Ian BoyneIT IS not enough that the University of the West Indies (UWI) should accord former Opposition Leader Edward Phillip George Seaga the Distinguished Fellow status. It should give the region a full, definitive scholarly assessment of one of the finest champions of the Jamaican underclasses; a man tragically misunderstood and mischaracterised.
In giving us this study, the UWI should acknowledge that it has been almost unforgivably remiss in being so late with a study that should have easily recommended itself. The political left and the progressive forces of the 1970s should also freely confess that it grossly misrepresented Mr. Seaga and allowed the partisan struggles of the period to cloud a scientific analysis of this remarkable Jamaican.
Even Professor Carl Stone, my Jamaican model of the intellectual par excellence, failed to properly position Edward Seaga. In his now famous quote, contrasting Mr. Seaga's managerialist leadership style to the populist and visionary styles, he failed to capture the essence of Edward Seaga.
The man is not just a pragmatist who was highly efficient and competent. He was not just an institution-builder and an implementer, in contrast to Michael Manley. That he certainly was. But there was something more fundamentally driving his passion to implement things and to build institutions; something which made him impatient with sloppiness and incompetence and which pit him against many accustomed to a political and public sector culture of ease, indifference and sloth. It was the vision he had for the Jamaican people. Yes, Edward Seaga was a visionary political leader. And he was populist in the sense of being obsessed with and single-minded in his devotion of the Jamaican poor and marginalised.
He was never populist in the sense of using rhetoric to incite class warfare or making short-term decisions just because they would gain political mileage. He did not play to the gallery or sought cheap popularity. Indeed, he paid dearly for spurning that time-honoured Machiavellian tradition, refined to an art in Jamaican politics.
ADVOCATE OF THE POOR
Edward Seaga stands in the league of Michael Manley as an indefatigable, relentless advocate of the Jamaican dispossessed and voiceless. If anyone had told me as an ardent progressive in the 1970s that I would ever live to write that of Edward Seaga, I would think the person a stark, staring lunatic. But today, if I were to make any correction of that statement it would be to point out that it was Michael Manley who followed the radical tradition of Edward Seaga.
It was Edward Seaga who in 1961 gave that memorably strident and poignant 'haves and have-nots' speech in the Legislative Council; a speech that would set the tone of his entire political life. Whereas Alexander Bustamante did have a focus on the working class, and while there where radical political activists from the 1930s who championed the cause of poor and disenfranchised, Edward Seaga brought a comprehensiveness of vision and a depth of understanding of the strengths, ingenuity, creativity and centrality of the underclasses urban and rural that was unusual.
Something profound happened to Seaga; a life-transforming, cathartic experience which would never allow him to brush himself off and pretend it never happened. When in 1953 he began to immerse himself in the culture of the Jamaican working and peasant classes from the vantage point of Salt Lane, Back-o-Wall as well as from deep rural Jamaica, and saw not only the depth of poverty but the wealth of the people's culture, Edward Seaga had the psychological equivalent of a 'born-again' experience.
Seaga became, in the jargon of sociology, a 'participant observer' of working class and peasant life. As he himself would later write, "I had lived in these areas experiencing life not as a visitor but waking and going to bed in the households of the village and ghetto and experiencing the widest form of participation possible of everyday life."
