Repeating history

IT HELPS, I think, to have a sense of history: an idea of what went on in years gone by, and how what is happening now will be written about and studied tomorrow as history.

I have just finished reading the Reverend Peter Duncan's early history of the Methodist Church in Jamaica (published in 1849); just before that I read the early history of the Baptists in Jamaica by Revs Clarke, Dendy and Phillippo (1865). They lived through that great watershed period when slave society was disintegrating because of its own internal contradictions, and its supporters made strenuous if futile efforts to sustain it.

Nowhere were these efforts more vigorous than in the Jamaica House of Assembly, whose members - the economic and political elite of the colony - used that House to further their own interests. They introduced bills to restrict the non-conformist missionaries, and to prevent slaves from interacting with them. The constabulary, militia and judiciary - made up mostly of persons of the same ilk - played their part in shoring up slave society, as did elements within the established church.

Ultimately, what brought the system down were changes in the mother country. Support for religious diversity in Britain led to demands for similar toleration in the colonies, and local laws which restricted religious freedom in Jamaica were disallowed by the Crown. But when in the wake of Sam Sharpe's 1831 Christmas Rebellion officialdom, along with supporters of the Colonial Church Union (CCU, based in St Ann), imprisoned missionaries and des-troyed Baptist and Methodist churches across Jamaica, heads began to roll. The Crown demanded the break-up of the CCU.

The Hon Henry Cox, a chairman of the CCU, was removed from his position as custos of St Ann; two magistrates (Rose and Heming) were dismissed from the bench; and on Huntley Common, the top officers of the St Ann militia, including their commander, Colonel Hamilton Brown (after whom Brown's Town is named), were publicly cashiered by the governor in front of the company.

Held captive by the elite

The prospect of freedom for the slaves was not popular, and many called for Jamaica to leave the British Empire and join the United States of America (which still had a strong slave society). The Assembly passed the Emancipation Act once the slave-owners had been promised monetary compensation for the loss of their (slave) property. All this stemmed from strong pressure on the political and economic elite exerted by forces outside the country. Without it, where would Jamaica be today?

Today, our present political and economic elite holds Jamaican society captive in another kind of slavery - to political corruption and criminality. In years to come, when the history of our period is written, garrison communities, the stuffing of ballot boxes, the hugging up of dons by politicians, the nexus between guns/drugs and politics, gun salutes at funerals, the resistance to full transparency and public disclosure, large secret private-sector donations to lobby foreign governments to drop extraditions, the rape of the natural environment in the name of progress and development, all will be looked upon as the dark ages of Jamaica's early independence.

Aiming to sustain corruption

Thankfully, this brand of corrupt Jamaican society is passing away, disintegrating due to its own internal contradictions; yet, as before, its supporters are making strenuous if futile efforts to sustain it. Legislators pass anti-corruption laws which can't do the job, to put on a good show: like the Access to Information Act, while retaining the Official Secrets Act, and Corruption Prevention Legislation with secret declarations. History will not absolve them.

Inevitable as the change is, someone is going to have to drag us - kicking and screaming - to the table of transparency, accountability and true democracy, because clearly our politicians, like their predecessors in the Jamaica House of Assembly, won't give up their political spoils on their own. A few years ago, the British refused to sell our police any more guns because of the high incidence of extrajudicial killings. The Americans seem willing to bring to trial high-profile Jamaican drug dealers and gunrunners on whom our security forces collect evidence but seem unwilling to prosecute. We need more of this sort of pressure.

In years to come, as the history of our period is written, the names of our present political actors will go the way of Hamilton Brown and Custos Henry Cox, socially nice people (it was said of them), but hopelessly steeped in the negative values of their day.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and a Roman Catholic deacon.