Civil Society, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

JAMAICA: On 120th Anniversary, Garvey Finally Wins Respect at Home

Dionne Jackson Miller

KINGSTON, Aug 16 2007 (IPS) - The gates to Marcus Garvey’s Liberty Hall on King Street in downtown Kingston are imposing. Tall, red bars tower above visitors, and between the bars, black birds can be seen peering backwards at intervals.

The are the backward-looking Sankofa birds, which are “an Asante symbol meaning that it is alright to go back to your past to retrieve pertinent information to assist us to move forward to the future,” says Donna McFarlane, Liberty Hall director and curator.

In a sense, that is what the renovated Liberty Hall is all about, a multi-media museum-library-inner city community centre where Marcus Garvey’s philosophies become a tool for educating people about the past, while helping them to move forward, in much the same way that Garvey did in that same space decades before.

Liberty Hall was the name given to the cultural and civic meeting places of the many branches of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the international organisation which Garvey founded.

Marcus Garvey, arguably one of the world’s best known Pan-Africanists, began his working life as a printer’s apprentice who went on to touch hundreds of thousands of people during his lifetime with his messages of black pride and economic independence. These were extraordinary concepts for a black man to have developed after growing up in colonial Jamaica, where black skin was seen as inferior, and poverty and ignorance the norm for most black people.

His formation of the People’s Progressive Party in 1929, with its demands for a minimum wage, an eight-hour work day and legal aid for the poor, was unable to gain traction as the poor blacks of Jamaica did not have the right to vote, not being property owners.

After travelling to several other countries, Garvey left Jamaica in 1916 for the United States, where he received widespread recognition as a public speaker and agitator for the rights of blacks and Africans. He inevitably attracted the scrutiny of the U.S. government, which eventually deported him after he was convicted of mail fraud.

But it is only now that his followers believe that he is finally gaining the attention he deserves at home in Jamaica, 120 years after his birth on Aug. 17, 1887.

Although Jamaica declared him its first national hero in 1964, many Jamaicans found it difficult to embrace Garvey, deriding him as a criminal for his conviction for mail fraud and his deportation from the United States.

“That’s because Jamaicans believed what they read in the Gleaner,” Jamaica’s oldest newspaper, said McFarlane, “and we have not done enough to teach the philosophy of Garvey.”

Jamaica’s Director of Culture Sydney Bartley acknowledges that Garvey has never received sufficient respect from many Jamaicans, but notes that the island’s people take many of their icons for granted, including reggae giant Bob Marley and current 100-metre-dash world record holder Asafa Powell.

“We need to deal with it… and so we have been trying to do that, but then the issue also becomes the nature of celebrations. There are some people who believe that unless you have something like a Sumfest (Jamaica’s largest and premier reggae music festival) you have not celebrated.”

Friday, Aug. 17, is the 120th anniversary of Garvey’s birth, and the Jamaican government is marking the event with 120 days of celebration, lasting until Dec. 14. There will be special programmes in schools, a poetry festival and public lectures.

“One of the things we need to understand is the idea of doing celebratory events based on concerts is not a sustainable development action, like a one-day concert on the 17th, but when we put the concert within a focus like the 120 days of Garvey it becomes the culmination of a series of activities… this has a more lasting effect,” Bartley says.

In addition, Bartley notes the convergence of the Garvey celebrations with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Jamaica.

“It is phenomenal to understand that 80 years after the slave trade was abolished Marcus Garvey was born, and that Marcus Garvey came in to himself and realised his role in the promotion of African redemption, African restoration, the promotion of the positive elements of African and our own cultural identity,” he explained.

President of the People’s Political Party, the organisation originally formed by Garvey, Miguel Lorne is now optimistic about the changes he has seen in Jamaicans’ attitudes toward Garvey.

“I would say we’ve seen improvements… some of the teaching institutions… have also started giving the relevance and the teachings of Garvey much more prominence,” Lorne says.

Apart from scholars, many Jamaicans have been largely ignorant of Garvey’s teachings over the years, he adds. It is for this reason that he is heartened to see more teachers taking an interest in Garvey.

“It certainly hasn’t reached the level that we would want, but there has been improvement and much more awareness on the ground, (for example) more of the younger artists are mentioning Garvey in their songs… I am seeing a cultural national renaissance coming to the fore,” he says.

But Lorne wants to see even greater recognition for Garvey with more made of his birthday and other significant milestones in his life.

“In terms of policy, that the government not just include (studies of Garvey) in the curriculum but direct the teachers to make it meaningful, that people understand that a humble black man from St. Ann’s Bay could rise to that level,” he argues.

Lorne maintains that 120 years after his death, Garvey’s teachings remain relevant in many ways, especially his messages on racial pride.

“That issue of racial pride whereby you are proud to be a black man, that is the overall factor. When you are proud to walk this earth and you realise that black people have given so many great things to this earth and… you don’t start the history from slavery, that would be the first Garvey principle that I would want every black person to embrace,” he says.