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Black Jamaicans have grown more self-confident and began to cast off the inner self-doubt which made them automatically defer and show 'manners' to their brown and white 'betters'.
Don Robotham, Contributor
AT LAST, WE are beginning to 'settle' and to return to the really central and urgent questions which face us as a country.
The arguments of the last two weeks, passionate as they may have been, in the final analysis were distractions from our very severe problems. Since time is not on our side, it is dangerous for us to allow ourselves to be sidetracked from the main challenges at hand.
None of these challenges have an easy solution. Not one of them can be resolved by a change of Government. This does not mean that the Government should not be changed if the Jamaican people wish it.
The sovereignty of the people is supreme. It extends way beyond a so-called 'plebiscitary democracy' in which some would-be charismatic leader simply 'puts a question' to the electorate for a simple 'yes' or 'no' vote once every five years.
Democracy requires a wide-ranging public discourse which helps the people to understand the issues before them in their fullness and to be a real part of developing and administering the solutions. This is why the role of the press is so absolutely critical.
We know what the major problems facing us are crime, the economy, inner-city and general poverty, education and training, morality (public and private), social and racial inequality and divisiveness.
All these major problems did not arise overnight. None of them were caused either by the People's National Party (PNP) or the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).
The politicians may aggravate the problems. They offer poor leadership or no leadership at all in addressing them. They often exploit the problems for purposes of demagogic one-upmanship.
They may engage in corrupt practices and show little integrity. But it is the height of naivety to think that they are the cause of our problems. Thinking of our problems that way is a way of evading our own responsibility for the state of the country.
This is very important for us to understand otherwise we will arrive at a superficial analysis which will lead to superficial non-solutions swinging from pillar to post in our desperation.
NO GLORY DAYS OF COLONIALISM
We should also be clear what is not the cause of our problems.
It is common today in Jamaica to find people who claim that life in Jamaica was better in the colonial days. Most people who say this were born well-after Independence and have not the foggiest idea what colonialism was like, having never experienced it.
I myself, strictly speaking, have direct experience only of the dying days of colonialism, since I grew up in the Norman Manley years of self-government.
Like many of my generation, I was a beneficiary of the policies of the anti-colonial movement, such as the Common Entrance which of course, was not introduced into Jamaica by the British as some young Jamaicans seem to imagine.
To get a real understanding of what life was like in Jamaica under colonialism one would have to go back to Jamaica before 1938, when there were no trade unions or political parties, no black middle class, and hunger, starvation and racism ruled every aspect of political, economic and social life in the land.
We would have to go back to slavery. Even if we don't go back that far, a brief tour of Jamaica in the 19th century would cure you forever of any nostalgia for colonialism.
Don't forget that not one of our major inner city ghettos originated in the period since Independence. All the major inner city ghettos of Western Kingston have their origins in the 19th century when colonialism ruled the roost. This has been amply documented by UWI historians.
The rise of the inner cities was caused by the collapse of the sugar plantation economy during the free trade period in the second half of the 19th century. This led to massive migration from the countryside, driven by colonial starvation. Our ghettos are colonial creations, practically without exception.
Some of these rural migrants went to Cuba to work. Many, like Marcus Garvey, went to New York. Others went to Panama to help build the canal. Others migrated to Costa Rica and Nicaragua to work for the United Fruit Company and to build railways.
That is why there is a city on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua which speaks Jamaican-accented English and which is named Bluefields. This is why there are Jamaican communities in Oriente province in Cuba and in Panama.
But many thousands instead went to Kingston. Their they settled in Hannah Town, in what is now Tivoli Gardens (near the old Tivoli cinema), in Matthews Lane, in what is now Rema and Arnett Gardens and all along the Spanish Town Road, pass Cockburn Pen.
It is sheer ignorance not to understand the colonial origins of our urban blight and of our more than 100 years of social and human decay. It is now the seventh generation which is growing up under these inhuman conditions!
We must not be afraid to recount these facts. We must have the courage to look these realities squarely in the face, without descending into mutual recrimination. Indeed it is very dangerous to run away from these realities and to pretend that we are all one big happy Jamaican family Out of Many One People!
If we do not understand how long-standing and deep-rooted this neglect has been, we will not be able to understand the ruthlessness and aggressiveness of the Jamaican inner-city criminal their often gratuitous brutality and 'dog-heartedness'.
And as I know from personal experience, this bloodlust can be combined with a strange kind of sensitivity. We sowed these seeds ourselves and watered them.
There are thus no glory days of colonialism to look back to, except in the imagination.
It is just post-colonial nostalgia, a hereditary disease in danger of reaching epidemic proportions among some light-skinned as well as black Jamaicans.
In fact, sometimes I think the black ones are worse than the 'brownings' in their construction of some fantastic colonial utopia. Has nobody taken the trouble to inform them that in the colonial days they were treated as less than dirt?
We have a colonial heritage in our economy and in values and attitudes. None of this means that the British are responsible to bail us out of our problems. If that is what we think, then we should not have sought Independence.
The reason why Norman Manley and the nationalists sought first self-government and then Independence was on the grounds that we Jamaicans would be capable of solving our own problems in a manner that the British could not.
That was the rationale and the only rationale for Independence. What Independence means, if it means anything, is that whoever originated our problems, we now take full responsibility for addressing them.
KNOWING HOW TO BEHAVE
So let us not try to use the fact of the origins of our problems in the colonial days as an excuse for evading our failure to address these problems effectively ourselves. Either we accept Independence or we do not. No games are possible here.
The problem in the area of values is connected to this problem of colonialism. It derives from the fact that the old morality which gave people 'manners' and kept them away from a life of crime, rested on a racial and biblical foundation.
It was not solely racist, far from it. British colonialism, especially in its reformist period in the 20th century, transmitted many very important liberal values which have served and will continue to serve us well. This is a point of the highest importance which any honest discussion of values will have to confront.
But in the colonial period these liberal Protestant values the rule of law, freedom of conscience, thought, speech and the press, freedom of movement and assembly, having 'manners' or 'moral sentiments' as Adam Smith called them were necessarily subordinated to colonial objectives.
They were inseparable from the racial and colonial foundation of the society. If you were brown, you knew instinctively how to behave to someone who was white and to someone who was black. Punishment was superfluous. You treated the white person as your natural superior and you regarded yourself as naturally superior to your fellow black Jamaican.
If you were black in the colonial days you did not have to face prison to know that you must always defer to your presumed 'betters' in every social and personal situation.
This is how it was and everyone knew it. It was in the bloodstream of the society. It was simply in the atmosphere and everybody breathed in this racist air.
Being law-abiding was part and parcel of this value complex. The Bible and Black Protestantism did not challenge this system.
On the contrary, they reinforced it or simply accommodated themselves to it and retreated in peace into their own Revivalist, Pentecostal or Baptist tabernacle.
It would be a bold person, indeed, who would assert that these attitudes of colonial self-subordination and self-hate have vanished totally from Jamaica today. But obviously they have been severely undermined.
CHALLENGING THE SYSTEM
This system of values had of course always been challenged. That was the meaning of slave revolts which were practically an annual affair.
That was the meaning of 1865 and George William Gordon and especially Paul Bogle. That was above all the meaning of Garvey and of Rastafarianism.
The problem in all these challenges and this is clearest of all in Garveyism was how to reject the racism, while at the same time affirming an alternative value system with a positive core.
That was the meaning of Garvey's emphasis on art and aesthetics and the performances at Edelweiss Park. The very same issue came up with Norman Manley and led to the creation of Jamaica Welfare. How not to simply 'negate'. How also to affirm and affirm vigorously.
Nevertheless, this race-based values and attitudes system survived all these challenges. It lasted quite long for at least six years after Independence.
Where it first began to really fall apart was during the Black Power movement and the Rodney Riots of 1968 during the heyday of high GDP growth which the JLP likes to boast about. It's a complex world!
This challenge to a race-based value system gathered steam during the 1970s and, in fact, was the driving force of the day and not democratic socialism as many people think.
The clearest expression of this was the enormous rise of a black middle and upper middle class, first in the state and then in the private sector.
In the 1980s, there was a brief lull but this resumed with force under P.J. Patterson our first really black Prime Minister.
Black Jamaicans grew more self-confident and began to cast off the inner self-doubt which made them automatically defer and show 'manners' to their brown and white 'betters'.
In the end, this will prove to be the most important achievement of Mr. Patterson, his many failures notwithstanding.
If you know anything about Jamaican history, it is an important achievement indeed. Indeed, if you know anything about Jamaican history, you will understand that Black Nationalism is a force which cannot be turned back.
It is a force for the good of the society, although many light-skinned Jamaicans hate to have this subject even raised much less discussed. Better to sweep it under the carpet and mutter some cliche or the other about racial harmony and being 'colour-blind'.
But you can't tackle values and attitudes without getting to this root.
For the problem has been that in rightly rejecting the old Jamaican race-based value system, other values which were intertwined with it were ignored and sidelined.
These values were positive, as has been pointed out above. Conversely, it does not help the cause of values and attitudes if the advocates are perceived as seeking to restore servility.
The most vivid illustration of this problem has been the debate about dancehall. Civility has been rejected for coarseness and vulgarity. The defenders of dancehall accuse the critics of having a hidden agenda: they are using civility as a cover to re-impose servility.
Here civility is seen as a sign of weakness, loudness as a sign of strength. To be civil is to be subservient, to be coarse is to be independent. In this line of behaviour, the thought that one can be civil and strong, indeed stronger, is simply not an option.
The fundamental problem here in the sphere of values then is one of conflation and confusion.
How to go beyond a simple negation. How to affirm and what to affirm. The simplistic view that because certain values originated in the colonial period that therefore they must be bad, has to be challenged.
Likewise the stubborn refusal to accept and welcome the fact that Jamaica is a black country.
We have to have an honest and critical dialogue about these issues, which are by no means simple ones. We must show that we can reject that which is harmful in the colonial experience without at the same time discarding those values which are universal and of lasting value.
We must show that we can affirm our blackness, especially if we are brown or white.
Don Robotham is an anthropologist who specialises in development issues in the Caribbean and West Africa.
