By Laura Tanna, Contributor
Dr Peter Phillips, Minister of National Security, making a point. - File
Today, we continue the special series on the Minister of National Security, Dr. Peter Phillips. Part one was published last Friday. Today, we examine his Rastafarian years.
PETER PHILLIPS remembers that his parents, Aubrey and Thelma Phillips, insisted on returning from the UK by August 1962. "They were in the stadium the night the Jamaican flag was raised as a symbol of our own independence, which was one of the high points of their lives." Young Phillips preferred staying for several weeks in New York City with relatives before coming back to start boarding school at Jamaica College. He explained, "JC was then going through its transition from a school of the privileged few to a school that was being influenced by the Common Entrance reality, the fact that a lot of ordinary Jamaican middle-class kids were going to the school. But there was this conflict, which in a kind of inchoate way you were aware of without really making full sense of it. But as you got older..."
INSTILLING SOCIAL OBLIGATION
He says that the Phillips' family would have been regarded by the larger community "as the ascending Jamaican brown middle-classes that had been emerging. My father was somebody who was obviously very much committed to social liberation. My father, in those years, would take us for drives through Kingston through what we now call ghettos and it was very clear in his view, a very strongly held view, that you had an obligation to devote all your talents, all your energies, to the upliftment generally of the society, that whatever you were was not a consequence of your own personal achievements. There was in a sense a social obligation that was placed upon you."
At JC: "There was a whole generation of us there." His closest friends were: "People like Jeff Pyne, at Sandals Group. Gordon Mills, with Grace. Bruce Golding came subsequently, that's where I first met him, a year or two ahead of me. I became a prefect at JC when he was Head Boy." Golding calls Phillips now "the sharpest mind in the PNP." Phillips recalls "Big Joe", Joseph Arthur Matalon, as also ahead of him and someone with whom he subsequently became good friends. Pat Belanfanti was close, but it was his first cousin, John Depass, from the Christiana area, born just four days apart from him, with whom he felt closest. Says Phillips, ''As an only child, he was, at JC, the brother I never had." Others, including Jerry Small and Garth White, shared in what he calls "a period of great ferment" influenced by the Black Power Movement in the US. "We used to read Elijah Mohammed's newspaper." The strike at Jamaica Broadcasting Corpora-tion, of which their Headmaster at JC was also the Chairman, caused much public controversy, reverberating through JC in the first year of post-independence, while Emperor Haile Selassie's visit to Jamaica in April 1966 was another event that had a great impact on Phillips who graduated from JC in 1967, having done his A Levels in literature, history, economics and general paper.
THE UWI DAYS
It went without question that as his father was on the staff of the University of the West Indies, that Peter would go to university there where he encountered the English political scientist, Anne Spackman, and Caribbean educators including George Beckford, Norman Girvan, Owen Jefferson, C.Y. Thomas, Walter Rodney, Hermione McKenzie, Mervyn Alleyne, Roy Augier, W. Marshall, Trevor Munroe and Edwin Jones. Jones became one of Phillips' tutors and a good friend. Phillips notes:
"I went to UWI at a time when the rural movement was very active, and we became embroiled in those discussions. Garth White, Golding and others, we went to UWI and got caught up in the turmoil of the Black Power Movement very actively. I spent the second year totally involved in student activism. Didn't spend a lot of time in classes. Spent a lot of time reading. Was introduced to people like C.L.R. James. Franz Fanon and his Wretched of the Earth was the dominant theme of the period. There was a growing disillusionment with what independence had bequeathed. The society was becoming more polarised. The emergence of the urban ghetto, rapid urbanisation, were all phenomena so we became involved in the Black Power Movement. Rupert Lewis, Don Robotham, Derek Gordon, Trevor Munroe were students ahead of us. Walter Rodney had come to the campus toward the end of '67 early '68. A group of us who had got involved: Jerry Small, Michael 'Poko' Morgan, Don Davis, who had left JC together, went to UWI together, and we all got kind of caught up in this the rural group and these debates centred upon civil rights issues, police brutality, the future of sugar in Jamaica, all the debates of the New World Group. We got involved in what was an informal education about these things. Girvan was very influential in this.
FALSE INDEPENDENCE
"We got embroiled in this whole sense that Jamaican nationhood and Caribbean nationhood was still not in the service of the black masses of the country. That in all kinds of ways it had been a false independence, to use the language of the time. There was a false decolonisation, a formal as distinct from a substantive decolonisation of Jamaican society that had taken place, so that was a period of great student activism. We were able to publish a newspaper and formed a little group called African Youth Move. Rupert Lewis was instrumental in publishing Bongo Man. It came to a head in '68, which would have been my second-year at university, in October with Walter Rodney, whom we had joined with and had gone about in the ghettos of Kingston Trench Town, Denham Town, Rema, West Kingston and were very active in having a whole series of reasonings and a kind of political movement at the time. Another great influence was the Cuban revolution as an attempt to create a different Caribbean reality.
"My first year was in Irving Hall. Then I moved out of campus. We rented a house in August Town, on Bryce Hill Road, Jerry Small, myself, a couple of others, Poko Morgan, then Garth White. We lived there and continued our life on campus as independent intellectuals and called it a Black Power House. We had been very close with Walter in the debates and discussions of the period, been with him down in East Kingston and elsewhere where we had done the work that subsequently formed the basis of the book Groundings with my Brothers. He was really articulating and engaging in popular education effort, raising the consciousness of people about Africa, the origins in Africa, the nature of African society, the role of the sources of African and Caribbean underdevelopment. We were more involved in the whole popular education thing.
"When he was banned (October 16) we were very much involved. I remember Bruce Golding being there in our discussion. We had become involved in student politics on the campus. That night, we had to decide whether we were going to march. Ralph Gonsalves was on campus and we were in a sense the ground-level activists. We had developed a strong connection with many of the people in August Town, and on the morning the students marched, we also marched with the rest of the student body. People were tear-gassed and this whole episode developed. The government responded with great muscle. People like myself and others were viewed as being causes of the problem and the Security Forces, Special Branch and others developed a special interest in us. There were raids on our house. There was a whole period the police raided where we lived and took away books that had anything to do with revolution, including the Industrial Revolution. This was Shearer's government.
TRAVELS ACROSS JAMAICA
'Manley wasn't very active in this. Remember, Michael was still a vice-president of the party. People like D.K. Duncan were active in Brown's Town, busy organising farmers in that area, and we developed contacts. He was older. There was a confluence of a whole lot of popular democratic influences in that period and we developed contacts with most of them. He became my dentist, in a sense. I would go to Brown's Town and we'd visit. Following the riots, our UWI group travelled far and wide in Jamaica. Got to know Jamaica considerably, went in many communities, among Rastafarians, among other popular forces of all kinds of ideological persuasions. Some were Maoists, some were Marxists, some were traditional Leninists in the trade union movement. There was Munroe who was back and forth as the independent trade union action councillor ITAC at the time. There were a lot of Garveyist groups and we were just doing various things at the level of the grass roots, in towns, villages, and all over. We carried the Abeng newspaper, distributed it around, in Westmoreland, around Frome and sugar plantations, in Clarendon, in other communities and in Kingston, in Trench Town, particularly. But in Waterhouse, Olympic Gardens and East Kingston, where you developed a whole network of persons who were in pursuit of these general objectives of liberation.
RASTAFARIANISM
AND MARRIAGE
"After the initial Rodney episode, we became involved in the Ethiopian World Federation (member of Local 15), which developed into the Twelve Tribes. I got involved as one of a good hundred or so founding members about in 1969. It was then based in Trench Town. I'd got married the first time in 1970, to Minion Smith. She was in the Rastafarian Movement. Her mother was a working-class person. Her father a policeman. She was part of this whole episode, part of the general ferment of the period, the Black Power Movement. She was living down in Standpipe but I met her in Mona Common, if I remember right. We married in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church located on Maxfield Avenue but they were having a visit of one of the church officials, the Archimandrite."
They lived first in Hermitage, then in Mona Heights over the period 1970-1976 during which they had four children: Michael, 1971; Tsahai, which means 'sunflower' in Amharic, 1973, and David 1974 and Ruth in 1976. Phillips worked for a few months in the civil service but ironically, the man who is now Minister of National Security was, at that time by his own account: "proscribed in all the Government things. We'd been dangerous people, so described." He was finally hired at UWI, starting as an administrative assistant in the Faculty of Arts, although he'd obtained his first degree from UWI in Economics with a minor in Sociology in 1970. He subsequently left his administrative position for academic work as a research assistant in the Institute of Social and Economic Research.
FURTHERING HIS STUDIES
"Eventually I formed a view that I needed to go on to study further as an intellectual exercise as distinct from just an activist exercise. Carl Stone was head of the research project that I went to work on and at the same time, about '74, I went to do my post-graduate studies. We were doing research in the housing programmes, looking at the urban renewal programmes, the kind of self-start programmes which resulted in Nannyville, De la Vega City and others. And I did work in relation to the Sugar Co-operatives, which Carl was also doing. Carl was a very great influence and great encouragement to go on to further studies. Locksley Edmondson was in fact my supervisor for my Master's thesis in International Relations (BSc. Gov't UWI 1976)."
Phillips' political role in the 1976 election consisted of analytical work in terms of elections, voting patterns and the like at the level of the constituency, especially in East St. Andrew-Mona Heights, Papine, Hope Pastures, etc. He felt that Michael Manley had evolved a political project that addressed the issues he'd been dealing with and represented the best option for the Jamaican people.
Next: His life in the United States and entry into PNP politics.
Caribbean underdevelopment. We were more involved in the whole popular education thing.
"When he was banned (October 16) we were very much involved. I remember Bruce Golding being there in our discussion. We had become involved in student politics on the campus. That night, we had to decide whether we were going to march. Ralph Gonsalves was on campus and we were in a sense the ground-level activists. We had developed a strong connection with many of the people in August Town, and on the morning the students marched, we also marched with the rest of the student body. People were tear-gassed and this whole episode developed. The government responded with great muscle. People like myself and others were viewed as being causes of the problem and the Security Forces, Special Branch and others developed a special interest in us. There were raids on our house. There was a whole period the police raided where we lived and took away books that had anything to do with revolution, including the Industrial Revolution. This was Shearer's government.
TRAVELS ACROSS JAMAICA
'Manley wasn't very active in this. Remember, Michael was still a vice-president of the party. People like D.K. Duncan were active in Brown's Town, busy organising farmers in that area, and we developed contacts. He was older. There was a confluence of a whole lot of popular democratic influences in that period and we developed contacts with most of them. He became my dentist, in a sense. I would go to Brown's Town and we'd visit. Following the riots, our UWI group travelled far and wide in Jamaica. Got to know Jamaica considerably, went in many communities, among Rastafarians, among other popular forces of all kinds of ideological persuasions. Some were Maoists, some were Marxists, some were traditional Leninists in the trade union movement. There was Munroe who was back and forth as the independent trade union action councillor ITAC at the time. There were a lot of Garveyist groups and we were just doing various things at the level of the grass roots, in towns, villages, and all over. We carried the Abeng newspaper, distributed it around, in Westmoreland, around Frome and sugar plantations, in Clarendon, in other communities and in Kingston, in Trench Town, particularly. But in Waterhouse, Olympic Gardens and East Kingston, where you developed a whole network of persons who were in pursuit of these general objectives of liberation.
RASTAFARIANISM
AND MARRIAGE
"After the initial Rodney episode, we became involved in the Ethiopian World Federation (member of Local 15), which developed into the Twelve Tribes. I got involved as one of a good hundred or so founding members about in 1969. It was then based in Trench Town. I'd got married the first time in 1970, to Minion Smith. She was in the Rastafarian Movement. Her mother was a working-class person. Her father a policeman. She was part of this whole episode, part of the general ferment of the period, the Black Power Movement. She was living down in Standpipe but I met her in Mona Common, if I remember right. We married in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church located on Maxfield Avenue but they were having a visit of one of the church officials, the Archimandrite."
They lived first in Hermitage, then in Mona Heights over the period 1970-1976 during which they had four children: Michael, 1971; Tsahai, which means 'sunflower' in Amharic, 1973, and David 1974 and Ruth in 1976. Phillips worked for a few months in the civil service but ironically, the man who is now Minister of National Security was, at that time by his own account: "proscribed in all the Government things. We'd been dangerous people, so described." He was finally hired at UWI, starting as an administrative assistant in the Faculty of Arts, although he'd obtained his first degree from UWI in Economics with a minor in Sociology in 1970. He subsequently left his administrative position for academic work as a research assistant in the Institute of Social and Economic Research.
FURTHERING HIS STUDIES
"Eventually I formed a view that I needed to go on to study further as an intellectual exercise as distinct from just an activist exercise. Carl Stone was head of the research project that I went to work on and at the same time, about '74, I went to do my post-graduate studies. We were doing research in the housing programmes, looking at the urban renewal programmes, the kind of self-start programmes which resulted in Nannyville, De la Vega City and others. And I did work in relation to the Sugar Co-operatives, which Carl was also doing. Carl was a very great influence and great encouragement to go on to further studies. Locksley Edmondson was in fact my supervisor for my Master's thesis in International Relations (BSc. Gov't UWI 1976)."
Phillips' political role in the 1976 election consisted of analytical work in terms of elections, voting patterns and the like at the level of the constituency, especially in East St. Andrew-Mona Heights, Papine, Hope Pastures, etc. He felt that Michael Manley had evolved a political project that addressed the issues he'd been dealing with and represented the best option for the Jamaican people.
Next: His life in the United States and entry into PNP politics.
