The Paul Bogle statue in Morant Bay is being repaired. In the meantime, there are residents in St Thomas who do not want the statue to be put up again because, according to them, it does not look like Paul Bogle. What did Paul Bogle look like? Was the photograph on the old $2 note a true image of him?

In 1962 a book was put out by the Jamaica Information Service called Six Great Leaders. In that book we read that the Bogle photograph was brought to them by someone claiming to be a relative and claiming that it was a photograph of Bogle. Was it likely that a poor Baptist deacon in rural St Thomas would be in a position to have a photograph taken of him during or before the year 1865? I do not know, but it is very doubtful.

Now we learn from a Sunday Observer article of March 21 that the depiction for the statue was taken from Bogle’s grandson. It is quite possible that Bogle looked more like the grandson than the photograph which was never confirmed. We do not know what Nanny looked like. We do not know what Sam Sharpe looked like. And we certainly did not know what Jesus Christ looked like.

The most we know about Jesus Christ is that he was a Sephardic Jew and that he was neither lily- white nor jet black. He was a brown man of about my complexion. Incidentally, today is the Feast of the Annunciation in many of the older churches. We all should know that December 25 was not the actual day that Jesus Christ was born, but that date was chosen by the church in the West (the original Eastern churches use January 6 or January 7 as Christmas Day).

So if one is using December 25 as Christmas Day, then nine months before on March 25 is celebrated as the Day of the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel. Please read Isaiah 7:14 and Luke 1:26-38. I know that many consider it odd that I include Christianity and specifically Catholicism in my columns but there are many who read this column to get such information. They do not necessarily respond in writing, but whenever I am criticised for writing like this they always tell me to ignore the critics and continue.

The Roman Catholic Church has always given its sculptors artistic licence (within reason of course), and I believe that we should do the same. St Thomas is the parish of my ancestry and I know it well because I also worked there as a JAMAL area officer in the 1970s. Because of the estate mentality, many of our people, no less in St Thomas, have distorted views about good looks.

The fact that people bleach their skins in Jamaica stems in part from the fact that a certain mindset has been handed down from ancestors raised on the sugar estates, which frustrates all efforts to fully emancipate all people from mental slavery. And because history is not emphasised in schools the way it ought to be, many might ask out of ignorance what sugar estates have to do with mental slavery. The simple answer is that it has a lot to do with mental slavery.

It was on the sugar estates in Jamaica that slaves were most needed just as they were needed to pick cotton in the United States. The slave masters believed that to get the most work out of slaves, they had to be brainwashed into believing that the slave master was superior and that the slaves and where they came from were somehow inferior.

So the children of slaves were usually sold to another estate to be away from the influence of their parents. And there they would be domesticated into the ways of being a slave which included being taught to see themselves as inferior. The parishes with the most sugar estates like St Thomas were the last ones to have secondary or high schools. The Morant Bay High School in St Thomas was built in 1960, a mere two years before political independence in 1962.

Clearly, slaves were not to be educated and even more so after slavery was abolished when the slaves could decide not to work on the sugar estates if they wished. And to this day, the people who have remained on the sugar estates tend to have shed less of the mental slavery than others whose ancestors left the estates and were brought up somewhat differently.

Edna Manley, sculptress of the Paul Bogle statue, had no such problem. Yes, she was an Englishwoman but she understood herself and saw beauty in the sculpture of black people. For this she underwent a tough time by the snobbish upper classes 70 to 80 years ago. It is sad but true to say that Edna Manley understood racial equality much better than our own people do even today.

How does one conclude that the Paul Bogle statue is ugly? Who determines these things? Unfortunately the brainwash continues. One way to instil pride in a flat nose, thick lips and the thick African cheekbone is to have the same statue erected once again. And everyone who looks like the statue should be proud that the real Paul Bogle looked like them.

ekrubm765@yahoo.com