Orville Taylor | I stand with Bert et al

If you missed it, never mind. It has no expiry date. On July 5, veteran attorney and pan-Africanist Bert Samuels launched the Kumasi Museum. The name, derived from the capital of Ghana’s Ashanti kingdom, is a powerful declaration of connection to the origins of the majority of our population.

This powerful initiative addresses a gap for Jamaicans who might have slept through history class or who grew up with the colonial lesson that nothing in our history is worth recalling.

It certainly helps that the President of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama, made the declarative Marcus Garvey assertion that Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean should be part of an expanded African Union.

But that is not the main issue here today. After all, if the Ghanaians had enough sense, sensibility, and sensitivity to include the Garveyite Black Star on their flag and name their national square Black Star Square, the conversation regarding our Africanness should already be at a different level.

What is the catalyst today, though, is the public forum put on by Samuels and his colleagues and partners to raise the national consciousness about, once and for all, dispensing with the Privy Council (PC) as our final appellate court.

True, the irony of the advocacy for the Trinidad and Tobago-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) replacing the PC is that for reasons yet to be understood by most of us, Trinidad has chosen not to “honour the prophet in his homeland” and still uses the PC. Doubtless, for not stopping the buck at home, the Trinis get an “F”.

But in all fairness, Trinidad and Tobago is far more heterogeneous than Jamaica, and like Guyana, it is unfair to describe either society as African as their ethnic identities are not anchored in an African framework.

Jamaica is very different, and we have a well-entrenched culture that has spread like bamboo, becoming well woven into the fabric of the international cultural quilt.

Inasmuch as the replacement of the monarchy, and thus the attainment of republican status, is stated by the Government to be a distinct legal goal and process from the CCJ replacing the PC, it is my considered view that they are inextricably intertwined.

The point is that even if the legal experts are of the view that the two issues require different procedures, the issue is that law is supposed to serve the goals of the people and not vice versa.

It is an untidy arrangement for either our head of state or chief jurist to reside outside the country. If there is ever a colonial arrangement, then having His Majesty or Their Lordships determining our destiny is a perpetual insult.

Legal barriers aside, assuming that they actually exist, there are two legs upon which the maintenance of the PC stands, and both are pointed in the direction of our posterior ends.

First, there is a narrative about the corruption of our judges. As stated ad nauseam, and despite an unexplainable misunderstanding by people who should be our most brilliant minds, our legal system, though imperfect, is cleaner than any other in the Anglophone Caribbean and certainly cleaner than that of our neighbours to the north.

Structurally, a known political allegiance of a senior lawyer is generally a prerequisite for appointment to the bench in the US. At last check, in more than 80 per cent of jurisdictions, state judges campaign and are elected directly.

The implications of this are obvious. Moreover, add to this the fact that US Supreme Court justices are screened not only for political allegiance but also on the basis of decisions made as judges of lower courts and then are appointed by the president.

Different strokes for different folks. Remember that America’s evolution to its present version of a republican democracy took a different path from ours. We, a black-majority country with universal adult suffrage for all, including descendants of enslaved Africans, a full 21 years before the USA, are farther down the road of political independence of the judiciary.

Samuels has cited my multiple references to the 2014 Global Corruption Barometer, which revealed higher levels of American and British respondents indicating that they had direct knowledge of bribes paid to judges.

The numbers for Britain were three times those of Jamaica. Not my survey. It is the same research instrument that measured the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).

Note, however, that despite being relied upon as axiomatic, the CPI indicates only belief, not experience. In law, it is not even of the quality of hearsay.

Though still fallible, Jamaican judges can be trusted more than goods in a ghetto corner shop and should never be disrespected wholesale in favour of the PC.

Underlying the second leg of the repugnance of maintaining the PC is a subtle argument about the system and judges not quite being “grown up”. Apart from the sheer stupidity of that view, the deeper sociology behind having a “for us, by us” system is that like everything else about a society, law, which is a system of structured behaviour, cannot exist outside a social and cultural context.

Many ethnic nuances circumscribe behaviour. I dare any British lord to explain the meaning of the ubiquitous Jamaican iconic trisyllabic curse word that starts with a “B” and ends with “T”.

How do British lawyers appreciate that there are deep cultural ridges within which the sanctity of sex resides despite their own biases towards gender? Jamaicans have no official racial categories, and race is determined differently from how it is in England or the USA.

Moreover, Parliament, whether Jamaican or Caribbean, passes laws for us to administer ourselves.

Not knighted or benighted as King’s Counsel, Samuels is the right man for this fight. And it won’t hurt if we follow Bert.

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.