Bradshaw Singh | Change Princess Margaret Hospital’s name

It would be more than an insult to the people of St Thomas for Jamaica to move into a republic with the Princess Margaret Hospital still celebrating the British monarchy. In the first place, there should not have been a monument to the monarchy in this parish, and worse, so near to the battle site of the Morant Bay Rebellion.

The, Paul Bogle-led, Morant Bay Rebellion was the boldest attack on monarchical injustice in post-slavery Jamaica for which then colonial governor Edward Eyre unleashed vengeance on the then St Thomas in the East Parish. Under martial law, hundreds were slaughtered and hundreds more seriously wounded, over a thousand houses burnt, cultivations and livestock destroyed. Many fled the parish in fear of their lives.

Without proper investigation, Eyre concluded that William Gordon was an instigator of this rebellion, something Gordon was innocent of. Gordon was then arrested in Kingston and taken to Morant Bay, where he was found guilty, and hanged in what is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Jamaica. The wholesale trial of alleged rebels was mostly without due process.

Verdicts of flogging were pronounced without charges read, prisoners sentenced for coming from settlements with ‘bad character’. With hands fastened and ropes around their necks, some prisoners were forced to swear that they would ‘well and truly state that G.W. Gordon has to do with the rebellion’. Paul Bogle’s trial is believed to have lasted about five minutes.

All attempts to criminally charge Eyre in England were overturned by Her Majesty’s courts. And even in the civil case, Phillip vs. Eyre, the courts of England concluded that Eyre had not committed a crime. Notwithstanding, Eyre had afterwards used the Jamaican Legislative Assembly - now Parliament - to pass laws that sanctioned martial law and the excesses he had used against the St Thomas people.

In every step of the way, Eyre’s injustice and brutality against the people of St Thomas were upheld by the British Monarchical Government; then headed by Queen Victoria, the great-great-grandmother of both Princess Margaret and her sister, Elizabeth II, who was monarch in 1955 when the old Morant Bay Hospital was rebuilt as the Princess Margaret Hospital.

VINDICATED

A Royal Commission sent to Jamaica in December 1865 to investigate Eyre’s response to the uprising vindicated him, a hero who saved the white population of Jamaica. Whether Queen Victoria or any other monarch, the British government had never being sensitive to the needs of non-whites in the empire. It was the same Victoria, the monarch, when plantation owners were paid £20 million and another £27 million extracted form indentureship for the loss of their property even to the end upholding the reduction of Africans to chattels.

Paradoxically, ex-slaves were coerced to sing,“Jubilee! Jubilee! Queen Victoria set wi free” to celebrate emancipation. Notwithstanding, slaves themselves had weakened the slave system by continuously revolting and that, along with industrial capitalism, are the primary causes that ended it, not the generosity of Victoria.

Since nothing reasonable can be found for a Princess Margaret Hospital in St Thomas, the people of this parish are bound to believe that local politicians and British monarchists had collaborated to strategically use it to bamboozle them to believe that the British monarchy was good to them. Princess Margaret being a so-called “patron” who attended the opening of the hospital in 1955 was a far insufficient reason for her name to be attached to it.

The old hospital and the parish clock were among the major Morant Bay landmarks ravaged by Hurricane Charlie in 1951. The response to both was in salutation of colonial traditions. The hospital rebuilt, glorifying the British monarchy, and the clock not being restored, sent the most profound message that St Thomas must be the “behind time parish”. The damaged clock was initially placed in the parish council office while discussions progressed for it to be repaired in England before all plans for its restoration vanished into thin air.

Since the Morant Bay Rebellion, even a baby in St Thomas knows, by oral tradition, that the parish is mistreated and stigmatised as a place of “obeah workers” and “no good people” because Queen Victoria had wanted it so. The George VI Memorial Park in Kingston was renamed National Heroes Circle in 1973. Incongruously, this Morant Bay Hospital still bears the name of his daughter, Princess Margaret. George VI was a great-grandson of Victoria. It is ironic that the British monarchy is so well celebrated in St Thomas when it is at the heart of the parish downfall.

UPROOTING

A change to republic in Jamaica should be accompanied by the uprooting of all colonial monuments, perceptions, and attitudes across Jamaica, but especially in St Thomas, where these are most entrenched. Derogatorily colonial terms are still widely used against people of this parish such as “Dem only want rum and jump up;” and “Mi a go a St Thomas fi him”. These are crafty ways of perpetrating the stigma that the people there are “obeah workers.” Drinking rum and jumping up are features of Kumina, Myal, and obeah.

At the time of the Morant Bay Rebellion, African spiritual practices were strongest in St Thomas since the “Afro-Jamaican spiritual space there was reenergised and expanded by Central African practices that resembled Obeah and Myal”. The largest proportion of African indenture was taken to St Thomas. Most were Central Africans. Yet the real cause of St Thomas being cursed as the obeah parish was the British claim that obeah was the tower of strength in the rebellion. Even the Royal Commission supported this claim. Notwithstanding, “some of the alleged obeah workers slaughtered in Eyre’s revenged killing were only using herbs and plants in natural healing processes. Some of them knew nothing about obeah, and most had nothing to do with the rebellion.”

Jamaica republic would be a new day for St Thomas if among other things, laws against derogatory colonial behaviour and utterances are put in place, the Princess Margaret Hospital becomes the George William Gorgon Hospital, and the primary intent of the proposed museum in Morant Bay is not “to keep the history of St Thomas”.

The history of St Thomas is, for the most part, too gloomy. Any museum or monument in St. Thomas must, therefore, be to celebrate the resilience of its people, their struggle for justice, and to motivate the now and then generations of St Thomas people to reach greater heights.

Bradshaw Singh is a historian, maths educator, and former principal. Send feedback to brasingh@msn.com.