Imani Tafari-Ama | A racist remark provides a teaching moment

There was a time when The Gleaner referred to the top political parties in Jamaica, the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), as the gangs of Gordon House for good reason. The constantly fractious exchange in the House is translated into gang and political violence at the ground level. For decades, desperate youth from underserved communities were seduced into fighting against each other, supported by politicians who consequently commandeered votes won by coercion. This form of clientelism sounded the death knell for democracy.

Shakespeare did say, though, that “all the world is a stage and the men and the women are merely the players” .We should, therefore, not be surprised or devastated by the insufficiency of the parliamentary performances. It is pointless really to be trying to come up with Band-aid solutions when obviously, something is rotten in the state script and the thinking that undergirds the design of the play.

The recent racialised parliamentary spat, featuring the beleaguered Minister of Finance, Dr Nigel Clarke, the Leader of the Opposition, Mark Golding, the butt of the finance minister’s racist remark that alluded to him as the value-loaded Massa Mark, and Dr Angela Brown-Burke, the scandalised defender of Mr Golding’s integrity, provides us with a profound teaching moment. It was a disaster that was a long time coming. This outburst could only happen because of the normalisation of vitriolic competition between political rivals.

The PNP walkout of Parliament was also symbolic of the binary justice system, which serves the cyclical revenge culture that ferments at the community level. The victor-victim dichotomy of the prevailing justice system rewards one party with a win and the other with a loss without addressing the residual trauma experienced. This approach is oppositional to the spirit of Ubuntu, the African concept that means I am because we are.

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Ubuntu drives the restorative justice framework, which was introduced in Jamaica in 2001. This followed the first Commission of Inquiry into a violent Tivoli Gardens incursion by the security forces. The interaction between perpetrator and victim in the restorative justice model is preferred to the hostile ending of current court cases. Lay magistrates (justices of the peace) manage the restorative justice process but are at the bottom of the totem pole of a judiciary still headed by the British monarchy.

Jamaica mimics Westminster democracy, which is a violent model of governance. Britain has not perfected this operational plan, and it has not produced happiness for the contending parties. It is, therefore, not likely to yield positive results when implemented in post-colonial polities like Jamaica. Yet successive governments’ adoption of the Westminster model is an indicator that our leaders are entrapped by illusions of grandeur. Those occupying the hallways of power have learned to fight each other to fulfil the requirements of their prescribed roles. This charade is ineffectual since subalterns acknowledge that “politicians on both sides drink champagne with each other and laugh at us in the ghetto” as one cynical observer once told me.

The drama would be comic if it were not so tragic. It is a contradiction in terms for an independent country to be ruled by its former coloniser. Such critical reflection on the paradoxes of politics was also reflected in the School of Drama’s recent enactment of the Pied Piper of Hamlin saga. In the Jamaican adaptation, the city of JamRats came alive through the personification of rats as the protagonists of pollution. This piece satirised the leadership failures that cause the corruption embodied by the pompous mayor and the pitfalls facing populations under those pursuing poor imitations of Westminster democracy.

JamRats also demonstrated that the problem of pollution is systemic and therefore demands radical solutions. The rats also represented what can happen when a situation goes out of control. This is like a metaphor for extraordinary authority enjoyed by pompous politicians. The canker of internalised racism and the reproduction of this pathology – illustrated by the minister of finance’s gaslighting of the leader of the Opposition, shows what Dr Carter G. Woodson diagnosed as miseducation.

RANSACKING MISEDUCATION

Dr Woodson, a contemporary of Marcus Garvey, explained why outbursts in Gordon House cannot be cured without a ransacking of the miseducation scheme that cements it in place. And will those who have read Dr Woodson’s seminal analysis, The Mis-Education of the Negro, please stand up? What do you mean, who was Dr Woodson? It is no wonder that black history has been sliding in the background, eclipsed by Reggae Month.

Carter Godwin Woodson was born on December 19, 1875. In February,1926, Dr Woodson launched “Negro History Week” as a national celebration of African heritage. He intended that Whites as well as Blacks would be aware of the African links with African-American cultures and societies established in the West. It is from this initiative that we now have Black History Month.

Woodson argued that “Negroes, however, sometimes choose their own leaders but unfortunately they are too often of the wrong kind. Negroes do not readily follow persons with constructive programs. Almost any sort of exciting appeal or trivial matter presented to them may receive immediate attention and temporarily at least liberal support. When the bubble collapses, of course, these same followers will begin to decry Negro leadership and call these misrepresentatives of the group rascals and scoundrels. Inasmuch as they have failed to exercise foresight, however, those who have deceived them should not be blamed so much as those who have liberally supported these impostors. Yet the fault here is not inherently in the Negro but in what he has been taught.”

As Dr Woodson prescribed, the education system should be decolonised to ensure that our leaders recognise the pathology of the prevailing profession of political representation. Mimicking former colonial masters with thinly veiled barbs cannot be called effective communication. While the finance minister provides a palpable scapegoat, though, he is only a molecular component of a project that should not be timidly changed.

Could the impending constitutional reform amount to just a cosmetic exercise? The attorney general did declare that there are aspects of the Westminster system that will remain even if we achieve republican status. This kind of plantation allegiance is what, according to Dr Woodson, prevents the mentally enslaved majority from having access to the elusive mirage of emancipation.

n Imani Tafari-Ama, PhD, is a Pan-African advocate and gender and development specialist. Send feedback to i.tafariama@gmail.com.