Bustamante (left) and Manley.
Rt Excellent Norman Washington Manley
Philosopher and statesman, he had a unity of vision that gave coherence to his many activities. He was excited and inspired by the task of creating a nation, and in doing this he taught us all, who were his countrymen, how to link thought with action, vision with one's everyday work, how to feed idealism into the nation's affairs. He demonstrated how power could be used to promote good government; and he insisted that if power were not linked with morality it would corrupt and destroy the society.- Philip Sherlock, Norman Manley: A Biography
Rt Excellent Sir Alexander Bustamante
If the word 'charisma' had not existed, the eruption of William Alexander Bustamante on the Jamaican scene in the 1930s would have caused some political scientist or other to have invented it. 'Charisma', in its original meaning, is the gift that God makes to man, freely, outside of compulsion - like the gift of grace.- Sylvia Wynter, Jamaica's National Heroes
The stature of the man and his work begins to assume significant dimensions when it is recognised that the qualities that produced the outstanding individual that he was, were generously and selflessly put to the service of an entire society and dedicated to a totality of experience producing ideas, programmes of action, vision for thebetterment of Jamaicans and the human condition. I refer, naturally, to the innovatory and creative vision of Manley who a generation ago stood, not altogether alone, but oftentimes lonely in his firm belief that the future of Jamaica turned on the people's capacity to create for themselves, their own goods, and make their own mistakes. 'Men', he once remarked, 'stand strongest when they are their own masters.' It was the bane of his generation that, by definition, people like himself were deemed incapable of being their own masters. And since nothing creative could, by definition, come out of the colonies, innovations and inventions awaited approval in the metropolitan centre. But Manley had an unshaken belief in the capacity of the Jamaican people to create for themselves, to carve out their own destiny.- Professor Rex Nettleford
Alexander Bustamante cannot be excluded from that generation which had a "distinct mission to perform" and his contribution cannot be ignored. The creation of a nationalist spirit in Jamaica would have been unthinkable if the bulk of the population, in this case the labouring classes of workers and peasants, had not been made to feel conscious of themselves as a class and had not been provoked to militancy and organised action. "The class militancy of the Jamaican crowd unleashed by 1938, although thus somewhat muted, has basically remained as a permanent element in Jamaican society. The old habit of class difference has gone forever, as testified indeed, by the way in which bitter complaint about 'bad manners' and 'abusive' language of the street populace has become, over the years, the stock in trade of the middle class and its communications media." Bustamante in his insistence that the common man, and indeed his countrymen at large, be treated with respect, allowed, no exceptions. Who else but Alexander Bustamante could say to a harried British Colonial Secretary who sought to limit him, as the leader of a Jamaican delegation, to a 20-minute audience, "I did not travel all the way from Jamaica to talk to you for 20 minutes!"- George Eaton, Alexander Bustamante and Modern Jamaica
The conclusion of this and other interesting perspectives can be found in Jamaica Journal No. 46. An extensive collection of other Jamaica Journal back issues are also available.
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