Melville Cooke Let's recall some great men
Who have been fighting for our rights
- The Burning Spear
LAST WEEK I began to address some misconceptions in Dawn Ritch's jottings entitled 'The white man's burden', published in The Sunday Gleaner of June 22, 2003.
Today, I continue by addressing a specific part of that ill-conceived collection of words, which reads:
Whether past or present, the people who have stood up for the rights of black people in this country are invariably brown-skinned, Chinese or white, and many have been of the female gender.
'Invariably'. A very sweeping statement, Ms. Ritch makes. And very irresponsible. And very inaccurate.
So let's recall three great men who, if Ms. Ritch had just read something other than 'How to Emasculate the Black Man' by Ms. Manless, she would have known. It is actually primary level stuff.
Alexander Bedward: Before Rasta, before Leonard Howell and Pinnacle, before Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, there was Alexander Bedward, August Town and the Jamaica Native Baptist Free Church.
Bedward preached the gospel, but he also preached black pride, self-reliance, dignity and hard work. Without e-mail, a PR agency or LOVE TV, in the early 1900s he had a network of 33,000 persons, with members coming from Cuba, Panama, the USA and Costa Rica.
Bedward preached against the churches, calling the preachers thieves and liars (and this was before televangilism), against the colonial government and the 'Pharisees and Sadducees' of the white race.
The church, naturally, did not like him very much the Anglican Bishop led a march against him and the RC Bishop issued a proclamation banning their members from having anything to do with him.
In 1921, he led a march from his Union Camp base that should have reached Kingston, after whipping a census taker, then a police constable and shunning high-ranking police officers who came to see him. The Bedwardites were held in Half-way Tree and an RM sentenced 300 of them in three hours (a no now no justice no deh a Jamaica). They were later pardoned, but Bedward was tricked and trapped.
He was declared to be of unsound mind and allowed to go, but as he stepped out onto Hagley Park Road he was nabbed, returned to the courtroom and charged with being a lunatic found wandering at large.
Alexander Bedward died in Bellevue Hospital on November 8, 1930.
Leonard P. Howell: Leonard Percival Howell was the fist man to preach that Haile Selassie is God. Like Bedward, he was persecuted and prosecuted by the authorities; unlike Bedward, he did not die there. Along with his deputy, Robert Hinds, he was sentenced to a prison term for selling pictures of Haile Selassie and declaring him King of Black men.
From telling black people not to pay taxes, because the land was theirs, to keeping public meetings of his Ethiopian Salvation Society in St. Thomas, Howell and his movement were immediately seen as a threat to the establishment.
Howell was part of the labour rights movement long before Ms. Ritch's "brown" heroes scrambled to the head of the people's frustration and channelled their frustration into more frustration with the BITU/JLP and NWU/PNP. He was on the serious side, as he was involved in the Serge Island riots in St. Thomas in the 1930s.
In 1940 Howell moved his encampment to the famous Pinnacle in Sligoville, St. Catherine, 500 acres of Rasta settlement, farming and craft, which the police kept a close eye on. In 1954 it all came to an end when there was a big raid on the settlement for (what else?) ganja.
Howell died in obscurity.
Like Garvey, he was also made a deportee.
Walter Rodney: A Guyanese man who studied at the UWI's Mona Campus from 1960 to 1963, he returned to Jamaica after doing postgraduate work and teaching at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, to teach.
And he taught Africa, Black pride, the power of the Rastafari movement and unravelling of the myths that white people had planted in the minds of Black people. He did not get the madman treatment after all, he was Dr. Walter Rodney (and you all know how titles impress Babylon). He did this not simply in the confines of the UWI campus, but in the ghettos and among the poor.
No, the Hugh Shearer-led government simply banned him from returning to Jamaica in 1968, after he had attended a Black Writers' Conference in Canada.
Walter Rodney was murdered in Guyana and, apart from snatches of How Europe Underdevel-oped Africa at UWI, his legacy is not taught in schools.
That is the fate of every black man in this country who has made a serious stand for the race. He is harassed by the state, ridiculed and demonised in the press, and written out of history by creatures like Ms. Ritch, who continue a colonial, planter-class stance that I had hoped was part of the unfortunate past.
But I naa feget.
Me haffi remin' yu
- Mutabaruka
Next week part 3 and final: African explanation.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer
