DAWN RITCHThere is a big myth in Jamaica that the People's National Party (PNP) is a poor people's party. It has never been.
It was founded by the ultimate brown bourgeois Norman Manley (N.W.), a lawyer married to an acclaimed white Jamaican sculptress, and supported from the start by the educated brown bourgeoisie. This is why it was the party of education and culture.
The Jamaican people en masse did not trust it however, which is why they rejected federation and voted for the tall, light-skinned Alexander Bustamante, who didn't speak English with the correct accent, nor have the words in the right places. This is who they felt safe with, to take them to national independence.
Alexander Bustamante, later knighted, N.W. was never knighted by the Queen which ought to have told us something drank from his finger bowl when he dined with Her Majesty to no one's particular alarm nor embarrassment.
Shearer "a well-built Negro"
The Americans weren't that keen on brown Jamaicans either. Of Michael Manley, the former U.S. Ambassador Vincent DeRoulet said the late prime minister was "evidence of the unwisdom of miscegenation". DeRoulet described Hugh Shearer at the same time as "a well-built Negro". Apparently feeling safer but not too safe with Shearer, since he was "well-built".
It pains me to say it, but DeRoulet was right in Michael Manley's case. Because while he was handsome, he saddled himself with an unnecessary guilt complex about his privileged background, and it totally impaired his judgement.
jamaicans forgiving
As soon as he took office in 1972, Africa was brought in, and he said he'd walk all the way to the mountain top with Castro. But Jamaicans are a forgiving people. As soon as he apologised to the white foreign owners of Tryall at a private dinner in Montego Bay, for his flirtation with armed intervention along with Castro in Africa, and socialist decisions in Jamaica and our foreign policy orientation, Michael Manley was forgiven.
He was beautiful to look at, and physically graceful. It didn't matter that he never apologised publicly to his own countrymen, because he had apologised to the people who mattered economically. Nobody ever said he didn't know how to do things in great style.
But Michael Manley had an Achilles heel, and it was a love for the black petit bourgeois, the ones who had a high education and were trying to make it in life. This love twisted both him and the country because the policy adventures never seemed to end, nor the reasons for them. Anybody with a good line of spin could get him to develop a programme for it. None of them worked, all of them were impractical, and in the end none of them mattered. We ended the decade poorer than we had begun.
Jamaicans respect basic education and think every-body should have one.
But they have always
had a healthy suspicion
of master's degrees and doctorates, recognising that the vast majority of the holders are educated beyond their own com-petence. These are not the people we tend to put in charge of things.
Michael Manley wasn't one of them, but we didn't realise that this was who he'd put in charge of things. And they are still in charge of things until today. Dr. Omar Davies is their candidate for the presidency of the PNP. And it doesn't matter that he's light brown too, because you can have all shades in the petit bourgeois, just as you get them in the Jamaican bourgeois.
a clone for bruce
Opposition Leader Bruce Golding has that problem too. This is why he's made light-brown Chris Tufton, Ph.D., a JLP senator. The two of them will look sandy together, say absolutely nothing that anybody else will ever understand, and Bruce will have found his clone. I had not expected him to achieve transmogrification quite so soon.
The black P. J. Patterson whose grandmother he says was a Scotswoman, is the worst kind of black man to have. He's a brown man in a black body who has kept up the pretence of blackness by surrounding himself with only black friends from the petit bourgeois, and behaving like a Haitian emperor when he knows better.
The highly-educated petit bourgeois are the most dangerous kind of people to have in government. They should stick to the private sector, or brief sojourns only as chairmen in the public sector. Keep them away from any executive positions in the public sector. They comfort themselves with spread sheets and don't leave their offices except to declare open things, while the island's drains can't be cleaned, much less Air Jamaica kept aloft. Yet they are the ones deciding how taxes will be raised and spent. They all need to go home and either find a job, or make a profit. Certainly, they should not be in charge of spending the nation's blood and treasure.
The amazing part is that Patterson has won four general elections, but I don't think he could win a fifth. He may be building a highway, but the great mass of Jamaicans have extreme difficulty finding gainful employment, and preferential sugar prices in Europe will be dead in two years. This industry employs tens of thousands of Jamaicans, and we're already having seven murders a day.
one of the greatest
The Prime Minister needs to start thinking about his legacy, do the right thing and get out fast. Someone told me last week that the most honourable will go down in history as one of our greatest prime ministers. He said cellphones, the highway opening up the interior of the island, deportee motor cars ... (he need only have added the increase in the housing stock) are going to earn Patterson the encomiums of history.
Never mind any of that. The horrendous price of the burgeoning national debt, poor social services, rampant unemployment and raging murder is much too high. We cannot go from Third World to First World without an intervening period of civilisation. But that is what is always attempted when you put a petit bourgeois intellectual in charge of government, to our great pain and cost.
We can only hope therefore, that this grand tour of the world upon which the Prime Minister has embarked from the New York Stock Exchange to China is a farewell tour. It would be cheap at the price.
