Causes of Jamaica turmoil, part 4
From Garvey to worker rebellion
By Pat Chin
Part 1 covered the recent
upsurge of violence in Jamaica within the context of capitalist
globalization. Part 2 covered
Jamaica's early history under Spanish and British colonialism,
the rise of the slave trade and sugar industry, and resistance
to terror and exploitation. Part
3 covered resistance to slavery and colonialism as well as
problems of the post-emancipation period.
The Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 led by Paul Bogle, the son
of a freed slave, embodied the struggle for land and
self-determination. It shook the white planter class to the
core, forcing minor concessions and a frenzied surrendering of
autonomy by the planter-dominated Jamaica House of
Assembly.
The move resulted in the assembly's abolition and the
establishment of direct British rule as a Crown Colony. As
such, the government was composed of a legislative council and
an executive privy council, but the colonial office exercised
full power over Jamaica through a British governor.
The voluntary reversion was a racist move aimed at weakening
demands for political power by the mixed-race sector of the
population. The fear was that if the mulattos won political
power, could the Blacks, who under Bogle's leadership had
demanded land and self-determination, be far behind?
By the end of the 18th century the British crown was forced
to allow some Jamaicans into the new assembly. They were mostly
local merchants, urban professionals and artisans of mixed-race
ancestry. "The smooth working of the crown colony system,"
recounts the web edition of the Library of Congress Country
Studies on Jamaica, "was dependent on a good understanding and
an identity of interests between the governing officials, who
were British, and most of the nonofficial, nominated members of
the Legislative Council, who were Jamaicans.
"The elected members of this body were in a permanent
minority and without any influence or administrative power. The
unstated alliance--based on shared color, attitudes, and
interest--between the British officials and the Jamaican upper
class was reinforced in London, where the West India Committee
lobbied for Jamaican interests. Jamaica's white or near-white
propertied class continued to hold the dominant position in
every respect; the vast majority of the Black population
remained poor and unenfranchised."
Rise of Garvey movement
It was within this context of racist inequality and
oppression that Black activist and labor leader Marcus Mosiah
Garvey rose to prominence. Garvey, who promoted self-confidence
and African pride, founded the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA) in 1914. Two years later, he moved to the
U.S. to raise funds for the organization.
UNIA was the paramount organization of its time, growing to
over 5 million members with 996 branches in 43 countries. Its
objective was to improve the social and economic conditions for
Black people everywhere. When UNIA established the Black Star
Line Shipping Co., launching four ships in line with Garvey's
back-to-Africa call, the capitalist class of the United States
successfully sabotaged the enterprise with help from
middle-class elements inside UNIA.
A "Garvey Must Go" campaign initiated in 1923 included
diplomatic pressure exerted by Washington on countries where
UNIA had branches. The Black leader was tried that same year,
indicted for mail fraud, and imprisoned in Atlanta, Ga., for
almost five years. In 1927 he was deported to Jamaica, where he
received a tumultuous welcome from the poor and is today a
national hero.
Between 1929 and 1930 Garvey founded one of Jamaica's first
political parties and a workers' association. It is not known
what became of these two groupings, but five years later Garvey
was hounded out of Jamaica by the servants of the colonial
regime. He then moved to Britain, where he died in 1940.
Garvey was gone, but Garveyism lived on in the hearts and
minds of the majority of poor Jamaicans, and many anti-colonial
manifestations were inspired by his teachings. The Rastafari
movement, for example--complete with its creation of reggae,
the music of social protest--was inspired in large part by
Garvey's cultivation of self-confidence and Black pride.
Rasta resistance to oppression
Rasta doctrine is limited by a lack of class analysis, but
the movement is an expression of resistance to colonial
domination and racist oppression. Ethiopia and its former
emperor, Haile Selassie, were the Rastas' central symbols of
Black independence and pride. In the mid-1930s the movement had
proclaimed the Ethiopian emperor--formerly known as Ras
Tafari--as its god, calling him "Jah." Early Rasta leaders like
Leonard Percival Howell called on Black Jamaicans to shift
their loyalty from the white king of England to Selassie as an
expression of Black pride.
"The state was terrified that the Rastafarians were not only
linking themselves to Ethiopia," writes Horace Campbell, "but
also called themselves Nya men--linking their ideas to the
anti-colonial movement of Kigezi,
Uganda--Nyabingi--which called for 'Death to black and
white oppressors.'" (From "Rasta and Resistance from Marcus
Garvey to Walter Rodney.")
It's noteworthy that in a meeting in London between Garvey
and Selassie, who had fled into exile after the 1935 fascist
Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Garvey reportedly took Selassie
to task for ignoring the plight of the masses of poor Ethiopian
peasants.
During the period between the two imperialist world wars,
dissatisfaction with crown colony rule reached its peak among
the growing mixed-race, British-identified middle class,
resulting in a clamor for increased self-rule. The Jamaican
elite had become dissatisfied with Britain's indifference to
their economic troubles, the Crown's monopoly of power over the
government and economy, and restrictions on advancement in the
colonial civil service. Their agitation formed the bourgeois
nationalist current in Jamaica, which was distinct from the
call for "Colour for Colour," linked with land and
self-determination, espoused by Bogle and the Rastafari.
Workers' rebellion in 1938
The most significant occurrence in Jamaican working-class
history took place in 1938. It took the form of a five-month
rebellion of poor workers driven by a newfound self-confidence
inspired by Garvey and the Rastafari movement.
According to Campbell, the new struggle against the white
planter class was launched when "1,400 workers armed with
machetes and sticks went on strike.... They forthrightly
demanded higher wages, stopped carts and wagons from entering
or leaving the estate and practically shut down the parish of
St. Thomas. The colonial State, which always supported the
planters, brought police reinforcements from Kings ton. In the
resulting attack by the police on the sufferers, 34 strikers
were injured and 60 were arrested."
The rebellion continued, however, for five months. The
entire island was eventually convulsed with armed resistance as
groups of poor people confronted the colonial state. They
included banana workers, cane cutters, domestic servants, small
farmers, the unemployed and others.
Many were killed and even more wounded. There were hundreds
of arrests. "In every parish," says Campbell, "the workers and
small farmers blocked roads, cut telephone wires, broke down
bridges, burnt cane fields, destroyed banana trees, ambushed
the police with sticks and stones, and stood up to demand an
end to the semi-slavery conditions of the society."
In the western parish of Westmoreland, construction workers
from Frome Sugar Estate confronted the multinational sugar
conglomerate, Tate and Lyle. They demanded better wages and
defended themselves when fired upon. Four people were killed
and 105 arrested. Calm was restored only when Alexander
Bustamante from the Jamaica Workers and Tradesmen Union (JWTU)
offered to mediate on behalf of the workers.
The year before, the worker-formed JWTU had organized
militant hunger marches. Its founder, Allan George Coombs, had
welcomed Bustamante into the organization. After the labor
uprising, Bustamante would inaugurate the Bustamante Industrial
Trade Union, followed in 1942 by the Jamaica Labor Party.
Recognizing the unstoppable nature of the revolt, the middle
class gave organizational support to the strikers, hoping to
redirect their anger into a narrow constitutional struggle for
workers' rights. It was from this setting that Norman
Washington Manley, founder of the People's National Party and
the National Workers Union, emerged.
So far reaching and well organized were the labor protests
of the 1938 uprising that London was forced to make
concessions. They started with better salaries and working
conditions, the legalization of union activity, the institution
of workers' compensation--among other things--and ended with
the granting of independence in 1962.
Next: Independence and
neo-colonialism and the prospects for struggle.
Reprinted from the Nov. 8, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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