Ajamu Nangwaya | Academic apologists justify Almshouse in Dancehall

When it comes to defending socially backward ideas and practices in the Jamaican dancehall, we can always count on some petit bourgeois intellectuals from the academic plantation to represent. The ‘Dunce Bangarang’ coming out of the dancehall and haunting working-class communities like a trailer load of bad duppies has provided an opportunity for some academics to use clever word-sounds to make dunceness acceptable.

The article, “Brushing off being called ‘dunce’”, by Dr Jahlani Niaah, a cultural and rastafari studies lecturer at The University of the West Indies, published in The Sunday Gleaner on October 1, peddles the notion that the deployment of ‘dunce’ is part of the “repertoire of subversive linguistic terms being expounded by urban folk to deal with their exclusion from learned society”.

It is dysfunctional Anancyism, at best, that makes us believe that the embrace of the term dunce is an act of subversion and rebellion against the neo-colonial, capitalist order in Jamaica. The structural violence of unequal access to quality education will continue to produce dunce bats among those of us from the ranks of the great unwashed masses. By contrast, children from class-privileged homes will continue to be tracked into the 30 or so high-performing high schools.

Of course, some of us from working-class communities win the educational lottery to those largely church-operated high schools that give us a pathway to membership in the bourgeoisie or tapanaris/uptown class. But most of us from the working class are forced to attend the inadequately funded state secondary schools that are the breeding ground for students who are seen as dunce.

APARTHEID SYSTEM OF EDUCATION

I speak from experience at Spanish Town Secondary School, Tivoli Gardens Comprehensive High School, and Wolmer’s Boys’ School. We have an apartheid system of education that makes life for those of us who are African and working class “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” – as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it. We are simply doing time or being warehoused in second-class educational institutions and will not acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitude to function in conventional society.

The academic apologists of the dancehall are acting as if word play or inversion of terms is a cultural studies performative act that will subvert the material conditions that make educational apartheid a concrete reality for the working-class. Fighting oppressive conditions is not a semantical, shadowboxing mind game. It is all about organising the people to change economic, social, and political structures that breed dunceness or educational exclusion.

We need educational institutions that will prepare oppressed groups to fundamentally restructure society to serve their needs. Therefore, it is laughable for Dr Niaah to refer to the dancehall as ‘a genuine university’ and source of ‘enlightenment’ for working-class and lumpen youth who are made into educational dunces by society.

Dancehall cannot serve as a university of resistance for the sufferers because this music genre emerged as a counterrevolution to reggae, which emphasises revolution, African self-love and collective empowerment. Dancehall is the embodiment of the neoliberal capitalist turn that came with the election of political conservatives Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the United States, Helmut Kohl in West Germany, and Brian Mulroney in Canada between 1979 and 1982.

CELEBRATING CONSUMPTION

Dancehall celebrates the consumption of the material trinkets of capitalist society. It promotes individualism and shifts attention away from group advancement. If dancehall is a genuine university, it would not be accredited by those revolutionary Africans who collectively resisted oppression. Dancehall is not producing education for emancipation.

I can assert without fear of contradiction that the petit bourgeois apologists of the dancehall would want their children to graduate from one of the high-performing high schools in Jamaica instead of enrolling in the revered and esteemed dancehall university. As much as they are infatuated with the comedic drama of word inversion, they have no desire to risk their children’s future in the “Dancehall University, Jamaica Campus”. That’s for the hapless children from working-class and lumpen households.

The attempt to whitewash the dunce bangarang (confusion) in society should be unacceptable after a careful examination of the song Dunce Cheque and the accompanying video by dancehall entertainer Valiant. For those of us who are opposed to sexual violence against women, Valiant’s glorifying of his English date’s use of the date rape drug Molly should be of concern to us. Additionally, his equation of the consumption of a wide range of brand-name consumer products from exploitative capitalist corporations with individual well-being is simply encouraging reckless behaviour and instant gratification among the sufferers.

INTERNALISED INFERIORITY

Often, many African middle-class and working-class persons mask our internalised inferiority along race and/or class lines by the excessive consumption of international brands. This tendency leads us to buy what we want and beg for what we need. The video version of the song Dunce Cheque is quite disturbing in the way that it fosters educational self-sabotage and facilitates dunce status. It constructs a classroom setting that is not conducive to learning with the consumption of hard liquor and zero attention paid to the teacher. This is a virtual breeding ground for the criminalised lumpen elements and sketels of tomorrow.

The academic apologists of self-harming ideas and practices in the dancehall will not be directly affected by what they are justifying. But those of us who are committed to the transformation of society know that equal access to quality conventional education is a good starting point to prepare the people for liberation. There is no place for the dunce culture among us!

Dr Ajamu Nangwaya is a worker-member of Mukasa Farms & Eco-Retreat and a former lecturer in the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of the West Indies. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.