Martin Henry

I went to see the exhibition, 'Materialising Slavery', at the Institute of Jamaica and met an aspiring young doctor. He, about nine years-old, lives in the dereliction of George's Lane just behind the Institute. What was once a choice location, just off the magnificent Kingston Harbour at 12 East Street now sits partly surrounded by inner-city squalor. What was once a magnificent complex is now the worse for wear.

On a Monday morning, Sonny Boy, the doctor, was out of school. He watched me parking and then I struck up a conversation with him and asked why he was not at school. He fell in stride with me explaining that his class had gone on a trip costing $1,000 and "mi madda neva have it". But the next day they would be having a class party for 'five bills' and he was going to that. And, yes, he will be working hard in school, Calabar Primary and Junior High, to pass his GSAT because he wants to be a doctor.

The expected request for 'a change' never came. That articulate, confident and dignified child turned back from our walk together up East Street, back to his forgotten lane to keep his big dream alive in his heart. And I went on to see 'Materialising Slavery'.

Slave trade

The exhibition, running to December 31, marks the bicentenary of the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade. And the Institute is sentimentally a good place to mount it, never mind the downtown inaccessibility. The IOJ was established in 1879 with the blessings of Governor Anthony Musgrave [after whom the Musgrave medals are named] as a centre of learning.

Particularly in the hands of Frank Cundall, Institute secretary and librarian, for nearly 40 years, the Institute became a major centre holding Jamaican/West Indian material. Its West India Library evolved as a significant collection of text and graphic material. And, Cundall himself wrote extensively on things Jamaican.

That great collection was designated the National Library of Jamaica in 1979. The Institute once even had a 'vivarium', which Jamaican writer W. Adolphe Roberts mockingly said was just a big name for a mini zoo.

With the establishment of a real university, a real zoo, the advent of electronic media, the general drift uptown, and the shameless abandonment of downtown to violence and decay, the IOJ - library, museums, and grand lecture room - has fallen upon hard times. But it holds a magnificent treasure that, managed properly, could boost its fortunes. The West India Library, the core of the National Library of Jamaica, is a unique collection of priceless and irreplaceable material, now hardly used for serious research.

If that stuff could be digitised for local and international electronic access by fee, a good dollar could be made and the now cloistered and guarded material made readily accessible to a global public.

'Materialising Slavery' is largely an art and craft exhibition of images of slave Jamaica arranged by the artist Fred Wilson. I had expected more material utilitarian objects. And more objects of slave creation. I remember Jamaica National Heritage Trust archaeologist, Roderick Ebanks, pointing out that non-literate skilled craftsmen among the slaves, would scratch their 'mark' into their work.

Dragged from Africa

The Europeans have not only stolen African civilisations but have crafted the myth that skilled craftsmanship in New World slave society was their domain. Many already skilled craftsmen were dragged here from Africa.

If Sonny Boy, the doctor, had been born pre-Emancipation he would have been inducted into the pickney gang of the brutal slave economy by the time he was six. The beautiful square grid town of old Kingston, where he lives in a now squalid lane, would have been largely built by slaves. Sonny Boy is free, but, in a way, enslaved by his address and circumstances. I hope those fingers never grip a glock, destroying instead of healing.