THE panel of three lawyers representing the Disciplinary Committee of the General Legal Council (GLC) nervously crossed every ‘t’ and dotted every ‘i’ before agreeing to strike Antonette Haughton-Cardenas off the roll of attorneys, for allegedly misappropriating funds from one of her clients.

They knew that they were dealing with a gladiator of the legal profession and a worthy adversary. The last time they clashed, the case went all the way to the United Kingdom Privy Council, when the GLC had insisted that all attorneys should file an annual accountant’s report, which was really a way for the Council to watch what lawyers were doing with their clients’ money. Haughton-Cardenas did not think they had such powers.

More importantly, though, the Legal Council – the body responsible for hearing complaints against attorneys-at-law for professional misconduct under Sections 11-17 of the Legal Profession Act – knew that their decision might well have signalled the end of an illustrious, if controversy-plagued career.

Antonette Marie Haughton, now 54, was born, it seemed, to a life of conflict and advocacy, in quiet Islington, St Mary. It probably is no mere coincidence. In time, she would come to champion the rights of the deprived from behind radio microphones, doing it with an energy and a passion often mistakenly described as anger.

While detractors found unkind ways to describe Haughton’s conduct of her talk shows – starting with RJR’s Hotline, which brought her to national prominence – the hordes of admirers couldn’t get enough of her. To them, she selflessly articulated the hurt and pain of their daily existence, and if she seemed the rebel, it was for a just cause.

Strong interest in the Black Power Movement

Haughton grew up in a political home, her parents being activists for the People’s National Party (PNP). The first signs of that would come when she passed the Common Entrance Exam and went to St Hugh’s High School in Kingston.

She told an interviewer that at that school: “I found out that I was different, not that I thought I was,” but perhaps because she had a habit of walking and singing to herself. But Haughton admitted she was not your “normal, obedient child”. She felt she was entitled to ask questions of anyone at anytime, or to disagree with them. That included the principal.

At St Hugh’s, she developed a love for history and a strong interest in the Black Power Movement of the 60s, which led to clashes with a white teacher she thought was racist. But Haughton was active in school, becoming, at different times, form captain, house captain, debating team captain and the like.

One day she was suspended on grounds that she was being disruptive when she brushed off another white teacher who tried to pull down the hem of her garment, saying it was too short, which it was.

Haughton at the time was doing things the school did not expect of a student. For example, she subscribed to the Abeng, a radical newspaper published on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). She declared herself against the “straightening of hair” and wanted her parents to “stop burning my hair”.

As house captain, when she led the prayers, it was different. She would read from the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr, or quote from the Negro Prayer: “Lord, we ain’t what we wanna be, Lord, we ain’t what we gonna be, but thank God, we ain’t what we was.” The teachers would be stupefied.

But to Haughton, her activism was not unusual. She had grown up hearing her father – who at one time or another was head of

the Banana Board, the Coffee Board, the Cocoa Board etc – talking about African heroes like Patrice Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah.

She played a prominent role in a student demonstration in Cross Roads, Kingston after a ban was placed on the wearing of the afro hairstyle, then popular among some students. Clearly at their wits’ end about how to deal with Haughton, the teachers quietly resolved to get rid of her at the earliest opportunity. That moment came when she was caught chewing gum during the inaugural fifth form graduation ceremony. The school wrote to her mother, advising her to take her out of St Hugh’s forthwith.

Michael Manley Award for Best Speaker

Wesley Powell, the legendary educator who ran the Excelsior School, accepted Haughton, against frantic advice from some St Hugh’s teachers who warned she would “mash up” the school. Her response was to pass three ‘A’ level subjects, and absolve Powell.

While at Excelsior, she won the Michael Manley Award for Best Speaker in a competition put on by the Inter-Clubs Committee of the UWI Guild of Undergraduates then headed by a certain Edmund Bartlett. She also copped the Hugh Shearer Cup in the Inter-High School Debating Competition.

Long before braiding hair was popular here, she and several students had theirs braided, after going to a performance by the visiting dance group, Les Ballets Africains from Guinea. Importantly, in sixth form she met the wife of CLR James, the author, and became part of a group of women who did a survey of domestic helpers in Jamaica. In one case, they went to Red Hills, upper St Andrew, with a questionnaire and found out that working conditions were appalling and the wages even worse.

Haughton was also an active member of the Sixth Form Association, which linked up with the Youth For Social Change. They would go to Trench Town some Sundays to do a survey on living conditions but on each occasion she would take back with her the awful scenes of squalor and deprivation of those stomach-turning slums of Kingston’s west end. She was also a member of the Jamaica Youth Council which spearheaded a campaign to get 21-year-olds to vote, arguing that in reality only 23-year-olds could vote at the time.

After ‘A’ levels in 1972, she left Excelsior for the University of the West Indies enrolling in the Social Sciences and majoring in Government. In the first week on campus, she got involved in a strike by the Trevor Munroe-led University and Allied Workers Union (UAWU), as part of a student support committee.

Sneaking a film out of Guyana

An insatiable lover of politics, her activism at the UWI intensified, if anything. She became part of the Union of Democratic Students, chairing its cultural committee.

After her first degree at 21 years old, she received a scholarship from the Government of Jamaica to do law. At the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, she wasted no time in joining a radical student movement. But Barbados would be special for many things, not the least of which was the fact that it was there that she would meet the Cuban envoy and university professor, Osvaldo Cardenas Junquera. She would marry him, in 1993, as if to say “there!” to anti-Cuban Jamaicans.

She represented the Union of Democratic Students at the congress of the youth arm of Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in Guyana where she met the late PPP leader and his wife. Not long after, she would go back to Guyana on a less innocent mission.

In 1976, she went there to receive a video-documentary on the alleged electoral atrocities of the Forbes Burnham regime. The documentary, titled The Terror and the Times, was secretly made by a group of film-makers. She was asked to sneak out the film to a contact at the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) in Barbados. Haughton carried out the mission with little or no thought for her own safety.

The notorious gunman Copper

While at Cave Hill she would return to Jamaica during the summer holidays to work with the prison reform programme of the Michael Manley administration. It was at that time that she met some of the most notorious criminals of the day, including Lancelot Henry, Donovan ChinQuee, and most importantly, Dennis Barth alias “Copper”. Copper escaped from prison in 1977-78, along with another well known convict, Malone Gordon. From his hideout, Copper sent her a note saying he would like her to write his biography.

Copper was a criminal in the tradition of the fabled Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest. He robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. That made him extremely well-loved. His philosophy was that no one should rob from the poor. The biography was never written and Copper was killed by police in a dramatic firefight that excited the nation. ChinQuee, whose oil paintings she had once mounted in exhibition from prison, was killed in an internecine warfare. Haughton thought it all seemed such a waste of young lives. But her own resolve to tackle the social problems that created the Coppers and ChinQuees intensified. Her activism had taken her beyond the point of no return.

This activism had intensified until it was clear even to the most casual onlooker that for her there was no turning back. Everything that would happen from here on would merely confirm the inevitable.

Home from UWI, Cave Hill, Haughton kept company with people such as Bob Marley, reggae and the Third World’s largest superstar and a rebel himself. She recalled how the superstar played a song for her and liked to refer to her as “lawyer dawta”.

About this time – in 1974 – Haughton worked with the Constitutional Reform Unit under justice minister Karl Rattray. She was a supporter of the PNP, starting with the PNP Youth Organisation, and contributing to the party’s political education programme. Haughton saw then PNP leader and prime minister Michael Manley as “the most creative, progressive and caring leader” that Jamaica had ever known.

“It was all about his policies,” she argued in an earlier interview. “The fundamental problem of Jamaica is one of poverty and exclusion. Michael Manley tried to deal with it head-on – his anti-apartheid stance, the issues of inequality in the nation and globally, and the courage he exhibited. the absolute correctness of his position. I am sure now, as then, that if your intentions are correct, then your errors can be lived with because you were trying to improve things. I am an unabashed supporter of Michael Manley.”

In 1979, she qualified as a lawyer, after two years at Norman Manley Law School, and continued her political activities. The 1980 election campaign was being fought. bitterly. But in the midst of it, Haughton became the campaign manager for Sam Lawrence of Central St Mary. Twenty-two years later, she would again be on the hustings, but this time, for her own party.

Tony Spaulding, the legendary PNP politician

Prior to that, of course, the young lawyer had joined the staff of the Ministry of Social Security and Welfare as a junior legal officer, to work off her government bond. At the end of that, she set up private legal practice in St Mary, the parish of her birth, while forming an association with the late Tony Spaulding, the legendary PNP politician and lawyer in Kingston. She describes Spaulding as “a tough but good criminal lawyer and tactician” from whom she had learnt “how to practise law on the ground”. During that period she was also associated with another legal luminary, Lowell Marcus.

She gave much of her time to legal-aid work in St Mary, frequently not even bothering to send the invoice for her work to the Government.

When the English Lord Anthony Gifford came to Jamaica to live and to practise law in 1991, Haughton was recommended to him as a good person with whom to partner. At the time, she was also a partner with Hugh Thompson.

Haughton took many children of relatives and friends into her home, becoming a surrogate mother to them.

The Hotline was hot

All this time, Haughton’s star was rising. Her passion and advocacy had not gone unnoticed. One morning in 1992, her office telephone rang. It was RJR inviting her to do a trial run for a possible co-host position on their top rated Hotline talk show, alternating with the venerable Barbara Gloudon. Haughton jumped at the chance, got the job and remained on the show for almost 10 years.

She had now arrived on the national stage and she would find that the court of public opinion was much different from the court of law. Previously, her exposure to the public, apart from her legal practice, had come from reading poems as a member of the Poetry Society and as guest moderator for Man Talk on TVJ, discussing rape in marriage. She had also appeared on Leahcim Semaj’s Night Doctor on RJR. Reflecting on the Hotline development, she told the interviewer: “One is completely exposed to the public. There is something disconcerting about being in the public eye, but that is what talk radio is about.” Yet, she was hooked. She recalled that the first day she appeared on the Hotline, people came off the street into the station to ask who was that woman on the programme. She spoke freely and passionately. One day as she railed against the proposal by the Electoral Advisory Committee (EAC) to introduce fingerprinting of voters, EAC chairman, William Chin See warned her he would have her charged for sedition and RJR got nervous. She was asked to drop the issue but responded by telling the general manager in no uncertain manner that she was “not a ventriloquist dummy” and if he wanted to speak, he should take the microphone!

She went on to take on institutions, saying she had worked hard not to be partisan on the basis that “we are one people and should operate as such”. As far as she was concerned, radio was an opportunity for the voiceless to be heard.

One outstanding example was the case of the 13-year-old boy, Damian English, who was being denied an opportunity to take the Common Entrance Examination (CEE), on grounds that he was too old. The case had been brought by the boy’s mother to Haughton’s partner, Lord Gifford, who passed it on to her. In the end, the court ruled that Damian had a right to sit the test, which he did. After that, the education ministry closed the loophole through which the case had been won, ensuring that henceforth no child over 11 years of age could sit the CEE, now replaced by the Grade Six Achievement Test, or G-SAT.

‘I love you, Miss Haughton’

Her own popularity on the show grew with each passing day. She straddled the social classes by opting from perfect English to patois. Callers, female ones in particular, were known to openly express their love for her and the work she was doing, often encouraging her to enter representational politics. At the height of her popularity, Haughton exchanged the radio microphone for the political platform.

It might have been her level of disillusionment with the two-party political system, or just plain naivete, when Antonette Haughton formed the United People’s Party (UPP) – on August 14, 2002 – fully knowing that Jamaica was a political cemetery for such parties. But in a way, her life had been leading up that road and it really was only a matter of time.

But this was the real world now. She would learn that Jamaican politics could be brutish, later describing her relatively brief flirtation with it as “an incredible walk with God”.

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