Woman of steel
From death of husband to UN battle zones, Oberlene Smith-Whyte built life and legacy defined by courage, service and survival
Published:Monday | February 9, 2026 | 12:12 AMKaren Madden/Gleaner Writer
To access this article in full please login or register today
At the young age of 23, Oberlene Smith-Whyte’s world as she knew it shattered. Her husband, Errol Whyte, was shot and killed along with then member of Parliament Roy McGann, to whom he was assigned as close protection officer, both victims of a...
At the young age of 23, Oberlene Smith-Whyte’s world as she knew it shattered.
Her husband, Errol Whyte, was shot and killed along with then member of Parliament Roy McGann, to whom he was assigned as close protection officer, both victims of a bloody 1980 general election campaign.
His brutal death left Smith-Whyte, who was also a cop, with a young son and pregnant with her daughter.
Some may have quit the police force, but not Smith-Whyte, who in her own words views danger, retroactively.
“I don’t know if this is a good thing. I think about it all the time, my siblings talk about it all the time with my friends, I don’t know if it is a good thing. I think about danger when it’s passed. I say, ‘Why did I do that?’, but when something confronts me I am going to go at it head on.”
Raised in St Thomas by her grandmother, then in Portland by her parents, Smith-Whyte spent 40 years in the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), having joined at only age 20.
Evolutions in the JCF
Referencing the recent guilty conviction of former policeman, Noel Maitland, Smith-Whyte, who retired nine years ago, told The Gleaner she has seen various evolutions in the JCF.
“The force is more intelligence driven than when I joined, where we relied a lot on witnesses to solve a crime. But now the force has moved from just merely witnesses, but now to significant forensic experience, intelligence gathering to solve a crime. For instance like we saw in the recent Maitland case.”
She also noted that, when she joined the force, there were things that women were not allowed to do.
“When I went to training school there was an obstacle course for men and another for women, because it was felt that the women could not do the same obstacle course as the men. But me coming from country, I went and I tried the men’s obstacle course and I went over it. It was brought to the attention of the instructor so they abandoned the women’s obstacle course and men and women were challenged to do the same obstacle course. So I was the first one and demonstrated [it] when the training wing was opened in 1977.”
For better or worse, she credits her immunity to fear to her childhood experiences.
“My first day at primary school, my grandmother just put on my clothes and sent me to school, so I had to find my way. And then my grandmother moved to Portland and I had to move there with her and she sent me to school again. I was nine.”
Her propensity to fight boys, while building her own strength, left her grandmother frustrated.
“That was the first time I heard my grandmother use the word ‘bad’. She said ‘I have to send you to your mother because you too bad’.”
So she went to live with her parents and, though the family endured some rough times, she told The Gleaner it was then, at age 11, that she started attending school with regularity.
The Stokes Hall Secondary (now St Thomas Technical) graduate discovered her thirst for writing in grade five and that was encouraged by her teacher who would read her stories aloud and show her work to other teachers.
Stared death in the eyes
Although violence claimed her young husband, and she was involved in several operations during her 40-year career as a cop, retiring as a superintendent, Smith-Whyte told The Gleaner it was as a United Nations (UN) peace officer that she stared death in the eyes.
She had responded to the call from the Jamaica Constabulary Force to join the UN peacekeeping mission, working to bring stability to areas of conflict on the African continent.
It saw her serving for a year in Namibia from 1989, in Liberia from 2004 to 2006, and Sudan from 2008 to 2010.
“My biggest scare was not in Jamaica. My biggest scare was in Darfur (Sudan).”
The UN calls Darfur the site of “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” due to an ongoing civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
On July 8, 2008 in what became known as the Shangil Tobaya Ambush, seven UN peacekeepers were killed and 22 others injured. The dead included five Rwandan military personnel and two police officers, one each from Ghana and Uganda.
That trait of thinking about danger after it has passed led to Smith-Whyte, the first woman to be assigned commander for a district (Tawila), deciding that she wanted to lead a mission to meet with the rebels, mere weeks after that massacre.
She was forced to ask the Rwandan military to send reinforcements with her as only two of the 100 men under her command agreed to go.
“Everybody else say they not coming because I was on a suicide mission.”
When her mission arrived, the stance of the rebels frightened her and she immediately questioned her decisions.
“That was when the scare started because I saw them positioning themselves that, if it was [that] we were to get into a fight, we could not get out of that fight. It was the first time I was seeing fighters strategically placed in their vehicles at different ends. That was when my heart start to beat in my chest and I started to have second thoughts about what I had gotten myself into, because, quite frankly, I thought I was going to die. When the rebels said to us to walk, I thought I was walking to my death.”
In the end, they talked without incident and Smith-Whyte, who served under six police commissioners, Joe Williams, Herman Ricketts, Francis Forbes, Lucius Thomas, Owen Ellington and Dr Carl Williams, safely returned to Jamaica.
She credits her daughter, the child she carried when her husband was murdered, as being the one who encouraged her to write her story.
It resulted in her publishing her first book in 2022, 10 years after she started writing it, an autobiography titled Undaunted and Determined.
She followed that up in June of last year, publishing From Diagnosis to Definition, which chronicled her struggles with diabetes and diagnosis and mis-diagnosis of other illnesses, and a booklet titled Porridge and Power – Raising Bold Brilliant and Brawta Children in a Jamaican Home, which she published last month.
From being an agitator as a child, “older than my years” and told “you nuh have nuh manners”, Smith-Whyte, who turns 69 next month, is an avid body builder, security consultant with an international organisation, author, co-host of workshops on domestic violence with retired Deputy Commissioner of Police Novlette Grant, which started in 2010 after the Tivoli Gardens incursion, and is lead facilitator for a social change initiative called ‘Rising Above Our Hurt’, where children who are considered “bad” are recognised as children who are hurting. For her, despite being told otherwise while she was growing up, “no child is bad”.