Mango Walk

what is desired not all may now attain

in honest time so shorten the coarse rope

shut down the store and fence off the last slope

in case some folk will climb against the pain

you can refuse the effort and the stain

but cannot tell the massive one to cope

with what is left of what was once great scope

and now is gone we all wait for the rain

this is no season for the less-than-strong

nor for a language moderate and weak

words won't endure and so for pity's sake

just give it up and give us one last song

about the sort who did not have to seek

the shiny gold but only had to take

there's no occasion to admit defeat

beneath an empty sky of callous blue

in this proud season when we must renew

so many hopes our senses cannot treat

these many messages of the hard street

 as what they are and the time's overdue

for easy answers so the young must rue

what they can't know and old ones lose the beat

we change the era as we change our socks

in solemn mode but yet with little thought

of any deeper meaning in the act

one moment free the next cast on the rocks

with every motion seeming overwrought

our species lost now between truth and fact

the saplings in the yard are in first leaf

their spring has now begun but it is late

maples they are and ruddy in relief

we ask the world for hope and no mischief

to strike us as we come out through the gate

the saplings in the yard are in first leaf

the pleasant season but we know it's brief

yet we are forced each year to a long wait

maples they are and ruddy in relief

time strikes us now as a harsh nasty thief

we look in pain at every passing date

the saplings in the yard are in first leaf

but life's revival brings no great relief

we're in the season of pain and debate

maples they are and ruddy in relief

all they can do now is recall hard grief

not reconcile us to eventual fate

the saplings in the yard are in first leaf

maples they are and ruddy in relief

this is the choice that we defy the night

for a short time and keep alive a spark

timid perhaps but worthy to remark

a simple thing of note to honest sight

rejection of the vast kingdom of blight

a wisdom that calls on us to skylark

with laughter to ignore the final dark

empowering the fragile human light

each one is a beginning we are told

to be recorded and to be advised

of what's around below and what's above

to find out what is clay and what true gold

what's best admired and what's best despised

the fruit of all our hope and all our love

not given much to metaphor as fact

the student struggles to relate her tale

each sentence on its own will sag or fail

the effort turns out bloated not compact

her model is the sermon and the tract

and writing comes to her like time in gaol

the style is cold the images are stale

and the whole enterprise with pain is packed

the reader wants so much to go outside

and take his whirling thoughts for a long walk

but finishing the job is all his pride

so from the horrid task he dare not balk

no leave nor yet excuse he has to plead

so the next essay he picks up to read

John Maxwell

As a toddler on Derby Beach, now Silver Sands, I remember asking my father what was the roaring sound we heard when we put seashells to our ears. His answer, I believe, was to the effect that the shell concentrated all the sounds around us, the wind, the waves, the sand, every noise in the universe, into the shells and perhaps, with enough patience, we could unravel and make sense of some of it.

If my grandchildren were in the neighbourhood  I don't think I'd need to answer that question, since I doubt that they would now be able to find a whole seashell on any Jamaican beach.

My father died when I was 12, of a heart broken (it was said) by the electorate of Northern Trelawny, who had forgotten the hard labour he'd put in as Member of the Legislative Council for the whole parish. His brother-in-law, Morris Thelwell, a comparative unknown, had won Southern Trelawny for the Jamaica Labour Party while the totally obscure Clement Aitcheson, head-teacher of the Duncans Elementary School, selected for that job by my father, had won in Northern Trelawny also for the JLP. Another brother in law, Hugh Cork, had won southern Clarendon for the JLP.

I remember as a ten year old cowering in my father's library in astonishment as my father excoriated Bustamante who wanted to recruit him to run for the JLP in 1944. It was an unforgettable confrontation: my father, all 5'6' of him facing down Bustamante, nearly a foot taller with a hairdo that exaggerated his height. Busta, furious, simply went across the street and recruited Aitcheson.

My father had refused to join the PNP because he thought that there was still a place in Jamaican politics for independents. His sympathies were with the PNP and he really admired Manley, but a decade earlier, Manley had been the lawyer whose arguments unseated him on the ground that he was not wealthy enough to be elected. It wasn't Manley's choice; in those days lawyers were more or less obliged to accept the first brief offered and the first brief was from the losing candidate, the richest man on the north coast, the manager of the building society, the chairman of the Parish Council, the Custos of the Parish, the MLC and the attorney for more than half the land and sugar estates in Trelawny – Mr W.U.Guy S. Ewen.

Manley regretted the result – as he wrote the Chief Justice afterward – why should people be prevented from being represented by the delegate of their choice simply because he was poor?

A few years later Manley joined a ferment with O.T Fairclough, Ken and Frank Hill, W.A.Domingo, Adolphe Roberts, Amy Bailey  and the rest to first energise the Jamaica Progressive League in New York then Public Opinion in Jamaica and finally the People's National Party which was determined to give every man a vote and to bring universal human rights to Jamaica.

So, despite my father's defeat at the hands of Manley, he would tell me, as a toddler, that I had to grow up to become a lawyer like Mr Manley, to defend poor people.

Shortly after the case Ewen's solicitors distrained on my father for the costs of the case. They were determined to finish him off. The bailiffs seized everything in the house, including my baby crib and announced that they were coming back for the "body" – they were going to arrest my father for debt and cast him into the debtor's jail in the St Catherine District Prison.

This animus was provoked by the fact that shortly after winning the case against my father Mr Ewen dropped dead, felled according to the gossipmongers, by my grandmother's obeah.Dad won the ensuing bye-election with all his papers in order

When the sale of my father's pitiful possessions failed to satisfy the lawyers a commitment warrant was issued for his arrest and incarceration. My father's roots are in Accompong and in Maroon Town and he vanished into the Cockpit Country. Not even my mother knew where he was.

The plan was that he could not be 'attached' once he was sworn in to the Legislative Council. But Trelawny is a long way from Kingston; in those days of marl roads the drive was anywhere between four and five hours.

My father's best friend, Mr A.B. Lowe,  MLC  for St James and a very sober and upright Baptist deacon was the unlikely agent. By prior arrangement Lowe picked up my father  somewhere on the Burnt Hill Road and then drove south, through Manchester, Clarendon and St Catherine, outwitting the small army of scouts on the expected North coast route.

In Kingston my father was stowed on the back seat of the car, covered by empty luggage and a carpet. Instead of coming through Duke Street and the northern approaches to Headquarters House, Lowe came from the East on Beeston Street. When he drove around Headquarters House seeking a place to park, special constables alerted to his friendship with my father, asked Lowe if he had seen Maxwell. Telling what was probably the only lie in his life Lowe said he'd seen someone resembling my father at the Beeston Street entrance and the bailiffs dashed off. Lowe and one or two confederates, pulled some of the luggage out of the car, blocking the sidewalk while my father sprinted up the steps, escaping capture by inches.

He was duly sworn in and in time paid his debt to the solicitors.

Like Mr Manley

My mother and various family members pressured me for years to become a what the Americans call a trial lawyer. Unfortunately  as a teenager I had become hopelessly enmeshed in journalism.

Since January 29, 1952, except for 18 months or so spent as the first press officer for the Industrial Development Corporation( now Jamaica Trade & Invest) I have been employed or unemployed entirely  as a journalist. Last month made it 58 years hard labour and there is nobody in Jamaican journalism, living or dead, who has spent more time at it.

There are others  still alive who may have become reporters before me but they have spent most of their lives in other, more lucrative pursuits.

Over that time there must be quite a paper trail, millions of words, hundreds of lost causes. Some of this is because my career paralleled to a certain extent, the development of modern media. In broadcasting for instance, I did things in the fifties that no one in Jamaica had thought of doing, a weekly political commentary and a thrice weekly economics-made-easy commentary called Progress report. We did things because we didn't know they were impossible. I did an audio montage of the people who lived on and off, the Kingston Dump. C.L.R.James said he'd  never heard anything as moving.

Moving back into print journalism in 1963  Having been fired by the Prime Minister, (and a certain Edward Seaga) brought me into direct conflict with the new government of Jamaica who behaved, as I and others said at the time – as if they had simply assumed the prerogatives of the British colonial dictatorship. I don't think any current  Jamaican politician would even think about jailing a journalist; fifty yeas ago I was threatened with prison for my "rude, insolent, indecent" remarks, which verged, it seemed, on sacrilege. The threats were made in Parliament. THe government tried to shut down my paper and eventually forced me into exile.

I spent a few years in Britain, doing what I'd been doing at the JBC, but half the work for twice the money.

I have never fancied myself a politician, contrary to my detractors. I returned from Britain to contest West KIngston in 1972 because the sad truth was that every other plausible  PNP candidate was too afraid to run. I ran to prevent the seat being handed to the JLP on Nomination Day. Some JLP people who know the facts, feel I should have graciously allowed a coronation in West Kingston in 1972,

Perhaps the single thing of which I am most proud is the invention of the talk-show –the Public Eye. There had been other talk shows, but none combining news, commentary and public participation. WE changed things. Despite attempts, there has never been anything similar.

Rosina Wiltshire and Gillian Monroe gave the programme a vital push soon after we started . They had done a study of working conditions among domestic helpers, then, as now, the largest single class of workers in Jamaica. I interviewed them, let them talk and was amazed at the horrors they revealed. When I asked domestic helpers to phone in,giving their side of the story it was as if a a massive dam of years of hurt, oppression and cruelty had suddenly burst, sweeping away all the pretensions of the Jamaican upper classes to civilisation.

In those days we used dial telephones and you could buy locks for them. It soon became a joke in Jamaica that every shipment of telephone locks was swept up within hours of arrival.

I have reported here before, how  we recruited first the Prime Minister's wife, Beverley and then Michael Manley himself to the idea that only a national minimum wage with enforcement could rescue the workers.

Public Eye went on to campaign for other workers causes, equal pay, housing, against capital punishment and police brutality,   and for what I and others thought was the essential framework of a civilised society.

It was my opinion that radio could be used to mobilise pubic opinion in the non partisan process of what Norman Manley called nation building.

At that time I was also the unpaid chair of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority,(the Beach Control, Wildlife Protection and Watershed Protection Authorities) and the National Gallery.

We managed to do some serious work including organising public opinion to clean up  Kingston Harbour, , to alert people to the government sponsored theft of public beaches and other lands – Hellshire, Long Mountain etc) and to the need to guarantee safe land for housing.

Over the years I have accumulated some really good stories, for instance how I solved two murder cases that baffled the police,but the real story of my life has been in the small stories about the human rights of people without friends and most of all, the story of the defamation and despoliation of Haiti.

As I once wrote in this column, sometimes I think I can smell the blood of Haiti from here.

This column is the last one from me for a little while.

Some of you may know that I continued writing every week through my one year course of  radiation and chemotherapy for advanced lung cancer.

The cancers are no longer in evidence thanks to the esprit de corps, optimism, determination and skill of dedicated practitioners in Jamaica and the Netherlands.

Having come out of what seemed a very long dark  tunnel and having lost a slew of friends – Sonny Bradshaw, Trevor Rhone, Wayne Brown,Albert Huie, Rex Nettleford, to name only the most prominent, I remember that I want to publish my columns on Haiti, on Jamaican politics and on the Environment.  I also want to select from and publish some of the 6,000 pictures I call 'Portraits of Jamaican birds.

So, if you see my column only occasionally, depending on my arrangement with my editors, it is not because I have abandoned you, just that I'm taking things a bit easier.

 After all I've been working for longer than most people have been alive.

The problem of course is that no journalist is ever free.

Copyright ©2010 John Maxwell jankunnu@yahoo.com

all softer magics fall before the lie

that eases into minds and dulls all taste

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

where carrion birds in masses all now fly

above the lands that swiftly go to waste

all softer magics fall before the lie

we watch the largest rivers all run dry

and wonder just what pain we have embraced

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

no one's ambitions here would move so high

now our best memories shall be erased

all softer magics fall before the lie

that all will soon be better by and by

when good and sacred words will be enplaced

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

for far too long and now no honest eye

is left to note the urgent need for haste

all softer magics fall before the lie

beneath its glamour we ignore the sky

John Maxwell

Henry Kissinger once said that the United States had no friends, only interests. Watching the US intervention in Haiti makes it clear that the US, in the pursuit of its interests, does not need to exhibit any human attributes, such as shame or grace.

I said a few weeks ago that it seemed a little counterproductive sending masses of soldiers to Haiti since you can't eat soldiers and soldiers needed to be fed and, in Haiti, one American probably consumes as much as ten Haitians. Feeding 20,000 US soldiers takes as much resources as feeding the entire population of Cite Soleil - the biggest slum in the Caribbean.

It is heartbreaking to read of the screwed-up relief efforts, screwed up mainly by sending in soldiers instead of relief workers, nurses and just ordinary people willing to follow instructions and to use their imaginations and initiative. Remember that army put-down from the comic books:

"You're not being paid to think!"

Famines, famously, are not caused by shortages of food but by deficiencies of imagination and planning. In Haiti at this moment, some of the world's most disciplined people are too often, being treated like wild animals. The problem is that many of Haiti's self-appointed rescuers are scared witless by their own superstitions and the garbage fed them by irresponsible journalists and crazy preachers.

You can see it in the pictures, where people have on their own, formed orderly queues but are still being harassed by men with rifles and an inflated sense of their own importance. One of the scourges of Haiti, self-righteous NGOs, are clearly wasting resources, time and lives insisting on being protected against starving women and children instead of getting out and doing what they should be doing.

Above it all are the mainstream journalists, busy viewing with alarm, scornful of the heat, the smells and the people, and prophesying at any moment, outbreaks of mindless violence.

It is impossible to view Haiti without realising the enormous tax the world pays for ignorance and fear, and without understanding the real cost of journalism in promoting strife, frustration and unhappiness.

The Internet has made it much easier to transmit lies and superstition. A piece that landed on my screen supposedly from a black person in South Africa was so full of misinformation and outright lies that I thought that it must be a production of one of the thousands of rightwing solfataras of hate. Briefly, this farrago of nonsense claimed that no black country had come to the aid of Haiti – when his own country had been one of the first responders. Venezuela and other Caribbean countries had also made their contribution and of course he forgot Cuba, with 1,200 doctors and other emergency workers now there and more to come.

The letter was meant to discredit the poor, the black and the developing countries who are clearly not grateful for the incredible blessings bestowed on the by colonialism.

One of these days someone should try to estimate the real economic cost of 'journalists' like James Anthony Froude, Rudyard Kipling, Bob Novak, Jules Dubois and their more recent versions, the Wolf Blitzers, Judith Millers and their ilk.

These people are among the most important factors in the current confusion about Haiti and about the true state of the world.

Robert Novak, for instance, parachuted into Haiti in 2004 on a mission to sanitise the bloodthirsty La Tortue and his way of doing that was to malign Jean Bertrand Aristide.

 According to Novak, the Haitian ‘Prime Minister’ La Tortue was correct in describing the bandits, rapists and murderers backing him as  ‘freedom fighters’”.

According to Novak “The radical president’s [Aristide’s] reign left a country without electricity, passable roads or public schools, with a devastated economy and, according to LaTortue, a looted treasury.”

La Tortue told Novak: "The public finance is in crisis. They (the Aristide regime) took everything they could from the reserve of the country." His estimate: "over $1 billion stolen in four weeks.” (Emphasis added)

The problem is that there has never been one billion of anything in Haiti worth stealing, and what is remarkable is that a remark so completely unbelievable and outrageous as to verge on the insane, was published and republished in newspapers and magazines considered reputable in the United States. Aristide, despite his interruptions, left a country better off than he found it. (See http://www.haitiaction.net/News/WWNF/2_28_5.html)

The question of course, is why the US has such a down on Haiti and why apparently sane people are so ready to believe the rubbish they do about Haiti.

Some of the reasons are:

     • Haitian insubordination in declaring themselves independent and offering universal emancipation and universal rights.

     • Haiti's strategic position, commanding two of the most important gateways to the Caribbean;

     • Haiti's potential as a base to attack Cuba;

     • Haiti's position on top of a super-giant oil-field, rivaling Saudi Arabia's in importance

     • Haiti's potential as an offshore slave plantation from which US companies can import cheap 'manufactures' without worrying about unions or human rights.

Haitians of course, have completely different ideas.

• They want to be allowed, for the first time at last, to govern themselves without the brutal interference of the former slave-owning states;

• They want back the money – €20,000,00,000 – extorted from them by the French and the Americans over 120 years, and which robbed them of the resources to develop their own country;

• Haitians driven abroad by US backed dictators want to go back home and work for their development of their own country.

• Haitians cannot understand why they are denied the benefits of their membership in the United `nations and other International organisations of which they were foundation members.

Part of the problem with any discussion of Haiti with Americans is the political illiteracy of so many Americans – particularly journalists – some of whom think Obama is a Socialist or a Nazi. Aristide's opponents, including some so-called journalists, have portrayed him as a blood-drinking, baby-sacrificing black-magician Communist. This garbage has been spread so wide and so deep that outside of Haiti, most people do not know that Aristide is a gentle, God-fearing priest.  A practical man whose ideology is Haiti.

The Haitian people know this and keep telling the world that they want their democracy and their President back. The world press this week is full of stories about the lack of leadership in Haiti. There is no lack of leadership in Haiti; the leadership is there but it is the leadership of the majority, of the Fanmi Lavalas, of people loyal to Aristide. The United States and their clients in the United Nations Security Council do not wish to see this.

Aristide does not want to be President again, but he wants to help Haiti develop. Between him and that aspiration sit a small gang of parasitic margin-gatherers who call themselves businessmen but are really sophisticated gang-leaders operating by remote control.

If Haiti is to regain its integrity and autonomy there will need to be a programme resembling the post-war de-Nazification in Germany to re-educate people in elementary civics. Otherwise, sooner or later there will be another Papa Doc or maybe, even an Idi Amin.

In 2004, the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, Reginald Dumas, a Caribbean man, declared that the UN should be committing itself to a long-term mission in Haiti to last about twenty years, "We cannot continue with the start-stop cycle that has characterized relations between the international community and Haiti. You go in, you spend a couple of years, you leave, the Haitians are not necessarily involved and the whole thing collapses. This has to stop," Dumas said.

 He told the council:

“There has to be a long-term commitment, which I perceive the council is ready and willing to give," Dumas said.   "It must be coordinated assistance. It must be sustained assistance, and it must be assistance that involves the people of Haiti. It cannot be a situation in which the UN or some other agency goes in and says `I have this for you.' There has to be discussion. There has to be cooperation, or else it will fail again."

I agree with Dumas but for one particular:  The Haitians needs to get out of the clutches of the Security Council and seek help from the General Assembly, where they have friends.

Copyright©2010 John Maxwell.  jankunnu@yahoo.com

Jamaica Mahogany

John Maxwell

There are lots of places in this world where, for weeks or months to come, people will be turning to other people and saying – "Let's ask Rex what he thinks …"  before realising that there is no Rex to ask, that the man they depended on for advice or counsel is not there any more.

Rex is dead. Gone.

He has been part of the intellectual landscape of Caribbean society for so long that he seemed to be a permanent fixture, one of those features that were here when we came and will be here long after we've gone

That will be true in a sense, except that when we lose a tree of this size, the space it once occupied  appears so big that it seems impossible to fill.

Trelawny and more specifically, the Cockpit Country and its environs is where the soul of Jamaica goes for rest and recuperation. It is the spiritual home of Jamaican culture, the centre of resistance to slavery and colonialism, the last bastion of the maroons and the first place where the British Army first conceded defeat in the Western hemisphere. And here, every little boy has a built-in feistiness, and the knowledge that he is no one's inferior.

As Rex Nettleford grew to young manhood he never appeared in any doubt that he was not simply destined to be 'somebody' but that he always had been somebody and he took it upon himself to carry this effortless self-confidence into the building of a Jamaican personality worthy of the Kojos and Akkompongs that populated the mists of Burnt Hill, Bunkers Hill and all of the Land of Look Behind.

But he was also acutely aware of the other side of his patrimony and embraced his European heritage as eagerly as the rest. In the Jamaica of the 1950s the idea of country boys dancing ballet was so outlandish as to seem bizarre, but that did not bother Rex Nettleford who knew what he wanted to do and refused to be fazed by opposition or even ridicule.

His determination to excel at anything he did swept away the ridicule and the opposition and by the time  he won the Rhodes Scholarship it was clear that here was someone out of the ordinary. His selection by Norman Manley to be a member of the Mission to Africa on behalf of the Rastafari movement was   recognition at the highest level, if any were needed, of his quality , and his career since then has simply amplified our understanding.

A little while ago, I had just  returned from nearly a year of medical treatment abroad. Rex sought me out to invite my wife and me to  the season's final presentation of the National Dance Theatre . At the very end of the concert came an electrifying session from the company’s massed drummers –  a performance that I told him deserved to be on DVD on its own. It was hair-raising, and with the dance, one of the most profoundly  exciting theatrical experiences I've ever had;  And I thought, this was the ultimate artistic tribute to Rex, who in the near half century of the NDTC has forged an instrument of national expression that is professional, imbued with enormous confidence and skill and with an elan that elevates them to the highest class. The NDTC’s achievement alone would be the pride of any one auteur working full time. That Rex managed this intricate and demanding human enterprise along with his other 'day jobs' is an amazing feat.

Rex was above all a teacher dedicated to his students and to none more so than the Diploma classes at Carimac that he and (Sir) Roy Augier, by far the most senior members of the university, insisted on teaching, year in and year out in an extraordinary example of commitment to the welfare of the young. He never gave up even when he was Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies.   He took the Extra-Mural Department and converted it into an open University, inadequately named the School of Continuing Studies and singlehanded he created the Trade Union Institute – in my view the crown jewel of his successful campaign for the 'smaddification' of Jamaicans like him

It is impossible to do justice to Rex Nettleford. It is, for instance, unprecedented and amazing that of Oxford's more than 7000 Rhodes scholars, Nettleford should be among four singled out for special centenary honour and even more extraordinary that the University of  Oxford should create, in his honour, a special prize in Cultural  Studies, a discipline almost unknown when he was at university.

I could go on, piling statistic upon statistic, fact upon fact, honour upon honour, degree upon degree, but none can  add to the lustre that was Rex's.

I am proud, simply to say that I was honoured to have been his friend for most of our lives

Albert Huie

  Albert Huie, the most renowned of all Jamaican painters, died a few days before Rex . Huie was another piece of Trelawny mahogany, having been born in Falmouth, a dozen or so years before Rex.

He was another feisty man  of the Maroon country who knew what he wanted to be at a time when country boys could become sign-painters, not artists. Albert told me that when he was a bare teenager he threw stones to help chase away gangs of bullies who had been hired to break up political meetings held by my father. My father, a penniless country parson, had challenged the power structure of Trelawny, then the last bastion of planter power in Jamaica. My father was running against one of the richest planters in Jamaica, Mr Guy Ewen; the leading lawyer on the north coast, head of the largest building society, chairman of the Parochial Board, Custos of the Parish and Member of the Legislative Council for 25 years.  Against all the odds, my father beat Ewen despite the fact, according to Albert, that Ewen's supporters had descended to hiring gangs of toughs to break up my father's meetings. The toughs would march up the road, liquored up, swinging their kukkumacca sticks and making as much noise as possible, to the alarm of those waiting to hear my father speak.

Huie and his friends would lie in wait for the marauders, armed with slingshots and rocks and at a signal would attack the surpised bullies who ran in all directions shouting ‘murder!’ Two or three such encounters stopped the rot.

Huie came into Kingston and headed straight for the Institute of Jamaica, then the centre of everything intellectual and artistic in Jamaica. There he was soon noticed by Mr Molesworth, the Director, but more importantly by Edna Manley, who was teaching art classes there.

Soon, he was selected to represent Jamaican art at the New York World's Fair. He was 18. Huie won several prizes at the fair and never looked back. He was a foundation member of the so-called Drumblair group.  He did spend some time earning money by 'interior decorating' or house painting, but he never gave up his art and for years Albert could be seen with his easel, on various mountainsides or river banks, painting the Jamaican landscapes he loved. In a more civilised society  Huie would have made a good living, but it wasn't until near the end of his career that patrons began to realise the importance of his work and began to pay for it.

I believe that Huie brought with him to Kingston something of the quality of light of his Cockpit Country backgrounds – adding a mysterious quality that pervades some of his best work.

His work is in collections around the world, not as well known as it should be, but now commanding the sorts of prices that should have made Albert a wealthy man But his wealth is in his vision and he, like his fellow Trelawny man, Rex, is a national treasure and he fortunately, like Rex,  lived long enough to know that.

The title of this piece is "Jamaican Mahogany", because Huie and Nettleford remind me of the giant mahogany trees which during our lifetimes, adorned the Cockpit Country. Their lightness and grace belied their immense size and it was only after they were no longer there that it was possible to understand what an important part of the landscape they formed. In the case of Huie and Nettleford, these were not simply a part of our intellectual and cultural landscape, they were also, more important, architects of the very landscape in which they were such important components.

Dr George Proctor

   I first met Dr George Proctor when I was at school, spending my Saturdays at the Institute of Jamaica – either at the Junior Centre or at the Science Museum. I remember Proctor as a rather gawky American reputed to be very learned and aloof. He would not remember these encounters. It was much later that we had any real contact, and only  a few years ago I at last did what I had wanted to do for years, interview him for a column

As I wrote in a column (Treasure in the Badlands) seven years ago, The Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, is the world's third most biodiverse region. and an almost unknown place in Clarendon called  Harris Savannah is one of the jewels in our crown, unlikely as it may seem.

"I consulted the leading expert on Harris Savannah, Dr George Proctor, who has spent the last fifty years attempting to find and catalogue every species of plant in this part of the world. In the first 6 years of this somewhat quixotic mission, Dr Proctor collected and catalogued about 12,000 specimens in Jamaica alone. Since then he has catalogued and described well over 100,000 plants and has become one of the world's foremost botanists. He is THE expert on the Jamaican flora, particularly on ferns – of which we possess 609 taxa – a great many of them discovered by him. At the age of 82 he is still exploring, discovering, collecting, and cataloguing.

Dr Proctor thinks Harris Savannah is a very special place - not only by Jamaican standards, but by any standards. It is, he says, is a scientific treasury."

This column is not about Harris Savannah and the riches it may mean for Jamaica. It is about Dr Proctor who, at 90, has just been found guilty of conspiracy to murder his wife and three other women and sentenced to four years in prison.

I do not contest Dr Proctor's guilt, although I find it hard to believe that he has been convicted on the word on a man who is a professional liar and con-man with 70 convictions for various frauds and misrepresentations.

If a jury found him guilty, so be it.

My objection is to the sentence. I appeared in court on Dr Proctors behalf to give evidence in mitigation. I told the judge that I believed Proctor to be a man with a great respect for life, as evidenced by his life's work.

 I told her I was there to try to prevent him going to jail because , I said, if you lock him up you are going to kill him. I thought it would be pointless to send a 90 year old man to jail in any case

The judge referred specifically to my appeal and declared that despite what I said, a 'balance' had to be struck

I do not understand what balance  she meant and I implore  my readers help me understand.

Prison sentences are supposed to induce remorse, to be  deterrent, to set an example, to prevent future offences. Does this apply to Proctor?

Dr Proctor is 90 and in Britain and the US would be accounted legally blind.  He suffers from diabetes, from macular degeneration of the retina and from glaucoma, any and all of which would tend to slow anyone down, particularly at 90.

Dr Proctor spent five days in the lockup at Central Station, sharing a cell with an accused murderer who he said treated him kindly. He was supposed to sleep on a concrete slab, to be shared with his cellmate. Dr Proctor can barely walk, cannot stand straight and in court was unable to sit up. His head rested on the pew in front of him.

He said to me, before court began

"John, my head has shrunk from the few days in jail," and it appeared to be true. As a diabetic he requires special food. None was available. He couldn’t eat. He was not allowed to buy even a cup of coffee. The first cup of coffee he had in five days was at the Supreme Court.

 I believe that conspiracy is notoriously the easiest charge for prosecutors to make. It is very difficult to disprove a conspiracy.

Whatever the merits of the Crown's case, I believe, in the end, that the proceedings cannot be described as either in the public interest, nor, as civilised.

Copyright 2010©John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com

John Maxwell

It would be ironic, if you like your irony flavoured with blood and disinfectant, to discover  that moored off Port au Prince at this moment is  the US hospital ship, the USS Comfort, one of two employed in 1994 as floating slave barracoons in Kingston Harbour. Today the Comfort is providing medical care for people  injured in the great earthquake of  January 12.

In 1994, the Comfort and its consort functioned as temporary 'processing facilities' for Haitian refugees fleeing from a US supported coup and attendant tyranny. The refugees had been picked up either on the high seas or in Jamaican waters, running for their lives from a US-backed hoodlum-state, whose favourite law and order procedures were murder by dismemberment and disemboweling with bodies left in the streets; and   women and children, beaten, publicly raped and disfigured and otherwise terrorised to encourage the others. Of those kidnapped either in Jamaican waters or on the high seas, 78.5% were sent back to their murderers while the rest were sent to Guantánamo Bay.

This barbarous triage was a joint venture operated by President William Jefferson Clinton of the United States and Jamaican Prime Minister Percival James Patterson. It was ended by Clinton's deciding he couldn't afford the death of a prominent black American leader on his record, if not on his conscience. Randall Robinson, President of TransAfrica, in one last desperate initiative, began a fast to the death in protest against his President's callous behaviour.

Clinton had inherited "the Haitian problem" from his predecessor who could tolerate any number of fair-skinned Cubans dropping in on Miami Beach, but was revolted by the idea of Haitians doing the same thing. It didn't matter that the Cubans, like Jamaicans and Mexicans were economic refugees while the Haitians were literally  in fear of their lives.

This point was made explicit in 2002,  by a former US Ambassador to Haiti, Timothy Carney, at the launching of the Haiti Democracy Project, the  most important US NGO operating in Haiti. The launching was at the Brookings Institution, one of the most eminent right ring 'think-tanks' in Washington.

Carney said:

"Ambassador Roger Noriega mentioned that one of our interests is to defend human rights, but he didn't mention the fundamental interest, which is to defend Miami Beach. We don't want Haitians on Miami Beach … That is a fundamental interest of the United States … Now that you have realized that interest, you hopefully will have policies by which Haitians can realize their prosperity and their future at home.

" How do you do that? Well, we haven't figured that out yet, have we?"

That was a job for the Haiti Democracy Project and other US backed subversive NGOs whose function was simply to make sure that the President of Haiti, legally elected, would be unable to govern.  These NGOs, dozens of them, using tactics honed in the 'peaceful overthrow' of former Communist states, didn't work well  in Haiti; violence and provocation were introduced. The most effective weapons against Aristide were the press releases of the NGOs, swallowed whole by a criminally compliant US press.  Even now, six years after Aristide was kidnapped by the then US Ambassador, US news agencies are printing garbage about "Aristide, deposed amid a violent uprising.'

These days, the USS Comfort, Bill Clinton and P.J Patterson are back in the organised hypocrisy  game, along with new players like Ban Ki Moon who is proving as clueless about Haiti as his predecessor, Kofi Annan. Obama has brought back G. W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice's mouthpiece. No doubt there is room for old Haiti hands like Roger Noriega and Otto Reich. Pity they can't reanimate Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, both eminent authorities on black people. But there's always Luigi Einaudi: "The only thing wrong with Haiti is that it is being run by Haitians"

Encouraging News

There is good news for those people, and there are many, who worried that valuable American cash was being squandered on hapless Haitians who specialise in provoking Acts of God.

The Associated Press reports:

 Only 1 cent of each dollar the U.S. is spending on earthquake relief in Haiti is going in the form of cash to the Haitian government, according to an Associated Press review of relief efforts.

Less than two weeks after President Obama announced an initial $100 million for Haiti earthquake relief, U.S. government spending on the disaster has tripled to $317 million at latest count. That's just over $1 each from everyone in the United States.

Relief experts say it would be a mistake to send too much direct cash to the Haitian government, which is in disarray and has a history of failure and corruption.

"I really believe Americans are the most generous people who ever lived, but they want accountability," said Timothy R. Knight, a former US AID assistant director who spent 25 years distributing disaster aid. "In this situation they're being very deliberate not to just throw money at the situation but to analyze based on a clear assessment and make sure that money goes to the best place possible."

The AP review of federal budget spreadsheets, procurement reports and contract databases shows the vast majority of U.S. funds going to established and tested providers, who are getting everything from 40-cent pounds of pinto beans to a $3.4 million barge into the disaster zone."

So, the worry warts can rest.

For one thing the Canadians and Europeans have donated more per capita to Haitian relief than the US and deserve a larger part in the  immediate relief works.

Organisations like the Haiti Democracy Project and John McCain's International Republican Institute will make certain that American money is spent on Strengthening American democracy and defeating the populist interests which have made governance in Haiti a problem ever since the peasant rebellion 90 years ago which required the machine gunning of entire villages to restore law and order.

Meanwhile the United States, Canada, France and the rest of the (rapidly diminishing) civilised world met in Montreal a few days ago to devise a plan for developing a Haiti for the Age of Globalisation.

The participants were more or less the same countries who plotted to depose Aristide. "Shortly after Aristide's overwhelming victory in Haiti's first democratic presidential election in 1990,  the relicts of the Jim Crow Marine occupation managed to convince the Americans, first John McCain's International Republican Institute and then elements of Bill Clinton's government and various Canadian politico and officials that Haiti under Aristide was a threat to civilisation as they knew it.…"

Denis Paradis, a Canadian Minister, convened a coven of like-minded fascists, "who decided that Aristide must go, and the Canadians and Americans through the Canadian aid agency (CIDA), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and John McCain's International Republican Institute financed a whole panoply of Haitian francs tireurs, pimps and wannabe-presidents and face-card NGOs to support the programme of the elites which was simply to grab back from the Haitian people, the Universal Human Rights promulgated 200 years earlier for the first time on Earth by Jean Jacques Dessalines and the other illustrious fathers and mothers of the Haitian Revolution." (Common Sense-Canada's Bloody Hands' April 19,2009)

This is the juncture where things get really tricky.

It would appear to me that a people who fought for their freedom incessantly, for 300 years and finally won it 200 years ago deserve to be accorded considerable respect. Moreso, because they fought as slaves, entrapped and circumscribed by the system itself and despite this, defeated three of the world's most powerful armies, one of them twice. They are the only people in history to have broken their shackles themselves. Spartacus who tried valiantly but failed, is revered as a European hero. Bouckman, Toussaint and Dessalines are ignored by the same historians. It is not so odd; TIME recognised Margaret Thatcher but not Fidel Castro as a revolutionary.

Those Haitians whose savagery, indiscipline and general lawlessness the western "press" celebrated  in slavering anticipation failed to show. The Haitians who survived behaved as those who know them expected: patient, disciplined, and displaying an exemplary solidarity, sharing their crusts while starving.

It was these same people who declared universal emancipation and universal human rights two centuries ago and who have told anyone who wants to listen that they know what they want and who they want to lead them and speak for them

They know how to develop their nation, if only, for the first time at last, they are allowed to do what they want.

They need help, but help on their own terms.

They want work, real work, not plastic 'jobs' in freezone  sweatshops..

They want to go back to feeding themselves. They want to be complete Haitians again; the people who helped Bolivar liberate South America.

The world needs to get out of the way. France, the United States and Canada owe the Haitians billions in damages. It is not for them to tell the Haitians what to spend it on. France used Haitian money to conquer Algeria. Haitians want that money to conquer child hunger and maternal mortality.

If the General Assembly wants to prove its worth it should move quickly to take the Haitian initiative away from the clueless and overtaxed Security Council. The Assembly can – guided by  the Haitians and with the expert help of Cuba, Venezuela,  South Africa, Kerala (India),  Brazil,  China  and other parts of the developing world – map out an agenda and organise help from wherever it is available without strings. The object is not to defend Miami Beach but to protect the vital interests of the Haitians, and, by extension, the vital interests of humanity.

And, if anyone wants to know what to do right now: Land 10 thousand wheelbarrows on the streets handing them over to neighbourhood groups. Let the groups decide how they are going to move the rubble and what they are going to do with it. Give the groups money and supplies to set up 10  thousand street kitchens say about $200 a group. Let the groups pay the wheelbarrow men if necessary.  In three weeks the casual journalist would be hard put to find any of the 'usual' stories. Total cost $2 million plus $1 million for wheelbarrows.

Meanwhile the UN can be assembling a real security force to protect the Haitians and particularly their president and under his direction, design and instal the apparatus  allowing Haitians to run their own country and to make their own mistakes, for the first time at last.

 COPYRIGHT©2010 JOHN MAXWELL – jankunnu@yahoo.com