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Old-timers reflect on past elections
Published in the Jamaica Gleaner: Sunday | August 5, 2007
Adrian Frater and Gareth Manning, Sunday Gleaner Reporters
'Politics nuh nice again,' was how seasoned People's National Party (PNP) activist, Venetta Samuels, described today's political campaigning in comparison to what she called, the 'Father Manley and Busta' time.
Samuels, of Mount Salem, in St. James, who proudly proclaims herself a Comrade, says politics in the late '50s and '60s was a fun-filled and fascinating experience under the stewardship of former PNP leader Norman Manley and his Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) counterpart and cousin, Sir Alexander Bustamante.
"Those days you used to have JLP and PNP meetings going on two streets apart and people would move freely from one meeting to the other," said the sprightly grandmother. "In those days, we never had any fighting and guns ... it was all fun."
Eighty-year-old Ziola Foster, who was born in Cuba but came to Jamaica as a child, remembers the electioneering of the 1940s and '50s as an unadulterated exercise in fun and merrymaking. According to her, people used to look forward to attending the various political meetings and to participate in the lively political debates that usually followed.
"It was just all friendly bantering ... no cuss, no quarrel and no fighting," says Foster, who now lives in Montego Bay and New York. "After the elections, life would go back to normal until the next campaign time ... we never dwell on politics day after day like I see happening today."
For Samuels, one of the high points of electioneering back in the '60s was the ceremonial burying of the losing party the day after the election, which usually featured the participation of both victors and vanquished.
"If the PNP lose, the JLP would make a token coffin and we would all march through the town with a marching band playing and people singing and dancing," says Samuels. "At the end of the day, we would have a mock funeral and then it would be all over for the elections."
Happy times
Simeon 'Black Boy' Tomlinson, who grew up partially in the Barnett Lane area of downtown Montego Bay, smiled broadly as he reminisced on his experience with political campaigning as a young man back in the 1960s.
"PNP would go to JLP meeting with their broom and pretend to be sweeping them out and the JLP would do the same thing," said Mr. Tomlinson. "However, once the meetings were over, JLP and PNP supporters would dance together in the street. There was no fussing and fighting."
According to Tomlinson, violence did not begin to contaminate political campaigning until the mid-1970s when he says rival supporters started stoning each other's meeting. He says the stoning steadily turned to gun violence in subsequent years.
But, for 60-year-old Marcia Smith (not her real name), of Duke Street, in May Pen, the violence really started during the 1980 election.
"Man heart jus get wicked, we no have no good heart again," she says as she remembers the bloody election campaign period in which over 800 people died.
Smith has been voting every election since Independence, but she says politics has taken a nosedive for the worst, and no longer has any interest in it.
"Me not voting. Only time politician come roun is when is voting time. Before dat them tell you seh if you have problem go to Harry, and then Harry tell you seh go to Tom. Me no know if a sense me never have, but me a vote and me never get nutten from the party," says a frustrated Ms. Smith, alluding to her failed efforts to get a house from the National Housing Trust. "Me just frustrated with the system," she adds.
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