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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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The Duty of a Leader
By John Maxwell
On February 8, 2003 I wrote: “Never
fear, the PNP can produce, at a moment’s notice, someone
as irrelevant to our problems as Mr Seaga . They will be
doing their damnedest to thwart Portia Simpson, the only
top politician who shows any signs of being able to
listen to the people or to understand what they say.
“In my view, and I am clearly
prejudiced, Portia Simpson is the only Jamaican
politician now capable of leading a movement for the
building a nation out of the atomised parts of what was
once, a proud and honest people. If we do not return to
that path, ‘dog nyam we supper’.” That was three years ago. My opinion
has not changed.
On Monday, Jamaica’s fastest growing
and most vital city, May Pen, was closed for business.
It was shut down by what the press describes as a mob,
bands of people outraged by the behaviour of the police,
demanding justice for four alleged gunmen, shot dead by
the police on Saturday.
According to the police, they carried
out a “targeted operation” in Alexandria, on the
Chapelton Road, where they killed two brothers, one 21,
the other a year older, and two teenagers. According to
the police they recovered three pistols from the four
corpses. Not one surrendered.
The demonstrators said it was murder.
According to them there was no shootout and the guns had
been planted by the police.
It isn’t easy or wise to contradict
the police version of violent confrontations – as I am
aware from more than 40 years of writing about such
encounters. In the first place, the presumption is that
the police, being a fine upstanding body of men and
women, sworn to uphold the law and acting in the best
interests of the community have a decided advantage when
they testify in court.
Judges, juries and the public they
represent are normally on the side of law and order and
deplore criminal behaviour of any kind. On the other
hand, the people usually shot by the police are almost
always described as ‘wanted men” even if nobody inside
or outside of the force knew that they were wanted
before they died. In fact they are usually the unwanted
members of the society, dropouts, no-hopers, usually
with few friends and no money.
According to the police, many of
these young men, some no more than boys, are so hardened
in vice and so desperate, that as soon as they see
policemen they open fire at them. Some of the behaviours
described by the police are so outlandish as to verge on
the fantastic. In Grants Pen Four Roads a few years ago
the police described shooting two boys who, according to
them, had ridden past the police on bicycles and when
challenged, had leapt off their bicycles and begun
firing at the police. As I commented at the time the
young men seemed to be kamikaze acrobats, rather than,
as proved later, just two ordinary boys walking home
(not riding) after ‘liming’ at Halfway Tree.
Even if the police May Pen story is
true in every particular, the society should be really
alarmed at two things:
First,
that there are people in this society so desperate and
depraved that they only need to see a cop to begin
hostilities and
Second: that there are people
willing to violently and publicly demonstrate their
solidarity with such despicable desperadoes.If the young men are so terminally
desperate, how did they get that way? What is it in their lives that makes
them so careless of death that they will continually
confront superior forces of heavily armed police,
knowing that there is no recent record of the police
losing any of the shootouts in which they have been
engaged? Why are our youth so keen on
police-assisted suicide? Do they consider themselves so
worthless and so lost that anything is better than life?
Second: How do we find so many
people so depraved that they will take to the streets to
show their solidarity with such dastardly criminals? Don’t these people understand that
eliminating criminals is good for them and the rest of
the society? Don’t they understand that the more
criminals killed by the police, the more happy and
orderly will their societies be?
If the police story is correct, if it
is the truth as they continually insist it is, there is
something very wrong – dangerously wrong with this
society. If the police story is wrong, if it is a lie,
there is something very wrong – dangerously wrong with
this society.
Whichever of the stories is true is
immaterial. Whichever of the stories is true
demonstrates that this society is sick, diseased, and in
urgent need of fixing.
Waiting for Portia
I have been an admirer of
Portia
Simpson almost from the first day I met her, more than
30 years ago. Although she was hardly more than a
schoolgirl at the time, she struck me as a very
clear-eyed, straight and straightforward woman with a
developing vision of what Jamaica could be. She didn’t
believe in airy-fairy solutions. She understood that
development was about people, not about concrete and
steel. She knew that people wanted work, not simply
jobs, but work to fulfill their ideas of themselves. She
understood that creative work which involved the whole
person was the answer to many of the problems of
alienation, exclusion and misery which beset the people
of whom she was so unapologetically representative.
She was not afraid to stand, almost
alone, in defending her people when they were savagely
attacked in the 1970s. I remember one weekend in July
1980 when she had to find from God knows where, the
funds to bury 17 of her constituents, gunned down in
partisan warfare. She did not flinch, she did not run
away. Despite the fact that her constituency was
viciously polarised and as badly neglected by her own
government as it had been by the JLP, she built a
community of interest there in which former enemies
became reconciled to each other and a measure of peace
introduced into what was a battleground created by
others.
While most Jamaicans do not know the
details of her work, there is an intuitive sense of who
Portia is among most people. Which is why there was such
unbounded celebration at all levels of the society when
she triumphed in the leadership contest in the PNP
earlier this year.
What she inherited was a national
movement which had lost its way and forgotten its
historic purpose. Patterson had recreated the PNP as a
more efficient and globally serviceable version of the
JLP. It was more efficient and ruthless about
liberalisation, privatisation and retrenchment than the
JLP would ever have dared to be. Its policies have
created more millionaires in the last fourteen years
than existed in the entire Caribbean before then. The
transfer of wealth from poor to rich proceeded at a pace
unmatched even in the satellites of the former Soviet
Union. In one of the most economically unequal and
savagely unjust societies on the planet it is now chic
to speak about “wealth creation” without admitting that
wealth creation goes hand in hand with poverty creation.
Most Jamaicans know very well what
has been happening. They know that, like a smouldering
dungheap, Jamaica is ready to erupt into flame. And they
believe that Portia Simpson can put out the fire, and
redirect our energies to building a Jamaica of the heart
and soul, instead of an embattled collection of gated
communities sitting on top of a degraded environment
from which all hope has fled and where joy is a refugee.
Most of us, with the exception of the
political classes, know that Jamaica’s course cannot
continue to be business as usual. It cannot make sense
for the government to steal beaches, destroy green
spaces, provide inadequate schools and keep people from
growing their own food. In a country of just over
fifteen hundred arable square miles, it is in my view a
scandal that one family can own nearly seven square
miles and an even bigger scandal that the government can
contemplate handing over to that family another couple
of square miles for factory farms. It is a scandal that
the government can even contemplate covering farmland
with concrete, so called housing solutions. It is a
scandal that we have raided the National Pension schemes
to build highways whose real purpose is to celebrate the
soon to be defunct internal combustion engine. It is
utter madness to build thousands of hotel rooms in a
climate of fear which will in a few years, destroy mass
tourism. It is even crazier to build these hotels in
areas which will be destroyed by increasingly frequent
and violent hurricanes and subverted by climate change.
In Hanover, the Parish Council is
braying for another super hotel. Why? Because it will
produce a few jobs for a few labourers and mass profits
for a few contractors. But such hotels will not be about
Jamaica. they will be about processing visitors like
hogs in a nineteenth century Chicago slaughterhouse. The
only thing they won’t capture is the squeal of the
processed animals. Meanwhile, no thought is given to a
different kind of agriculture, one based on the care of
the land by people and not on the brutalisationn of the
land by pesticides, herbicides and expensive machinery.
If we began to think, it would be
plain to us that the tourism industry. if intelligently
designed and operated, could provide not only jobs for
waiters and housekeepers, but a huge export market for
Jamaican produce, organically grown and nurtured with
love by people with real stakes in a peaceful,
prosperous society.
A Jamaica of the Heart
There are people of all classes
waiting for Portia to summon them to sacrifice and work.
There are people waiting for Portia to tell them how
they can help re-think redirect and refashion Jamaica,
how they can help to develop their brothers and sisters,
how they can teach the illiterate to read and to grow
food, lead scout troops, teach children music, dancing,
gymnastics and swimming and how they can bring Jamaica
back from the brink of disaster.
Sadly, it seems to me, Portia is
being purposefully entangled in a bureaucratic spiders
web of ‘heavy metal development’ in which people wax
eloquent about trickle down theory without understanding
that education and better domestic environments will not
only reduce crime and HIV/AIDS but increase the GDP and
public safety. And that the politics of love and care
can produce Marcus Garveys and Harry Belafontes out of
‘wanted men’ and Mary Seacoles and Louise Bennetts out
of teggeregs and ‘bad girls’
When Portia Simpson was campaigning
for the Presidency of the Peoples National Party she
told us , famously and presciently, that we needed to
elect not a manager but a leader.
As her paradigm, Norman Manley said
nearly half a century ago, in 1958 when Portia was still
a little girl –”The duty of a Leader is to Lead.”
A few years years later he advised
us to ‘dis-enthrall’ ourselves – to emancipate
ourselves from mental slavery. And then he died, but his
movement did not die, nor did his ideas.
Copyright©2006 John Maxwell
/jankunnu@yahoo.com
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Obama congratulates new Jamaican PM on electoral victory—10
January 2012—U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday called the new Jamaican prime
minister, Portia Simpson Miller, to congratulate her on the recent victory in
the parliamentary elections, the White House said in a statement. . . . In the
recent parliamentary elections, the Jamaican opposition People's National Party
(PNP), led by 66-year-old Miller, defeated the ruling Jamaica Labor Party headed
by former prime minister Andrew Holness. Miller served as the country's first
female prime minister from March 2006 to September 2007.—ChinaDaily
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New Jamaican PM calls time on Queen as
head of state—During her inaugural address Jamaica's new Prime Minister
Portia Simpson Miller says the time has come for her country to cut ties with
the British monarchy—Mrs Simpson Miller made the pledge just weeks after it was
announced that Prince Harry would visit the Caribbean nation later this year to
mark the Queen's diamond jubilee. The constitutional changes are not expected to
disrupt his trip but may lead to a potentially embarrassing diplomatic situation
where a representative of the monarchy visits Jamaica at the same time the
government is working to sever its links to the crown. Speaking at her
inauguration on Thursday, Mrs Simpson Miller offered a fulsome tribute in
English to the monarch, saying: "I love the Queen. She is a beautiful lady, and
apart from being a beautiful lady, a wise lady and a wonderful lady." However,
she pointedly switched to Jamaican patois as she told the crowd of 10,000: "But
I think the time has come." Plans for the switch to a republican government are
aimed to coincide with this year's 50th anniversary of Jamaica's independence
from Britain in 1962. The Queen remains the head of state and is represented on
the island by the governor general, Sir Patrick Allen.—Telegraph
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New Jamaican PM to be sworn in, with
promise to review anti-gay law—Stephen Gray 5 January 2012—Jamaica’s new
Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, who has said she will review the criminalisation of homosexuality in the country and not forbid gays from serving
in her cabinet as former Prime Minister Bruce Golding had, is to be sworn in
today. Simpson-Miller returns to power after a convincing win at the end of year
elections in which her People’s National Party defeated Golding’s replacement,
Andrew Holness, who held the position for two months. In a televised debate in
December, Simpson-Miller said gays would not be forbidden to serve in her
cabinet, and that the government should “have a look” at the criminalisation of
gay acts, and vote freely on the matter.Holness, of the Jamaican Labor Party,
and Simpson-Miller were asked whether they supported the statement made by the
former Prime Minister Golding that gays were not welcome in his cabinet.
After saying it was his responsibility to
make sure the “institutions of freedom” were in place, Holness said: “My
sentiments reflect the sentiments of the country. The Prime Minister has a
discretion, but that discretion cannot be exercised in a vacuum.” Holness, who
was Jamaica’s youngest-ever leader, had accepted earlier in the debate that
there were minimum standards of human rights to which the country had to adhere,
but said Jamaican society should determine its own “civil rights”.
Simpson-Miller, however, who was Prime Minister in 2006 and 2007, said she would
choose cabinet members because of “their ability to manage and to lead”, not
their sexuality. . . .
The new government will
primarily have to deal with the national debt, which stands at 120% of GDP, a
figure approaching Greece’s 2010 debt level of 126.8%, as well as widespread
unemployment. Simpson-Miller said she would work “unswervingly to achieve the
desired growth, development, and to lift the standard of living in Jamaica”. As
a result of her relatively pro-gay comments, one member of the then-ruling party
questioned whether Simpson-Miller had been paid by the international LGBT
community to speak up for gay rights.—PinkNews
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Inaugural address of Prime
Minister Portia Simpson Miller
John Maxwell: A gladiator wielding a merciless
pen (Desmond Allen)
John Maxwell Table
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Media and Violence in Jamaica
Edited by Marjan de Bruin et and Claude
Robinson
The
review of research on the impact of
media and violence on children and
juveniles is particularly noteworthy and
supports the intuitive understanding of
the influence the media must exert in
the development of what Garbarino (1995)
calls the social maps children construct
and which guide their behaviour. Many
children today cannot sit still for ten
minutes without an I Pod, an MP3 player,
a Game Boy or a TV movie and the
explicit portrayals of murder,
person-on-person violence and violent
sex acts in films, television, video
games, and the lyrics of popular songs
convey images of violence as being part
of the normal pattern of interpersonal
interaction and relationships. When violent events and known
violent offenders are given prominence in the print
media and interviewed on radio as well as
television, mixed messages are sent to children who
now see violent behaviour as a means of capturing
public attention and gaining prominence. The
de-sensitization of young people to violence and its
effects is an important outcome of such exposure,
and it can irreparably damage their psychological
and emotional development.—Emerita Professor Elsa Leo-Rhynie, Former Principal, The University of
the West Indies |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
Library Journal |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
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1985
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 27 August 2006
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