While in Toronto Canada last week I went to a live free performance by Jamaica’s international star Shaggy. The massive crowd, composed mostly of young females of all races, enjoyed itself immensely. At one point Shaggy brought a young girl of about 12 on stage and serenaded her while the crowd cheered. When he did his signature piece “It Wasn’t Me” the place went wild. (Why are women of all ages invariably the biggest fans of “old dog” songs?) Afterwards Shaggy gave a studio interview shown on big screens around the venue where he came across as bright, articulate and humble. Having tasted stardom once before and then been almost forgotten, he realized fame was fickle - “Another guy might soon come along to take my place, so I’ve just got to enjoy it while I can”. Shaggy made me feel proud as a Jamaican – “What a nice guy” everyone kept saying. The crowd left feeling happy and in high spirits, which after all is what entertainment is supposed to be about. All in all it was first rate stuff. The man deserves to have sold 10 million records.

Whatever else he may be, Edward Seaga is unique. He must be the only non-native born white man ever elected prime minister of a predominantly black country. And has anyone else in recent times played such prominent roles in both the cultural and political development of a nation? A pioneer in Jamaican anthropology; a driving force behind the popularization of ska; an originator of Festival; arguably our best finance minister; the prime minister with the second longest term in office; the longest serving parliamentarian ever - no one else has influenced modern Jamaica in so many ways.

“It would be a fine thing indeed if the world was run by those who judge men from books and the world from maps!”. Napoleon’s jibe against ivory tower intellectuals came to mind when I read Marcia Sutherland’s December 5th letter about my article “Thinking in patois”, which accused me of “linguistic bigotry”, advised me to “examine the scientific linguistic evidence”, and chided me for lacking “scholarly expertise”.

The United States claims to be the land of the free. But like many television ads, the reality is very different from the image. The US contains only 5% of the world’s population but over 25% of its prisoners, and America’s incarceration rate of over 730 per 100,000 is the highest on earth. (Jamaica’s 135 per 100,000 is fairly normal.) In 1980 there were 500,000 inmates in the US. There are now over 2 million, two thirds of whom have been convicted for non-violent crimes, mainly drug offences. Average prison sentences have also increased, partly as a result of “three strikes and you are out” legislation mandating long fixed jail terms for repeat offenders. All this is the result of laws making it easier to arrest and convict suspects.

AIDS now kills more people worldwide than any other infectious disease and is mankind’s fourth leading cause of death, after heart disease, strokes and respiratory infections. And more people died of AIDS in 1999 than in any previous year.  In many affected countries the improvement in the quality of life that has taken place over the past fifty years is being reversed. In Zimbabwe over 25% of adults are HIV positive - the world’s highest infection rate - and some estimates there show life expectancy falling to 38 years, 17 years shorter that it would have been. “Healthy life expectancy in some African countries is dropping back to levels we haven’t seen in advanced countries since medieval times” says one UN Health Agency director. This is a far worse disaster than anything foreseen when worst-case HIV scenarios were first discussed. US Government analysts now say that a quarter of southern Africa’s population is likely to die of Aids, and the epidemic could follow a similar course in South Asia and the former Soviet Union.

The mapping of the human genome is one of man’s great intellectual achievements. And the sequencing of the 3 billion DNA letters of our genetic code will one day enable millions to live longer and happier lives. But to some the ‘book of life’ also shows that living things, including humans, are merely information-processing machines.

In 1955 Jamaica recorded 20 murders and our homicide rate was about 1 per 100,000. This was slightly above Britain’s, about the same as Barbados’s and about a quarter of America’s. In 1999 Jamaica recorded 848 murders or a rate of about 33 per 100,000. This was over 15 times that of Britain, and about 5 times that of Barbados and the USA.

Of the 22 countries where democracy has existed continuously since 1950, 18 have parliamentary governments - Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the UK. France has a hybrid system and Switzerland a plural executive. Only Costa Rica and the US have presidential governments.

Except for Switzerland and Sweden, the only countries to enjoy uninterrupted democratic rule between 1914 and 1945 were Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This was no accident. As the black American Economist Thomas Sowell wrote.

“History is nothing but a record of the crimes and misfortunes of man” wrote Voltaire. A famous Chinese proverb agrees - “Fortunate countries have no history”.
Compared to the often chilling chronicles of our nearest neighbours - Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic - Jamaica’s past makes pretty tame reading. We have no ‘Remember the Maine’ invasions, Citadelle Lafferriere horrors, or Trujillo massacres to contemplate with fascinated dismay. The Sam Sharpe slave uprising, the Morant Bay rebellion and the Frome riots would scarcely rate footnotes in these countries a mere 100 miles away. Jamaica did have to endure the unspeakable brutalities of slavery, but that was an almost universal New World experience. Even then slaves in the English speaking Caribbean were freed by decree a generation earlier than anywhere else, and there were no brutal liberation wars here as in Haiti.