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The planners and the plotters
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Fewer than one in 10 of all Jamaicans now alive were among those present half-a-century ago, so it will probably come as a considerable surprise that at that time Jamaican history was not taught in Jamaican schools.
John Maxwell
There were no Jamaican history or geography books or any other Jamaican textbooks for that matter.
At school I learned more about Lake Taranaki in New Zealand and the Battle of Hastings than I knew about Kingston Harbour or the Maroon Wars.
George William Gordon and Paul Bogle were footnotes in the Gleaner's so-called Geography and History of Jamaica (GG&HJ). That was mainly a timeline of the destruction wrought by British governors and Caribbean hurricanes, interspersed by the odd slave uprising or Maroon War, which were matters of unavoidable but insignificant note. Bogle and Gordon were small-time agitators, according to the GG&HJ and they got no more than they deserved.
The Maroons were lavishly slandered, producing a tradition which persists to this day.
On March 19, 1953, according to Hartley Neita's 'This Day in Our Past' in the Gleaner, the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Jamaican history be taught in schools. This resolution owed much to a novel by a Jamaican author, Vic Reid, published in New York and London in 1949. In this novel, for the first time for most people, it appeared that George William Gordon and Paul Bogle were not troublemakers and criminals, but heroes in search of justice.
And although Jamaican history began to be taught in schools after 1955, when Norman Manley became head of government, most people were still unaware of Bogle and Gordon's real status. That was why, in 1959, my then wife and I drove down to the Kingston Parade at midnight on October 25, where I vandalised a statue of Dr Lewis Quier Bowerbank, who was the Lady Macbeth to Edward John Eyre's Macbeth, in the murders of Bogle and Gordon.
For me and a few others, it was an insult to Jamaica that a statue of this traitor should occupy the place of honour in the central park of Jamaica's capital, while his victims were buried en masse in the yard of the Morant Bay Courthouse.
When I smashed the statue I also painted on the pedestal the date '65 - to remind people what the action was about. A little later Norman Manley built a new Parliament building and named it Gordon House.
Oddly enough, last week was also the anniversary of the publication of Vic Reid's New Day. I was entranced by his prose and, as a trainee reporter at the Gleaner, I sat at his feet, almost literally, every Saturday night for a year and whenever I could thereafter.
By 1954, Vic was editor of Public Opinion and I was his political reporter, raising hell about the profits and the pollution of the Caribbean Cement Company and campaigning successfully for the abatement of the toxic dust and unsuccessfully for the reduction of the extortionate price charged by the company, which I believe, set back development in Jamaica by half-a-century.
At that time, Jamaica was in a nationalist ferment: Evon Blake, editor/publisher of Spotlight, a monthly magazine, Mayor C G Walker and two ethnic Jews - Wills Isaacs and Leslie Alexander - were campaigning for an end to the de facto apartheid in Jamaican life. Alexander was later to demand that the Government of Independent Jamaica bring home the body of Marcus Garvey and do appropriate honour to that hero.
Democracy in practice
Despite the failure of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) 1944-54 government, democracy was alive in Jamaica, in forums like the Jamaica Agricultural Society, the Jamaica Union of Teachers and other inheritors of the debating club, traditions which had nurtured people like Marcus Garvey and Ken Hill.
In the first 10 years of adult suffrage, the JLP had formed the Government, and, th
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Fewer than one in 10 of all Jamaicans now alive were among those present half-a-century ago, so it will probably come as a considerable surprise that at that time Jamaican history was not taught in Jamaican schools.
John Maxwell
There were no Jamaican history or geography books or any other Jamaican textbooks for that matter.
At school I learned more about Lake Taranaki in New Zealand and the Battle of Hastings than I knew about Kingston Harbour or the Maroon Wars.
George William Gordon and Paul Bogle were footnotes in the Gleaner's so-called Geography and History of Jamaica (GG&HJ). That was mainly a timeline of the destruction wrought by British governors and Caribbean hurricanes, interspersed by the odd slave uprising or Maroon War, which were matters of unavoidable but insignificant note. Bogle and Gordon were small-time agitators, according to the GG&HJ and they got no more than they deserved.
The Maroons were lavishly slandered, producing a tradition which persists to this day.
On March 19, 1953, according to Hartley Neita's 'This Day in Our Past' in the Gleaner, the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Jamaican history be taught in schools. This resolution owed much to a novel by a Jamaican author, Vic Reid, published in New York and London in 1949. In this novel, for the first time for most people, it appeared that George William Gordon and Paul Bogle were not troublemakers and criminals, but heroes in search of justice.
And although Jamaican history began to be taught in schools after 1955, when Norman Manley became head of government, most people were still unaware of Bogle and Gordon's real status. That was why, in 1959, my then wife and I drove down to the Kingston Parade at midnight on October 25, where I vandalised a statue of Dr Lewis Quier Bowerbank, who was the Lady Macbeth to Edward John Eyre's Macbeth, in the murders of Bogle and Gordon.
For me and a few others, it was an insult to Jamaica that a statue of this traitor should occupy the place of honour in the central park of Jamaica's capital, while his victims were buried en masse in the yard of the Morant Bay Courthouse.
When I smashed the statue I also painted on the pedestal the date '65 - to remind people what the action was about. A little later Norman Manley built a new Parliament building and named it Gordon House.
Oddly enough, last week was also the anniversary of the publication of Vic Reid's New Day. I was entranced by his prose and, as a trainee reporter at the Gleaner, I sat at his feet, almost literally, every Saturday night for a year and whenever I could thereafter.
By 1954, Vic was editor of Public Opinion and I was his political reporter, raising hell about the profits and the pollution of the Caribbean Cement Company and campaigning successfully for the abatement of the toxic dust and unsuccessfully for the reduction of the extortionate price charged by the company, which I believe, set back development in Jamaica by half-a-century.
At that time, Jamaica was in a nationalist ferment: Evon Blake, editor/publisher of Spotlight, a monthly magazine, Mayor C G Walker and two ethnic Jews - Wills Isaacs and Leslie Alexander - were campaigning for an end to the de facto apartheid in Jamaican life. Alexander was later to demand that the Government of Independent Jamaica bring home the body of Marcus Garvey and do appropriate honour to that hero.
Democracy in practice
Despite the failure of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) 1944-54 government, democracy was alive in Jamaica, in forums like the Jamaica Agricultural Society, the Jamaica Union of Teachers and other inheritors of the debating club, traditions which had nurtured people like Marcus Garvey and Ken Hill.
In the first 10 years of adult suffrage, the JLP had formed the Government, and, th