Marcus Garvey's beliefs and what drove him into action, as seen through his son's eyesThis message was delivered by Dr. Julius Garvey at an event in Montreal to mark the celebration of Jamaica 55th and hero’s day. We believe it was important enough a message for as much of the world to hear as possible. Here is the message as transcribed from the recorded speech. Note: there are a few omitted bits of the speech which were inaudible due to overriding noises, low volume or enthusiastic cheering. But we do not think that those were enough to take away from the essentials of the speech. Also note, some names of individuals mentioned may be spelt incorrectly, we want to apologies to such individuals or interested parties. Thanks and enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Garvey. I would like to thank the Jamaica association of Montreal for this invitation, for having me here to celebrate Jamaica's 55th, and to celebrate hero's day with this banquet. As you've heard, I'm not a stranger to Montreal, I was here from 53_62 and then left for the United States, and I've been practicing surgery in the United States since then. I've been going back and forth to Jamaica. I think Jamaican are a very special people do you agree? Then you're right. I think that the reason why we are so special, is because we have gone through so much- we've gone through the horrors of slavery and the subsequent horrors of colonialization, without any restitution for stolen, free labor and we have had to develop out of that background. Which went on for 350-400 years. That's a very long time to be brutalized- for having to go through hell on Earth. And I think that is why it is important for us to honor our heros, because our heros are the ones who fought free from the Spanish in 1865 and then from the British subsequently in: Tacky, and Nanny, and Sam Sharpe who said he would rather die on yonder gallows than to live as a slave. And of course, he paid with his life for so many others. But his rebellion in 1832 was what paved the way for the end of slavery in the Caribbean in 1834 Sponsored By: The Tattooed Trails Book. #Doyoudare No restitution for slavery And then there was Paul Bogle because, as many of you know, there was no restitution given to the slave. At the end of the period of enslavement, but the restitution was given to the slave master. To the tune of millions and millions of dollars. So the slave was landless, and he was going through then, another period of de-humanization... Many left Jamaica to go to other countries to work on plantations, the Panama canal etc., etc. And you know, Paul Bogle was a Baptist minister and he could not feed his family without land and so he took up the question of land and along with many of his compatriots, he was marching from Morant Bay to the seat of government and of course the British troops and the governor met them and started abusing them. They killed there approximately 800, and that was the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. So our ancestors have paid an enormous price for what we now considered to be our freedom. The inhumane Berlin conference. As we've heard, Marcus Garvey was born in 1887, that was two years after the Berlin conference in 1884-1885, when European countries simply sat down at the conference of Berlin, looked at the map of Africa and divided it up and said: you take this piece, and you take that piece and so on. Totally inhumane, totally brutal, totally greedy, totally selfish. And that was how colonialism began, and of course, imperialism extended out into globalization. Marcus Garvey was born two years after that process began and approximately fifty years after the end of slavery. He traveled throughout the Caribbean and Europe and he saw what went on, on the plantations in the Caribbean and he saw what went on, on the Panama canal. He worked there in Panama and he traveled throughout Europe as well as in England and he saw the way how they paralyzed the colonies, and he saw what the condition of the colonized were there in the colonies. Our history did not start with slavery. He worked for a magazine: Africa time and orient review, and he learned a lot about Africa and his own history... He learned where he really came from, he learned the actual history of Africa. And he learned that people who had been enslaved, their history did not start with slavery, and this is the thing which we have to teach our kids: (that our history does not start with slavery). He saw the brutalization, he saw the results of the brutalization. And on the ship coming back to Jamaica in 1914, he contemplated all that had happened up to that point in terms of his life, his experience, and what he'd read and it came to him: his epiphany... Where is the black man's representation? Where is his country? Where is his economic power? He hasn't seen it anywhere and he committed himself to reconstructing the African Civilization. Right there in 1948. So we know he had a significant vision, it wasn't just an ego trip or something. I think it really had to be his meeting with his master and his master telling him: this is your job: To rebuild the African Civilization- to redeem African people after 400 years of degradation, and he spent the rest of his life doing that. What does freedom mean? He was a Nation builder and out of that we have the Jamaican Nation. Out of that he influenced people like: Kwame Nkrumah and Kenyatta. And we have all free Nation in Africa, from about 1952... All of Africa is theoretically free, and the Caribbean is theoretically free. But I think if you understand current affairs, and if you understand that after the plantations system was over, that we have neo-colonialism: Kwame Nkrumah told us about that, and neo colonialism is with us today in the presence of the IMF, World Bank, The world trade organization and even in the presence of the United Nations. Where you have a large number of countries that represents most of the people in the world, in terms of the general Assembly, but the Security Council has the veto power within the eyes of very few peoples. So we have the continuing inequality, Mal distribution of wealth and globalization. And this is maintained by systems of government and systems of international treaties which maintained that inequality. So we continue to have wars, rumors of war and fake news, where people invade other people's countries and kill other people's country with fake news when they are really after their oil and their resources. And so much of our leaders have been marginalized. Marcus Garvey have been killed, Martin Luther King have been killed, Malcolm X, Namumba etc, etc. Others have been killed, whenever they would stand up for the rights of their people. So that, we still have Injustice, inequality. I think those of us who are from Jamaica can honor our history, can honor our freedom fighters by creating a country that is both just and moral, this is what is needed. These so-called great countries that are in existence today, they are not societies that place Justice and morality first. The whole period of the last five hundred years,(rep) of the domination of Europe over the rest of the world has been an Injustice. Justice has been fractured Justice itself has been fractured, and the world has gone in the direction of selfishness and greed and even while many of these countries profess religious values and morality, their actions on a day by day basis are absolutely immoral. I dare to say that every day in the cooperate structures of the world, the seven deadly sins are practiced routinely. Every day. And many of these Nations are so called Christian nations, or religious Nations. Jamaica needs to be in the forefront of a transformation that needs to happen, because if you understand what is going on in the world today, the current paradigm: global warming, inequality, people are not standing for that anymore. Self-sufficiency The white economic structures is going to have to change. Jamaica has got to be prepared for that, where we've got to be self-sufficient, at the present time we import even something as simple as onions. That is absolutely and totally ridiculous, when we have a tropical country and we can have two or three growing seasons where you can grow anything: you can sow a seed out there and tomorrow you have a massive tree, not just a plant, so it's absolutely ridiculous for us not to be self-sufficient in food. Marijuana/Diaspora must help We have a marijuana industry that: now in Canada and the United States is reaping billions and billions of dollars... The freedom to utilize that resource which in some sense, we pioneered, so we shoot ourselves in our own foot. We called ourselves independent but we don't have independent policies, because the world Bank and the IMF still controls what we do with our economies, that's not Independence. We have as many Jamaican living overseas as we have living in Jamaica, there are about three million of us. We all have to help Jamaica to become truly independent. Independence is not about having a national anthem. Independence is not about flag, Independence is about having your own vision for your Nation and then working towards that as your destiny, without any interference from anyone else. We are a proud people, we have a right to be a proud people because we fought free from slavery and we fought free from colonialism but we have not defined what that freedom means in terms of an industrial and post-industrial world. And that is what we have to do, we have to give the world that new paradigm. We can't do it all by ourselves but we can participate with those Nations who will move in that direction and of course, we have to blaze the trails when there is no other Nation that is moving in that direction. But, all of us need a just and moral society and that is what my father is all about: Nation building. One God And he was about one God for all of us, he didn't see any difference between a black god and a white god, he didn't see a difference between different religions because we believe in the spirit of the mind and the body. And he did not believe that any religious entity ought to interfere or come between you and God. So you can worship your god by yourself, because you are made in the image of God, and the Christ figure is a figure that's in all of us, and of course, if a person comes out of the African religion which is the original religion and it's... (Could not hear) And that's what it's all about. It is the ideal... for us. It’s the idea of the human being, the human man... What we can be if we live up to the expectation of our ancestors who made the first Civilization. And the definition of a Civilization is a society which humanizes its members and if society is not humanizing its members then it is not a civilization. You can call it a technological Civilization or you can call it a materialistic Civilization but it's not truly a civilization. A Civilization has to be centered on human being and it has to be humanistic and it's what Africa has given the world from day one in: the first human being and two, the first Civilization. So we need to be proud of that and you need to teach your kids that, because, you knew, part of my journey is, not just in terms of: choosing my parents very carefully, (laughs) but part of my journey has been to find out what was my history. Read about Marcus That's what my father was all about, what was he trying to know, reconstruct? That has been part of my journey. And then I think that part of everybody's journey is to know yourself, and I'm very thankful that I've had the opportunity for an education here at McGill and to be part of a different culture for nine years because: coming from Jamaica, I was pretty much an introverted kid and then coming to Canada and: you know, I used to take the Trolley from Cote des Neige to come down to Sherbrook you hear the kids talking about their dates the night before and those kinds of things, this to me was totally a... You never talk about your personal affairs in public. So it was a total cultural shock so I had to adjust and I had to rebuild my thinking etc, etc. And therefore, I had to look for my own self, who am I? And it leads you deeper and deeper into yourself and then, one of the beautiful things at McGill is, when you graduate medical school, they give you a little book by Sir William Osler: A way of life, and that was very precious to me and what he talked about (in the book) is: compartmentalizing your life day by day. In other words, when you go home at the end of the day, you should look at what you've done that day and examine it to see the things you've done right and what you've done wrong. What caused you to do the right thing and what caused you to do the wrong things, and then you make that effort to do better the next day, and then, if you do that every day, that's a form of introspection which I think you can only gain from. And it then allows you to do something which my father was very, very big on: which is to transform yourself because he thought that the human being is perfectible, that you have the Christ image in you and that you can be the perfect human being. It is a type of Christ... I am very happy that I chose him as my father and that I have him as my inspiration, and I offer his life to you as an inspiration, and I ask you to read as much as you can about Marcus Garvey. And pass that on to your children. I don't see as many young people here as I would have liked to see and therefore I would like to say that: you are not passing on your heritage to the younger generation, and that's my charge to you. The head of the UNIA earlier on today said that he may invite me back in 2019. I said, If God willing. But if I do come back in 2019, I would like to see this place filled and I would want to see it filled at least half way with young people. Study Jewish people
And I think we can take an example from our Jewish guests here that Jewish people are able to pass on their culture and they've been able to pass on their culture for thousands upon thousands of years because the older ones teach the younger ones. Even where they don't get it in the schools, but they do get it at home. So I think we need to follow that example, and we need after school programs and so on and there are many other groups that do just the same thing. Trump is not a good example But we need to teach kids their history, because it seems as if the trends nowadays are just to be a person, and a person, you know, is somebody who is on Facebook, somebody who tweets and somebody who twitters. Of course we have the president of Tweeting back in the USA, where I live and he is not a good example for your kids. So, you know they're much more knowledgeable than what they gain on social media, and at the present time, I think it's the responsibility of the elders to pass on that heritage because people died so that you can be free, people suffered so that you can be free. Freedom is not free You have to remember, really, every day, that freedom is not free, we've got to earn freedom, and as my dad said: the battles of the future are going to be the battles of the mind. It's all about knowledge, and you know, there's a lot of senior peoples here but education never ends. Like dad says, read four hours a day. I may not read four hours but probably at least two hours, or three hours, Ah, If it's on basketball season I ended up not reading quite as much. But no, otherwise I do read and read... Knowledge is power and again, the battles of the future are going to be the battle are going to be about knowledge and science but science has to be guided by spirit and that is one of the other things that, as we've said: you have to know your spiritual self, because you are made in the image of God and you can communicate with your spiritual self without any intermediary at all, you know, no priest, no Rabbi you know any religious person, you can communicate with God because God made you in his or her image. And it is your job to perfect yourself. That's the purpose of life, that's what gives life meaning- that struggle on a day to day basis to perfect yourself, and again I think I got some of that inspiration from McGill in terms of the stretching of my mind, in terms of a knowledge base. My professors were great people and I admire them and they stimulated me in terms of my learning process. Sir William Osler as I mentioned before, helped me to look at myself... Introspection is important, you know, some people call it meditation, some call it contemplation but you all have to do that, you all have to know who you are because if you don't know who you are, somebody else is going to tell you who you are, but when you know who you are then you can know what it is that you want to do, where it is that you want to go. So read, read, read. Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge. And impart that to the younger generation. I'm very pleased that you are carrying on the Jamaican culture here with this large number of people here. I spent a great bit of time this morning with your current president and I'm very, very impressed with his knowledge base and his innovative spirit and intelligence. So I know that during the rest of his tenure you will be drawing, and definitely you need to give him a second tenure as president when his first ends, so that you can draw some more. And I do hope when I come back I'll see a more thriving Jamaican community, not that it isn't thriving now but you need to push yourself and go from one level to the next level and I thank you very much for having me here and hope you will have me some other time this year. One God, one aim, one destiny. If you like it, Share it
1 Comment
Errol Kelly (The-poet)
2/11/2017 08:31:38 pm
This message is just too potent not to share. I did, will you?
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AuthorE Lloyd Kelly is an Author, poet and blogger born in Jamaica W.i. to Raglan and Alma Kelly. Now lives in Montreal Qc. where when not writing, he drives a shuttle bus between campuses at McGill university Via: Poetry Foundation
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