Chase dem crazy bald heads ...

I am still trying to recover from the poll results published as the headline story of The Gleaner's June 27 publication, which shows that 60 per cent of Jamaicans feel that we would be better off today if we had remained a colony of England.

My deep reflection on this poll result is only outweighed by my deep disappointment in the level of miseducation of our people. The process started during and after slavery with the British, who were aware of the need to influence the minds of the enslaved population. They successfully indoctrinated us with the feeling of self-hate. They made us accept the word 'black' as representative of evil; they made us believe that the Bible placed on us a curse, and that their reward for being blessed with the colour white was our forced labour.

We were taught songs that made us fully aware that we needed to be "washed in the blood of Christ" so that we would become "whiter than snow". The legacy is bleaching, reverence for white people, self- hate, and now, the shameful position that we would be better off with the oppressor continuing to be in charge of us. Cheers to a job well done, Mrs Queen!

Miseducation

When the sons and daughters of former slaves were made to sing in school Britannia Rules the Waves - a song glorifying the British wealth and power over the rest of the world - the miseducation continued.

When the people of St Ann in the 1860s began to feel the harshness of a freed but uncompensated former slave, they misguidedly looked to Mrs Queen for help. The very Queen who had compensated the planters for their loss of slaves who gave 400 years of free labour; planters who kept the fertile plains and drove us into the rocky hills they called free villages. The British Queen gave those free villagers the advice that, only from their hard work, will they be able to pull themselves out of their misery.

Those of us polled in that 60 per cent of Jamaicans could not be aware of this history and could not be seeing the insult that a people who are yet to be compensated have repeatedly faced from the British, who built a rich empire with our unrewarded labour.

The educated among us have failed to impart to the people our true history. We continue to teach the British version of events, which is apologetic of the horrors of slavery and have continually echoed the words of Mrs Queen that our poverty rests with the fact that we are lazy, and has nothing to do with centuries of free labour we gave to them. Marley, in an interview, said that if had he been formally educated, he would be a fool. He repeated this in his song Crazy Bald Head with obvious reference to Mrs Queen when he penned:

"Didn't I build the cabin,

didn't I plant the corn

didn't my people before me

slave for this country

You look at me with scorn

and you eat up all the corn

I am gonna chase dem crazy

bald heads

out of the town.

Built your penitentiary

built the schools

took your brainwash education

to make us the fools."

Therein lies the greatness of Bob, who missed the education that has led to the 60 per cent of us wanting to embrace the oppressors in a way similar to the phenomenon where hostages begin to endear themselves to their captors. We endear her with such great regard that our Constitution, the highest law of the land, at Section 68 makes it clear that "the executive authority of Jamaica is vested in Her Majesty".

This was a man (Bob Marley) light years ahead of learned lawyers and judges who go to court daily listening to police open the session by saying "God Save the Queen", and find nothing wrong with it. We learned lawyers also listen to witnesses taking the oath on King James' version of the Bible, where it is recited by each witness in our criminal courts that they will speak the truth in the "... matter joined between the prisoner and our (sic) sovereign lady, the Queen". The reality is that with all this and more, the polls could not have gone in any other direction.

May God save us all.

Bert Samuels is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and bert.samuels@gmail.com.