Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
YESTERDAY - the eve of Heritage Week - marked the 138th anniversary of the day National Hero Paul Bogle marched from Stony Gut to Spanish Town in search of justice.
At that time of course, he was not yet a National Hero. For his efforts, he was shown the way of all poor, black, uppity, nonentities who thought that the word "justice" had anything to do with them in the Caribbean created as part of the mission of Columbus.
With a swing of the hangman's rope Bogle was silenced.
Yesterday also, the third annual Peter Tosh symposium was held at the University of the West Indies as a prelude to the international celebrations of his birth and his life's mission equal rights and justice.
Like Bogle, he was silenced.
Regardless of who stood behind the trigger, the same mission was served one less uppity black man from that uppity place called Jamaica, with a mistaken notion that "justice" was meant to include him. And to boot, he wasn't even a Baptist, so what common cause could he have found with the Baptists and their so-called wars?
And wasn't history later to prove that the declaration of war was the exclusive domain of people much further north?
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 9/11
September 11, 2001 did change the world, and there were many of them. September 11, 1987 is one but it was not televised.
A defiant, self-assured singer-songwriter-musician-poet ceased to be, without ever once settling for anything less than he knew he was destined to be. Fully human, full stop.
Not much was televised either of September 11, 1973 when the democratically elected Government of Chile was toppled in a bloody coup which also saw the rounding up, detention, maiming and execution of some of the world's most gifted poets, musicians, singers and storytellers who just happened to wear Chilean national identities.
In the aftermath, thousands of others were simply made to "disappear" and the name of Augusto Pinochet the dictator who was "instituted to power" all but eclipsed that of the elected leader, Salvador Allende, and people ask where is the justice?
"We want justice" is still the most popular slogan to turn up on posters at demonstrations against everything in Jamaica including potholes and the war, now the occupation of Iraq.
In the United States, it has become the cry of Families Against the War but you have to catch it on C-Span since news channels seem to have found a way to ignore it.
And too many young people of this country, for whom Peter consistently expressed concern about their education, the state of the spirit, and their prosperity, seem to have been given a way to ignore it. They have yet to catch the vision and heed the exhortation in Barry Chevannes' Forward March to "fill Jamaica full with our song" in honour of Bogle's march from Stony Gut, Garvey's March for Africa and the march of countless unnamed others for whom Jimmy Cliff demanded "a piece of the pie, right here, right now".
Part of the dilemma, of course, is that, as a nation, we really lack the courage to name our heroes and claim their heroic deeds if we are unsure about the kind of reception they might receive in the global village.
Would we have had the courage, for example to declare Bob Marley the greatest composer of all time? See? Village life is not always conducive to the villagers acting independently in their best interest, defined on their terms.
We have National Heroes whom we are afraid to teach about in schools except as a birth date, a death date and some other "vital statistics".
Imagine school children singing the anthem of Garvey's UNIA at the official flag raising ceremony to begin the week. Or dancing to Tosh's:
"You teach the youth about Marco Polo and you said he was a very great man,
You teach the youth about Pirate Morgan and you said he was a very great man ...
Oops! That might mean that they understood the whirlwind of violence which we are all now reaping. It might even mean that they had some notion of why there can be no peace till there is equal rights and justice.
EMANCIPATION
Black, free, naked and nothing in my hands I bring, since massa teck it all, leaving us with the philosophy that we who came into the world with nothing must leave with nothing.
Bogle and Tosh might want to know how come then Massa children always have so much to inherit and don't really care too much about what the rest of us philosophise about Heritage Weak, oops, Week?
EQUAL RIGHTS AND JUSTICE
Suppose our young people began to make conclusions about the similarities between our Paul and Peter and the Biblical Paul and Peter as taught to them in schools?
These have as their common centre the truth that he who sins must repent and as far as possible make reparation to Divine justice. Repentance that is, heartfelt sorrow with the firm purpose of sinning no more is thus the prime condition on which depends the value of whatever the sinner may do or suffer by way of expiation. Oh, I can hear it now "That was then ..."
Yet religious education and the timeless values it is supposed to transmit is deemed to be central to their sense of being and critical to the attitudes and values we want them to develop as productive and responsible citizens of Jamaica Land We Love.
Paul Bogle wanted the people to have land that would give them security and independence.
Tosh wanted an end to the wars, threats and rumours of wars and the associated scorch earth policy that left them nothing but hillside and rockstone, which in turn forced them back to massa's plantations and exacerbated existing injustice.
Tosh was murdered a week after his album, No Nuclear War, was released in the United States. Through it he addressed the issues of nuclear holocaust, apartheid, world peace and spirituality.
And Palestinians are still fighting for it. The people of Zimbabwe fighting for it. The Sudanese. The Syrians.
CORRUPTION RANKING
During the days leading up to Heritage Week, we received the news of Jamaica's higher ranking on the world corruption index.
It probably would not mean a thing if local business interests didn't tremble at the thought that foreign investors might notice and decide to take their money elsewhere. Some of us expected instead, at least a little whisper of "stop, teef!"
And the man Peter Tosh still wailing with Paul Bogle feed my people, include them in the processes of Government and, yes, take actions that indicate that you repent of your sinning ways.
Build on the positive outcomes of Bogle's march fair courts, better roads, better education and better medical services. And as for Winston Hubert McIntosh, "Him nuh dead, him nuh dead, him nuh dead. De man a trod eart still, younger dan ever, de man deh pan eart a watch all de wickidness whey a gwaan."
