LIKE MANY other urban dwellers, I regularly leave 'town' to spend the weekends in rural Jamaica. The simple lifestyle, tranquility and the salubrious climate of the districts in the Santa Cruz Mountains provide the perfect getaway for me.
Since the advent of Hurricane Ivan, I have begun to anticipate the conversations among the group of young and not-so-young men who gather daily at the 'one-stop-shop' in the district of Stanmore.
I have noted that the complaints about the loss of the farm products and the roofs of some people's houses were repeated in a variety of intonations.
Everyone is still wondering whether they will get any assistance, or if they will be left behind as usual. They profess to know how things work. They have no illusions.
POTSDAM INCIDENT
Two weekends ago, no one at the shop mentioned Ivan or his enduring impact. Everyone, including the women (who appeared more animated than usual) had a version of a horrendous crime that was committed in Potsdam District, which is next door to Munro College.
There was general agreement that four young 'town boys', including an adolescent who had left the area and now reside in Kingston, had stabbed to death a shopkeeper and one of his customers. Both men were decent, hardworking and well-connected in the social fabric of the
community.
It is posited by all and sundry that the absence of electricity might have been a facilitator of the hideous acts which were carried out in the veil of solid darkness which is a feature of so many rural nights.
Ironically, the Jamaica Public Service Company at the same time was in the process of restoring their damaged infrastructure which had contributed to post-Ivan darkness in the Potsdam district.
Any analysis of the communication systems in rural Jamaica will identify the 'wild-slip telegram' system as a continuing competitor to the radio and the television. It is, therefore, important to check with informants beyond those at the one-stop shop in any district.
To this end, I gathered 'intelligence' from members of the dead men's families, friends and acquaintances. All these accounts confirmed that when the citizens of Potsdam realised that two persons connected so intimately with their community were murdered by a group of outsiders, a number of them searched for the criminals and started on a chopping spree.
When day broke on the Saturday morning after the incident, they were assisted by the morning sun that lifted the darkness of that fateful Friday night.
They cornered one of the culprits in the vicinity of the lighthouse and they chopped him to death. They say another is in the hospital, one is in jail and one is still on the run.
VIGILANTE JUSTICE
One woman who is a close family member of one of the men who was stabbed to death by the young criminals, related her feelings of anger, fear and disgust.
"Yes," she said, "I am saddened by my cousin's brutal end but I am finding it difficult to deal with the joy in the eyes of those who chopped up the alleged criminal. Can you imagine, they chopped him even when they knew he was very dead."
The Potsdam incident is just another in a series of vigilante acts that have been taking place in St. Elizabeth and other rural parishes. These acts do get reported but there has been little or no reactions to vigilantism in the Jamaican society.
Vigilantism and vigilante justice are concepts surrounded by a complex of historical forces, emotions, sense of justice, and various rationalisations.
'EXTRAJUDICIAL SELF-HELP'
In a discussion on the
faculty.ncwc.edu website, the word vigilante is broadly defined in both a legal and sociological framework.
It is argued that in some jurisdictions, lawyers refer to vigilante justice as 'extrajudicial self-help', but generally it is in the sociological arena that most people frame their reaction to the atrocious acts that characterise vigilantism.
Large numbers of the citizens of Munro and its environs tend to subscribe to both the legal and sociological definitions of vigilante justice. The sociological explanation understands vigilantism as "morally sanctimonious behaviour aimed at remedying a structural flaw in society."
To many God-fearing and upstanding citizens, the major structural flaw in the Jamaican society lies in the perception that the legal framework is either woefully ineffective or not enforced for a variety of political, economical and sociological reasons.
In listening to the conversations of the men and women who were trying to come to grips with the troublesome growth of acts of violence in a relatively and traditionally low crime rate parish, it is obvious that many citizens of St. Elizabeth subscribe to the notion of 'extrajudicial self-help' and the 'righting of a criminal wrong by wrongful means.'
In a real sense, they have accepted that it is both moral and legal to take the law into their own hands.
GODLESS ENEMY
The criminal who enters such rural communities and create mayhem by robbery, murder, rape and other such dastardly acts are seen by all and sundry as godless enemies of the society.
On the other hand, the groupings of men, women and children who round up such criminals and beat and chop them to bits with machetes, sticks and stones see themselves as friends of their communities and, by extension, friends of the Jamaican society. Within this framework the vigilante becomes 'the good citizen'.
Some researchers who study vigilantism point to the fact that the phenomenon has historically been very much linked to masculinity and to the prerogative of the male. For instance, in some sectors of the United States, the anti-black and anti-Semitic racist vigilantes called the Ku Klux Klan were mostly a white man's club. That is not to say that mothers, wives, sisters, aunties and girlfriends of Klansmen did not share in the dominant racist and separatist world view aimed to keep black men in their ascribed places.
In the same vein, the machete wielders and choppers in rural Jamaica are predominantly men, but the women are always there to watch and cheer on the action. They also have been known to
