From brigadista to preacher to author

Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer

After five years as a below-average student at Ardenne High School, Clifton Campbell was shown the door and ended up at un-fashionable Trench Town Comprehensive High School.

For Campbell, the move from upscale, tree-lined Ardenne Road to gritty Trench Town was a big step down. But he says over the years, he came to appreciate his time in the area once known as Concrete Jungle.

"It was a blessing in disguise, it gave me a deeper grasp of social inequities," he said.

Campbell's years as a student, brigadista, teacher and preacher inspired Badness: Psychology of Life, his first book which is distributed by Dorrance Publishing Company out of Pennsylvania.

Throughout the book, Campbell examines the pathways to crime in Jamaica. He links politics to crime and inner-city youth, and also looks at how poverty forces many young girls into prostitution.

He takes on the inequalities of the justice system, pointing out that social status determines the fate of defendants in the courts. Oftentimes, children of privilege are pardoned while heavy sentences are given to ghetto youth facing similar charges.

"This is no figment of my imagination, I lived these things," he said. Campbell began writing Badness immediately after the October 1980 general election. The self-described 'communionist' had been a political activist during the 1970s. He was among the first batch of 30-odd Jamaicans who went to Cuba in 1975 for the controversial Brigadista programme.

He said his 18 months in a Cuban training camp opened his eyes to Cold War espionage in the form of agents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which at the time was monitoring the close relationship between Jamaica and Cuba.

Campbell not only used his Cuban expedition to illustrate how Jamaican politicians exploited the country's youth, but gives an insight into the CIA's presence in the Caribbean.

Political activist

Clifton Campbell was raised as a Catholic in Kingston. He was one of many youth drawn to the democratic socialist message of Michael Manley who became Jamaica's prime minister in 1972. He was still a committed political activist in the months leading up to the 1980 election which was bitterly contested by Manley's People's National Party and the Jamaica Labour Party, which the latter won 51 seats to nine.

He said the violence of that year pushed him closer to religion.

"I began preaching on the streets, on the buses, in the prisons," he recalled. "A lot of people said it wouldn't come out but perseverance has proved them wrong."