Governor-General, Sir Howard Cooke (centre), gets some help from Patrick Johnson of Metropolitan Parks and Market (MPM) in planting a tree symbolising the opening of Emancipation Park, New Kingston, on Wednesday night. Looking on at left is Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, who also planted a tree. - Michael Sloley /Freelance Photographer PRIME MINISTER P.J. Patterson says that the new Emancipation Park in New Kingston will commemorate the country's survival and beyond.
Speaking at Wednesday night's opening ceremony, Mr. Patterson said that it was a monument to the resilience of Jamaicans who successfully resisted slavery, endured protracted suffering and proved, " against all odds," the invincibility of the human spirit.
"We dare not forget the beginning of our journey that has taken us through self-government, Independence and the continuing quest for a productive and prosperous way forward - a quest in which we are engaged today."
He said that Emancipation Park was intended to celebrate and mark "a glorious and challenging" beginning which had beckoned our forbears to re-discovery of self and the shaping of a new order of society.
The park commemorates the ingenuity of the people from whom we sprang, he added.
"I firmly believe that our ancestors would approve of much that has been accomplished. As soon as they achieved their freedom, they rapidly left the estates, where they had suffered all the indignities and desperation that slavery engenders and fled into the hinterlands, into the hills and began building a new life for themselves. In the words of a former slave at a function to commemorate emancipation held in upper Clarendon in 1842: "Now we can buy our own land, build our own house and go we own church".
Turning to the issue of land tenure, Mr. Patterson said that Jamaica's history recorded that during slavery, our ancestors used hillside lots to grow ground provisions that fed the entire population, including the planters.
"These lands passed down from generation to generation as family land.
Everyone, perhaps naively in retrospect, expected that following the principles of English Common Law that these lands would become the property of the people at Emancipation.
"Indeed, the British colonial governor, the Earl of Sligo, made a ruling precisely to that effect. However, not surprisingly the local planters protested and the Colonial Office overturned the ruling of their own Governor. Thus, on the eve of Emancipation, the people lost access to lands, which had been in their family for decades.
"The colonial power's determination to maintain a labour supply for planters in Jamaica made ownership of land by the people next to impossible, except through the granting of land by employers.
It was with a sense of the historic significance of the initiative, that last week I launched the Cadastral Mapping and Tenure Regularisation of 30,000 parcels of land in St. Catherine, in Sligoville, the site of one of the first Free Villages in Jamaica.
It is a part of the mission that I am determined to fulfil, to make our ancestors' dreams come true for more of us. It is the desire to help realise these dreams that informs so many of the policies of this administration.
I have heard talk about my excessive passion with regard to finding every means possible to provide home ownership, to ensure security of tenure for land for the people of this country. I will never apologise for that passion.
I have openly acknowledged that Operation PRIDE and the activities of the National Housing Trust and other agencies that administer the provision of land and houses must be carried out with rectitude, transparency and free from political discrimination. But having said that, I will insist with my last breath, that it is time for the dream of our ancestors to be realised.
"Access to education, provision of the basic amenities of life - water, roads, electricity and housing. For the masses of the people, the direct descendants of those slaves whose emancipation we commemorate today - these are vital to completion of the process started two hundred years ago.
Urban Revitalisation
"This park is vivid testimony to the value we place on urban revitalisation. Enough cannot be said about the merits of developing and maintaining public spaces and the resulting impact on the psyche of the citizenry.
"Nowhere else perhaps is the principle of common good demonstrated than in a public park. Our ability to respect and enjoy the beauty of nature and to honour our history here in this park has no relation to whether our home is Kingston 8 or Kingston 11. The park is constructed on the premise that we each have an affinity for our country and for our neighbours.
"There has been much debate on the best use of this land. Many of us here this evening may have felt that transforming this piece of prime real estate into a park was a waste of resource.
"The truth is that there is no price that can be placed on the value of showing a child the magnificence of Royal Palm; on the value of seeing the joy on the face of the young or the old on seeing the sparkle of the water in this fountain reflected in the sunlight; the pleasure of finding a haven of serenity in the hustle and bustle of the New Kingston urban centre."
