Martin Henry What could be an award-winning photograph was recently carried by this newspaper showing the Father of the City and the head of the Jamaican state standing together against the spectacular backdrop of the capital city's chief cesspool.
Mayor of Kingston, Desmond McKenzie, and Governor-General, Professor Kenneth Hall, a historian by trade, were finely composed against a backdrop of Kingston Harbour. They were guests at the launch of the second edition of Senator Anthony Johnson's City of Kingston Souvenir Book in the Bank of Jamaica auditorium.
I love the harbour and the waterfront. When you don't focus on the city's mess messing about in the discoloured water, the long view is a spectacular and refreshing sight. The Palisadoes peninsula across the shimmering water. The ring of mountains forming the city's backdrop. Kingston enjoys a spectacular location.
The pollution of the harbour from washdowns and sewage has been the subject of study and discussion at least since the 1960s. Not much corrective action.
While the harbour itself and the immediate waterfront are powerful magnets, one goes there, as I sometimes do, with a good deal of trepidation. The waterfront is ringed by volatile, high-violence communities - a waistband of decay and disorder. The edge of the harbour is populated by a variety of hustlers and hangers about - and dereliction.
While efforts have been made at greening, there isn't really a park, or the sense of security required to really enjoy a park. One of the reasons for the popularity of Devon House in its heyday as a public green space was the sense of security which visitors enjoyed. Hope Gardens has lost a lot of that.
The city needs cultivated, safe green spaces, and where could be better than its waterfront? Bruce Bicknell of Tank- Weld and chairman of the inner-city Seaward Primary and Junior High School had a most interesting letter in The Sunday Observer this week [May 13] describing the greening of the campus and its positive impact on the school community, "softening the social space".
At the book launch the chairman of the Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee to commemorate the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, Professor Verene Shepherd, announced the allocation of $10 million for the construction of an arrival point monument on the Kingston waterfront. Now that monument is going to need a real park around it. All over Jamaica, municipal parks and existing museums have been allowed to fall into decay. It was a crying shame to see the condition of the Bath Botanical Gardens in St. Thomas when I last stopped there a couple of months ago. Now big - and costly - efforts are being made to restore.
Difficult time
The JNBC chair made a direct pitch to the KSAC to collaborate with the committee to make the monument a reality before the end of the bicentenary year. Let's see. Mayor is having a difficult time cleaning up the immediate surroundings of the municipal offices, which are quite literally in a mess.
Our newspaper journalists, Janet Silvera from here and Kerry McCatty from there, packed off to South Africa on an observation tour, have been filing of the apartheid museums there. South Africa, with hordes of poor people, doesn't have much more money than we do for these things. They have a different attitude to the preservation and commemoration of their important history and culture. Ghana, with a lower level of economic development, has established slavery memorial museums in some of its infamous slave forts.
To the sound of the lapping of the waves in that fabulous harbour, bicentenary chairman Shepherd pleaded in the hearing of City Father and of Head of State, "Let us not allow this year to end without constructing such a marker [the slave arrival monument] so that our people can have a spot for an annual pilgrimage to memorialise their past."
Let's make that a daily pilgrimage in the pleasant setting of a safe, peaceful, green waterfront park edging a rehabilitated harbour, a tourism hot spot.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.