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Nothing new under the sun
MICHAEL BURKE
Thursday, May 08, 2008
This year marks 50 years since an Avianca airliner crashed in the sea near Montego Bay. When all the passengers were assumed dead from the passenger records of the Colombian aircraft, it turned out that one man was alive but someone else was travelling on his passport and that person died. The point here is that it is not yesterday that things like this have happened. That incident was 50 years ago. But some people speak as if such things started only today.
It is the same with illegal guns. In 1948, Dr Ivan Lloyd stood up in the House of Representatives and stated that there were too many guns on the streets of Jamaica. Apparently, after the Second World War, not all of the guns went back to the armouries. And even that was not new. In the account of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Clinton Black's History of Jamaica, Paul Bogle and his men first stopped at Church Corner where they relieved the guards of the guns before proceeding to the Morant Bay Courthouse.
But where did they learn this? Did they learn this from the wars in Haiti in which many Jamaicans took part? Or was this a carry-over from the days of the Maroon wars? What we do know is that there was indeed a great amount of travel between Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba in those days. And at the time all travel was by boat. Many Haitian presidents were also exiled here. Did they come alone, or were many Haitian warriors also exiled here?
Jamaicans also travelled often to Cuba, especially during the Spanish-American wars. Historian Olive Senior wrote that George Stiebel of Devon House fame achieved his money through gun-running in Cuba where he was taken prisoner for a time. And even that is not new because, in a real way, we are suffering from the legacy of Henry Morgan and the pirates. Morgan had been made governor of Jamaica in the 1670s to control piracy so that England could keep its end of the 1670 Treaty of Madrid.
And Morgan controlled the pirates by selling land cheaply to them, who in turn became the aristocrats of Jamaica. True, the first European settlers in Australia were criminals and they do not have our crime problems. But the criminals were not put in charge of Australia immediately, and those criminals did not have the non-existence of family life as the African slaves experienced in Jamaica. Please remember that there was no encomienda system for the slaves in Jamaica after the English captured Jamaica in 1655.
Encomienda was a Spanish concept. And for that matter there was no Code Noir, which was a French concept.
Both the encomienda and the Code Noir were systems set up by the Spanish and French that saw to it that the slaves who went to church were allowed to marry, and protected from being brutalised. These security systems prevented all sorts of wrongs from happening which would have been passed down from one generation to the other. So to bring about meaningful change remains a challenge. But it is sheer hypocrisy to pretend that our problems started last week.
The North Street wars between St George's and Kingston College students happened in the 1960s when I attended Jamaica College. And there were other school wars also. There were youngsters on football teams who purposely absented themselves from school when their team played certain other teams. Some students would complain that there were members on the opposite team who had knives in their socks as they played. And this was in the 1960s.
There really is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
The Bruce Golding-led JLP government is providing an on-the job re-enactment of Michael Manley in the 1970s. With respect to the call from agriculture minister Dr Christopher Tufton for people to eat more local foods like cassava goes back even further. During the Second World War when it was difficult to get flour, Rudolph Burke, later the president of the Jamaica Agricultural Society, told people to eat cassava.
In the late 1970s, when I was an area officer for JAMAL (the adult literacy programme) in St Thomas, many old-timers told me that my grandfather (Rudolph Burke) used to tell people to eat cassava and other local foods just as Michael Manley was telling people at that time in the 1970s.
Bruce Golding and members of a Jamaica Labour Party cabinet have just returned from Cuba. One recalls the famous trip to Algiers in 1975 when Michael Manley flew in the same aeroplane with Fidel Castro. Many, who today see nothing wrong with it, were frightened and the feeling was that Jamaica was going communist, and the trip with Castro was proof. What nonsense! This topic needs a whole book to describe it. As they say, what goes around comes around. But more important, there is nothing new under the sun.
ekrubm765@yahoo.com
MICHAEL BURKE
Thursday, May 08, 2008
This year marks 50 years since an Avianca airliner crashed in the sea near Montego Bay. When all the passengers were assumed dead from the passenger records of the Colombian aircraft, it turned out that one man was alive but someone else was travelling on his passport and that person died. The point here is that it is not yesterday that things like this have happened. That incident was 50 years ago. But some people speak as if such things started only today.
It is the same with illegal guns. In 1948, Dr Ivan Lloyd stood up in the House of Representatives and stated that there were too many guns on the streets of Jamaica. Apparently, after the Second World War, not all of the guns went back to the armouries. And even that was not new. In the account of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Clinton Black's History of Jamaica, Paul Bogle and his men first stopped at Church Corner where they relieved the guards of the guns before proceeding to the Morant Bay Courthouse.
But where did they learn this? Did they learn this from the wars in Haiti in which many Jamaicans took part? Or was this a carry-over from the days of the Maroon wars? What we do know is that there was indeed a great amount of travel between Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba in those days. And at the time all travel was by boat. Many Haitian presidents were also exiled here. Did they come alone, or were many Haitian warriors also exiled here?
Jamaicans also travelled often to Cuba, especially during the Spanish-American wars. Historian Olive Senior wrote that George Stiebel of Devon House fame achieved his money through gun-running in Cuba where he was taken prisoner for a time. And even that is not new because, in a real way, we are suffering from the legacy of Henry Morgan and the pirates. Morgan had been made governor of Jamaica in the 1670s to control piracy so that England could keep its end of the 1670 Treaty of Madrid.
And Morgan controlled the pirates by selling land cheaply to them, who in turn became the aristocrats of Jamaica. True, the first European settlers in Australia were criminals and they do not have our crime problems. But the criminals were not put in charge of Australia immediately, and those criminals did not have the non-existence of family life as the African slaves experienced in Jamaica. Please remember that there was no encomienda system for the slaves in Jamaica after the English captured Jamaica in 1655.
Encomienda was a Spanish concept. And for that matter there was no Code Noir, which was a French concept.
Both the encomienda and the Code Noir were systems set up by the Spanish and French that saw to it that the slaves who went to church were allowed to marry, and protected from being brutalised. These security systems prevented all sorts of wrongs from happening which would have been passed down from one generation to the other. So to bring about meaningful change remains a challenge. But it is sheer hypocrisy to pretend that our problems started last week.
The North Street wars between St George's and Kingston College students happened in the 1960s when I attended Jamaica College. And there were other school wars also. There were youngsters on football teams who purposely absented themselves from school when their team played certain other teams. Some students would complain that there were members on the opposite team who had knives in their socks as they played. And this was in the 1960s.
There really is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
The Bruce Golding-led JLP government is providing an on-the job re-enactment of Michael Manley in the 1970s. With respect to the call from agriculture minister Dr Christopher Tufton for people to eat more local foods like cassava goes back even further. During the Second World War when it was difficult to get flour, Rudolph Burke, later the president of the Jamaica Agricultural Society, told people to eat cassava.
In the late 1970s, when I was an area officer for JAMAL (the adult literacy programme) in St Thomas, many old-timers told me that my grandfather (Rudolph Burke) used to tell people to eat cassava and other local foods just as Michael Manley was telling people at that time in the 1970s.
Bruce Golding and members of a Jamaica Labour Party cabinet have just returned from Cuba. One recalls the famous trip to Algiers in 1975 when Michael Manley flew in the same aeroplane with Fidel Castro. Many, who today see nothing wrong with it, were frightened and the feeling was that Jamaica was going communist, and the trip with Castro was proof. What nonsense! This topic needs a whole book to describe it. As they say, what goes around comes around. But more important, there is nothing new under the sun.
ekrubm765@yahoo.com