By Laura Tanna, Contributor 
Bruce Golding - Ian Allen/Staff Photographer
BRUCE GOLDING became a member of the Central Executive of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in 1969 and after graduating from the University of the West Indies with a B.Sc. in Economics in June 1969, spent the next two and a half years campaigning to be elected member of Parliament for West St. Catherine (1972-76). He and a group of young university graduates, including Percy Broderick, Pearnel Charles and Errol Anderson, began working closely with Eddie Seaga.
HIS FAMILY
In 1971, through Pearnel Charles, Bruce met Pearnel's sister, Lorna, who was living in New York working for the NAACP. Engaged in November 1971, they married the following year and have three children Shereen, Steven and Ann-Merita. Golding says of Lorna: "She's the disciplinarian and I am the philosopher. She certainly raised the first two and I kind of helped with the last one. Because of that I was very attached to my daughter, very, very, very attached." Shereen is in her final year of law school at Georgetown University. Steven, a graduate of Rutgers University, is a passionate Garveyite, goes to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and works with his mother at their Honeycrust Bakery, while Ann-Merita, in her second year at Howard University, is considering a career in rehabilitative speech therapy.
The fear and violence which transformed Jamaica in the 70s came much closer to home for Golding than many people realise. His brother-in-law, Pearnel Charles, imprisoned by the People's National Party (PNP) government during the State of Emergency in 1976, wrote of the experience in his book, The Politics of Power. I asked Golding, who once said that he slept with a suitcase packed, in case the proverbial knock on the door came in the night, to describe the impact of that period on his own life as a member of the Opposition party.
"My brother Tony was charged during the 1976 Election. It was a trumped up charge of shooting with intent. He was taken to the Gun Court and eventually acquitted. They had no case whatsoever. There was a plan to take me and it wasn't done because of the intervention of Hugh Shearer. Hugh Shearer always had a special relationship with Michael Manley and my name and Errol Anderson were on the list. Hugh Shearer managed to argue a case that there was no basis for our being detained. Still, we expected to be detained, and therefore you didn't want to be taken in your underwear so you had a suitcase in which you had your essentials and toiletries with you.
"Edward Seaga assumed the leadership of the Labour party in November 1974. Immediately after that, I became the general secretary of the party. We mounted a campaign in 1975 called the Action Team Campaign, where we went to all the major towns. It was a blistering campaign. Percy Broderick and I were in charge and we were beginning to have a significant impact. The growth that the PNP government had inherited remember 1971, the growth rate was seven or eight per cent they had lost it. We had growth in 1972, their first year. We had minimal growth in 1973 and by 1974, the economy was in trouble. So we were having a significant impact. That took us into 1976 when we started putting pressure now for the elections to be called. Manley was determined that he was going to cauterise this political pressure and a State of Emer-gency was concocted. Because that is what it was. There were all sorts of plots that we were supposed to be involved in.''
STATE OF EMERGENCY
Golding spoke of ''Robinson trying to ingratiate himself with the Labour party as a plant. This was being set up as a trap for Seaga. There was a question of some meeting being held at Turtle Towers in Ocho Rios. He [Seaga] very wisely called the JDF [Jamaica Defence Force] and asked them to send one of their intelligence officers, in plain clothes, totally incognito, who sat in and listened to the discussions. Were it not for that, Mr. Seaga himself might have been detained.
