EACH generation has challenges not of its own choosing but its character and courage are tested and measured by how it responds. In that continuum, Donald Keith Duncan need not be enlarged beyond who he was in life but there are important lessons to be learnt from his seminal response to the society he confronted.

As an eyewitness to the burden of his challenge, I believe it is helpful to make clearer the moral purpose of his contribution.

In the winding staircase of my mind, I still recall seeing him as a tidy, clinical batsman of JC’s Sunlight Cricket team of 1959. Over a decade later, he appeared again as a major figure within an iconic movement that wrote one of the great chapters of social transformation and political courage the nation has known. For certain, Michael Manley didn’t go to the mountain top alone, there were others who walked with him; Dr DK Duncan was one of them. It was a time that found DK in the midst of relentless inequities, bitter socio-economic indignities and the cynical hypocrisies of a class-based nation aptly classified by Edward Seaga as ‘the haves’ and ‘the have nots’.

If Michael paralleled Fidel then DK was his Che Guevara. In the spirit of noblesse oblige like Che, a medical doctor, D K, then a young dental surgeon, forsook his thriving practice in Brown’s Town, St Ann to change wasted lives by lifting the poor and the forgotten in an uncaring land. The combined offerings of his fellow travellers on that journey forcefully provide an important story of unwavering commitment to the people’s good.

At the centre of the progressive movement stood Anthony Michael Spaulding, ‘the Trench Town Rock’, a brilliant attorney whose uncompromising quest to better the lot of the masses was informed by his generic linkage and living understanding of their circumstances. In the glorious tapestry of Michael Manley’s monumental social revolution, Tony’s unequalled contribution to the housing sector, underpinned by his pioneering work in the establishment of the National Housing Trust, is immeasurable.

The Wolmerian batsman Tony Spaulding not only forged an unbreakable partnership with DK but together they kept Michael fixed on a left-leaning, anti-imperialistic path that still captures the imagination of all who cherish the goal of social justice.

In that circle of social change were other consequential figures: Arnold “Scree” Bertram, the Calabar off-spinner, brilliant historian and strategist; Dudley Thompson, the formidable Queen’s Counsel and renowned Pan-Africanist; Dr Winston Davidson, the epidemiologist who not only spoke the language of social upliftment but competed on the hard ground of political combat as councillor for the Trench Town Division in St Andrew Southern.

At Tony’s Camelot too, the PNPYO’s presence was marked by a young Paul Burke who, along with the Spanish teacher Louis Castriota, personified the unyielding idealism of democratic socialism declared by Michael Manley.

Beyond others, who the former leader of the Young Socialist League, eminent jurist Hugh Small QC, once called “the sentimental left”, were substantial activists like Flo O’Connor, who headed the Jamaica Council for Human Rights; Ruel and Leroy Cooke; Sheldon and Norris McDonald; Martin Afflick, Perry Stultz; Councillor Lisa Holt; and a young basic school teacher, Portia Simpson.

Buffeted by such supporting thinkers and political activists, D K better understood that the struggle for self-dignity and a more equitable society demanded not only the morality of angels but the courage of Comrades here on earth, ready to die in the face of sabotage, misinformation and the cold, advanced weaponry of international capitalism and its local adherents.

Finite history with its cleansing properties found DK at the centre of that struggle as ‘the general of the streets’. Threatened, poisoned and assailed for his cause, he neither flinched nor compromised in that furnace of unrelenting attacks on the Manley experiment from the ground.

At the height of his powers, as general secretary of the People’s National Party (PNP), D K not only organised his party for victory in 1976 but held it together in the face of overwhelming violence, contrived shortages and sabotage, which continued up until its defeat in 1980. In this he understood well a tragic, if unavoidable, lesson of history is that every advance must inevitably contend with forces of reaction, and prepared himself accordingly.

In a real sense he was the ‘John Brown’ of the progressive movement, a man who lived his sense of justice, listened to his conscience until it became a trumpet call for action. Glorious, original, ramrod-straight and totally incorruptible, he earned the respect of all his colleagues and those he led — whether committed activists, Cuban-trained Brigadistas or the masses in the streets.

He accepted that God’s moral design will ultimately come to pass but applied the parable of the talents as a spiritual call to action here and now to stop the dying, heal wounds and improve the human condition.

He unapologetically believed in the power of the State to effect change and set the nation right. Perhaps this is why Michael Manley fittingly appointed him minister of national mobilisation in 1976.

In the end, despite the mellowing vicissitudes of his long journey, he continued his quest towards the liberation and fulfillment of humankind; never fully satisfied, he was the one who always asked, “Why not” and sought to do something about it.

Paul Buchanan is a member of the People’s National Party and former Member of Parliament for St Andrew West Rural.