference remembered as the place where the United States and Israel stormed out of the General Assembly rather than discuss the issues of reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans and controversies concerning the Palestinians. Except for a few references here and there to Peter Tosh, locally, none of the above received an honorary mention in the international remembrances of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in the United States of America.
Well, maybe the rest of the world could be forgiven for not knowing of the events and people who are major artistic and political significance to the forward movement of Black people.
But can Black people be forgiven for not paying homage to their own, even as they console others in their time of grief?
I listened to the Prime Minister recently allude to our collective failure "to establish a national identity" or to put Jamaica first. Any wonder? There is a self-rejection that cannot escape notice in the way we brutalise, alienate, ostracise and silence the voices which not only insist on equal rights and justice but who also dare to insist that in our context, equal rights and justice are inextricably linked to reclaiming who we are as black people.
So what did Miss Lou, another September landmark, have to do with that?
And how do we make Marcus Garvey's cultural and artistic objectives fit into the restoration of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), headquarters in this age of globalisation when the issue of identity keeps taking centre stage in major conflicts around the world?
Simply to give consideration to the idea is to pay tribute to artistes who refuse to let these issues die, who taught us to focus on the priorities of black liberation and reparation of the collective rather than narrow self-interests designed to tilillate without attaining the shock value for which they strive, artistes who refuse to be manipulated as freaks in sideshows which detract from our mission of emancipation of the mind.
What a September we could have towards reasserting national identity if we could find the way to bring the conscience of our unrelating creative souls and Mr. McIntosh too, out of the wilderness where Oko Onoura tells us he has been too long "wailing, there can be no peace until there is equal rights and justice"...for all.
What a September, if we would allow our creative spirits to do what they are ordained to do so that we can identify and defeat the devils of this millenium who "deh pan eart still" fulfilling the plans to deceive us unto being more of others and less of self.
