Jamaican athletes are forced to struggle on meagre per diems or none while they deliver ace performances at global athletic meets. In the wake of the 2015 World Championships in Beijing Asafa Powell, one of Jamaica’s most beloved and talented athletes, is speaking out.
“The Jamaican public pretend as if there are only ten persons here at the World Championships, what happens to the other forty who have to go back home after the championship and won’t get the chance to go to any track meet? If these athletes can get help for even five months out of the year, that would help.”
Powell added that they have started to ignore some of the promises from government over the years.
Kayon Raynor ‘s story on our struggling athletes is going to generate a lot of discussion – and has already. The first response – I predict – from “authority” is going to be that they help quietly but that the athletes are either too demanding or they can’t provide the level of help needed. (That has been said already on several occasions in different ways). Here’s what I think. Time to take this long-simmering issue which creates untold resentment into the air and ventilate it with a national discussion, with the aim of finally coming up with solutions. Tired of the secrecy and whispering, and the opaque responses. I fully believe that help has been provided. But I fully believe that athletes are suffering, and the pot-cover banging and photo ops, without much more, I suspect, help feed the resentment. What are the possibilities? Structured assistance? Another lottery specifically for this purpose in association with help from donations/corporate Jamaica? Why should this not be a public conversation, especially regarding any kind of structured assistance? What can we and what can’t we do? Juliet Flynn has been saying for years, for example, that there needs to be more creativity eg a national gym/facility/partly sponsored by corporate Jamaica, where athletes could get physiotherapy, massages, treatments.. It is time to stop the cycle of banging pot covers in HWT then forgetting about them until the next big event. It’s time to have an honest, open conversation about this. I don’t think we have done so yet.
commentary on Jamaica’s stellar performance at the world championships in Beijing 2015 with must-see video footage.
The video above is from Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce’s Facebook feed. It shows the 200m final in Beijing up close and personal and in slow mo too–
“Bolt not only reached for the moon in Beijing, but also has shown that he wasn’t a flash in the pan or an outlier. Four years later he has picked the moon out of the sky again and has done it with ease and bravado, again something Jamaicans dearly love. You must not only win, you must do it with effortless style—something Bolt has displayed over and over again. His derring-do and bravura performances are symbolic of the Jamaican ambition to appear cool and deadly at all times.”
Three years after I wrote that paragraph for Newsweek Bolt has pulled it off yet again. A thrilling double gold in the 100 and 200 metres at the Beijing 2015 World Championships (see video above for footage of the 200m). As he matures Bolt has grown into a thoroughly engaging, all conquering hero, the legendary status he once coveted now his permanently. He is the athlete of the century, this one and the last.
At Bolt’s side is the equally swift and admirable Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce now the most decorated female runner on the planet with three 100m gold medals in the World Championships alone. And in their wake are the myriad of other Jamaican athletes plucking medals from the rest of the world, with ease and grace; young Danielle Williams winning the gold in the 100m hurdles and Hansle Parchment silver in the 110m hurdles. The women’s 200m gold went to the flying Dutchwoman, Dafne Schippers, a talent to watch, but Jamaica’s elegant, gazelle-like Elaine Thompson was hot on her heels and the much beloved Veronica Campbell-Brown hot on hers. They took the silver and bronze respectively.
Not many people realize that Jamaica has a proud tradition of sprinting going back more than half a century—to 1948 when 6 foot 4 inches tall Arthur Wint sped past Herb McKenley to win gold in the 400m. Jamaica took gold and silver in that race which can be viewed in the video immediately above. In the 1952 Olympics Jamaican runners swept the 4×400 relays from under the feet of the Americans. The video embedded below has incredible footage of Arthur Wint and Herb McKenley mining some of Jamaica’s earliest Olympic gold.
Finally here is the full text of the essay I wrote for Newsweek during the 2012 London Olympics. It captures I think some of the indomitable spirit of Jamaica and Jamaicans.
Jamaica gained independence from Britain in August 1962. As the nascent nation replaced the Union Jack with the Jamaican flag, its people imagined a future full of glory, honor, and world-thrilling exploits. With the colonizers gone and the days of slavery far behind, what could stop them from conquering the world?
As the decades rolled on, a deep and abiding disappointment began to set in as successive governments fluffed opportunities to create a workable, new framework for the aspirations and ambitions of ordinary Jamaicans. For many, things seemed to be worse than when the British were in charge; you only had to look over at the Cayman Islands for confirmation. Once part of Jamaica, the Caymanians had remained with Britain in 1962 and now seemed to be flourishing while Jamaica languished, violence and corruption paralyzing its body politic.
Most postcolonial countries have found it hard to overcome the handicaps they inherited at independence, and Jamaicans are rightly proud of their superb tradition in athletics and the country’s incomparable music, both of which have catapulted them onto the world stage on more than one occasion. For a nation this tiny, Jamaica has an ego and cultural wallop grander than most superpowers, punching way above its weight, as some here like to say.
It’s a matter of some chagrin to middle-class Jamaica that those who have put this little country on the map have been, almost without exception, members of its underclass. While formal, official Jamaica lumbers along tangled in red tape, bureaucratese, and “proper” English, the people at the bottom have sprinted and sung their way to international attention.
The exploits of Usain Bolt and his fellow Jamaican athletes have to be seen against this background. They all come from deprived communities, and each is a story of personal triumph and determination in the face of incredible odds. Usain Bolt is the personification of what Jamaicans would have liked their country to be: swift, insouciant, and unbeatable at what he does best—run. When he powered to the finish line in record time during the 100-meter, with Yohan Blake in close pursuit, they were elated. But nothing can describe the mood of brimming joy that has pervaded the nation since Bolt repeated his triumph in the 200m, once again with Blake hot on his heels. And then, as an example of what Jamaicans call “brawta”—a little extra thrown in to perfect the whole thing—Warren Weir in bronze position, completing the Jamaican trifecta.
Nothing warms the heart of Jamaicans more than to hear a story about someone triumphing against all odds, through sheer perseverance, guts, and hard work to prove his or her talent and ability. “Never say die” should have been the national motto, for as long as you try your best, even if you lose, Jamaicans will love you. But you’ll have to die trying.
Bolt not only reached for the moon in Beijing, but also has shown that he wasn’t a flash in the pan or an outlier. Four years later he has picked the moon out of the sky again and has done it with ease and bravado, again something Jamaicans dearly love. You must not only win, you must do it with effortless style—something Bolt has displayed over and over again. His derring-do and bravura performances are symbolic of the Jamaican ambition to appear cool and deadly at all times.
Jamaica is a contradictory mix of individualism and community spirit. Bolt was raised by a village, Sherwood Content, in rural Jamaica. What Jamaicans love is the fact that although you could take the boy out of the village, you couldn’t take the village out of Bolt. At heart he remains the healthy-spirited, simple-hearted boy who grew up there, though he now knows how to negotiate the deadly streets of Kingston and the world.
As video footage of Bolt and his teammates in Birmingham and at the Olympic Village shows, the Jamaican men’s team thrives on camaraderie, good will, and fun and games. Do it well and enjoy what you’re doing is another Jamaican homily, illustrated by the young men and women of this extraordinary little country. On the Olympic stage it’s been a winning strategy.
To be the best in the world is what every Jamaican would like, though circumstances often come between them and this simple ambition. Bolt is beloved because he has honed his natural gifts to perfection with enough gas left in the tank to reach higher and farther.
This is a two-part guest post by media maven Marcia Forbes who used to be General Manager of TVJ (Television Jamaica) many years ago. Jamaica was shaken last week by news of a merger between its two largest media entities, RJR and the Gleaner. TVJ is the the crown jewel of RJR (Radio Jamaica), the broadcast media conglomerate which has just merged with print media giant The Gleaner. The merger has had the effect of a small earthquake with journalists worrying about layoffs and others concerned about the birth of a media monopoly. Mergers, acquisitions and buyouts are changes which have been happening all over the world, the fallout of the digital revolution, and should have been anticipated, but it seems to have caught everyone here by surprise. Watching the pre-emptive moves that Google is making with the creation of Alphabet, the temporary subsidiary set to flip into the primary entity, one can’t help note the opposite scenario at play here…that is, two local media giants who waited till their stocks had declined before taking action. But hey, c’est la vie in the Tropics.
For all those wondering what’s in store for us, Marcia Forbes’s analysis should help. Read on.
#RJRGleaner Media Merger
Marcia Forbes
Here we were on the day before Jamaica’s August 6th celebration of it 53rd Independence Day, learning about the proposed merger of two of Jamaica’s oldest and most highly respected media entities – The 180 year old Gleaner Newspaper and the 65 year old RJR.
Between them, the merged RJR and Gleaner will own an arsenal of electronic media comprised of five (5) F.M. radio stations, a free-to-air TV station and three (3) cable channels – RETV (originally branded as Reggae Entertainment TV), TVJSN (TVJ Sports Network) and JNN (Jamaica News Network). They will also own a print newspaper that boasts several distribution outlets overseas. Then too there are online platforms and services. At one time Go Jamaica, Gleaner’s online portal, was reported to be attracting 55 million hits per month.
Youth Views
Some of the howls were predictable. I didn’t expect them from young people though, seeing that they have largely disconnected from traditional media. This tweet captured the general sentiment of those on Twitter at the time the announcement broke – “2 men now control over 80% of the Jamaican media market #RJRGleaner”.
One youth said she was “terrified” because “it’s harder to spot media biases if the media is (sic) all owned by the same people.” In response to my probe as to why “terrified”, she said, “we (young ppl) value independent sources a lot more so seeing two powerful old heads knock together isn’t good news.” Concerns regarding media ownership are not new and are usually also tied to issues regarding number and variety of media ‘voices’ and threats to democracy if plurality of participation is perceived to be under threat. I will return to the matter of media ‘voices’.
RJR & Gleaner’s Dominant Market Positions
Going by the 2014 All Media Survey (published in 2015), Television Jamaica (TVJ) commands a whopping 72.5 percent (almost three quarters) of the free-to air TV market, with substantial leads on every day of the week as well as in every day-part. Looking at the local/regional cable TV share of viewership (this excludes international cable), the RJR-controlled channels (TVJSN, RETV, JNN) account for approximately 28 percent of that market. Sportsmax, a local/regional cable system recently acquired by Digicel, commands 62 percent.
While the total potential audience of local/regional cable TV is reportedly a miniscule 61,000, that for free-to-air TV stands at over one and a half million viewers (1,530,000). And even when one takes into account the 667,000 potential audience for international cable TV, Television Jamaica still packs a powerful punch and pulls advertisers. Although RJR’s radio brands have managed to lose their shine over the years, with Irie FM commanding a greater share of listenership (19.3%), compared to the combined share of 19.1% for all three of RJR’s brands, with ‘combo’ selling to advertisers, the RJR Group is able to offer fantastic deals.
Overall, Sunday to Saturday, the average readership and reach of the Gleaner substantially outstrip the Jamaica Observer. The Sunday Gleaner attracts 77.3% of readers, compared to the Sunday Observer’s 22.7%. Then too, The Star, Gleaner’s Monday to Saturday tabloid, also outstrips the Observer on most days. Gleaner is the dominant player in the print medium.
Based on their market shares, a combined RJR/Gleaner media entity dwarfs all other traditional media entities in the Jamaican landscape and would be able to offer a near unbeatable option for advertisers; At least in the short term. This is one area of concern that no doubt the regulators will want to consider closely. Money drives the mare and smaller player will be hard-pressed to attract ad revenues.
The Issue of Media ‘Voices’ & Democracy
The proposed RJR/Gleaner consolidation also raises real issues pertaining to media voices not only because these two entities stand at the forefront of the Jamaican landscape for traditional media but also based on the number of persons they employ as well as the revenues they pull in. Reported at $3.2 Billion for the Gleaner and $2.0 Billion for RJR, this is in excess of the combined earnings of several smaller media entities. Who pays the piper calls the tune.
Audiences, such as those who voiced concerns via Twitter, are justified in raising the alert to issues of potential threats to democracy by way of media control, with the possible shutting out of some/certain voices. I say media ‘control’ more so than ownership since both RJR and the Gleaner are traded on the stock market in Jamaica. Additionally, RJR, the reported leader in this merger, has a ceiling of about 12 percent on share ownership by any single individual/organization.
Although RJR’s ownership rule may be strictly adhered to, tracking ‘connected parties’ is not always easy. It is conceivable that someone or a group of persons, through share purchase by others on their behalf, could arrive at ownership dominance. Clearly though, once revealed, corrective steps would be instituted. But yes, one can understand concerns re media ownership being consolidated in the hands of a few persons and how this can stifle plurality of positions on national issues such as elections.
More Nuanced Reading of RJR/Gleaner Merger Needed
On the face of it regulators and others may be quickly inclined to baulk at the proposed RJR/Gleaner merger, however, a more nuanced analysis is essential to place the merger in proper perspective. This must take into consideration global and local trends such as the migration of media to online platforms, growth of online advertising, entry of telecos into cable TV, the mobile, social lifestyles of millennials (now the largest population cohort), and other trends that toll the near-death knell for traditional media such as print newspapers and local free-to-air TV unless they innovate and change.
Additionally, there is much more to arguments about media ‘voices’ and democracy than obtained during the era when traditional media reigned unchallenged. The All Media Survey reported potential Internet users in Jamaica as 1,676,000. This is the largest potential market of any media and shows an 82 percent growth over the past seven years. It compares to declines by other media, with newspapers showing about 27% falloff in potential market over the past 10 years and radio 25%.
The coming together of RJR and the Gleaner is a smart survival strategy when one examines international and local trends. Regarding the protection of democracy and media ‘voices’, regulators and the Court need to be fully informed and objective in their analysis of this merger. There is no place for knee-jerk reactions. Clearly though, if it goes through, job will be lost. Workers who equip themselves for a more nimble and digitally-driven media entity will win.
Why is Stuart Hall seemingly persona non grata in Jamaica? Can there be a Brand Jamaica that excludes him? Why and for what?
There is a curious affinity in Jamaica for the idea of branding and a certain obsession with the notion of ‘nation branding’ (as noted in my previous post To Brand or Not to Brand Jamaica). In 2012 the country was startled by a release from the Jamaica Information Service announcing that a ‘national branding programme’ was to be implemented “to effectively communicate and reinforce the true essence of what it means to be Jamaican.” No one was quite sure what this meant.
Also in 2012 Jamaica’s participation in the London Olympics and the superb performance of its athletes there spurred much talk of ‘rebranding’ the country. Earlier that year the PNP, having recently won the last general election, looked forward to enjoying a spectacular track and field season at the Olympics with Jamaican athletes set to sweep the sprint events (the team won 12 medals in all, 4 gold, 4 silver and 4 bronze, Usain Bolt alone winning 3 of the gold medals).
In 2012 the nation was also celebrating its 50th year of Independence and a new Director, Robert Bryan, was appointed to head the Jamaica 50 secretariat. The song commissioned by the previous government for the jubilee celebrations ‘Find the flag in your heart and wave it’ by veteran music producer Mikie Bennett was scrapped and a new one ‘Nation on a mission’ created. Branding seemed to be a central aspect of this ‘mission’.
A grandiose project to celebrate the nation’s 50th anniversary at the 02 Arena in London during the Olympics was launched. According to Bryan “the plans would be a platform to rebrand Jamaica globally and it would be done in a way to capture world attention, delivering maximum impact of the brand worldwide and to attract international television coverage. Ultimately, he said, Jamaica hoped to convert the exposure to financial gains, including more visitors and greater publicity for Jamaica’s products.”
Three years later, sitting in IMF-straitened Jamaica progressively tightening our belts, its hard to see that the exorbitant ‘rebranding’ of 2012 achieved anything at all. Yet here we are talking about branding once again à la the Brand Jamaica symposium. See my previous post for more detail on this.
A recurrent view expressed at the Brand Jamaica conference was that the country urgently needed to move beyond the cliched image the Jamaica Tourist Board had managed to fix of the island being a fun destiNATION (my terminology) and little more. As the Executive Director of the Broadcasting Commission, Cordel Green said in his paper:
Every person in the world who thinks Jamaica–must be disabused of the notion that outside the walls of all inclusives and tourist enclaves lie shacks and derlection. They must also know that we are considerably more than beaches, sun, rum and fun.
Our cultural heritage, history and intellectual pedigree are world class and this country has made an international footprint that bears no relation to her size, age and global ranking.
Hume Johnson, one of the main organizers of the conference also succinctly summed up the redemptive objective of the exercise:
Our aim is to advocate for a re-imagining and repositioning of the Jamaican brand, the creation of a more complex narrative beyond sun, sand and sea, one that projects a more positive and complete image of the country centred on its people, culture and heritage.”
The question at the heart of the Re-imagine Jamaica conference was how to produce this more nuanced, complex narrative about the country. After her presentation, keynote speaker Samantha North asked the audience what they would like to see included in Jamaican identity that might help shift or alter global perception of the country as a tourist playground with a violent, homophobic population. What were some of the assets Jamaica possessed that were little known by outsiders? That could be enlisted in the reconstituting and recuperation of its image?
The audience advanced a number of suggestions–Jamaica’s cuisine, its beauty queens, its intellectuals, its footballers dwelling in foreign climes such as Raheem Stirling. In terms of intellectuals Rex Nettleford was mentioned more than once and I brought up Stuart Hall, arguably the MOST outstanding intellectual Jamaica has produced whose influence globally, and on Britain in particular, easily puts him in any list of the top ten public intellectuals worldwide in the last four decades.
Stuart Hall wrote the textbook on representation and identity, how stereotypes are formed and how to dismantle them (see video above), his work is so highly cited (citation factor being the metric used in academia to measure scholarly worth) that on any given day a Google Scholar advanced search for his name returns approximately 54,000 results per 0.03 seconds to Rex Nettleford’s 2,000 (the highest of any locally based academic). For comparison Orlando Patterson, another Jamaican intellectual superstar located in the diaspora, returns 51,000 results; Frantz Fanon about 36,600 results and Derek Walcott a measly 12,900 results.
Patterson and Hall are in a category with other global intellectual giants such as Amartya Sen, Edward Said, Richard Rorty and Slavoj Zizek, the latter lower at 44,000 than either Patterson or Hall. While Patterson is known to Jamaicans Stuart Hall is so unheard of that the main newspaper here wrote an editorial after his death in February 2014 lamenting the lack of awareness in Jamaica of who this towering intellectual was.
Isn’t it time to end this abysmal ignorance and claim Hall once and for all for Brand Jamaica? The point of mentioning citation rates is merely to say that Stuart Hall has far more name recognition globally than any local intellectual and in any national reputation-building exercise his name would go much further than many others. People pay top dollar to have outstanding, well-known individuals associated with their ‘brands’, just look at the companies lining up to enlist Usain Bolt. My point is Jamaica could benefit from associating itself with a figure such as Stuart Hall. And he comes free because in a sense having been born and brought up here he belongs to Jamaica and the country can rightfully lay claim to him. Who better than Hall to complexify Jamaica’s identity/image along with the many other stellar intellectuals who live in the diaspora? He’s not the only one. How many know about Sylvia Wynter, another remarkable intellectual globally recognized and celebrated and one of the few female intellectuals from Jamaica/Caribbean operating at the level she does?
There’s a curious territoriality that comes into play when it comes to academia and intellection. An idea that to acknowledge Jamaican intellectuals who live abroad somehow implies disloyalty to the ones who ‘paid their dues’ by staying at home. This is a myopic view in my opinion. To claim Stuart Hall as the son of Jamaica that he was and the world-class intellectual that he became is hardly to disregard Rex Nettleford or his peers. It isn’t an either-or situation. Let’s suppose for a moment that Jamaica was putting together a team for an intellectual tournament–a world cup of groundbreaking scholarship–wouldn’t it be silly not to reach, in addition to Nettleford and company, for a Hall, a Patterson and a Wynter, whose experience abroad has forced them to be more competitive and therefore more exceptional and unbeatable than those who stayed at home and didn’t have the same opportunities?
Why is it ok for the national football team, the Reggae Boyz, to be composed of diaspora-based players who barely know the national anthem but not the intellectual equivalent of that team? Why should an intellectual team representing Jamaica be represented only by those ‘born and bred in Jamaica’?
For make no mistake, just as in football, there is a cost to restricting oneself to local or regional boundaries in the name of ‘paying dues’. Scholars and intellectuals whose work circulates globally and internationally such as those mentioned above are Jamaican/Caribbean by birth but their ambit is global–that is they think and write as if addressing the world not merely the region or the nation they happen to come from. Most or all of them are/were oppositional voices who confronted the establishment when necessary but crucially such was Hall’s genius, his gift for communicating, that “his ideas traveled seamlessly to a broader world”.
Scholars such as Rex Nettleford, Norman Girvan, Barry Chevannes and many others (who are favoured as what I term ‘fi wi intellectuals’ or ‘our intellectuals’) were more committed to solving national and regional problems and in declaring epistemic independence by founding indigenous modes of scholarship. Unfortunately this obsession with battling ‘epistemological colonialism’ has led to a situation described as a crisis-of-mission for social sciences at the University of the West Indies, one where ‘theory’ was demonized as being Eurocentric and practically expelled from the academy while indigenous knowledge-building became paramount though increasingly this became restricted to statistical data-gathering and report writing.
These two groups are not at all mutually exclusive. There were moments when the national and regional scholars’ work addressed wider audiences but in general some of the most promising scholarly minds fell prey to what has been described as “the politicization of the social sciences in Latin America” where “Social science is part of public and political life in close relationship to power and to power struggles.” Many became advisers to Prime Ministers, or served as cabinet ministers and members of parliament while teaching at the University. Others were seduced by ‘the twilight world of consultancy’– contract research–for large agencies such as the Ford Foundation. These conditions fostered conformism and accommodation with the needs of the establishment rather than confrontation or dissent.
Acknowledging the immense pressure on public universities to solve national and regional problems Don Marshall (head of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, Cave Hill) warned some years ago about the inherent danger in such a capitulation: “It can lead to academics abrogating their intellectual responsibilities by giving identity to the immediate realms of the policy process. The consequence is one that not so much brings an appropriate education to public affairs as infiltrates the academy with the unreflective imperatives of state bureaucracies.”
Marshall identified a second but related problem: the entrenchment of a liberal-positivist leftwing intellectual tradition in the Caribbean unwilling to question, or perhaps unaware of, its own ontological assumptions in an increasingly conservative and pragmatic social environment. This has led inevitably to “a virtual discouragement of dissenting approaches.”
Stuart Hall whose name is synonymous with the groundbreaking field of cultural studies was never part of the nation-building processes in Jamaica having migrated at the age of 19 to attend Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. But can Jamaica afford to avert its gaze from such a distinguished son? Should it? In so many ways Hall was the very model of the kind of scholar you would have expected the Caribbean academy to produce in the fullness of its postcolonial moment. Rather than detain Hall and other outward-looking, globally-minded thinkers in the diaspora, surely it’s equally important to cultivate an academic community capable of communicating with scholars abroad and bringing up-to-date knowledge to bear on local problems? Surely epistemic diversity is just as important as epistemic sovereignty?
Before I digress too far from the subject of this post–that is Stuart Hall and Brand Jamaica–let me rein in the argument I’m trying to make by invoking what acclaimed film director John Akomfrah said about the British-Jamaican cultural theorist. “Stuart Hall was kind of a rock star for us. For many of my generation in the 70s…he was one of the few people of colour we saw on television who wasn’t crooning, dancing or running. His very iconic presence on this most public of platforms suggested all manner of ‘impossible possibilities’.”
In Britain Stuart was integrally involved in combating the stereotyping of black migrants by the lily white English establishment, literally inserting the black in the Union Jack. He did so most of all by vigorously amplifying the narrative of what it means to be Jamaican/Caribbean by embodying the black public intellectual par excellence. Let’s claim him–for he would burnish Jamaica’s image and identity no less brightly than Usain Bolt does every time he runs a race.
Of course before we can do so we have to get to know Stuart Hall. I post two clips from his memorial service last November–one immediately above from the documentary he made on the Caribbean in the 70s–Redemption Song–and the second Jamaican theorist David Scott’s tribute to him. Scott’s remarks are interesting also for his discussion of ‘Brown’ Jamaica. The third (at the top of this post) is a clip of Hall talking about representation and the media in a lecture given at the University of Westminster in London in the 70s (it ends abruptly but continues in Part 2 of 4 available freely on YouTube). His ideas animated the world, radicalized the study of the humanities and social sciences globally and continue to be relevant today.
Still, as another Jamaican intellectual in the diaspora, Columbia University’s David Scott, noted at the memorial service held in Hall’s honour in London last November (for the full text please see video):
…Jamaica scarcely recognized Stuart, maybe no one should be surprised by this. He certainly wasn’t. Because he understood that part of what makes Jamaica enviably, unsettlingly Jamaica, part of what draws from us a grudging admiration, is precisely its scornfully prideful soul, its insouciant indifference even to its own, its willful, sometimes self-destructive, don’t care attitude… its proverbial ethic of not begging anyone a glass of ice water. Stuart i think would have been the first to salute the defiant principle of this moral posture as an invaluable inheritance from the bitter past, it was in a very special way his inheritance too, in fact in that instinct for independent-mindedness, for finding his own way, his own idiom of dissent and refusal, in his way of being done, finished with exhausted phases of his life, we recognize something familiar, something that made him, to paraphrase CLR James, of Jamaica, Jamaican.
One thing I do know is that the Jamaica Scott describes here–the scornfully prideful, insouciantly indifferent, self-destructive country–is one that no amount of shallow ‘rebranding’ can redeem. It would be a hard sell. Part of the exercise of building a new identity for Jamaica will have to involve a radical shift in attitude and world-view. There is no one more equipped to help with this than Stuart Hall–he may be gone but he has left behind archives of new knowledge that students all over the world eagerly consume. We should too. His work on representation, the power of the image, stereotypes and how to dismantle them are directly related to the discussions on branding. But the most important thing about Stuart Hall as a symbol of what Jamaican intellection can and should be is the example he sets for Caribbean youth of a Jamaican operating at the top of his game not in athletics, not in music but in the virtually impenetrable world of high theory.
Some remarks on the recently held Brand Jamaica Symposium, the first of a series of three posts looking at predicaments facing Jamaica and Jamaicans.
Hume Johnson, Moji Anderson and Erin McLeod
In the middle of July there was a good little conference on re-imagining Jamaica organized by two academics from the Jamaican diaspora, Hume Johnson (Assistant Professor of Public Relations, Roger Williams University, USA) and Kamille Gentles-Peart (Associate Professor, Roger Williams University, USA). Held on the campus of the University of the West Indies, Mona, the conference rose above the rather mercantile ambitions suggested by its subtitle, “Brand Jamaica Symposium 2015”.
The conference call for papers was by no means crudely reductive allowing space for a broad range of responses. According to chair Hume Johnson:
It is important to begin a process of taking stock of the quality of the nation’s global brand and image, both the areas which are positive and can be leveraged for our economic benefit and political and social advantage as well as the aspects that threaten our good name.
Our aim is to advocate for a re-imagining and repositioning of the Jamaican brand, the creation of a more complex narrative beyond sun, sand and sea, one that projects a more positive and complete image of the country centred on its people, culture and heritage.
For many of us the discourse of branding is problematic, doubly so when it’s related to countries like Jamaica with its history of slavery, of human beings treated as property whose abject ‘thinghood’ was burnt into their flesh with branding irons—probably one of the earliest articulations of the branding discourse–to literally mark on the bodies of slaves the symbols or logos of the plantation owner they belonged to. The very first paper, “Back to the Brand: Inequality and Alienation through ‘Brand Jamaica’” amply critiqued the concept, signaling presenters Moji Anderson and Erin McLeod’s profound disagreement with the idea of ‘nation branding.’
It’s a matter of some irony that despite this history of inhumane servitude the nation state of Jamaica would develop in the 21st century into a country that fetishizes brands and branding. Only a few days before the conference an economist named Dennis Jones noted the Jamaican predilection for logos and corporate branding.
I was especially struck today by a picture of two top executives [JPS] wearing business suits with the company logo embroidered on them–not just the snazzy polo shirts, or the neat cotton shirts with the brand on the pocket or lapel or collar.
Grace Kennedy and their top executive, Don Wehby, often hit the eye with their branded clothes.
I gladly admit to knowing nothing about why this [love for branding] is so strong in Jamaica. It goes even to public service agencies, like government ministries. So, it’s deep in our economic culture.
A rather horrifying thought is that perhaps thinghood is so deeply rooted in our culture that we gravitate effortlessly towards the corporate and corporatization. The phenomenon of uniforms in Jamaican offices is also worth noting. There seems to be an ardent desire for incorporation, a longing to belong, to have a rightful place, and then having been incorporated, to brandish that affiliation for everyone to see. Are we invisible unless we have a logo to claim? Is this why some Jamaicans are anxious to brand their country and re-tool its image away from the stereotypes it currently conjures in the minds of non-Jamaicans?
The commodity fetish (a la Anne McClintock) is an inevitable feature of the ‘commodity culture’ we inhabit. However it’s one thing for the wo/man on the street to be subsumed by the mercantilist ethos of our times but should our policy-makers, politicians, technocrats and academics not adopt a more nuanced view of things?
Samantha North, the place specialist who gave the keynote lecture is herself wary of the term ‘nation branding’. “Personally I don’t even like to use the term ‘brand’ but it is sort of entrenched in the industry now …I think identity is a better word, more descriptive and I hope that it can come into our lexicon,” said North in a radio interview after the conference. On Twitter she expanded further: “The term #nationbrand trivialises the entire thing & gives a false idea of our true aims. This is NOT about marketing. Perhaps a new term is needed, as I mentioned last night in my keynote. Identity is a good one. #BrandJamaica = Jamaican identity.”
Despite the negatives associated with the concept of branding the conference itself produced a number of spirited panels and discussions. From the simplistic appeal of the President of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourism Association for self-censorship (in effect complaining that Jamaicans had tweeted too much about the Chik-V outbreak here last year scaring tourists away in the process—one couldn’t help wondering–would she rather they had come here and succumbed to the epidemic? How would that have enhanced Jamaica’s image?) to the Executive Director of the Broadcasting Commission, Cordel Green’s observation that there is nothing at Jamaica’s airports to announce to tourists their arrival in Reggae country to Anna Perkins’ paper on the economic costs of homophobia the conference was rich and diverse. Alana Osbourne, a PhD. Student from the University of Amsterdam spoke on Aestheticizing Poverty and Violence in Trench Town, Jamaica. For a full list of speakers and topics go here.
Investment guru, Michael McMorris discussing foriegn direct investment and whether Jamaican can get it right.
Not only was there plenty of food for thought, there was also food and drink on the house at this well-organized and free-to-the-public event. Unsurprisingly audiences were robust and participated vigorously in the debates and discussions some of which is captured in the tweets presented at the end of this post. The consensus was that as North said, quoting Obama, “You can’t put lipstick on a pig.” Jamaica has a serious image problem which cannot simply be erased or reversed by a few well-funded public relations campaigns.
Jamaica’s negatives—its crime, its violence, its homophobia, its lack of economic growth–are liabilities that will have to be eliminated or reduced before Jamaica’s many assets can be effectively leveraged, or used to burnish its image.
The Re-imagine Jamaica conference was put on in partnership with the University of the West Indies’ Centre for Leadership and Governance (CLG), a good collaboration between the diaspora and yard.
This post is the first in an interconnected series I want to write. Hopefully the next one will be available tomorrow. That’s the plan anyway 🙂
In which Kei Miller eloquently details the problem with long-distance activism and boycotts organized by outsiders who refuse to engage with activists on the ground, or even inform themselves adequately before taking drastic action:
“It is very obvious that several well-meaning white North Americans would like (ever so earnestly) to bear witness to the suffering that LGBT people experience in the Caribbean. They would like to amplify these hurts – to give an international sound to these poor, hapless trees and saplings falling about in the Caribbean with ‘no one’ at all to hear them. And this kind of advocacy is deeply problematic.
“But let us use an actual example to talk this through. Between 2008 and 2009 a campaign called Boycott Jamaica was started in San Francisco by a man called Michael Petrelis. The launch of the campaign saw people gathered in Stonewall New York to throw bottles of Redstripe Beer and rum down into the sewers. The symbolism could not be lost anyone – Jamaica was such a repulsive place that anything coming out of it rightfully belonged in the sewers. The campaign created the unfortunate image of mostly white Americans who had possibly never been to Jamaica pretending to know and understand what was happening there.”
You know of course the philosophical question I am punning on – the tree that falls in the forest. If no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? Apparently if we take the question outside of the discipline of philosophy and place it, instead, within the discipline of Physics, then the answer is possibly No — It does not make a sound. The scientific community is now split on this, but one argument as proffered by the journal Scientific American, goes: sound is what happens when various stimuli and vibrations reach to the ear. The ear translates these things into sound. But if there is no ear to receive such stimuli and vibration, then the sound, technically, isn’t made. The same might be said of an image: if someone wears a bright red shirt, and no one opens their eyes…
In which Kei Miller decisively dismantles Mel Cooke’s presumptuous point of view on homosexuals, published in the Gleaner a few days ago. A masterful takedown…read it…
One of the most important points he makes is worth calling out: “To publicly challenge things that are said publicly is not the same as being censorious. To point out (sometimes with vehemence and rigour) how some things can cause offense, or how they might be homophobic or racist or whatever, is not the same as saying that thing should never have been said. That is reductive thinking. Of course I affirm Mel’s right to say what he wants to say, to share *his* point of view if not the assumed Point of View of the Other. But I also affirm everyone else’s right to contend, to debate, to come with new arguments and counter arguments. Isn’t that what discourse is?”
Nuanced discourse is too often missing in Jamaica…certainly you rarely find it in the newspapers…hallelujah for blogs where some of the best critical writing can be had at a moment’s notice.
There is a saying in Jamaica – mi throw mi corn, mi nuh call nuh fowl. (I threw my corn, I didn’t call any fowl). And another one – ‘throw stone inna hog pen, him who squeal a him it lick’. (when you throw a stone into a pig’s pen, the one who squeals is the one who was hit). Both sayings are about words that are aimed and yet pretend disingenuously to have no directions – words that hit targets but then shrug. ‘Oh? Did I hit you? I am so sorry!’
Mel Cooke’s recent article in the Jamaica Gleaner, ‘Bye-Bye, Boom-Bye-Bye’ did a lot of throwing. He was throwing corn, throwing stones, and throwing word. His target? Oh – the usual of course. Every Jamaican DJ who wants the crowd to go wild, every Jamaican pastor who wants a louder Amen, and every Jamaican newspaper writer who…
A selection of tweets from the day Obama arrived in Jamaica
Who knew how much Jamaicans love Barack Obama? I didn’t until he arrived yesterday and the country went into full One Love mode. “So the real world boss land” commented Colin Channer referring to the local self-titled Worl’ Boss, Vybz Kartel, languishing in jail. Meanwhile “We welcome the President on this hysterical moment” a newscaster is reputed to have babbled in his excitement. People congregated at key sections of the road from the airport to New Kingston but were disappointed when Obama was transported by helicopter instead of the Beast. Nevertheless as @wayneprawl tweeted: Marine One just frigging passed over my house. The entire Port Royal just erupted in waves and screams. Others noted that POTUS’s arrival had displaced the live draw of Cashpot, a national lottery, that never yields its airtime not even for the Olympics. Obama has managed to stop Cashpot and NOTHING stops Cashpot tweeted @jomariemalcolm in awe while Alison Stuart said: What! He stopped Cashpot!!!!! He mus really be a powerful man!!!!!!!
Meanwhile my neighbour Deborah Anzinger told me her daughter Zoe, 6, had asked if her parents could take her to talk to Obama. What do you want to talk to him about? her mother asked. Her answer: she wants to ask him “why are you here?”
A discussion of The University of the West Indies’ peculiar policy towards sexual harrassment on its Mona Campus.
Everyone agrees that in order to deal with a problem you first have to acknowledge it exists. I thought of this when listening to Camille Bell-Hutchinson, University Registrar, energetically refuting the charge that gender-based violence is out of control on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies. Today the Letter of the Day in the Daily Gleaner is from the University’s Director of Marketing, Recruitment & Communications, Carroll Edwards. Like the Registrar she denies allegations of rampant attacks on campus women made in a Sunday Gleaner article dated February 1, 2015, ‘Halls of horror: gender-based attacks haunt UWI, Mona’.
The denials come in response to a study cited in that article quoting Taitu Heron, currently National Programme Coordinator at UN Women Jamaica, who chronicled some of the reported cases of violence against women on the campus in her 2013 study Whose Business Is It? Violence Against Women at UWI, Mona. The study, conducted while Heron was a lecturer at UWI’s Institute of Gender and Development Studies, used data compiled from incident reports made to the Office of Security Services on campus. Records showed 67 reported incidents including stalking, physical assaults and domestic disputes.
Astonishingly this was categorically denied by the UWI registrar who stated in the media “…while the university cannot say sexual violence does not take place on campus, the university has never had a report of sexual harassment on any of its six halls of residence.”
Remarkable! If this is true it is a huge feather in the university’s cap. Its security arrangements are so good that not one case of sexual harrassment has been reported–EVER. I hope the University’s PR and marketing department is making lavish use of this extraordinary ‘fact’ in advertising the campus and the excellent security that obtains there to potential students.
Considering how prevalent sexual harrassment is on virtually every other University campus in the world this should also qualify UWI Mona for some sort of global award–for it has NEVER had a report of sexual harrassment on its campus if the Registrar is to be believed. I would imagine that the University’s gender specialists and social scientists have done considerable research on this amazing state of affairs so that it might lead the way in showing other universities how to manage gender-based violence on their campuses.
Returning from UWI’s alternate universe to the one described by Ms Heron, much of what she reported sounded alarmingly familiar. I still remember a women’s group on campus in the early 90s putting up posters inviting concerned individuals to a forum to discuss the many violent incidents female students were facing on campus with a view to forming some sort of strategy that would provide women with better support than was then available.
Before the meeting could be held an edict was issued by the administration. There was to be no such forum and all posters advertising it were to be taken down forthwith. Organizers were reprimanded for jeopardizing the ‘good reputation’ of the university by holding such a discussion in public and ordered never to do it again.
Very little appears to have been done by the University to upgrade the security of female students between then and 2007 when the attacks grew so flagrant that another women’s advocacy group took the matter of female security on university campuses to parliament. A Gleaner article detailed the issues:
Rape, a major problem at UWI – advocacy group
April 12, 2007
Complaining of a disturbing number of rapes and other forms of sexual offences on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), a female advocacy group on the campus is calling for special legislation and other measures to combat the problem at all universities in Jamaica.
The recommendation was made yesterday by the Society for the Upliftment and Advancement of Women Via Education (SUAWVE), a group based at the UWI’s Mary Seacole Hall, during a presentation to the joint select committee of Parliament considering legislative changes relating to sexual offences. Real-life incidents
Lanoy Crumbie, president of SUAWVE, related three real-life incidents on the campus: In the first incident, she said a female student attending a party on campus was gang-raped by male students from her class, who videotaped the assault. Student number two was raped by her male study partner in his on-campus bedroom, after they had finished studying. The third student was raped by a classmate, whom she had invited to her bedroom; but he flatly denied that it was rape, since she had invited him to her room and, by her own admission, he did not use physical force. Crumbie admitted, however, that none of these incidents had been reported to the university authorities or the police, citing the victims’ reluctance to undergo the “trauma” associated with rape cases.
Responding to the report, Joseph Pereira, deputy principal of the Mona campus, also made clear in an interview with The Gleaner, however, that these incidents had not been brought to the attention of the university administration.
Heron also cited SUAWVE’s 2007 initiative to Parliament in her paper. In its submission to Parliament SUAWVE noted the prevalence of ‘acquaintance rape’ as a particular problem at UWI’s Mona Campus.
“Shortly afterwards”, as Heron notes in her paper, “the Student Group was called into the Prinicipal’s Office and reprimanded for bringing the university into ill repute”. Heron concluded “The primary concern was not that the incidents of violence against women occurred but rather that speaking about it in an open forum made the University look bad.”
Nothing much seems to have changed between the early 90s and 2007 or since in the University’s strategy for dealing with problems of sexual harrassment. Suppressing information and preventing potential victims from mobilizing support for themselves or discussing the problems seem to be cornerstones of its policy towards sexual harrassment. In another incident I’m aware of two girls narrowly escaped being raped by a mob of young male students at one of UWI’s Halls of Residence at Mona. When a student newspaper tried to publish a report on this incident, in an act of blatant censorship, they were ordered to drop the article from the publication immediately. How women are to take precautions when much needed information is suppressed in this way is something an institution of higher learning such as UWI needs to explain.
In the same vein a few years ago some female students called up Ragashanti’s virally popular Newstalk 93 talk show to complain about rape and sexual harrassment threats they faced on the Mona Campus. Ragashanti was sympathetic, urging them to speak freely, only to be hauled up by the administration who ordered him to cease and desist from holding conversations on the subject of female vulnerability on campus. The virulent arguments between Ragashanti and Rodina Reid, a senior campus administrator, originated over this matter.
Recall also poet and writer Stacey Ann Chin’s vivid description of the near rape she suffered in a bathroom at UWI.
What is consistent in all of this is the University’s tactic of demanding and imposing silence on victims and potential victims of sexual harrassment on campus while at the same time doing very little to secure the safety of its female students. It was striking that in her appearance on Newstalk 93, University Registrar Bell-Hutchinson insisted there were hotlines for students to call in case of trouble though she was unable to provide the number when pressed by the host to announce the numbers for the benefit of students who might be listening.
Also striking is the emphasis placed by senior UWI management on the lack of reportage of sexual harrassment incidents as some sort of vindication of its reputation rather than recognizing it as an extraordinary situation that requires immediate investigation. Instead of claiming proudly that the university “has never had a report of sexual harassment on any of its six halls of residence” or that “these incidents had not been brought to the attention of the university administration” let’s try and find out what is preventing such reportage, let us then put systems in place to facilitate female students who are being victimized, and let us immediately stop this foolish strategy of censorship, cover-ups and bullying of advocacy groups who are legitimately attempting to solve problems the University has been more concerned to deny than address.
Finally no more of statements such as this: “The UWI, Mona, also rejects the allegation that the issue of gender-based violence has not been accorded priority by the campus.” Had this issue been prioritized as it should have been as far back as 30 years ago it wouldn’t keep returning to haunt the university today.
Some documentation of Jamaican responses to the possiblity of an Ebola outbreak here.
Clovis, Jamaica Observer
I hope someone somewhere is keeping track of the way different countries and cultures have reacted to the news of a possible Ebola pandemic. I will do my bit by documenting a representative sample of some Jamaican responses here. In general there has been an air of barely controlled hysteria, perhaps understandable in a population already ravaged by a pestilential disease called Chikungunya which crept up on us virtually unannounced about two months ago. The entire months of September and October were lost to Chik V as the mosquito-borne illness is nicknamed and perhaps November too, so long-lasting are the effects of this peculiar virus.
The word Ebola first started being bandied about by Jamaican media in August and escalated in frequency after news broke that a Texas hospital in the United States was housing an Ebola patient who had just returned from Liberia. In early August Trinidad and Tobago entered panic mode and isolated a flight from London because it was carrying a Nigerian doctor married to a Trinidadian. It was later discovered that the doctor had not set foot in Africa in the last five years. In mid-September the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health here was forced to issue a statement denying that Jamaica had received its first Ebola case.
“I want to dispel the rumours surrounding a patient who was admitted to the University Hospital yesterday afternoon. The person is in fact a 65-year-old senior physician who travelled to Trinidad and returned to the island feeling ill. The person fell and was admitted to the hospital. There is absolutely no travel history to any Ebola-affected country or possibility of contact.”
The hysteria continued to build with Jamaican doctors announcing that in the absence of appropriate protective gear they would not be turning up to treat Ebola patients. Meanwhile neighbouring Cuba announced that it was sending nearly 500 medics to West Africa to help fight the deadly disease.
Shortly after that all hell broke loose at a hospital in Mandeville, a bougy hill station in the centre of Jamaica. What caused the panic was a resident Nigerian suffering from food poisoning who sought help at the Mandeville Hospital. As the newspapers had it:
“…the Nigerian presented himself at the hospital at 5 o’clock yesterday morning, sweating profusely and vomiting. He was reportedly placed in isolation in one of the rooms in the Accident and Emergency Department and was seen by a nurse, who was not told of the man’s history.
The source said the nurse took the man’s temperature without wearing any protective gear. Panic quickly broke out at the hospital as that nurse and other medical personnel refused to tend to the man on hearing that he was from Nigeria.”
Another news report some days later carried the Nigerian doctor’s response to his ordeal:
“Dr Bob Banjo, who has resided in Jamaica for the last 28 years, blasted nurses and other employees at the hospital as being ill-prepared for an Ebola outbreak and described how some became hysterical after he revealed that he had travelled to his homeland in July.
Banjo, in recounting his ordeal to The Gleaner yesterday, admitted that he had dizzy spells and was sweating profusely when he turned up at the hospital and said the doctor on duty assigned a nurse to take his temperature and blood pressure.
He said the test showed that his blood pressure was high, prompting the nurse to ask him if he had travelled overseas this year.
Banjo said he admitted to visiting Nigeria from July 16 to August 27 and recounted the panic and hysteria that followed.
“The moment I told the nurse I travelled to Nigeria, she ran out and told the doctor [and] the whole hospital – even patients and the staff. They went haywire,” he recounted.
“Because they claimed, ‘This is somebody from Nigeria; he has Ebola’,” he asserted.”
In recent days Jamaicans have been somewhat reassured by offers from Cuba to help train medical personnel here in the treatment of Ebola. But not all Jamaicans have been so pusillanimous in the face of Ebola. One doctor is in Liberia already ministering to the afflicted and urging other Jamaicans to join her:
“Jamaican medic Dr Coril Curtis-Warmington has urged colleagues in Jamaica to join her in Liberia, one of the countries at the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak, to get first-hand experience in treating the deadly virus which has already claimed more than 5,000 lives.
Curtis-Warmington made the call last Friday as she spoke by Skype from Liberia to the 10th annual scientific symposium and general meeting of the Caribbean Association of Clinical Microbiologists, held at the University Hospital of the West Indies.
“It is not easy, but even short term, just for two weeks. Please consider it because we really need you,” she begged in her final comments at the end of the 45-minute link.
Whispers of “who, me?” were immediately heard from medical professionals following the plea, but Professor Marvin Reid – who chaired the live interview session – promised that as vice-chair of the Medical Association of Jamaica, he would present her call to his colleagues.”
Finally, yesterday the island’s leading newspaper, the Gleaner, published a cogent editorial arguing that Jamaica has a moral responsibility to help Ebola-hit nations:
“Nonetheless, we believe that Jamaica – which used to pride itself as a leader among developing countries – has the capacity, and indeed an obligation, to do more – even if only symbolically. First, the vast majority of Jamaicans have their roots in that part of Africa, the region of the Gold Coast, from where most of the slaves to the New World arrived. In that sense, the victims of Ebola on the African continent are Jamaica’s kith and kin, claimed in popular culture and strategically embraced as part of a geopolitical insulation against the buffeting by the powerful of the world.
Yet, in stark contrast to neighbouring Cuba, which has sent hundreds of health workers to the three worst-hit countries, and from which this country has sought help in crafting an Ebola plan, the Jamaican authorities have offered them nothing – at least nothing that the country has been told about.
A public declaration of sympathy is the least that the Government could do. Moreover, Jamaica, which has responsibility for foreign relations within the Caribbean Community, would be expected to be mobilising the Community to a shared response, including, possibly, medical assistance and/or logistical and security support.
At a private level, there is no sense of Jamaican health workers – neither doctors nor nurses – volunteering, like their counterpart in other countries, to work in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea. They, as one Jamaican doctor resident in Liberia told this newspaper, are needed and would be welcomed.
Nor are there any projects to raise money to help these governments finance their anti-Ebola efforts or for relief for the survivors of the disease.
With regard to the latter idea, Jamaican musicians/entertainers, especially dancehall deejays, should be at the forefront. They are often in the media boasting about their exploits in Africa – the adulation they enjoy and the large audiences at their concerts. They often wear their Africanness like badges. It can’t be too difficult and be too much of a burden for such artistes to organise benefit concerts for the Ebola-hit countries and to contribute a portion of the sale of their albums or concert income to this project.”
Surely a people that pride themselves on having the most churches per square foot in the world should have a more humane, enlightened and charitable response toward sufferers of this latter day plague?
– RT 
Active Voice 