Karl F Watts
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
www.jamaicaobserver.comMarcus Garvey, Jamaica's first National Hero, made an observation in the early 20th century as relevant today as it was then, about the terror that accompanied the colonial process.
Garvey wrote in poetic form:
"They (the colonialists), have stolen, murdered, on their way here,
Leaving desolation and waste everywhere;
Now they boastingly tell what they have done,
Seeing not the bloody crown they have won."
The "they" that Marcus Garvey spoke of were the "great men" of colonial exploits regaled by venal historians, but such was Garvey's insight that it may well apply to the modern-day crusaders and their bloody adversaries on the world stage as well as our own home-grown terrorists, engulfed in an orgy of murderous mayhem.
It is instructive that the reaction to this fully home-grown terrorism euphemistically called crime, has spawned a series of studies usually by well-fed and hapless professors whose unheeded recommendations have now been replaced by the clarion call "to get help from outside".
Garvey and self-reliance
This would have been anathema to everything that Garvey practised and preached since he saw the liberation of the oppressed black people of his day as being based on a doctrine of uncompromising self-reliance. When Garvey introduced the concept of liberating Africa to the world and indeed the creation of a model African state in Liberia, the reaction ranged from hostility to ridicule. Years later when the Jews sought to create their own independent homeland, there was no ridicule, instead they received massive support from some of the very people who were Garvey's most vehement foes, notably the British colonial establishment.
Self-reliance was not a sentimental ideal for Garvey, but a way of building confidence in a group of people whose self-esteem had been shattered by racism and its attendant ills. It is from this goal that he advanced the slogan, "Up you mighty race" to motivate oppressed black people in the early 20th century. He sought through the conventions of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the newspaper The Negro World, the Black Starline enterprise and various cultural activities with education as its centrepiece, to address this problem of dispossession and low self-esteem.
Marcus Garvey and youth
Today, marginalised black youth, both locally and internationally, must once again confront the very issues that Marcus Garvey sought to address in the early 20th century, of low self-esteem fuelled by hostile societies. Their most obvious reaction is violence, anti-social music and dance and the wanton taking of life. This is in part due to weak leadership which manipulates rather than motivates.
When Marcus Garvey confronted a similar situation, he was able to take an equally alienated people with nothing but loose and boundless energy and channelled their rage into the first black mass movement in the United States, which was to reverberate throughout the then colonial world.
Garvey's programme and ideas did not come easy, unlike today's party leadership races which are more a version of "beauty contests", but required the endurance of unimaginable suffering including imprisonment, being shot, and death alone in poverty. The example that Garvey offers is not only his visionary work but in the character that must be forged to achieve great things.
A better appreciation therefore of the National Hero's life, as well as his work, would go a long way in addressing the intractable social ills of criminality, corruption and mindless imperialism, as the world grapples to find meaningful and constructive responses in this the age of terror.
Karl Watts is a freelance writer.
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