Editorial | Obeah law nonsense

The Gleaner wishes to apologise, on behalf of the Government and Jamaican state, to Oshawn Grant, the young man who was last month convicted in the St James Parish Court for practising obeah, and fined J$5,000 by parish judge, Kaysha Grant-Pryce, for the purported offence.

We are grateful to the lawyer and constitutional scholar, Lloyd Barnett, for again highlighting the absurdity, and clear unconstitutionality, of Jamaica’s retention of the Obeah Act. And as we did in these columns in 2019, we insist on its repeal, forthwith.

This law is one of those holdovers from slavery and colonialism that continue to assault, and belittle, the dignity of people of African descent – which is the vast majority of Jamaicans – and ought to have been removed at the same time the Patterson administration excised the vagrancy element from the Towns and Communities Act over two decades ago.

The Holness administration must now urgently comb through existing legislation to remove therefrom all remnants of laws that, in effect, were designed to keep certain classes of Jamaicans as the inferior “other”.

Specifically, obeah, common across the Caribbean, is one of the African spiritual retentions that slaves blended with elements of Christianity and mysticism, which could be called on to protect against evil, and to cast evil on others.

Like all African retentions, belief systems and rituals which colonial authorities feared could provide a platform for rebellion, or might otherwise undermine the system of slavery, obeah was officially prohibited in plantation and post-slavery society.

The existing Obeah Act of 1898, notably defines “obeah to be one and the same as myalism”, another form of Afro-Jamaican spiritualism, some of whose dances and rituals are, ironically, highlighted, in stylised fashion, during cultural festivals.

PREMISED

As Dr Barnett noted in an article in this newspaper on Sunday, the Obeah Act is, on its face, premised on going after people who use it for fraudulent gain, or to frighten persons by pretending “to use any occult means” or to “possess supernatural power or knowledge”. Shorn of the language of the Act, this could apply to many of the high-powered television pastors and Christian evangelists who earn huge sums by purveying faith and the power of their healing to followers.

Significantly, the instrument of obeah is imprecisely and widely defined in the law, which is “anything used by such a person (the practitioner) and pretended by such a person to be possessed of any occult or supernatural power”.

Put another way, the artefacts of obeah can be anything a police officer seized from a place where he believed obeah was being practised, which the accused person could not prove was not the case. Or, as the law puts it, where “any instrument of obeah is found, the person in whose possession it is found shall be deemed, unless and until the contrary is proved, to be practising obeah”.

It is perhaps on this ground that Mr Grant was convicted and advised by Judge Grant-Pryce to use magnesium or read the Old Testament prophets Habakkuk and Haggai to deal with insomnia, for which he was apparently engaged in his ritual.

The published accounts of Mr Grant’s case didn’t suggest that he attempted to perpetrate a fraud on anyone.

IRONIC

It is ironic, if not contradictory, that the administration would maintain this standard of proof for people engaged in a belief ritual that involves no high crime and misdemeanour, while being skittish about introducing the unexplained wealth orders (UWO) for people who can’t show how they gained wealth beyond what their known sources of income can account for.

The Gleaner’s more fundamental concern, as we pointed out six years ago, is the Obeah Act’s infringement on core rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

These are:

• the right to “freedom of thought” at Section 13 (3)(b)n; “freedom of expression” at 13(3)(c);

• the right to “freedom of peaceful assembly and ­association”, at 13(3)(e); and

• the right to “freedom from discrimination on the ground of … race, place of origin, social class, colour, religion, or political ­opinions”, 13(3)(f)(ii).

These rights are not exclusive or exclusionary, to be withheld based on creed and class or from people considered to be the social “other”.