What’s the Jamaica Tourist Board up to with its new slogan?
The UK Guardian carried a story on the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) and its new slogan which doesn’t immediately resonate either with them or me–Jamaica Get All Right. As the Guardian points out its a slightly dodgy slogan grammatically speaking. Reminds me of the Jamaica Broadcasting Commission’s Transitioning Digital campaign; I don’t actually remember the slogan correctly anymore merely that it was fundamentally ungrammatical. Mercifully the powers that be seem to have realized this belatedly and ditched it. Anyhow here’s what the Guardian had to say on the new JTB slogan:
Earlier this month the Jamaican tourist board unveiled a new brand identity, ditching its previous slogan, “Jamaica – Once you go, you know”, and replacing it with the far more succinct, albeit grammatically obtuse, “Jamaica – Get All Right”. The new slogan is currently being launched around the world; last week the tourist board rolled the world’s largest stress ball into New York’s Times Square and on Tuesday a twitter campaign ran to the tune of #getallright.
As an exhortation to the country itself it might work…for the Lord knows Jamaica does need to ‘get all right’. It seems to be suffering from a malingering degenerative disease that we would all like it to snap out of. But as a slogan for tourists? Do you think it works?
Noting with alarm another tragic and completely avoidable police killing in Jamaica.
I was just getting ready to write a rare pro-Police post, after listening to Police Commissioner Owen Ellington on one of the morning programmes; he was describing in detail the gang structures the police are trying to dismantle and what a Sisyphean task they face. Listening to the calm, rational voice of Commissioner Ellington I actually wondered if sometimes we aren’t unfair to the Police when we protest so vigorously against their unnecessarily life-threatening tactics. Then I listened to the 5 pm news on Nationwide Radio and found myself seething with rage at yet another wanton, vicious police killing.
Two 16-year old cousins in Hanover were riding a motorbike when police ordered them to halt. Afraid because they weren’t licensed to ride the bike the boys took off with the police in hot pursuit. Having blocked them successfully after a chase the police are alleged to have beaten them to a pulp. How dare they disobey the Police? This would teach them to do such a thing again. Well if there’s one thing the Police seem to excel at, its the application of violence to hapless youths (not the apprehension of real criminals judging by the 5% conviction rate for murders and the rising number of kidnappings, robberies and murders we hear about daily). So soundly were the boys beaten that one of them succumbed to his injuries yesterday and the other remains critically injured.
Tell me how this is acceptable Commissioner Ellington? How can you expect the rest of us to sit idly and watch this brazen brutality continue? If the police involved in this boy’s death are allowed to go unpunished aren’t you sending a message to other cops with no respect for human rights, especially the rights of the poor, that they have a license to behave like this? how many other youngsters will meet their deaths at the hands of uncontrollable policemen? Why are none of them ever found guilty and punished?
I’ve met so many really good police men and women over the years. Especially officers, some of whom are or were students at the University. I’ve always been amazed at how civil and considerate most of them seem. But where are they now? Why aren’t they speaking up when these atrocities happen? Why aren’t they stopping them? How much longer will this wanton bloodletting be allowed to go on? If you, the good police, don’t put your collective foot down you surely will be considered to be aiding and abetting in some of the most inhumane policing tactics in the region. Please. Say something. Do Something. Stop the killing.
Featuring Super Smiley…the giant stress ball advertising Jamaica in NYC…
WIN! Jamaica Tourist Board’s giant stress ball in NYC. Did you see it by any chance? I’d say JTB should use Draftfcb Agency more often. They clearly know what creativity means and how to apply it.
Apparently Gyptian was on location too…read about all about it in this Adweek story (thanks to @Gordonswaby for drawing my attention to it with his tweet).
Being analog in a digital world….TV Jamaica’s acquisition of exclusive rights to The Voice…and how they had to change their tune.
A few weeks ago, when the current season of The Voice had just begun there was a bit of an uproar in Jamaica because one of the two local TV stations, TVJ, bought exclusive rights to it and then refused to show it live. They showed it two hours later when they figured they would snare the largest number of viewers. What made matters worse was that those who normally watch the show on cable as part of a bundle of American programming they have paid for suddenly found their access to NBC’s broadcast of The Voice denied simply because TVJ had bought exclusive rights to the show.
Infuriated viewers took to social media and complained enough that by the second week’s broadcast TVJ had agreed to carry the show live on one of its subsidiaries. The problem was that there was some kind of technical snafu that prevented The Voice being broadcast till an hour into the show.
People who had looked forward to watching Jamaican singer Tessanne Chin wow the judges for the second week running were upset and once again took their complaints to Twitter and Facebook. TVJ management later said it was shocked by the intensity of the reactions and the vitriol expressed by viewers. In retaliation TVJ executives tried to pit cable viewers against non-cable viewers by suggesting that somehow the former (privileged fatcats) wanted to deprive the latter (downtrodden masses with no options but local TV) of the pleasure of watching The Voice.
How they figured this is beyond me. The cable viewers didn’t object to TVJ broadcasting the Voice, what they objected to was being deprived of access to the cable channel they normally watch the show on. Similarly there was a strong suggestion that those who objected to TVJ’s buying the exclusive rights to The Voice and then not showing it live were somehow encouraging theft of intellectual Property.
I found myself in a radio discussion on RJR (Radio Jamaica) with Oliver McKintosh, President and CEO of Sportsmax, Chris Dehring of the West Indies Cricket Board and Gary Allen, Managing Director of the RJR Group that owns TVJ, where there was a tendency by the corporate representatives to lecture listeners about IP rights, about respecting rightsholders, about how this was no different from stealing physical property etc etc.
I was more than a little bewildered. Had anyone suggested that TVJ steal rights to The Voice? When?? Who?
Judging by Gary Allen’s statements on radio that evening, RJR’s motives for buying exclusive rights to The Voice were largely humanitarian. They had noticed that the participation of a local singer, Tessanne Chin, was exciting a bit of interest amongst Jamaicans and felt called upon to respond. As Allen elaborated:
When we recognized that this programme is one which is going to expose the talent of one of our artistes and that it is creating so much interest, our primary thing was, at that stage–not everybody has access to cable, we have a responsibility and a mission as broadcaster to try and bring content that is of interest to the widest possible audience. And therefore we were also very interested in exposing this beyond the cable audience. People who have cable very often forget that there are tens of thousands of people in Jamaica who do not have that access and to whom we should extend our services.
Aren’t Jamaicans lucky to have such a magnanimous TV station, one willing to spend millions of dollars buying exclusive rights just so their viewers can have access to Prime Time American TV programming without depending on cable? Conversely how quick TVJ’s top honchos were to throw us cable viewers under the bus! How little we matter to them. Tsk tsk tsk. Perhaps they’re not aware that the number of Jamaicans watching cable is as high as 70% according to some cable providers.
When it was President and CEO of Sportsmax Oliver MckIntosh’s turn to speak, he said he was a ‘bit disappointed’ with the reactions of those who had protested on social media and promptly went on to talk of piracy of content. Chris Dehring interrupted, objecting to the use of the term piracy because “it makes it sound almost romantic”, and insisted that it–whatever ‘it’ was– be called stealing.
“Just because there are a number of cars sitting on the wharf for 9, 10 months, you can’t just jump into a car and drive it off…If everyone’s allowed to steal which is essentially what is being proposed here…” he continued.
How analog they all sound I thought, futilely trying to point out that TVJ’s cardinal sin had been acquiring exclusive rights to a popular show and then not showing it live, particularly when it was the kind of reality show that demanded audience participation in the form of texting, voting and tweeting. It’s called interactivity and it has revolutionized the way content is presented, consumed and distributed globally. Those who want to profit from making content available, from providing access to it, cannot afford to overlook the huge transformation sweeping the creative industries.
I remembered all this as I listened to David Pakman (@Pakman), the keynote speaker at JSTOR’s Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship Conference in New York City recently. Pakman co-founded the Apple Music Group in 1995, co-founded MyPlay (pioneer of digital music locker), and was COO/CEO of eMusic for five years.
Pakman talked of the profound technological shifts that have taken place, the move from analog to digital for instance, and the tendency nowadays toward something he called ‘mass customization’. It had all started with the internet and its effects on the way music was consumed–in essence the fallout of ‘debundled’ content being made available. “The story of music is the story of unbundling,” said Pakman as he moved into explanatory mode.
The CD or music album was a bundle; you had no choice but to buy 10 songs bundled together for the one or two hits among them. “Then singles came along and ruined the bundle,” he said. The sale of albums had shrunk not because of piracy but because of debundling. Traditional incumbents try to bundle and the legacy costs of businesses are predicated on bundling.
Bundling is more expensive, it artificially raises overall costs. Information wants to be distributed friction free–and what flows best? Atomic units–which are more user-friendly.
The world is moving towards debundled content, journals too will be unbundled, with articles not papers, being the units of sale, Pakman said, making the link to the field of scholarly publishing that had brought together his audience of journal editors, librarians and publishers.
The Internet is a bi-directional medium–the user is also a producer, he explained, bringing up the interactivity I mentioned earlier. New aggregators are the social platforms not the publishers, and content discovery has shifted to social media where those with Twitter and Facebook clout have become the new ‘influencers’.
The latest American shows are fully aware of these new trends and have adapted to them, sensitive to the bi-directionality or interactivity mentioned earlier. The last episode of The Voice even incorporated Twitter into its voting process.
You can buy the exclusive rights to such shows but you can’t do that and treat them as if they’re the kind of traditional uni-directional, analog content that’s on its way out without raising the ire of your viewers. The sooner management of all the top media entities here realize this the better it’ll be for all concerned.
Sezi’s instructions to Tessanne Chin’s numerous supporters in Jamaica and Adam Stewart’s Instagram are a hint of the Voice mania that has overtaken the country. This evening NBC’s popular singing reality show introduces a first-of-its-kind Twitter vote using the hashtag #VoiceSave. This will allow tweeters to keep one contestant from joining the reject heap in an ‘instant save’ during a five-minute voting window toward the end of the results show.
I’ve been quite amused by the national frenzy to make sure Tessanne Chin, the popular Jamaican singer on this season’s Voice, is not eliminated due to a shortage of votes. Everyone from radio talk show hosts to scholars to teachers is busy devising methods to beat Jamaica’s inherent ‘economy of scale’ problem. How else could a small country with a population of 2.5 million, three at the most, compete in generating the required votes for their favourite singer?
You just have to admire the ingenuity called forth by everyone and their grandmother, check out these tweets to see what i mean:
@SadeSweetness: My co-worker in Trinidad just gave me remote control of her pc via #Lync to vote for @TessanE via @Skype
@mamachell Bitch! Lol RT @thtGrlDanielle: Every email in my contact list going vote fi tessanne whether u like it or not
@Dale_Gonsalves
Come on peeps, buy @Tessanne’s #thevoice songs on itunes, we need to get her numbers up. NO, downloading it illegally wont help. Ole Teef
@taraplayfair
Morning! We have until 11am.. Get up. Get voting. Or get friends/family in USA/CAN to vote for… instagram.com/p/gnXW0XBI2a/
@cucumberjuice Purchase during the voting period for the purchase to count for Tessanne’s votes. Voting period begins @ 9:55 PM.
@ingridriley And di las lick before me really gone to mi bed…Mek sure oonu vote, and tell your friends and family in the USA to vote for #tessanne
@ThisisPreki Right now Cuffe cant go outta road and do nuh wrongs cuz di whole world know him now and to how dem luv Tess dem wudda buss pon him
They will be referred to as Hijras in both English and Bangla
Hijras, who are neither male nor female, from now on will be considered as a separate gender in Bangladesh and will get priority for education and other rights.
The decision was made at a Monday cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Cabinet Secretary Musharraf Hossain Bhuiyan briefed the media after the meeting.
Journalists asked Musharraf whether the spelling of Hijra would be spelled with a “z or a j.”
“With a j. They will be referred as Hijras in both English and Bangla language. Any other translations in English is misleading,” the cabinet secretary said.
There are currently 10,000 Hijras living in the country he said, referring to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Social Welfare.
This has led the government to consider them as a separate gender alongside the existing male and female sexes, he said.
Hijras are already enlisted as voters in Bangladesh.
The move comes as the current government’s term draws to a close.
The Bangladeshi decision comes on the heels of the German government’s move to recognize the status of those of indeterminate gender. According to a Huffington Postarticle:
As of November, Germany will be the first country in Europe to offer a “third gender” distinction on its birth certificates.
A new German law stipulates that children who are born of indeterminate gender no longer have to be categorized as “male” or “female.” Instead, parents can choose to leave the space blank on their child’s birth certificate, according to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Those individuals can eventually decide whether to identify as male, female or neither.
There is a large Hijra community in India as well. Not sure if they have legal rights but their existence is socially accepted and recognized though they are by and large treated as outcastes. Below is an excerpt from a first person account by one of them:
Then there’s Kamal. He was the only son of an Ulhasnagar businessman. But from childhood he was fond of cross-dressing; wearing a sari and make-up. The family dismissed this as a kid’s fancy. But one day Kamal told his family: “I will not be able to live as you want me to, as a male.” Saying this, he left home. His best friends were Shiba and Vinnie, and all three of them became my chelas. Kamal’s folks landed up at my place in Thane. They were comforted to learn that their only son was safe and sound, and that we lived together as a family. Today, Kamal’s folks have opened their doors to her. Sometimes she goes home on overnight visits. She’s not in the family business of course, but works instead in a dance bar. She hands over her earnings to her folks, believing it to be her duty, though her parents are well-off and do not need her money.
A colleague at UWI, Julian Cresser, alerted me to the following. I had no idea:
Androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), formerly known as testicular feminization, is an X-linked recessive condition resulting in a failure of normal masculinization of the external genitalia in chromosomally male individuals. This failure of virilization can be either complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) or partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS), depending on the amount of residual receptor function.
Both individuals with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome and individuals with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome have 46,XY karyotypes. Individuals with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome have female external genitalia with normal labia, clitoris, and vaginal introitus.[1, 2, 3, 4] The phenotype of individuals with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome may range from mildly virilized female external genitalia (clitorimegaly without other external anomalies) to mildly undervirilized male external genitalia (hypospadias and/or diminished penile size). See the image below.
Penoscrotal hypospadias is shown. Note the associated ventral chordee and true urethral meatus located at the scrotal level.In either case, affected individuals have normal testes with normal production of testosterone and normal conversion to dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which differentiates this condition from 5-alpha reductase deficiency. Because the testes produce normal amounts of müllerian-inhibiting factor (MIF), also known as müllerian-inhibiting substance (MIS) or anti-müllerian hormone/factor (AMH/AMF), affected individuals do not have fallopian tubes, a uterus, or a proximal (upper) vagina.
For squeamish Jamaicans who insist that no such thing as ‘trans gender’ exists here try acquainting yourselves with the story of British socialite Lady Colin Campbell. Not only were her roots Jamaican she was born trans gendered much to the horror of her Jamaican father who reportedly advised her to take poison:
Lady Colin Campbell is one of our most flamboyant socialites. The 64-year-old is best known for her royal biographies, in particular her book, Diana in Private (“One of my closest friends was one of her closest friends”), which caused a sensation when it was published, with its revelations about Diana’s eating disorders, affair with James Hewitt and tales of marital strife, prior to Andrew Morton’s biography. She was dismissed as a fantasist, only to be later vindicated.
But royal scandals are as nothing in comparison with the roller coaster that has been Lady Colin’s own life. Born into Jamaica’s prominent Ziadie family, she gained her aristocratic title on marrying Colin Campbell, younger brother of the 12th Duke of Argyll in 1974. But when they broke up acrimoniously, she claims he sold the tabloids the – inaccurate – story that she had been born a boy.
Her outrage at his betrayal is undimmed with time. “I bitterly resent it, I resented it then, I resent it now and I will resent it until my dying day,” she says in her endearing half-Jamaican, half-upper-crust accent. “It was wildly inappropriate.”
Finally would love to know more about this. Grateful for any information, I don’t read the papers anymore and may have missed updates.
Corroborated: Crossdresser found dead in St. Catherine
03/11/2013 15:16:00
The body of 19-year-old Britney Ebanks o/c “Luke” was found on Thursday, October 31 in the community of Central Village, St. Catherine. The former winner of a “Miss World 2012” contest was reported missing on Sunday October 27, 2013 after failing to arrive at the home of friends that night. Residents stumbled upon the body on October 31 and summoned the police. The scene processed before the body was removed to the morgue.
Jamaican Police’s war against murals and memorials exemplified by the destruction of the Glenford ‘Early Bird’ Phipps murals at his brother, Zeke’s bar in Matthews Lane.
A policeman paints out the mural of Glenford ‘Early Bird’ Phipps which was on a building at the intersection of Beeston Street and Matthews Lane in west Kingston in February.-Norman Grindley/Chief Photographer, The GleanerThe mural of Glenford ‘Early Bird’ Phipps, seen being painted out above, photographed in 2004
In a bizarre twist on community policing lawmen in Jamaica have embraced iconoclasm–the erasure of painted memorials in this case–as a strategy. The photograph accompanying Honor Ford-Smith’s article in the Gleaner today (see above) pleading for the Police to be more sensitive to the social role images play in the communities that produce them is a case in point. What its caption doesn’t tell you is WHO Glenford ‘Early Bird’ Phipps was, or his relationship to Western Kingston and Matthews Lane in particular. It’s just another example of how Jamaican media occludes rather than reveals information.
“For some years now, the Jamaican police have been painting out murals in working-class communities in a symbolic battle with residents,” begins Honor’s article, a longer version of which she had sent me a week ago:
Judging by the public silence, many agree that destroying the murals will somehow help to obliterate donmanship. Perhaps this is understandable, given the fact that we’re all tired of living in fear and we’re tired of the global media marketing the idea that all Jamaicans are pathologically violent. It is hard then to ask what other meanings the police ‘clean-up operation’ might carry, or to suggest that we have much to learn from the murals themselves.
….
The destruction of the murals is an act of violent censorship of a popular street-art movement in Kingston in the guise of law enforcement. It is a violation of the right to freedom of expression that is guaranteed in the Jamaican Constitution. We may not like the murals. We don’t have to. That is not the point. Not liking them is not the same as denying the right of self-representation.
Just how much history is packed into murals and images produced by street artists can be seen by looking at the history of the very image the policeman is painting out in the Gleaner photograph above.
It happens to be a mural that I photographed a bit in 2004 during a close encounter with Zekes, the notorious Don of Matthews Lane, who brought Kingston to a standstill in 1997 when the police briefly arrested him. Glenford ‘Early Bird’ Phipps was Zekes’s beloved brother, brutally murdered in 1990 and memorialized by Zekes in an extensive series of murals on the walls outside and inside his bar (see below).
In this photo you can dimly see Zekes behind his bar. He actually tended the bar himself and poured me a portion of John Crow Batty, a powerful white rum the likes of which i’ve never encountered since.Inside the bar there were more images of Early Bird, flanked by humming birds. You can also get a better look at Zekes with one of his lieutenants. On the left behind his camera is Julian Henriques, film-maker and lecturer at Goldsmith College in London.Zekes was initially hostile, incensed at my taking photographs without his permission, though he soon became very friendly, even posing for photos and sending his lieutenant, who had previously ripped the film from my camera, to accompany me while i took photos outside.
But even better than this, Early Bird was memorialized by none other than the famous poet Kamau Brathwaite in his long poem Trenchtown Rock. I’ve taken the liberty of photographing and reproducing below relevant portions from that poem so that you get a better sense of who Glenford Phipps was (“was a young Dreadlocks, [later I was to learn that he was known as “Early Bird”/catching his first too early worm of death that early All Souls Morning] his beautiful long hair like curled around his body making snakes like dance“), his sensational slaying outside the very building Brathwaite lived in, in which Phipps had also been resident, and his importance to the community he came from, to whom those murals would have been of great significance.
This magnificent painting of Early Bird was on the outer wall of the bar.
Many will say the murals are merely ‘a glorification of criminals’ and should be defaced for fear of their ‘grave effects’ on ‘poor Jamaicans’ etc. I quote from a Facebook response to my posting of Honor’s article. Frankly I’m always amazed at how many Jamaicans talk as if everything is black or white, easily distinguishable, devoid of ambiguity or nuance. Many of Jamaica’s national heroes were on the most wanted list of the colonial government in power at the time. How does a profoundly corrupt state determine criminality? If/When so many police personnel behave like criminals and in effect ARE criminals how do they determine whom to punish? And should the public support them in this? These are hypothetical questions but ones worth pondering. One of the interesting things brought out in Honor’s article on censorship is the fact that also memorialized in many of these communities are the fallen policemen belonging to them:
Some of the murals can be read as covert statements against police impunity and against police methods. But this doesn’t mean communities are against the police per se. If this were true, police from inner-city communities would not be memorialised. But they are. They, too, are mourned and remembered. Nevertheless, it is well known that Jamaica has a high rate of police violence that undermines public confidence in law enforcement.
Do we really have a right to erase the social history of communities in the name of hard policing? Really? What next?
A brief look at the University of the West Indies forum on the proposed logistics hub at Goat Islands
I didn’t actually make it to UWI’s one day colloquium on the proposed Goat Islands logistics hub today but tried to keep track through those who were live tweeting it. Below is a selection of tweets from the event, unfortunately all the tweeters seem to be critics of the project. I’m no environmentalist myself but am sympathetic to arguments on behalf of preserving its integrity against rapacious ‘developers’. It’s unfortunate that such projects inevitably portray environmental activists as ‘anti-development’ or ‘anti-economic growth’. In fact what we need to do is look at the last 10 projects that environmentalists protested about and see whether the claims of economic developments, ‘job-creation’ etc actually stand up to scrutiny now that those projects have steamrolled ahead. Can the cruise ship terminal at Falmouth be called a success? For whom? Have the big Spanish hotels been good for the economy? or are local tourist interests hurting and unable to keep up with the cheap rates they offer? Is anyone doing the cost-benefit analyses needed?
What i found amusing was Nature being invoked by the developmentalists when someone said ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ in arguing the urgency of pursuing the hub. Hopefully Nature’s potential wrath will also be taken into consideration when turning the proposed Iguana sanctuary into a logistics hub, so that it is done with the least amount of damage to the surrounding areas. One can hope, can’t one?
PS: Nov 10. Top journo Dionne Jackson-Miller’s takeaways from the forum under discussion at which she actually chaired a panel, give a fuller picture of the day’s discussons. Check her post out.
Diana McCaulay @dmccaulay
Beautiful Sat morning – heading to all day UWI session on the logistics hub billed as economy vs environment? Sigh
Damien King @DamienWKing
At UWI forum on the logistics hub. Still don’t know if hub will be a facilitator for the broader economy or an enclave that will burden it.
@DamienWKing when we hear special economic zone it means enclave of no taxes that everyone else will have to pay taxes for #LogisticsHub
@DamienWKing : we nd to know why ja has bn worst performing economy over past 40 yrs so we can know if #LogisticsHub will solve the problems
Diana McCaulay @dmccaulay
100% all male panel at the head table for opening session. Does UWI not have a Gender Studies Dept??
Diana McCaulay @dmccaulay
Am musing on what Easton and Conrad Douglas talk about over dinner..
Diana McCaulay @dmccaulay
World can’t wait for opening of Jamaica’s logistics hub – nature abhors a vacuum. Folks have options – will make other plans
Jherane @Jherane_
Wow. After showing the massive harbours that will be built they show pretty pictures of the local beaches we have…
Jherane @Jherane_
There’s only one female panellists today. Out of 24 panellists, only one female. Wow.
Diana McCaulay @dmccaulay
Usual story: Since we’re running late, Q&A will be shortened
Jherane @Jherane_
“[Jamaica] has a stable political and social culture” –> hysterical laughter from the audience.
Diana McCaulay @dmccaulay
Logistics hub task force has 12 sub committees – none on the environment
Jherane @Jherane_
Caribbean Coastal Area Management (C-CAM) lists storm surges, tsunamis, flooding, sea level rise amongst the climate change risk.
A Jamaican Minister inexplicably asks for a police oversight body to be shut down. what does this mean??
What a disappointment Member of Parliament and Minister of State for Entertainment & Tourism, Damion Crawford, is turning out to be. Check out his tweet, pictured above, about closing down INDECOM, before its had a real chance to show what it can do. Why such unseemly haste Mr. Crawford? Why aid and abet police men and women who may be abusing their powers, by shutting down the one agency empowered to investigate police killings and other crimes?
Clovis. Jamaica Observer. Nov. 12, 2013
Earlier this year, on May 23 to be precise (the third anniversary of the Tivoli Massacre), a group of us decided to make extra-judicial killings by the police and security forces the subject of Jamaica’s first Blogging Day. We did this because the police seemed out of control, there is no accountability for such killings, and no police personnel are ever held responsible, emboldening the police to kill more wantonly, more frequently, more brazenly.
The only ray of hope recently has been the creation 3 years ago of a unit called INDECOM, an independent commission to investigate cases of police abuse, and prosecute officers guilty of corruption and murder. Although their success rate has been less than stellar there has been so much pushback recently from within the police, now escalating all the way to the level of a state minister that it makes you wonder if they may not be on the verge of making an example of some bad cops.
In fact I’m beginning to wonder in the wake of MP Crawford’s astonishing tweet whether what my Labourite friend has been telling me for years isn’t true. He claims that police killings go up astronomically once the PNP are in power, because the police feel licensed to terrorize the population under the guise of hard policing. If this is true then its up to us the citizenry to muzzle those who represent us in Parliament, to let them know in no uncertain terms that we will NOT put up with the casual murder of so many citizens by those the state has hired to protect us.
Some months ago Baroness O’Loan, a former police ombudsman of Northern Ireland spoke in Montego Bay during an Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) Open Day held at the Old Hospital Park. Her speech was reported in the Jamaica Observer and is well worth noting:
“There is an unparalleled level of police shootings in Jamaica,” she said, citing figures in a 2002 paper presented by the local human rights group Jamaican for Justice, which showed that “police killings of civilians were running at around 150 a year.”
“In the 10 years since then that number has almost doubled. In 2011 there were about 210 shootings, in 2012, 219 police fatal shootings and between January and June this year there were 147 fatal shootings by police,” lamented Baroness O’Loan.
Baroness O’Loan said she has worked across the world, even in places like Liberia and in Timor Leste when there was an attempt to assassinate the president, yet she has not seen police fatal shootings in the numbers as she has seen them here.
She underscored the need for a thrust by INDECOM, to not only identify the cops involved in shootings, but also their commanders.
“They will need to see the intelligence or information which the police had before and after the shootings. My experience was that once the police concentrated on proper planning of operations; once they risk-assessed each planned operation and send police officers out — briefed to use minimum force to carry out the arrests or searches — the level of police violence dropped dramatically,” Baroness O’Loan argued.
She noted also that proper proactive police management, modern intelligence-led policing, human rights compliant policing — rather than just sending squads of heavily armed police officers out to do a job — can save lives, and make people more trusting of the police.
“When that happens people support the police more and are prepared to come forward as witnesses, and then the police can do their job better,” she said.
Among other measures she recommended was for Government to increase the staff at INDECOM.
“INDECOM needs more resources. They don’t have enough investigators to do this work. They have only 37. I had 91 in a country with fewer fatal police shootings and a smaller geographical territory and I did not have enough,” Baroness O’Loan argued, adding that civilians and members of the JCF should also report police officers involved in wrongdoing.
Also check out Think Jamaica’s blogpost on INDECOM for more statistics on police killings.
Ever since I heard Robert A. Hill’s lecture in April this year titled ‘The University Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica: The half that has never been told’ I’ve wanted to blog about it. I started a post soon after but it remained a draft all this time because I felt quite inadequate to the task of conveying the brunt of what Bobby, a friend of many years standing, was saying.
Robert A. Hill, Professor Emeritus, UCLA; Director, Marcus Garvey Papers Project
That talk, sponsored by the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), where I happen to work, began with Bobby announcing:
What I’m going to talk about this evening might be rephrased as the hidden history of the University Report on the Rastafari Movement. It is hidden because in my view the report was based on considerable deception. This was not my view going into this research, I’ve spent 6 years probing, researching, trying to understand how this report came to be. It’s only in the last two months that I felt ready to go public with my findings and this evening is the first time an audience will hear the findings and I leave it to you to make your own interpretations.
After that dramatic opening Professor Hill handed out timeline worksheets, essentially Xerox copies of calendar pages with cells displaying the months April–October 1960 along with pens for those who didn’t have their own. It was important Hill said, to keep track of the dates he was going to talk about, the chronology being important, “so that we are all, not just figuratively on the same page, but literally on the same page.”
The impact, influence and staying power of the Rastafari Report, he pointed out, has far outweighed any of the other reports emanating from the University, most of which are collecting dust today. Hill remembered seeing the report for the first time as a 17-year old. “It was like a meteor had crashed into the whole world. Jamaica has never been the same since that August day when i first saw it. ”
Although first published in August 1960 when Rastafari was spelt as two words ‘Ras Tafari’ most people are familiar with the ‘edited, redacted’ version reprinted in 1968 with a Ras Daniel Heartman image on the cover. There were many reprints thereafter with different covers like the one below, reprinted in 1975. What the reprints all have in common is that they spell ‘Rastafari’ as one word, again something pointed out by Hill in the course of his lecture.
The Report was a triumph for the Rastafari movement, Hill claimed. “I’m going to say very carefully that the Report was a propaganda victory for the Rastafari Movement…but I’m not using propaganda in its sinister sense, I’m using it in its classic sense, namely the propagation of one’s beliefs.” Hill then went on to recount how the Report ‘armed the mission’ sent by the Jamaican government to Addis Ababa in 1966 to initiate conversations about the repatriation of Rastafari to Africa.
The first date Hill asked his audience to note on their worksheets was the date renowned Nobel Laureate Arthur Lewis took up his position as Principal of the University of the West Indies. April 16, 1960.
This was where I gave up, unable as i said before, to succinctly convey the gravamen of what Robert Hill was suggesting. Months later I decided to ask Bobby for an interview thinking that would be the best way to capture the sensational charges he was making against the University of the West Indies. He obliged. The interview started modestly but soon swelled to 40 pages. I agonized again over how best to present such a long document here. Finally I realized the simplest way to accomplish this was to publish it as a WordPress ‘page’.
To fully understand some of the points Bobby raises in the interview its important to remember how feared, reviled and despised Rastafarians once were. You can get a good sense of this by reading Roger Mais’s Brotherman, a novel written in the 50s or from Deborah Thomas and Junior Wedderburn’s film Bad Friday, about the Coral Gardens massacre in the 60s. Even VS Naipaul, writing of his visit to Jamaica in 1960, in The Middle Passage, talks about the fear caused by militant Niyabinghi groups pledging ‘death to the whites.’
We’ve certainly come a long way from those days especially when you consider sentiments expressed at the opening of the Rastafari exhibition at the Institute of Jamaica on July 21, 2013. “Rastafari is deeply connected to Brand Jamaica” said Lisa Hanna, Minister of Culture. And at the closing ceremony of the Kingston-leg of the Rastafari Studies Conference and General Assembly, held on the campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, on August 15 Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller said that Rastafari was “an important part of the image of brand Jamaica.”
Pariahs no more…the hidden history of the Rastafari and their relationship to the nation of Jamaica certainly is the perfect illustration of the biblical sentiment Bob Marley made so famous, “The stone that the builder refused, shall be the head cornerstone…
Well folks, it gives me great pleasure to present my interview with Professor Robert Hill, aptly titled Our Man in Mona. As Bobby said at the beginning of his SALISES lecture “I leave it to you to make your own interpretations.” I find Bobby’s research and findings quite persuasive but I’m also willing to be persuaded by a counter-explanation of events that is as painstakingly researched and presented as his. In the meantime I thought it important to make this provocative hypothesis widely available to keep alive that spark of agonistic engagement so lacking in the public sphere today.
Active Voice 