Melville Cooke/ColumnistWHEN GUNMEN invaded Bob Mar-ley's home at 56 Hope Road, St. Andrew, on December 3, 1976, shooting him in the arm, his wife Rita in the head and manager Don Taylor in the groin, it gave rise to the most profound analysis of Jamaican 'showciety' that I have ever heard on a record.
And that was only in the first verse.
"Ambush In The Night", released on the "Survival" album in 1979, is not one of the Marley songs that is favoured on radio (or by the Jamaica Tourist Board). It starts with a statement of the situation at hand ('"see them fighting for power, but they don't know the hour'"), evolves through the conflict of materialism and morals ("so they bribing with their guns, spare parts and money, trying to belittle our integrity now'), then pinpoints the attitude of those in power ('"they say what we know is just what they teach us, and we're ignorant. For every time they can reach us through political strategy").
And then, before Marley places his personal experience of '"ambush in the night all guns aiming at me'" within the general situation, he does the lines that sum up Jamaica society: '"They keep us hungry and when you gonna get some food your brother's got to be your enemy'".
Chances are (Marley reference intended) that he was speaking about the divide and rule politics that have divided the society, creating communities that are inherently hostile towards each other today without knowing the beginning of their conflict. However, it applies to the so much more than the 'Ps' which have put us at each other's throats.
Because while we lament mostly about the black on black violence for scarce benefits and spoils that pops up on police reports as 'gang-related incidents', there is significant institutionalised enmity in the society. In addition, there is the constant friction of a deeper kind of hunger, the one for acknowledgement as a person of some worth.
HUNGRY BLACK PEOPLE
I am saddened when I see higglers running with their goods, Metropolitan Parks and Markets (MPM) personnel in hot pursuit, or when items that were being sold from the sidewalk are seized and tossed onto a truck. It is a case of hungry Black people, starved of an education by a system that is geared more towards turning out functional illiterates whose minds are attuned to the monotony and repetitiveness of manual labour than actually developing the intellect, becoming each other's enemies. There is an underlying hunger, though, which fuels the savagery with which the police and MPM personnel treat Black people whose backgrounds of poverty and struggle are often not unlike theirs. It is the need for 'respect', for recognition as being 'smaddy', for the food of self-esteem, of which so many Black people in this country have been starved.
Of course, since for the Black person of low self-esteem (the majority, I believe) the Chinese, Indian, whites and other such 'pretty hair' people are clearly out of their league, so if they are going to feel 'better than' somebody else, it has to be another Black person.
Hence we have a situation where when the police, almost invariably black, stop a black motorist the attitude, the approach and language are quite different from when they stop someone of another race. And the darker the skin of the person they stop the more likely, I have found, for a police officer to be abrasive.
CONSISTENT INTERACTION
But it goes deeper than that. I have often found that the darker the skin of the person in a relatively low level job which requires consistent interaction with the public, the ruder they are to those they feel are in their 'category'. This applies to persons employed as cashiers, clerks, receptionists, secretaries, and so on.
And beware of the person in that low level job who is dressed to the nines, who sizes up the person in front of them with an eye flick over their clothes and skin and decides if the contest is on or not.
It is a sad situation, which can only be fixed by teaching black people their history and inherent worth as human beings. But that would eventually mean reordering the society and that aint gonna happen any time soon.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
