Martin Henry A NEW state, Panama, aided and abetted by the United States, secedes from Colombia. The split comes after Colombia rejects the Hays-Herran Agreement for the construction of a canal across the isthmus of Panama. The United States immediately recognises the new regime and negotiates with it for rights to build the canal. Construction begins.
Towards the end of the year, on December 17, Kitty Hawk flies 120 feet in North Carolina staying aloft for 12 seconds. She is the invention of the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright, a heavier-than-air flying machine.
The year is 1903. On the fourth of July, US Independence Day, the American President, Theodore Roosevelt, transmitted the first message across the Pacific Cable which connected San Francisco and Manila in the Philippines.
Jamaicans and other West Indians flocked to the isthmus for work on the canal in the first major wave of Jamaican/West Indian out-migration of the 20th century. The United States retains control of the Canal Zone through the century to 1999.
American actions in Panama, such as the removal of the military dictator, Manuel Noreiga, were always underlined by the strategic importance of the canal to American interests. In 2003 there is an impending war with Iraq with the objective of 'regime change' to protect American strategic interests, not least of which is oil.
In many ways the 20th century has turned out to be the American Century (which would have surprised most people in 1903). The 21st will be even more of an American century, but everyone now expects this.
In 1903 the age of the telephone was in its infancy. The age of radio and television mass communication was yet unborn. The Italian Guglielmo Marconi had sent a Morse code message across the Atlantic by wireless radio transmission in 1901. And the vacuum tube was invented exactly one hundred years ago in 1903. The age of the Internet, combining computer, telephone and satellite was not even dreamt of. My son, a child of the age, and serving as my Net research assistant, has plucked out of thin air a ton of marvellous stuff on the year 1903 for this column.
The Queen was dead only two years after a reign of 64 years, the longest in British history. Her name, Victoria, was attached to an entire era which now at 1903 is slowly but surely passing away steadily.
While Victoria reigned, the sun was supposed to never set on the British Empire. She had started in 1837 just a year before the end of Apprenticeship and 'full free' for former slaves in the Empire, but in the minds of the freed people her name became forever linked with Emancipation.
1903 was still very much the Age of Empire. The European scramble for Africa was still under way. On February 3, British forces captured the walled city of Kano in Northern Nigeria. The stresses and strains of ethnic and religious differences between South and North in a 'united' Nigeria have erupted from time to time, including a major civil war and most recently in the riots over the Miss World contest.
At 2003 there is hardly a colony left. Who would have thought that 100 years ago?
On April 7, after an exchange of visits by the British King and the French President, an Entente Cordiale was signed between France and Britain directed at containing German expansionism and ending some 200 years of hostility and rivalry between the two countries. Anglo-French rivalry deeply influenced our own history in the Caribbean region. That rivalry accounts for many of the forts in Jamaican coastal towns and the presence of the statue of Lord Nelson in Spanish Town Square.
The Entente of 1903 deeply influenced the subsequent flow of 20th century European and world history. Britain and France fought on the same side, and against Germany, in World War I and World War II. A number of other events of the year set the stage for major developments through the rest of the century:
On August 3 in London, the Russian Socialist Party splits over party structure. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, go on to successfully stage the October Revolution of 1917 which established the USSR, the world's first communist state. The other faction was the Menshiviks. The Cold War emerges, post-World War II, with the sides led by the USSR and the USA replacing old colonial rivalries as the defining feature of geo-politics between 1948 and 1991. Then the Soviet Union collapses, following a number of its Eastern European satellites, and leaving a uni-polar world on a scale not seen since the times of Roman hegemony.
The King and Queen of Serbia are murdered by their own army officers on June 11, confirming the Balkans as a trouble spot out of which future wars will emerge through the 20th century. Another assassination in the region sparks the First World War in 1914.
At Easter on April 16, in Russia, dozens of Jews are massacred by Christians in the Kishnev Pogrom, the worst attack in the new century. The old bogey-man was trotted out: The Jews were accused of killing a Christian girl to make Passover bread. This allegation against Jews is today still trotted out, by some Islamists this time. The Holocaust follows. The pogrom gives a major boost to the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine which becomes reality in 1948 and out of which the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict flows.
Foreshadowing the waves of ethnic, religious and ideological cleansing that would follow, the Turks, in 1903, massacre thousands of Bulgarians while suppressing a rebellion in Macedonia.
A strong hurricane smashes across North-Eastern Jamaica, an important part of the banana belt, leaving considerable damage in its wake. Only two years before the Imperial Direct Line of Steamers was inaugurated to get our fruits into the British market. A brisk trade with the United States had been running for years. The flood rains of 2002 on the tails of hurricanes reminded us of just how vulnerable we are to hurricane damage. The WTO wrangles over bananas remind us of the importance of the fruit in the Jamaican economy for over a century, even as they signal a New Economy of the 21st century.
In 1903, it would have been difficult for even the most astute observer of the times to foresee the torrent of change that the new century would bring. The turn of the last century was a time of great optimism for human progress among the intelligentsia. A great deal of that blustering optimism sank with the Titanic and exploded with the First World War. An age of anxiety set in.
Humankind has grown accustomed to roaring change. Will the nation-state disappear? Where will technology take us next? What will the resurging old hostilities of race and religion do to us? Can our damaged environment continue to sustain us? No one in 1903 would have seriously worried about the health of the planet and about human survival on Earth.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
