Celebrating people who care

Laura Tanna

DAVID MCLAUGHLIN died peacefully of old age, call it heart failure if you will, on Friday, August 3, 2001, at his home in Westmoreland, with his grandson at his bedside. If you didn't live in Abeokuta or Water Works, where the last of the Nago people from Nigeria had lived, his name might not mean much to you. He was 87 when he died, and was a Jamaican who honoured and respected the old-time African ways he'd heard of from his elders.

I first met him 27 years ago. If you look on page 8 in Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories you'll find a paragraph that starts: "It was in Water Works that I witnessed the most memorable Anansi session during my field work. As I left the main road and walked down a path towards the local sawmill, suddenly there was a clearing beneath large, protective trees. Nestled at the foot of the hill, which gave access to Abeokuta, was a clean and pretty village with a cricket green where the youth played."

Mr. McLaughlin owned that sawmill until floods swept it away. Now he too is gone. But thanks to his generosity of spirit, his memory will live on. His daughter, Ionie Moxie, remembered how even though her parents had five children of their own and his daughter by a previous union, her parents cared for street boys, her mother sewing them short pants and her father feeding them. Of course back then, Mrs. Moxie says, we used to call them abandoned children. Makes you think, doesnt it? Abandoned child has a different ring than street boy.

Mr. McLaughlin was a neighbour of Alberta Rachel Whitelock Fenton, at one time the oldest living Nago in Jamaica before her death, and the two of them entertained Hazel Ramsay McClune and me royally one afternoon and evening in March 1974, with Ms Rachel singing African songs she knew, in that clearing under the trees, and Alfred Doman joining in with songs and dances he'd learned from his Nago grandmother, as he held a massive mortar stick which he pounded into the earth as his rich voice rang out with the strange African words.

It was David McLauglin who took the youngsters to task when some of the ever-growing crowd laughed at Ms Rachel as she flung her arms up and shouted "EWO EWO" at the end of each song. He quietly rebuked them, saying this was their culture and they ought to be proud of it.

I count it a blessing that Olive Lewin met Ms. Fenton and her neighbours and was thoughtful enough to ask Hazel Ramsay McClune to travel across the country with me so that I might also meet them and record some of their heritage to share with you. And though The Gleaner paid it no mind, both the Observer and CVM-TV found it newsworthy that the Jamaica Broilers Group Ltd thought that the preservation and transmission of Jamaica's oral narratives of African heritage was so important, that in July 2001, they donated 100 copies of the book, Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories, 100 copies of the 60-minute audio cassette, Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories, 100 copies of the 60-minute audio cassette, Maroon Storyteller, and 20 copies of the 104-minute video Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories to The Jamaica Library Services so that this material can be accessible, not only to Jamaicans throughout the island, but most importantly in school libraries for a new generation of Jamaicans to learn from the wisdom of their ancestors.

They will learn from Anansi that ambiguity is always in our midst, that the world is not always fair and that out of chaos we can create order if we have our wits about us. And if trickster tales portray the world as it too often is, then non-trickster narratives show us the way that it ought to be, with values to be learned: in Timorimo, of loving the next woman's child as your own; in Preeny, of mothers protecting their children from incest; in John Crow and de Yawsy Bwoy, of looking beyond material appearances to see a person's true character.

That Robert Levy and Claudette Cooke of Jamaica Broilers Group Ltd cared enough about Jamaica's traditional culture to help ensure that others will have access to it is very special. Since the original 1984 edition of the book appeared, before the video and first audio came out in 1987 and the second one in 1992, by the time the fourth printing came out last year, Bongo, Frederic Cassidy, George Cawley, Alberta Fenton, Adina Henry, David McLean, Thomas Rowe, D.F. Shalland, Sebert Smith, Nehemiah Williams, Ranny Williams and now David McLaughlin have all died, but because they cared enough about their culture to share it, through their voices which live on in this material, we remember and cherish them.

Back to Commentary