Jamaican Till I Die!

When it comes to reporting on the UK, all our Local media outlets have failed the Jamaican people. Take Brexit for example, it is amazing how we managed to report on Brexit without highlighting the daily racist hate mongering and hate crimes happening in the UK. Our Local media continue to make the British look civilized and the Jamaican people uncivilized. Our local media and the UK media have no problem reporting on the nasty underbelly of the Jamaican society while selectively reporting on the UK society. I will never understand why our local Jamaican media reports on the United Kingdom the way they do, with blinkers on and very selective trying to shape hearts and minds to become Anglophiles. I know for a fact that if the British media does 10 news reports on the Jamaican society then 9.5 of those 10 reports will be very negative and extremely disgusting. This is regardless of all the good things that maybe happening in Jamaica with good people, doing good work. In fact, af...

Cultural Conditioning or as the British historians Niall Ferguson calls it, the use of Soft Power to control hearts and minds. Making the subjugated do what you want them to do and think how you want them to think. This concept came back to me while I was watching the 1939 movie Gunga Din. A story about the exploits of colonial Great Britain in India. Growing up in post-colonial Jamaica, as in most other colonial countries, meant we inherited the mind-set that White Great Britain was Right, good, benevolent and we the black, brown, indigenous people wrong, useless and worthless. This is what the British spent over 350 years beating into us as a means of control. To relinquish control to the British, one must first accept the British concept and narrative about who we are as a people. That we are useless and worthless, uncivilized savages and without the British, without the Mother Country to save us from ourselves, we would be in a worst off. Where would we be without the Mother Cou...

Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Search who got what and how much Some Jamaicans are so desperate trying to identify Jamaica’s “ Oh So Special ” moment in history, trying to identify with something big, great and special from our past that they are now claiming that the period of Slavery was Jamaica’s “ Oh So Special ” moment to be proud of. I often wonder why Jamaica’s half breeds and white population are so willing to identify with the whip hand of slavery, with the plantation slave owners. So quick to sing their praises to the black population, like rubbing salt in the wound of our ancestors. My great, great, great grandfather was Lord Racist Overlord and he owned 300 slaves. Any comparison between wealth generation during the period of slavery and wealth generation today is flawed and should never be made by anyone. To treat the period of slavery as a special time in Jamaica’s history is an insult to humanity and a bigger insult to Jamaica’s black population. To make...

Many Jamaicans have a romantic notion of life in old colonial Jamaica. Somehow they feel that life was better for all under British colonial rule and I sometimes wonder just where they got this idea from. Yes life was very good for a chosen few, the colonial class. Yes it was a simpler time but back then the vast majority of Jamaicans lived in poverty and the only difference is back then they accepted their lot in life. Just before independence 80% of the Jamaican population was functionally illiterate. One quarter of the total workforce had no jobs. No real housing, no running water or electricity and the distribution of land ownership and the means of production represented gross and growing inequalities. At that time pre-independence Jamaica had a very small middle class. During colonial Jamaica, just before independence only 20% of the population could read and write  During colonial Jamaica the unemployment and underemployment rate was as high as 45% to 50% of the popul...