Orville Taylor | Emancipendence at risk

At St Patrick’s Primary School, another little eight-year-old was being jeered because he sat on the toilet while emptying his bladder. It wasn’t funny, because my parenting taught me that one should never kick someone when he is down or trample on the powerless.

Even then, as a grade three child, it wasn’t amusing. Thus, despite mischievously mispronouncing the words, my commitment to the National Pledge was born. Without stooping or bowing, “I promise to stand up for justice, brotherhood and peace.” My aim eventually was honed as I became a man, and the only way to shoot was straight. We fix the crown of our fellow princes and princesses. We do not seek to take it, unless it is ours.

Last Tuesday, I was blessed to share the annual celebrations of the Scott’s Hall Maroons. Today is 61 years since we first called ourselves a nation. On November 20, it will be 79 years since we became the third Anglophone Population to have free and fair elections under universal adult suffrage. Yup, we beat Australia, Canada and the USA at that too.

Some 190 years after the Emancipation Act and 185 since full legal emancipation, we are still failing miserably in extricating the colonial plantation virus. As Colonel Wallace Sterling, of the Moore Town Maroons, said on the platform at Scott’s Hall, the British did a very good job of colonising us. Not only did they neatly divide, preventing us from recognising and acting on our commonalities, but more importantly, they used a formula perfected by Holy Roman Emperor Constantine, as he organised the Christian Church. Create the hierarchy, small rewards of both status and material wealth, thus make some privileged members of the African-descended population develop false senses of superiority, based on a system of ranking that means nothing in real terms. However, this delusional state, whereby categories of men or women were made to feel better or worse than others, based on little titles, has been an effective tool.

REPLICATION

Emancipation cannot mean a replication of the plantation, where the old masters are simply replaced with those who look like us.

This is Jamaica, not the British Empire, and we did not elect a king, despite his representative being here to rubber stamp the government’s wishes.

Our National Anthem is a prayer; not some egotistical boast about our country being superior to others. True, it, as well as the National Pledge, lacks the essential prayer element of giving thanks. Nonetheless, the indispensable alignment of justice and truth, after asking for true wisdom from above for our leaders, is clear recognition of the correlation between simply doing what is right, and having good social outcomes. It is of deep significance also, that we pray to be respectful for all and to cherish the weak.

All of the above are inimical to the legacy of the plantation. Whether we are ordinary citizens or especially if we are in positions of power, we must serve with the paradoxical “humble pride”.

As we ‘kin puppalick’ and chant over the history-creating Reggae Girlz, who have eclipsed their male counterparts, gutting France and football college Brazil, in the Women’s World Cup, our pride is justified. A small country of just under three million inhabitants is the tiniest state to have gone this far in any version of the game.

Doubtless, the Sunshine Girls, whom I have predicted to win it all in the World Netball Cup, have us on tiptoes. In fact, shooter Jhaniele Fowler, right now, is the best in the world and the netball equivalent of Usain Bolt.

INCIVILITY

Yet, in all of this, there is a level of incivility and sheer one-upmanship, which smack of abuse and the rise of the plantation gene once again. Let it never be forgotten that unlike the USA, the planters utilised other enslaved Africans to beat their fellows. It is as entrenched in our cultural DNA as if it were constitutional.

This desire to abuse our peers, because we were given a little power, is a big part of what keeps us in the plantation quagmire. One might chose not to believe it, but many of our social pathologies are directly correlated to how workers are abused by their seniors and how the powerful treat the powerless. This is research; not anecdotes.

An attorney, apparently spiking his drink with schizophrenic feline urine, decided to channel a convicted felon, and without claiming peer pressure, said unthinkable things about a senior pre-geriatric attorney, who got a bit of cyanoacrylate glue applied to her chair.

Exasperated, another, whose ancestors did not come through slavery, showed none of the ‘benevolence’ of the association to which he belongs. Becoming a lubricated conduit for the late reggae star Peter Tosh, he got his biology mixed up and throwing decency aside, asserted the ‘misconception’ that ‘anal’ysis produced abusive men.

Add to that the poor attempts at humour that made two very unfunny politicians look like the Somalian 100 metres ‘printer’, who couldn’t even keep up with the ‘S’.

I stand with former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, who didn’t need a JAMBAR-jarring amendment of the Constitution to be the longest person to stay in the seat he seemed to personally own. There has been an outbreak of discourtesy and simply boorish and disrespectful behaviour from our elected and selected leaders.

It is not just his words. Those below the age of 30 might not know, but P.J. brushed off some of the nasty things said about him in his run-up election for leadership of his party, comments by the opponents in general elections and virtually ended the undeclared civil war, where Labourites and Comrades literally felt that they had the right to kill each other.

Our entire emancipation process is at stake. Rule of thumb; if the behaviour and words are not suitable to expose to your mother; suck it up and say nothing.

- Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.