The Caribbean island of Jamaica has a population of less than three million, yet this small country has a global importance greater than many that are far bigger. This is the focus of The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson’s recently published book.
Himself Jamaican, Patterson contends that the extremely brutal history of the island’s slave system explains much of modern Jamaica’s dysfunction, including a high incidence of violence: last year 1,332 people were murdered, a per capita rate three times higher than the average for Latin America and the Caribbean.
In January 2018, due to rampant violence and murders, the government of Jamaica declared States of Emergency and Zones of Special Operations for several parishes.
Numerous historians have documented that more abducted Africans were brought to Jamaica over the course of the slave trade than were imported to the entire continent of North and Central America and the enslaved were worked to death. Poverty remained the lot of most of its population after slavery was abolished and even after independence in 1962.
On paper, the country created a Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, with the consolidation of the country’s two main political parties, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNP), both founded in the early 1940s. The 63 members of the House of Representatives are elected in single-member constituencies by first-past-the-post voting.
On Sept. 3, the centre-right JLP won 49 of 63 seats in a general election. Prime Minister Andrew Holness had called for the early vote in what analysts saw as a bid to capitalise on people’s satisfaction with his economic agenda and early response to the COVID-19 virus.
The result was one of the larges margins of victory in decades, with the JLP gaining 17 new seats, but also one of the lowest voter turnouts at 37 per cent. The left-of-centre PLP, under Peter Phillips, remained in opposition, with 14. The two parties have monopolized power since independence.
In 2011 Holness lost an election to the PNP’s Portia Simpson Miller, the country’s first female head of government. Four years later, the tables were turned, and Holness beat Miller.
All of this hid another reality: by the time it was granted independence, Jamaica had established a pattern of political clientism which permeated partisan politics. The fact that jobs, houses, and other rewards were distributed and controlled by the victors of an election added to the stakes of party affiliation.
For politicians, the dispensation of patronage proved a powerful means of securing electoral support, and thus violence erupted around it. After all, for members of the various constituencies, ensuring that their candidate won was tied very directly to the material conditions of their lives. As one commentator put it, “when your party is in you eat; when the other man’s party is in you starve.” Under these circumstances, violence began to supplement the electoral process.
It led ultimately to the two parties losing control of their respective gangsters, who ran their own protectionist shadow governments within the poor and violent slum areas around Kingston and Spanish Town, commonly referred to as “garrison communities.”
By the 1970s, near civil war between gangs acting as proxies for the political parties left hundreds dead from gun battles. I travelled around Jamaica on public buses in 1975-1976 and it was indeed fraught with danger, especially in and around Kingston.
This was the period when government was controlled by the PLP under Prime Minister Michael Manley, whose brand of democratic socialism “scared the professional and capitalist classes,” writes Paterson (who served as a special advisor to Manley from 1972 to 1979).
Patronage, however, is not the only way that “the democratic process both enables and is enabled by violence,” he asserts. While we tend to think the ballot replaces the bullet, Patterson maintains that in Jamaica the bullet followed the ballot. Democratization coincided with extreme levels of violence.
The forms of mobilization that large-scale democracies require tend to calcify political identities and exacerbate conflict, he concludes, and he demonstrates how parties and elections inspire a solidarity and loyalty that ultimately entrench divisions and violence within a society. He calls this the “tribalism” of democracy. It’s a problem in all too many countries.
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