THE little country church in the sleepy, deep rural district of Clapham was filled to capacity on that rainy evening 10 years ago.

It was Miss Eva’s funeral and it seemed as if every household had emptied itself to attend. I sat on a hard church bench like everyone else as Connie, one of Miss Eva’s grandchildren, walked past the casket and up to the pulpit to sing in honour of the widely loved matriarch of the Wallace family.

Connie was 20-something and just a little slip of a girl. As country funerals go, I expected nothing more than the usual — droning hymns and overdone speeches. And then Connie began to sing and the church, including myself, wondered how such a giant of a voice could come from such a small body.

I was stunned because her voice was ‘off the charts’, meaning it had that quality that immediately made one say, “Why is she not earning millions making recordings?” Halfway through the song Connie broke down in tears and was unable to continue. I must confess that in the years which followed I lost track of her. I know she was a back-up singer for Luciano and other headliners, had a daughter and travelled extensively as she gathered credits for the full launch of her solo career. In recent times she did back-up for Shaggy and was well on her way to stardom until tragedy struck in a most brutal and unexpected way.

On August 23 last year she was at the Crossroads Entertainment Complex in Maryland. Minutes before she was due to perform she had a seizure. Everyone was shocked because Connie took the view that what others tended to do in the rough world of entertainment was not necessarily her way. She therefore shunned the world of drugs and heavy drinking. At 34 years old Connie was diagnosed as having suffered from a brainstem stroke. Connie has Locked-in Syndrome — LIS — she hears everything, is able to react to some commands, but is unable to speak.

Her health insurance has since been used up by the hospital, which included costs for time in the ICU of up to US$5,000 per day. Connie should have been transferred to a rehabilitation facility from September 17 as she needs speech, vent-weaning care, and long-term occupational and physical therapy. The brain stem takes six to nine months to regrow and rehab will be for one to two years, depending on her response to treatment.

Proposals from rehab facilities ask for US$90,000 down payment as security, and monthly amounts of US$45,000.

These amounts are not petty, but doctors are of the view that Connie’s youth is a factor in her recovery. That will, however, take time. Her sister Sandra Campbell, a life underwriter with Sagicor, and someone whom I have known all of her life, said, “Her neurologists state that because she has youth in her favour she has a great chance, but her recovery will take time, and as the family is experiencing, it takes money for her recovery.

“I have personally met with Dr Trevor McCartney CMO, physiatrist Dr Paula Dawson, and spoken to senior personnel at the KPH about her return to a Jamaican facility. Her move here, they said, is not advisable as the hospitals do not have adequate facilities and human resources for a patient needing long-term ventilator support and rehabilitation.

“I am asking for assistance… as every bit counts. Connie has an 11-year-old daughter, Gianni, who is now in my care, and consistently dreams of her mother’s return.

“We have formed the CONNIE CAMPBELL FOUNDATION with accounts at RBTT, Dominica Drive: Ja Sav Ac# 44103172004606326 and US Sav Ac# 10317200406318.”

To compound matters, Connie’s family is under stress from the courts. Said Sandra, “I am to attend court in Maryland in April, as the hospital is suing for monies owed and are applying to the courts for custody of Connie, so they can make decisions on her behalf. If I get her in a rehab facility, the attorney said, the case will be dropped.”

I am asking readers to assist, not because Connie can and will sing again, not because she is one of us, not because she brought joy into the lives of those who heard her and knew her, but because life is tenuous and we are all subject to its unpleasant surprises.

Please, do all you can to give some help and make Connie sing again.

Does the JLP need Black Leadership?

A political party’s main product is not its policies, it is instead its leader; and that leader, once agreed on and chosen, or, to use the politically correct euphemism, elected, that leader must be the best salesman in selling himself to the electorate.

The vast majority of our people are black-skinned and over the years they have elected leaders who look nothing like them. In colonial times and just beyond that, enough of us found favour with the brown man Bustamante to eventually make him Jamaica’s first prime minister.

It is my view that when our people did this, as uneducated and poor as they were, for the times, they were not into the business of fooling themselves into believing that a black leader could get for them more than what a high-brown man could achieve. Plus, Busta communicated well with his targeted audience.

In 1972 another great communicator, Michael Manley, rose to political power with much heraldry. The people loved him, the women adored him and he wallowed in it until he moved beyond what he could realistically deliver. In 1980 when the political crescendo spilled over, Eddie Seaga, a white man, was catapulted to power. His communication skills never received better than a ‘good’ rating but, at the time, he was the master of selling the people on the dangers of the ‘other side’. He was never liked because he came across as too much of a cold planner. Some took this to mean that he didn’t like black people and merely tolerated them as a means to his personal end.

That he never cared to remake himself was a mystery to many as cosmetic engineering in politics is always the first expression of a need to win or, more importantly, strengthen political power. When this was added to what came across as waves of animosity in how he treated black second-tier leadership in his party, significant numbers of those in the electorate and in his own party saw him as uncaring, and not having the ‘common touch’. In those times, the label ‘big-man party’ appeared.

Ever since the early months of 2002, PNP supporters and some issue voters (surprisingly) would, if probed, admit that the JLP’s leadership was giving some credence to what the little man at street level, especially PNP supporters, were saying: the JLP is a brown-man party.

This was intensified in the months leading up to the September 2007 elections. The sociological path from the JLP being described by some as a ‘big-man party’ in the 1980s to significant numbers seeing it as a ‘brown-man party’ from 2002 to now is a complex one and, some may argue, not worth discussing.

Some believe that if a factor in our politics has no seal of approval from those considered intellectual, then it is a waste of time to bring the discussion to the level of a newspaper column. And then there is the very valid view that skin colour ought not to be, in a utopian, colour-blind world, a factor in any consideration. Well, the factor exists and to me, that is all that matters.

Others may form the view that we have too much on our plate now to be discussing such a matter. After all, they may say, did Jamaica not elect Norman Manley, an upper-class, near-brown man in pre-colonial times? Did we not also elect PJ Patterson and eventually made him the ‘winningest’ politician in Jamaica’s history? And, at the end of his run, which lasted from 1993 to 2006, for all that the ‘black prince’ PJ Patterson was worth in his governmental performance, Jamaica stood fourth from the last in GNP per capita of 25 countries in the region.

The perception that is supported by a majority among the electorate is that this Government has performed way below expectations, and because of this the ‘brown-man’ party label has resurfaced. When I asked a shop owner who is borderline JLP why he believes that the JLP is a brown-man party when it is going out of its way to ensure that Dudus, a black man, has all of his rights represented in dealing with the extradition request from the US, he quipped, “The first part is true, the second part is political expediency. Yuh trying to trap mi, but I dare yuh to tell mi a lying.”

Where is the example of black success?

There is no doubt in my mind that how we view skin colour in this country comes from our direct look (overseas travel, TV, cable, Internet) at who runs the planet. There are not five countries in the world that have black populations that black people could point to and say, “There, we can do it and more.” The other supporting influence is our own culture which sends a less-than-subtle message that brown-skinned or white Jamaicans behave better than black Jamaicans and, from the richest to the poorest, the colour fades respectively from white, brown, near-brown then black.

All of that coupled with the hangovers in the system from colonial times cause black Jamaicans to give more respect to lighter-skinned Jamaicans than those as black as us. It is more than likely that politicians such as the late Alexander Bustamante, Michael Manley and the still living Eddie Seaga perfectly understood that important factor and factored it into the times of their ascendancy.

Late last year Dr Oscar Lofters, a highly intelligent Jamaican living in Canada, wrote the following as feedback to a column on race by colleague columnist Michael Burke: “In Jamaica we have been conditioned to believe that white personifies power and progress. How can we not believe that white men who enslaved black people for centuries are not superior? All the great powers of the world for the last several centuries were white. We see white people land on the moon and win great wars.

“Then we see black people and black countries starving and begging for handouts. We see black people fleeing from poverty to the white meccas of New York and Miami. Everything our children see on white-inspired television reinforces white superiority. For God’s sake, even the Jesus we worship in our churches is white. Our children see a black music icon change himself to a snow-white freak and we wonder why our children now bleach themselves. Then we tell our children that black people were once great. We dig up Egyptian history and great tales of African superiority and our children wonder where are the great current black countries and mighty black people. Then they see a Jamaica political and business class of brown and white citizens who appear in the social pages of our newspapers in fine raiment holding dainty champagne glasses, while most black citizens survive on a patty and a soft drink daily and live in squalid garrisons .”

Stark and true, but the fact remains that the most successful politician in Jamaica has been PJ Patterson, a black man, and it is my belief that that is why certain elements within the JLP have been covertly examining more than the possibilities of changing the ‘face’ that the JLP shows to the electorate.

The fact that the ‘brown-man’ leadership in the JLP has not signalled that it has the tools to deliver is giving this push more validity. As those in the forefront ponder the possibilities, the first big step lies in the recognition that the majority of the black entrepreneurial class (likely funders), which threatened to break big time into the rarefied air of ‘top of the class’, was destroyed at a time when there was a black prime minister, PJ Patterson, and a black finance minister, Omar Davies.

Well, so much for the dream.

Would you partake in mob killing?

It happened at the beginning of last week and it has shaken me up so much that I am rethinking my views on vigilante justice.

A young school girl, not yet 12, from a district in the Red Hills area, goes missing last Monday. All involved go in search of her. Among those desperately trying to find her is a taxi driver who plies the route between Chancery Street and Padmore. He accompanies relatives to the police station to report the child missing.

That same evening, in a mix of the worst of horror movies and miracles, a tragedy unfolds. That same taxi driver turns out to be a beast of the worst sort. Earlier he had picked up the girl from Half-Way-Tree, driven the long way up into the bushes by Smokey Vale, stopped the car, manhandled the child then brutally raped and did other unspeakable things to her.

After he was finished, he bashed her head in, dug a grave and buried her, thinking she was dead. While he was pretending to look for her, the girl, who survived, dug her way out of the shallow grave and ran naked onto the nearby roadway where she was rescued by a passerby.

At the hospital the early hope is that she will be able to retain sight in the eye on the side of her head the monster bashed in. She told them what happened and later the police arrested the man.

I have never been a supporter of mob violence, but even the father of the monster said, “If mi si dem a kill him, mi wi tun wey mi head.”

Jamaican businessman Doug Halsall, CEO of Advanced Integrated Systems, wrote recently that it was his hope one day that in Jamaica, “…crime will soon be tamed to be more that of passion, rather than those born of anger, depravity and deviance”.

What makes this crime so depraved and the wider Jamaican community so scared is that the taxi driver involved was ‘just another man’ trying to earn a bread by working like the rest of us. The question is, if his mind could conjure up such a sick, depraved idea and he could bring it to reality, what does that say about the rest of us who are ready to make the claim that we are normal and not prone to such extreme and deviant behaviour?

Were it my daughter involved, that police station could not hold such a monster.