4 J’cans who cast ballots in first election under Universal Adult Suffrage compare then with now

BY KERRY MCCATTY

If you asked most people what they were doing 70 years ago today, they’d probably look at you like you were crazy. But at least four Jamaicans, all more than 100 years old, could answer with confidence, “I was voting — for the first time.”

Lister Richards, 105, of Waltham in Manchester, remembers clearly, because, well, he remembers everything.

“I’ve voted every time from 1944 ’til now, both local and national,” Richards says in the living room of the home he built himself. “I’m a Jamaican,” he adds with a laugh. “I’m a Jamaican; don’t need more [reason] than that.”

But it wasn’t by choice that he, Verena Smith, Robert Kennedy and Veda Morrison all waited until they were more than 30 years old to vote. In fact, for these citizens, and a reported 389,000 others who voted on December 14, 1944, that day was no ordinary Thursday. It was the day of Jamaica’s first election under Universal Adult Suffrage.

The only ‘new’ conditions to vote were that you had to be a Jamaican citizen and you had to be older than 21. Before that, only people with property of specific values could vote.

Like Richards, all of these seniors state their commitment to voting in a very matter of fact or practical way. They make no deep, philosophical statements about voting in that first election, even if they were aware of its significance. Voting seemed, and continues to seem like just the thing to do, and they are proud of their record of participation.

Veda Morrison, 102: “Dem seh yuh supposed to vote, I vote. Only way I don’t vote, I must sick. I’m voting all my life.” Later she says, “I think it is right to vote.”

Robert Kennedy, 100: “People sometimes follow customs and practices and habits… and sometimes you don’t even have to question the reason why. You just do what others do.”

Verena Smith, 101 (‘and six months’): “A yuh me love, when election come, me guh gi yuh mi mark, since a fi mi.”

The two ladies tell stories of inconveniences or even injuries they endured so they could vote. Smith remembers that in one election she walked endlessly just trying to find her polling station. But she was not deterred.

Morrison tells of an accident involving a truck in which she and a number of other people had travelled to a polling station to vote. She injured her right breast and eventually had to have it removed, after being diagnosed with cancer.

“So I suffer bad in voting and yet,” she says, emphasising the ‘yet’, “I still vote when voting time come around.” And then she begins to wonder aloud, “I think it was parochial, I don’t think it was general election…”

Clearly, however, Jamaicans didn’t always feel passionately about a right many people didn’t even know they could have prior to the 1930s.

In a new publication titled History of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica, the country’s electoral administration body explains that newspaper articles, radio announcements and dissemination of information by school masters and members of the clergy formed part of the work that went into preparing the population for the 1944 election. For one, to accommodate adult suffrage, the Electoral Office of Jamaica had been formed.

“Prior to the election period, a film, Adult Suffrage and the Secret Ballot, illustrating the functions and duties of a presiding officer, poll clerk and the elector in the polling station had been prepared under the direction of the chief electoral officer. The showing of the film was very effective in educating very large numbers of people who had never voted and were quite unaccustomed to the procedure in the polling and recording of votes,” the ECJ book says.

And this was necessary by Richards’ and Kennedy’s accounts, because people really didn’t understand much about the right to vote.

“They loved some of the political parties. They did not really consider the right to vote. For example, if you were the leader of a party and you are more humorous, people would gravitate to you. But we did not even understand the reason for voting. Do we want this thing or do we want that thing, or would we be more free or whatever? No,” Kennedy says. Eventually, he says, people started considering policies.

For Richards, it was as if the eyes of the population had been opened to perceive a reality they never even considered before national heroes Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley, who were instrumental in lobbying for Universal Adult Suffrage, rose to prominence.

“I don’t know how to describe it. Jamaicans were unlettered people, and we were subject to the idiosyncrasies imposed on us by the British, so that it was chiefly a plantation society…

“So that when Bustamante came, he stirred the feeling of oppression imposed by the British and then the people became alive to the inequalities and indecencies and so on. So Bustamante really awakened the eyes of the people, along with Norman Manley,” Richards says. “Because all those years coming up to 1944, we were veritable slaves, although slavery was abolished a hundred years before that.”

All of these senior electors speak of Manley and Bustamante easily, the way you speak of something you really know. Morrison can even recall direct quotes from political meetings she attended in her home parish of St Catherine. So too Kennedy, who attended meetings in his district of Asia in Manchester. He remembers, as well, that he briefly considered entering politics.

“From Bustamante and Manley time, you know seh dat deh time deh me a sweet gyal you know,” Smith’s recollection of the heroes begins. “Anyweh dem meeting deh mi di deh. As fi di Bustamante him, mi did love him fi kill. An dem always keep meeting outta crossroad, you know, and as dem come suh, mi di deh. Whether Bustamante or Manley. Mi ha one bway mi gi him name Busta, you know,” she says.

But those are the stories of the past, and in present-day Jamaica, many people feel no enthusiasm about politics or about voting. This baffles a couple of the seniors. Politics wasn’t the centre of his life, Richards says, as he spent years working 18 to 20 hours a day to support his family, but when it was time to vote, he was present.

“I don’t know why people don’t vote, because if you’re a right-thinking person, you must have an idea of where you want to go and what you’d like to happen and so on, and you see what is happening and you like or dislike it. So, people, I don’t know. What is wrong with people these days is that 90 per cent of the people on earth today think only in terms of what I can get, and not what I can give. What I can get. And the prime decision and thinking behind what I can get is how much money I can get to live the way I want to live and not how much I can get to help a needy person out there,” Richards says.

Kennedy, who himself hasn’t voted since he returned to Jamaica in the late 1990s, thinks young people especially have a responsibility to elect their representatives.

“I think young people should vote to build their country, and to become leaders if they have good training, because if I’m a politician and you were in the same party with me, I’m supposed to lead you upward, not downward. I am not sure that a good percentage of our young people are looking up,” he laments.

For Morrison, it’s a matter of fulfilling a duty.

“I love the law and I try to live up to the law. If you have to vote, you supposed to vote and live up to it,” she says.

And for Smith, it’s quite simple. “If dem like, dem galang guh vote (for) who dem like. ‘Cause dem mus like smaddy. Anybody that they like; any party that they like, yuh can’t seh anybody, yuh have to seh any party. Any party dem like, guh gi dem mark. As simple as dat.”

— Kerry McCatty is Electoral Office of Jamaica’s public education officer

KENNEDY… believes young people especially have a responsibility to elect their representatives

MORRISON… if you have to vote, you supposed to vote

RICHARDS… I’ve voted every time from 1944 ’til now

SMITH… remembers that in one election she walked endlessly just trying to find her polling station