Dawn Ritch, Contributor
IN THE early days of the United States farm work programme in the 1950s, two water pipes were provided for the workers in the segregated South. A 'whites only' pipe, and a 'black' pipe.
Jamaican farm workers there refused to use the black pipe, and made a beeline for the white pipe, causing riots. The farm management refused to have them drink from the white pipe, and Jamaican workers would drink from no other. Those from Barbados and all the other Caribbean islands used the black pipe without complaint. The managers were forced to provide a third pipe for Jamaicans. There were now the white pipe, the Jamaican pipe, and the black pipe.
In those days Jamaicans had no time for political correctness, and no identity problems whatsoever. Nor did we seek the leadership of the Third World. We felt superior to all that, and were acknowledged and welcomed everywhere. Our nurses, teachers and transport workers were the backbone of the systems in the First World.
The crab in the barrel Trinidadians kept asking us if we didn't notice we were Black. And when they found they could do nothing about it, fell into Calypso and mocked us. To this day and even in our penury, they are consumed with envy still.
It was not until the 1970s that Jamaicans began to use African names for their children. Before that 'John' and 'Mary' had been fine. At this point people began to take out and focus on the African strand in our make-up, and talk a lot about slavery. Nobody had been interested in the subject before, except a few fringe lunatics best left alone.
Under the Michael Manley regime of the 1970s it became official cultural policy. The teaching of classical music was therefore abandoned, as too strenuous and self-negating for Jamaican Black people. And all this while Mr. Manley himself listened to the romantic classical composer Rachmaninoff.
Shirt-and-tie was thrown away, and in came the Kareeba, an unspeakably hot shirtless jacket that could only be worn well by men with fine figures, such as Michael Manley. Needless to say the local inventor was given a national honour.
Hand-in-hand with this went the promotion of a mythical African identity for Jamaicans. Indeed this was the raison d'être of the University of the West Indies. Its chief cultural theorist and promoter was Rex Nettleford who, in his young days, had a fine figure. As the chief proponent of what was to become the national identity crisis, he still feels obliged, though a little long in the tooth, to dress in a ridiculous Kareeba. Though no more ridiculous, I suppose, than today's young men's fashion of wearing their underpants outside their trousers. The great populariser of patois, Mr. Nettleford's accent and speech nevertheless remain resolutely Oxonian and grand.
Overnight the country fell into illiteracy. Bear in mind that Michael Manley took over from the JLP Government of the 1960s a booming economy, and ran for election under the slogan 'Better Must Come'. The collapse of meaning was complete. And the navel-gazing search for identity began.
Having destroyed a booming economy and failed to provide all else except rhetoric for his people, Michael Manley presided over an identity industry which went into overdrive. Some people took to the black identity business like a weapon, the only weapon they had. It was accompanied by much drumming and aggressiveness, which now ironically stand in the way of the development and marketability of our indigenous reggae.
Even Tony Laing on Power 106 recently admitted that there can be no harmony in music without melody. He has also had very helpful things to say about the physical environment, which the Government continues to ignore.
In the 1970s it was the opposite. Then Dr. D. K. Duncan, an official in the Manley regime, told Jamaican youth at the opening ceremony of the new German Automotive School that it was too clean for them and needed to be 'de-sanitised'. In this it did not concur with the newly-manufactured Jamaican cultural identity of dirt and blackness, African struggle, tams, barefoot, and Jesus sandals.
BROWN MAN
It was as though Norman Manley was not a brown man, and his wife and Michael's mother Edna, not a white woman. As though these pivotal Jamaican figures had never marched in Harlem, and given heart to the American black people as much as anybody else. And not once did they ginnal a single soul while doing it. The political correctness launched in the 1970s however, demanded that black identity become a liberation struggle fought by Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Otherwise known as how to punch your way out of a brown paper bag.
Particularly in the United States, but also elsewhere, it led to a new industry called Black history. As though Black history was going to be any different from women's history, and all the other little histories people began to invent, and press into the service of ideologies to justify their sense of social inferiority.
In the 1950s nobody suffered from a social inferiority complex unless he or she was physically dirty without cause. In fact older people in the middle and upper class routinely called young men of poor means 'son', and tried to be helpful.
Once bastardy was abolished in the 1970s, (another piece of senseless social engineering) cheap familiarity was substituted for interest, and the streets got noisy with the sound of "Mumah, gimme a money nuh?!"
I'm told we can't go back to the past, but I don't know why we had to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Black identity has taken a few professors somewhere, and one or two singers, but for the vast majority of the rest of us it has been an unmitigated disaster. Not one area is properly managed. Why can't some of them make sense?
In time they may put down the weapon of their blackness. But for the cultural gurus who have grown fat on it, they have no other life. The rest of us have no such luxury. We have to get on with it.
