Mark Lee
(In a letter to the Editor)
MOST JAMAICANS subscribe to the rule of law and condemn criminality. Most Jamaicans also believe in fairness and justice. It is unfortunate that we have been socialised into a culture that violence is the first means of achieving our objective - good or bad.
The people of South St. Andrew aren't any less Jamaican than the rest of us nor are those of West Kingston whether in their ambition or their sociology. From our platforms of relative privilege, we rush eagerly to condemn people before examining the issues confronting them. Let's take some broad sweeps of our history and relate them to the stories we're writing in our country today.
In the period after the Emancipation Act came into force, to the Morant Bay uprisings, our foreparents, the new Jamaicans, were filled with expectations and ambitions. They withheld their labour from the old massas, mostly helped by the non-established churches especially the Baptists they acquired land, built free towns and villages, grew their crops and pursued occupations in trades and minor professions open to them.
In return for their independent industry, old massa tried his best to use the law and state power to exclude from participation and criminalise every action and behaviour of the emancipated people. The result was that, even in the short period before the emancipation, "dons" were emerging among the wider population of the unrepresented. So we had Daddy Sharpe in St James, presenting himself as the defender of the people; when George William Gordon after whom Gordon House is named was being unfairly prevented from taking his seat in the elected Assembly, Paul Bogle the St Thomas 'don' and his 'posse' were there demanding Gordon's right be respected.
My reading of Sherlock and Bennett's "Story of the Jamaican People" says that the situation was so bad in terms of injustice in the legal system and the dispossession of the mass of the people, that the Baptists and other denominations supported them in forming their own courts to settle matters independently of the State system.
PROTECTION AND PATRONAGE
From the foregoing, it may be assumed that the Jamaica Labour Party and People's National Party, powerful as they are in the control of the state mechanism today, did not invent the system of protection and patronage. And without the protection and patronage of the early non-conformist Christians, the peasantry might well have been forced into new forms of servitude and indentureship.
The slums of Antigua's Farm in St John's, The Bahamas' Over-the-hill in Nassau, or Bridgetown, Barbados' Orleans, like Kingston's former Back-o-wall, dung hills of Africa in the West, were garrisons of poverty before any politician entered them. Who from the comfort of his/her manicured garden and picket fence home would venture into Back-o-wall before Edward Seaga created the more liveable community of Tivoli Gardens?
If the Labour Party and the PNP are to be faulted it is for not destroying the system which creates the need for protection and patronage outside of the State apparatus, which they have juggled between them since 1962 when Britain happily gave up that responsibility. The parties have continued to train communities to block roads and burn tyres as a first line of action in every protestation since 1962.
That the people of Arnett Gardens have had to resort to violent means to get the ear of their government led by their party suggests serious flaws in our system. And then to suggest that these Jamaicans are behaving as they are out of illiteracy, is insulting to them and the nation and condemnatory of the work done in formal education and programmes such as JAMAL and HEART. To unleash the police on the community to smother the incident as mere criminal action is unfair to the police, who are being set up to lose any initiative they've pursued to give the constabulary a new face as our partner and protector in the legitimate fight against crime, rather than hateful adversary.
And to think, one of the pleas of the protesters echoes eerily of the lament of 1865: Just allow us a voice, a community council so we may play a part in determining our destiny.
marval@sprint.ca
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Via Go-Jamaica
