Say what you want about some of the decisions around the period right about the time we gained our independence, but I love them. You know ..say about Bustamante’s decision to tell the Police to bring in the Rasta’s dead or alive.“
The revisionist historians all write in glowing terms, the struggles of the “Rastas” leading up to the Coral Gardens incident in which Rastafarians ending up in a confrontation with the police in a struggle between the State and anarchy.
One of the things which made me an eternal skeptic as it relates to how some of these stories are told is the fact that I lived in Jamaica for 31 years.
That experience gave me a pretty good idea how to read between the lines rather than read what’s written on them sometimes.
I damn sure was not around during the Coral Gardens incident but having looked at the incident across several accounts, I realized that the prevailing narrative has been a sanitized version which has not only resulted in the Holness Administration apologizing to Rastas and giving them
Regardless of who writes the narrative, the story is the same. The general slant is written in a way that makes it impossible not to be supportive are at least empathetic, when the entire text is exculpatory of the Rastafarians with all incriminating evidence and the reasons for Bustamante’s orders left out.
Here is what I mean .….….….….
“BAD FRIDAY inaugurates the first
- Robert A. Hill, University of California, Los Angeles.
Notice the same tropes characterizing the event, written by people who have their own ideas of how the narrative is to be shaped?
Enveloping the narrative in broader coverage of oppression and social injustice, they knew quite well that people of color and black people, in particular, would be hard pressed not to find common cause with the Rastafarians referenced in this accounting.
It was fifty years ago April 11,
This writer vividly remembers that events of April 1963 because it was the same day we interred the remains of my younger sister who had joined the ancestors. We lived in an area where we knew brothers and sisters. We also knew Rastas from the different working-class communities across Montego Bay and its environs. That weekend is now known among freedom-loving Caribbean persons as the weekend of Bad Friday. The continuities from that period of repression are to be found in many areas of the social life of Jamaica and the Caribbean. The children of the class forces that orchestrated that repression has now aligned with nationalists and even former Rastas who are the conduits for the exploitation of the people.
Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is the author
I cited just two examples of writings in which the writers have latched onto Rastafarian victimhood. In both examples, the writers decided on shaping the narrative themselves, instead of telling the stories and allowing the facts to dictate the essence of the events as they occurred.
They co-opted the sanitized version of events which Jamaica’s pseudo-intellectuals have scrubbed and repackaged and sold, not just to Jamaicans, but to outsiders, in a mad rush to embrace Rastafarianism.
For those unable to understand why, look no further than the late Robert Nesta Marley, Jamaica’s Rastafarian Reggae artiste who brought international musical acclaim to the Island.
Marley is worshiped as a literal God, in some circles. If Marley and others like him were to be canonized for posterity, their Rastafarian faith also had to be scrubbed of it’s entitled and violent past.
Here are some facts which they just failed to incorporate into the story which once understood, not only cast a different light on those events but makes Andrew Holness’ apology that much more galling and reprehensible.
By the late 1950s, a group of Rastafarians had begun to attract attention from overseas with the visit of members of the USA-based First Africa Corps who joined the Claudius Henry-led militants at a camp in Red Hills.
In April of 1960, the police carried out a raid on the camp, arresting Henry and seized a number of weapons.
Henry and a handful of the group’s membership were charged with treason.
Rudolph Franklin, a Cornwall College graduate who had embraced the Rastafarian faith, became embroiled in a land dispute with the Kerr-Jarrett family in western Jamaica.
Franklin was reportedly farming illegally (capture land, squatting)on lands in the Tryall area. From the reports, the landowners had engaged the services of the police to remove the illegal squatting/farming on their land and, during an altercation with one of the police officers, Franklin was shot five times and left for dead in a churchyard.
His body was later discovered by schoolchildren and removed to a local hospital where he was treated, but on his release, he was charged with possession of ganja. Franklin was sentenced to six months in prison and, according to those who knew him, he was an embittered person when he was released in early 1963.
Rudolph Franklin (the militant leader of the Rasta group) set the Ken Douglas Shell service station on fire), Lloyd Waldron and Noël Bowen (all Rastafarians), two policemen, Corporal Clifford Melbourne
Prime Minister Sir Alexander Bustamante visited the parish along with the commissioner of police and head of the Jamaica Defence Force. Bustamante is reported to have declared, “Bring in all Rastas, dead or alive…“
Damn right mister Prime Minister!
Police from neighboring parishes were dispatched to Coral Gardens and Rastafarians, were rounded up and arrested.
two of Franklin’s accomplices, Carlton Bowen and Clinton Larmond, were charged with murder and went on trial in July 1964. They were found guilty and sentenced to hang following a month-long trial presided over by Justice Ronald Small, father of current Queen’s Counsel Hugh Small. Bowen and Larmond were hanged on December 2, 1964.
Alexander Bustamante understood the threat posed to the country by the insurgent Rastafarian movement which had incorporated foreign elements into our country and was, in fact, stockpiling arms in their camp in Red Hills and other places as far back as the early 1960s.
Andrew Holness, with the blessings of the inept and corrupt People’s National Party(PNP
To add insult to injury Rastafarians and their offsprings have been paid with the tax dollars of serving police officers, while the offsprings of Corporal Clifford Melbourne and Inspector Bertie Scott receives nothing.
What the Government did in cahoots with the Opposition party is collude to spit on the graves of those two heroes., A similar sequence of events replayed itself in Tivoli Gardens. Again both political parties, and it was Déjà vu. They repeated exactly what they did at Coral Gardens.
Ask yourselves then, why would criminals of all stripes not kill police officers, burn police stations, disobey laws, and do whatever they please, knowing that the nation will apologize to them for law enforcement bothering them?[sic]
Sooner or later there will be a payday down the road, entire communities are aware of that.
That is the essence of Jamaica.
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