The 1967-1972 Administration

• Author: Trevor Munroe/Arnold Bertram
• Profession: Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Fellow, political scientist, labour activist and politician, is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of the West Indies, Mona/Distinguished commentator on Jamaican Social History and Political Development is a former Legislator in both houses of the Jamaican Parliament and a former Minister of ...
• Pages: 320-370

320 / Post-Independence Administrations

The 1967 Elections: Background and Results

The defeat of the nationalist Party on the eve of Jamaica’s

Independence, not only demoralized the PNP, but generated internal

dissention as well. A part of the leadership never forgave Norman Manley

for holding the referendum on Federation and calling general elections

two years early, thereby depriving the PNP of its perceived historic ‘right’

to lead Jamaica into Independence. Wills Isaacs, the most vocal against

Jamaica joining the West Indies Federation, resigned his Vice-Presidency

and all other posts in the party. William Seivwright, Norman Manley’s

confidant since 1938, who had broken with his mentor on the question

of Federation, retired from active politics.

The full weight of the political defeat came down heaviest on Norman

Manley as his biographer, Vic Reid, described:

He was a tired man, bone and mind, weary from the strains of

past campaigns fought so much alone, and battered by the worst

of the few defeats he had received in his efforts. Those who saw

him in those agonised weeks commented on his restlessness, the

unaccustomed apathy, the torment that obviously racked him.1

In May of the following year, Norman Manley came out to lead the

PNP’s annual Labour Day march in the city. This time it ended in a

rout. The corporate area was no longer the PNP stronghold it had been

The 1967–1972 Administration

Chapter 8

The 1967–1972 Administration / 321

since 1949.

The disintegration of the national movement at the centre produced

a proliferation of small and overly ambitious left-wing organizations,

each seeking to occupy the vacuum left by the PNP’s retreat from

socialism. The first two such organizations were the Unemployed

Workers Council (UWC) and the Socialist Party of Jamaica. Both were

formed following the split in Richard Hart’s People’s Freedom Movement

(PFM) that had unsuccessfully contested the 1955 elections. The UWC

led by Ben Monroe was Marxist/Leninist in its orientation and extremely

critical of Hart’s leadership of the PFM, which was described as

opportunist.

If the UWC’s opposition to all forms of political unionism tended

to give it a maverick coloration among leftwing forces, its activism

among the urban and unemployed, and its defence of destitute

slum dwellers, loaned it a specificity unmatched in the history of

Jamaican post-war social movements.2

While Monroe and the UWC were establishing a militant presence

among the urban poor, Hart and the rump of the PFM, along with the

veteran communist Hugh Buchanan, established the Socialist Party of

Jamaica in September 1962. Its president was Purcell Lawson, a former

civil servant in the Income Tax Department, who had started a bakery

and a small shoe factory in Allman Town.

Simultaneously, a younger stratum of the radical intelligentsia

affiliated to the PNP started the Young Socialist League (YSL), with

Norman Manley and leading industrialist Aaron Matalon attending its

first meeting and giving the organization their blessing. At its first

conference, the league set itself the objective of working as a vanguard

within the PNP to reorient the party to socialism once again, having

recruited to its ranks an extremely able and committed cadre of militants

drawn from the ranks of the intelligentsia, including Hugh Small, Trevor

Munroe and Robert Hill.

Within a year, there was a split in the YSL between those who

favoured working within the People’s National Party and those who

322 / Post-Independence Administrations

argued against this strategy. By 1965 the Young Socialist League as well

as its affiliate, the Workers’ Liberation Union, had run their course. The

fall out came at the 1964 Conference of the PNP, where confrontation

with the Party’s Right isolated the League from the mainstream of the

PNP. The following year, its leaders, Hugh Small and Dennis Daley

were both expelled from the PNP.

The Left as a whole, however, found the going hard in independent

Jamaica, as the anti-communist orientation of the state became evident.

Bustamante himself made it very clear just what communists could expect

from his administration, as he addressed Parliament in November 1962,

‘I have plenty of empty cells for communists, to lock them up … that is

my policy, to lock up communists.’3

Ironically, the PNP despite its historical embrace of socialism, was

hardly in a position to rebuke Bustamante, since in their two

administrations, between 1955 and 1962, they had issued some 190

prohibition orders restricting the movement of known socialists and

communists.

The first five years of independence completely transformed

Jamaica’s economic, political and social landscape. Phenomenal growth

in the manufacturing sector had contributed to an impressive

performance in the economy. The major problem was unemployment,

which had grown from 12 per cent in 1960 to some 24 per cent in 1967.

The opportunities for large-scale emigration, which had kept

unemployment down in the 1950s, were no longer available. This, more

than any other factor, contributed to 50.7 per cent of the population in

Jamaica between 15 and 19 years old being unemployed or not gainfully

occupied by 1967.

One stratum of this increasing ‘army’ of urban unemployed turned

to Rastafarianism, embraced its moral and cultural codes, despite the

ridicule of the middle and upper classes as well as continuous police

suppression. Another stratum became the vanguard of a rebellious youth

movement known as ‘Rude Boys’, which developed a culture of resistance

to elite values and modes of behaviour, particularly in their deportment

and speech. It was from this stratum of the lumpen proletariat that

political parties recruited ‘soldiers’ as political warfare intensified, in a