Orville Taylor | Questioning their Manleyness

Mike check! One two. There is a danger in politicians pointing to a glorious past and suggesting that we make the country great again because whenever we dig up old compost to unearth old bones, we invariably discover stuff that the historians find inconvenient. In anthropology, we refer to an approach called ‘epochalism’, whereby societies’ leaders appeal to a mystified, and even mythicised past, in order to galvanise a current generation. A reverse technique would involve a caricature of historic figures, making then exaggerated one-sided versions of the truth.

Prime Minister Andrew Michael Holness, whose middle name could very well have been influenced by the results of the general election five months before he was born, has not only stepped on lots of corns, he has crushed the cob, leaves, and stalks of many die-hards of the People’s National Party (PNP). Perhaps unwittingly, he has pulled in voters who might not previously have been energised to mark an X in a country still deeply divided but thankfully not as divided as most other democracies. After ‘founding fathers’ Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante, there is a second tier of revered leaders, including Hugh Shearer, Michael Manley, and Edward Seaga, who a lot of people feel should simply be left to rest in peace. They will always be heroes to a significant chunk of the electorate of all sides, many of whom would have forgiven them for their travesties.

Yet, there is so much still unsaid about the decades since we obtained universal adult suffrage and had one of the first truly democratic elections in the hemisphere after World War II. In the period between 1944 and 1989, there is much about which we can feel shame as well as pride. For example, Norman Manley, a Marcus Garvey antagonist, led non-independent Jamaica in being the first nation to sanction the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa. In the following decade, he opposed the National Insurance Scheme although he was the one who introduced such types of benefits, starting with sugar workers.

PARADOX

A worker-oriented Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) led by Bustamante, with Shearer and Seaga in tow, visited untold horrors on Rastafari, banned black-oriented books and intellectuals, including Walter Rodney, and brought the Queen here. Yet, it also brought Martin Luther King and Jah Jah Haile Selassie I, all within months of her visit. Such was the paradox of the 1960s that it was the period of unprecedented economic growth – still the highest and most sustained in our modern history – yet at the same time one that marked major economic and social marginalisation, inequalities, and a lie to the ‘trickle-down myth’. This paradox of progress/prosperity/poverty handed the country to the PNP in 1972.

Nonetheless, one would be forgiven if those who celebrate the Michael Manley democratic socialist era of the 1970s as that which made poor people become ‘smaddified’ overlook the fact that all of his socialist revolution was not from the PNP. Indeed, Manley gave the nation the 1975 Minimum Wage Orders, which were languishing since 1938 when the act was passed. Equal pay for men and women became statutory in that year as well, and he capped the decade with compulsory maternity leave in 1979.

Many current politicians from both sides and academics have university degrees because of his free-education policy, and the milch cow, the National Housing Trust, is his brainchild.

However, the two main labour laws, the Employment Termination and Redundancy Payment Act of 1974 and the Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act, 1975, were actually 1971 bills introduced by the Shearer-led JLP. And why would this surprise anyone who was born before the February 1972 election given that the relationship between Shearer and Manley was also at the DNA level, them being cousins?

Of course, the 1970s are characterised by high unemployment, increased poverty, as well as an unprecedented level of violence akin to a civil war. We have never recovered from that. However, it takes two to war, and if we call a spade a shovel, we would admit that there is so much blame to go around that hardly any politician active in that decade can cast the first stone. Importantly, one risk that a member of a current generation takes is that he is writing his own history and has more than enough time to make faux pas and blunders for which historians might malign him.

In retrospect, Andrew should have let the sleeping dogs ‘lie’ and focus on the current set of politicians, who often do so.

Nevertheless, with a lead of at least 19 percentage points and an electorate that is apathetic regarding voting and corruption, the prime minister might feel comfortable enough to jab at the past.

Elections are in the air, but touching Manley and Shearer is not an ant’s bite. It is opening up a whole nest.

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at The UWI, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.