Edward Philip George Seaga was born on May 28, 1930, in the Evangeline Booth Home and Hospital, a Salvation Army hospital, situated at 202 West Newton Street (today a park and playground), in Boston’s South End.

His 18-year-old Jamaican mother, Erna Alleta Maxwell, was of mixed East Indian and European stock; her roots running deep in the hills of northern Manchester. His father, 29-year-old salesman Phillip George Seaga (who could sell snow to an Eskimo) was a second-generation Lebanese-Jamaican.

In the year Edward was born both his parents had recently departed Jamaica. They lived in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, following their marriage in Boston on October 19, 1929.

The hospital to which the young couple turned to deliver their firstborn was eight miles across town. The hospital was a respite of sorts; it prided itself on the wonderful “stories of poignant heartbreak and reinstatement to happiness” that it helped to bring about.

When Erna and Philip returned to Jamaica, they brought with them their infant son, then three months old. They baptised him on Dec ember 5, 1930, in Kingston’s Anglican Parish Church.

Young Seaga attended primary schools in Kingston and St James, and secondary school, Wolmer’s High School, in Kingston. After completing high school, he left Jamaica to study at Harvard University, fulfilling an unrealised “dream deferred” of his father’s. He graduated from Harvard in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts in social relations.

He returned to Jamaica, where, while with the Institute for Social and Economic Research, at the University College of the West Indies, he conducted anthropological field studies in rural village areas miles away from the University’s upper St Andrew location. He would later apply the insights gained from his studies of Jamaica’s rural life to aspects of folk life within the transplanted urban environment of Western Kingston.

Interest in Politics

The earliest indication of Seaga having any sort of sustained interest in politics were in newspaper articles and letters he wrote to the editor of The Gleaner criticising the policies of the 1950s’ People’s National Party government under Norman Manley. He had by then broadened his academic interest in rural folk life to include recording and producing its evolved urban musical form.

And to sustain himself financially he became an importer/distributor of recorded sound-system dance music. Seaga’s Gleaner writings brought him to the attention of founder and president of the opposition Jamaica Labour Party, Alexander Bustamante, whose emergence on the national scene owed much to his own strident letter writing (in the 1920s) against Jamaica’s ruling colonial order.

In 1959 Bustamante appointed Seaga to sit in the upper house of the Jamaican Legislative Assembly (later reconstituted and renamed the Senate), making Seaga, at 29, the youngest person up till that time to occupy such a position.

Seaga’s rise within the JLP would be meteoric. In 1960 he was elected assistant secretary of the party, and two years later he was elevated to the post of secretary. His analytically tough “Haves, Have-nots” speech, delivered on the floor of the Legislative Assembly, brought him fully into the national spotlight. In the speech, Seaga used hard social science data to highlight the glaring inequalities then existing in the Jamaican society.

He would shine more brilliantly, though – certainly in the eyes of the JLP leadership – in the JLP’s successful campaign in 1961 to defeat the PNP in a national referendum to determine Jamaica’s future in the fledgling West Indies Federation.

The Jamaican electorate’s decision to pull Jamaica out of the Federation not only defeated the federal idea (though not entirely); it also called into question the political ability of the PNP to continue governing.

Norman Manley was obliged to call an early general election – which he did four months prior to Jamaica gaining its independence from Britain.

Bustamante selected the 31-year-old Seaga to contest the West Kingston constituency in the April 1962 election.

The constituency was perhaps the most volatile within the corporate area: it was primarily into Western Kingston that peasants forced off their “country” land were migrating, swelling the ranks of the urban poor. Between 1944 and 1959, the West Kingston electorate had gone back and forth in its preference for candidates representing one or the other political party.

Seaga defeated by a narrow margin the PNP’s Dudley Thompson, a British-trained barrister and renowned Pan-Africanist. The JLP win brought the party into national power on April 11, 1962. Under Bustamante, the party would form the first independent government of Jamaica.

Bustamante named Seaga minister of development and welfare, at which Seaga served until 1967, when he became minister of finance and planning, after the sudden illness and unexpected death of Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Donald Sangster.

Seaga served at the finance and planning post until the JLP lost power – after two successive terms – to Michael Manley and the PNP in February 1972.

The JLP out of power in 1972, Seaga sought to set himself up as a venture capitalist. He’d eventually, though, establish himself more securely as a professional politician, having become unbeatable in West Kingston. Two years following the JLP defeat, in 1974, when the party needed a Member of Parliament with the most secure seat to lead them, delegates elected Seaga as party leader.

Head of Government

Towards the end of the 1970s, with the country teetering on the brink of economic collapse, the electorate saw Seaga as the leader to “bring back” and ultimately “deliver” the country. With strong backing from the US government, which viewed him as a bulwark against communist and left-wing forces in the region, Seaga led the JLP to a massive electoral victory over Michael Manley and the PNP – and their “democratic socialist” experiment. Seaga became independent Jamaica’s fifth prime minister.

In government, Seaga attracted significant inflows of foreign capital. The period marked “a shift from public sector to private sector investment”, wrote the eminent political sociologist Carl Stone in 1987. Seaga and his government also undertook a pro-Western and particularly pro-US foreign policy stance.

He became the region’s staunchest advocate of the Caribbean Basin Initiative, US President Ronald Reagan’s economic plan for the Caribbean. And Seaga led other Anglo-Caribbean states in opposing the left-wing Maurice Bishop regime in Grenada, enthusiastically backing, after Bishop’s demise, the October 1983 US invasion of the island.

His attempt, though, to cash in on Jamaica’s participation (as “peacekeepers”) in the invasion backfired when the PNP boycotted the general election he called a few weeks after the dust settled in Grenada; the uncontested win denying him the kind of political legitimacy he would have preferred.

The better part of the JLP under Seaga’s two turns in government was spent at crisis and economic management. By the time indications of growth had started to trickle in, an impatient electorate – which in much of the 1980s had lived through sharp cutbacks in social services and failures of several small businesses – returned Michael Manley and the PNP to power in February 1989.

Culture Czar

As minister of development and welfare in the 1960s, Seaga was the new nation’s cultural Czar. He created national cultural institutions and brought back from England, for final, heroic internment, Marcus Garvey’s remains. But Seaga also ran, managed and directed nationally staged events, shows, pageants and beauty contests.

One of the contestants he met, and fell in love with, was “Miss City of Kingston”, subsequently “Miss Jamaica 1964”, Marie (“Mitsy”) Constantine. But he was attracted to her not only because of her beauty: “Mitsy fitted perfectly my mind’s eye of what I wanted in a wife”, Seaga told me. They wed in front of 20,000 people in the Kingston Parish Church on August 22, 1965. Together they raised three children, Annabel, Christopher and Andrew.

Seaga remarried Carla Vendryes 32 years later. When they met, Carla was working on a project to help poor people set up their own small businesses. In September 2002, in the midst of his penultimate election campaign, Seaga would, at 72, father with Carla a “brand new” baby girl, Gabrielle.

At its November 2003 annual conference, JLP delegates voted for Seaga to continue as leader – but only half as enthusiastically as they’d done in bygone years. The JLP was about to plunge itself into an anarchic period of reconstituting and reorganising, the ruffling effects of which would test the limits of chaos theory. Bernard Headley is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Psychology & Social Work at the University of the West Indies, Mona. This article is from his notes and eventual biography of outgoing JLP and Opposition leader Edward Seaga.