JAMAICA’S INDEPENDENCE IS A MYTH! By Renaldo McKenzie

Jamaica celebrates 58 years as a post-colonial British/Spanish colony today Agust 6, 2020. Jamaica is putatively an independent democratic nation. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, since 1962, Jamaica’s elites have carved out a future for themselves, as they apply “race-to-the-bottom” policies that continue to exclude and extract their people and wealth. In effect, decolonization and “neoliberal globalization” have deepened Jamaica’s dependence on the new global elite of the “Washington consensus”. Jamaicans negotiated their independence without taking back their wealth. Their capital drained and transported as royalties overseas to the global elites while many of their people fall further into abject poverty. What was necessary was not just negotiated independence, but a redistribution of the wealth, a pre-accumulation of capital that eluded them for decades. This redistribution of wealth I believe could only come through force because the oppressors do not willingly share what they stole, but the wealth must be taken back by the oppressed. Hence, the question for consideration is, how do Fanon’s ideas apply to the de/re/colonization and neoliberal globalization experience of Jamaica? My own observations are oriented by my own interest in the political economy of decolonization and neoliberal globalization. Jamaica’s Independence is a Myth, because they are still helplessly dependent on outsiders for their survival. Decolonization paved the way for neo-liberal globalization. Therefore, this means that we must reassess influence of the Martiniquan psychiatrist and political scientist, Franz Fanon, on radical Caribbean thought from the 1960 to 1970s. The British granted Jamaican’s independence on Britain’s terms, and did not take it by violence or force - as the culmination of a militant, popular, anti-colonial mobilization. Hence, it was not independence at all but a myth, created jointly by the colonial powers and the middle-class ‘nationalist’ leaders, the nouveuax rich.The British sought to maintain the essence of the colonial status quo, while the nationalists merely wished to substitute their formal authority for that of the colonial rulers, with all the trappings and perquisites of office that that brings. This was to cripple the collective capacity of the Jamaican people to forge a new society in the postcolonial era.