Seventy-five years after his death on June 10, 1940, the St Ann Homecoming and Heritage Foundation, and friends, gathered last week Tuesday to celebrate the life and achievements of St Ann-born National Hero Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Much like a rite of passage, it was a calendar event in St Ann when the foundation hosted its annual Marcus Garvey Lecture at the foot of the hero’s statue in St Ann’s Bay.

I was privileged to attend this year to listen to former Governor General Sir Kenneth Hall deliver a most eloquent and erudite lecture on the subject. Sir Kenneth kept his audience of students, teachers, business persons, Garveyites, returning residents, and civic leaders entranced as he raised the question: How and why does Garvey exercise such a hold on our thinking after such a relatively short life of only 53 years?

How on Earth, you had to wonder, could that little man Marcus be so courageous to challenge, time and time again, in the USA, in England, in Central America, and in Jamaica, the existing order of things and in particular the assigned place of Africans in a colonial world?

Sir Kenneth, the teacher, did not spare any punches in defending Garvey’s continued relevance to Jamaica and to people of African descent all over the world. His contribution, said Sir Kenneth, was not just to challenge the system: “Of equal importance were the action programmes he introduced that sought to change it.” His was a bold, unprecedented, and still unequalled and unsurpassed achievement in the history of black liberation struggles anywhere in the world.

But, ‘hold the phone’; Garvey was not just a lecturer, a writer, an artist, politician, a thinker, a visionary, a leader. The Garvey that Sir Kenneth presented to us was also a man of immense courage, a fighter for human rights and dignity, who led from the front; one who never gave up even while facing tremendous odds. There is no evidence in his character, his actions, his beliefs that indicate that he was seeking personal gain.

The genius of Garvey is that he did not have to do what he did in the struggle for liberation. Having travelled and seen the conditions that affected black people on three continents, he simply stuck to his mission, which was to teach and motivate black people to uplift themselves from the universal degradation that had characterised their status in the early part of the 20th century.

Sir Kenneth told us how Garvey felt that the first responsibility of people of African descent was to uplift themselves. They should develop a vision of themselves that would inspire self-confidence, as they alone were capable of changing the perception of themselves.

And so he taught that black people had to interpret their own reality by writing their own history to reflect the true African perspective and not the perspective as others saw them. Art, poetry, music should reflect the struggle to change their conditions and create a vision of their black society that would support black dignity, black integrity, black aesthetics, and even religion.

Black dignity? What on Earth was this man talking about? Surely, said the veranda gossipers, the high-society folk, the landed brown and white proprietors, along with the colonial masters, this man is mad! Garvey was treading on dangerous ground.

So they hounded and arrested him, and tried to shut him out. But 75 years after his death, asserted Sir Kenneth, the man’s ideas still live on. More to the point, said the lecturer, in assessing Garvey’s relevance to Jamaica and to the black world, it is the impact of his ideas that stands out.

In Africa, many of the leaders who led their respectove countries into independence refer to Garvey’s philosophy as having great influence on their thinking, among them Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya.

And in the United States, the leaders of the civil rights and black power movements, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, drew on his philosophy in the organisation of their own movements.

Labourer’s progress inspires J’cans

Do you remember Isaac Barrant? His appointment as minister of agriculture and lands in 1950 was surely the embodiment of Garvey’s message that “people of African descent have a responsibility to define their own place in the world and the realisation that this is possible”.

Barrant was born in 1907 in Bath, St Thomas. He was forced to leave school early owing to the death of his father. He started his career as a labourer on parochial roads in St Thomas. It was also said that he was a truck sideman, whether true or untrue. He also worked as a linesman on a sugar estate and eventually a banana dealer for the United Fruit Company. With limited education, his only criterion for recognition, according to journalist Vivian Durham, was a profound faith in the common man and a devotion to the cause of helping to lift poor people out of the clutches of their degrading existence; this during the early part of the 20th century.

For his trade union militancy, his strength of character, and his humble roots, Bustamante chose him to run for the Eastern St Thomas constituency in 1944 against a background of the pride and prejudices of the reactionaries of the day. His grass roots connection whipped up support for the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union and the Jamaica Labour Party, and he beat the colonial stigma to become a member of the House of Representatives and then, shock after shock across the society, a government minister — appointed by Bustamante in 1950.

He became one of the most popular members of the House, cutting across party lines, and was said to be a favourite of Opposition Leader Norman Manley. As a parliamentarian, he caught on rapidly and made a fine contribution to parliamentary debates with a fierce dedication to the people of his constituency.

As described by Durham: “Prejudice dies hard, and more so in the face of diabolical, perverted, capricious, false, and blatant propaganda. Many were the jokes and slurs cast at him, a kind of ‘truck sideman’ cruel jest which nevertheless failed to move Barrant.”

As minister, he claimed several credits under his belt, including the idea of self-sufficiency for Jamaica in food, land for the landless by land lease, the development of soya beans as a major crop, the development of the rice industry, and introduced incentives for the dairy industry and the tobacco industry.

During his time, he also pioneered the expansion of the overseas labour programme, and although he was frequently lampooned, he broke through racial barriers and compelled the British colonial civil service to respect him.

This little man from rural Jamaica more than justified Busta’s instinctive faith in him. He would have made Marcus Garvey proud. In that most unlikely appointment of Barrant, Bustamante gave concrete expression to the hopes and aspirations of the working class. Barrant became a household name, and his progress inspired many black Jamaicans and helped to open the doors to black enrolment in the civil service.

The little peasant farmer from St Thomas unfortunately did not live to see Independence. He died in 1956. I stopped at his grave in 1977 when I was taken on a visit to his widow’s home in Port Morant following a push cart derby event Kaiser Bauxite had sponsored for the parish. It was the anniversary of his death, and flowers surrounded the family plot, as well as evidence of an annual Kumina event put on every year in his honour. A Sunday Gleaner was neatly folded on top of the tombstone, and I was told that every Sunday the paper was placed there by the family as a mark of respect for the icon’s contribution to the national movement and to the emergence of black pride and dignity.

That was Garvey’s legacy and relevance in action. And that was Isaac Barrant, in 1956, helping to raise the status of black people and to inspire pride in the castle of their skin, their potential, and abilities.

According to Sir Kenneth, what forces us to continue to place significance on Garvey’s ideas and messages are their continued relevance in Jamaica today. As the late Rex Nettleford put it: “There is no doubt that Garvey’s vision has come full circle to challenge us again in the 21st century.”

“This is so,” he suggested, “precisely because many of the challenges that existed then, have remained remarkably the same today”.

Lance Neita is a public and community relations consultant. Send comments to lanceneita@hotmail.com.