Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang Read Free Book Online Page A

Rastas traditionally reluctant to participate in what Peter Tosh called the Babylon
shitstem
all clamored for change. Sufferer anthems took over the sound systems. The resistance to roots reggae finally gave way on JBC radio, as listeners came home from the yard dances to demand that tunes like Delroy Wilson’s “Better Must Come” and the Wailers’ “Small Axe” (cut with Perry) be played during daytime hours. Burning Spear summed up the mood of the time: “The people know what it is they want, so they themselves go about getting it.” 10
    Compared to Seaga, who had worked the nexus of culture and politics for years, Michael Manley, the democratic socialist PNP candidate, was a late-comer. But as Manley geared up for the 1972 elections, he began appearing at political rallies with his “rod of correction,” a staff that he said had been handed to him by Haile Selassie, in explicit recognition of the influence Rastafarianism held among the poor. The rod, he said, would lead him to redressing injustice. Befitting his new image, he spoke of reggae as “the people’s language,” and selected Wilson’s “Better Must Come” as his campaign theme. The following year, the PNP swept the JLP out of office. In Laurie Gunst’s worlds, Jamaica in the ‘70s was “a fever-dream of raised consciousness and high hopes.” 11
    But better never came. The twin downpressing forces of Cold War positioning and global economic pressures ripped Jamaica apart.
    Manley’s democatic socialist government pushed through key social reforms, including lowering the voting age to eighteen, making secondary and university education free, and establishing a national minimum wage. But when Manleymoved to reestablish relations with Cuba and build solidarity with leftist leaders in the Caribbean and Africa, CIA surveillance sharply intensified, and First World leaders withdrew aid and investments. In 1971, Jamaica received $23 million in aid from the United States. By 1975, that amount was down to $4 million. 12
    The worldwide oil crisis-fueled recession hit the Jamaican dollar hard, unleashing economic chaos. Prices tripled while wages declined by half; a paycheck suddenly bought one-sixth of what it used to. Labor unions unleashed an unprecedented number of walkouts. Between 1972 and 1979, there were more than three hundred strikes.
    North American banks refused to renew aid loans. Jamaica’s debt doubled between 1975 and 1980 to $2 billion U.S., the equivalent of 90 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. 13 After a bitter internal fight, the PNP reversed course and finally agreed to accept emergency loans for Jamaica from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who imposed severe austerity measures that caused goods shortages and massive layoffs. The IMF’s plan wreaked long-term havoc on the island’s economy, wiping out entire industries. To pay off the skyrocketing debt, the PNP raised taxes, causing other businesses to flee the island.
    In 1973, gun violence broke out between rival gangs in the Kingston yards. Manley first placed the island “under heavy manners,” expanding police powers to search and raid, and stepping up joint police-military operations. He then established a special Gun Court, where gunmen and illegal firearms traffickers faced mandatory indefinite sentences for their crimes.
    By the end of 1976, when Manley declared a State of Emergency—the Jamaican equivalent of martial law—it was becoming clear that much of the violence was politically motivated. In the Kingston yards, gangs had divided and mapped their turf. As Seaga had long understood, gang leaders were useful to party machinery—they delivered a yard’s votes in election years, fought the ground war during the off years. In turn, politicians granted jobs, favors, and programs to the area dons, who organized the youths into work-groups or