The People’s National Party (PNP) led by Michael Manley won the general election of February 29, 1972. Michael Manley was sworn in as prime minister on March 2, 1972, 45 years ago today. It was the end of a political campaign that really started in 1969 when Michael Manley was selected PNP president and appointed leader of the Opposition.

Despite the booming economy of the 1950s and 1960s, many Jamaicans lived in hovels, went about barefooted, and in the rural areas little children carried buckets of water on their heads. It is in this context that the PNP’s 1972 slogan, “Better must come”, should be understood.

From 1971 into 1972, for the first time ever in a Jamaican political campaign, the use of recorded music and a reggae bandwagon was employed as part of a campaign strategy.

Michael Manley would later write in Struggle in the Periphery: “The PNP was always socialist in the sense that it never said that it was not.” But Michael Manley shelved the word socialism between 1969 and 1974. In those times, political campaigns were mainly done in the form of political meetings.

Michael Manley went to Ethiopia and received a rod as a present from Emperor Haile Selassie in 1969. It would henceforth be called the “rod of correction”. Whenever Michael Manley arrived at a meeting and displayed the rod, the crowd went wild with excitement. Once when his home was broken into, Manley said afterwards at a political rally at the Simon Bolivar statue: “I know why they broke into my home.” He then showed the rod, as if to say that the real and only reason for the break-in was to steal the rod. Then Manley said: “But an angel appeared to me in a dream and said, ‘Joshua, let not thy rod out of thy reach.’” The atmosphere got electric again.

At that time Hugh Shearer was the prime minister. But the only person in the Jamaica Labour Party hierarchy who understood what was happening was the sociologist Edward Seaga. He produced a walking stick at a Jamaica Labour Party meeting and said that he had found the rod. Manley then called a meeting at Coronation Market and produced the original rod.

Seaga understood the use of religion in elections, as it had always been used in Jamaica up to that point. In 1990 he would say of the ‘Gang-of-Five’ that they should “take up a candle, sing a ‘Sankey’ and find your way back home”, signifying a distinct understanding of the use of religion in politics.

In the old days, Christian hymns were sung at political meetings. There have been reports of the use of obeah to frighten illiterate voters in the rural areas. In 1989, the PNP stopped one of its defeated candidates from carrying such a case to court. But between 1969 and 1972 it was not traditional Christianity or obeah, but Rastafarian theology that was popular among the younger generation. Many saw Rastafarianism as a Jamaican expression of black power.

Leonard Howell founded the Rastafarian Movement in 1930 at Pinnacle in St Catherine. The heightened popularity of the Rastafarianism in Jamaica might have started with the visit of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1966 and enhanced after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in April 1968 and the expulsion of Dr Walter Rodney from Jamaica in October 1968.

The election date called by then Prime Minister Hugh Shearer was the result of a strategy of the PNP. Councillor Eric Bell, who was also a PNP-appointed senator, said at a meeting of the Kingston and St Andrew Council that he was charging the prime minister to call the election by February 22 — a date that would have been beneficial to the JLP, as that date was close to Alexander Bustamante’s birthday.

But no self-respecting prime minister would comply with such a demand from the Opposition. So Shearer announced February 29 as the election day, which the PNP said was the birthday of Edna Manley, the wife of National Hero Norman Manley. Shearer had fallen into a ‘trap’ set for him by the PNP. But Edna Manley could not have been born on February 29, 1900, because 1900 was not a leap year. Normally, a leap year must be divisible by four, but the last year of a century must be divisible by 40 to be a leap year. While the year 2000 was a leap year, 1900 was not, and the year 2100 will not be a leap year unless changes are made to the Gregorian calendar. No one did sufficient homework to know that it was a hoax until some years later when the late Hector Wynter, a former JLP minister of government in the 1960s (later editor of The Gleaner) pointed it out.

Hector Wynter ran and lost for the JLP in 1972 for the St Ann North Western constituency. Today, one could simply download any information about leap years on the Internet, which was totally unheard of in 1972. Information on leap years was contained in the front pages of my first form maths textbook called General Mathematics when I was in first form at Jamaica College in 1964. I graduated from Jamaica College in 1971. But in 1972 I did not know which year Edna Manley was born.

Perhaps Hector Wynter did not know which year Edna Manley was born either, until Edna Manley (The Private Years 1900-1938) was written by Wayne Brown in the mid- 1970s. Her birthday was actually March 1. But such is the stuff of which politics is made, whether we like it or not.

Up to the early 1990s, issues of the day were very important in campaigns for winning elections. In the earlier years, Norman Manley was no match for Alexander Bustamante’s charisma, so his strategy was to have an organised PNP. So it became a tradition for the PNP to be highly organised.

In any case, popularity alone does not win an election — a fact that Michael Manley understood very well. A highly organised PNP mobilised its voters on February 29,1972 and gained 37 of the 53 seats. This was reduced by the court to 36 seats in 1974 following an election petition by the JLP’s Arthur Williams Sr. Williams was declared the winner over the PNP’s Douglas Manley in Manchester Southern.

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