THE EDITOR, Sir:
REV. DEVON Dick hit the nail on the head when he asserted in his article that the Maroons should apologise for their selfish role of oppressing other blacks in Jamaica during and immediately after slavery. Although the moral pinnacle from which this assertion is made, to a large extent, is eclipsed by the daily slaughter of non-Maroon blacks by non-Maroon blacks, Rev. Dick's point is timely to correct the deliberate manipulation of our history.
It has always burdened my heart to see what ignorance can do when every January a large number of non-Maroon blacks trek to Accompong to witness the observance of a festival which was to have marked the beginning of their ancestral sorrows at the hands of Maroons. Ironically, the passage of time has dealt poetic justice to the Maroons by their squalor and poverty, continually mesmerised by the déjà vu of greatness, but yet stung by the venom of shortsightedness, plunged into a seemingly hypnotic trance of economic folly from which there is apparently no escape.
Perhaps it is forgiveness which the Maroons need, provided that the correctness of the interpretation of their past role is held up for them to see that we "know", instead of their educated descendants trying to sterilise their dastardly acts mired in an ominous past.
I am, etc.,
SHALMAN SCOTT
shalscott@hotmail.com
Lot 452 Redbirch Crescent
Montego Bay
Via Go-Jamaica
