Jessica Huntley: a great tree has fallen

Jessica Huntley, nee Carroll, arrived in this world on 23rd of February in 1927. She left to become an ancestor on 13th October 2013. Her arrival must have caused much joy among the African Guyanese family into which she was born in Bagotstown, then a village, on the right or east bank of the Demerara River in Guyana. News of her transition brought forth a great outpouring of sorrow. Many it will be who shall mourn her loss and celebrate her life in London, Georgetown, Toronto, New York, Dar-es-Salaam and other places around the world now that she has departed.

There is revolutionary significance in both the date and the year of Jessica’s birth. On 23 February 1763, twenty-eight years before the outbreak of the great Haitian Revolution, enslaved African Guyanese revolutionaries brought Dutch imperialism to its knees and placed a revolutionary government in power for eleven months. Accabre, Jessica’s daughter was named for one of the leaders of this revolution. Nineteen twenty-seven was the prelude to a very memorable year in Guyana. In 1928 the British overlords suspended the constitution in order to derail Guyanese nationalism. Guyanese would feel this cruder side of British colonialism again in 1953 when the constitution was suspended for the second time in the last century. The British government launched an armed invasion of its own colony, mounted a coup d’état that overthrew a democratically elected government, and dragged many of the Guyanese leaders off to jail without charge or trial or conviction. There was a false belief that such oppressive acts could deflect or derail a fight for bread, justice and dignity.

One-year-old Jessica was of course not active in the politics that called forth the first suspension in 1928. But in 1953 she and Eric, her husband, were very present in the front lines of the continuing struggle at a point when it occasioned the second intervention. They had grown up and come of age in colonial Guiana between these two years. They were living participants and witnesses to colonialism and its contents as well as to the resistance such conditions engendered. As members of the working mass of people they experienced the harshest end of the system and they would first distinguish themselves as leaders of the organised Guianese resistance to that system. Later on they would continue the fight against capitalism and its manifestations in the imperial centre itself. Jessica Huntley was therefore a working woman in a world of male dominance, middle- and upper-class prejudices, European racism, exploitation of workers, denial of trade union and political rights to working people, the falsification of histories and the assassination of identities and many other ills of a system erected upon the oppression of the majority. Jessica rebelled against every one of these limitations upon the humanity of humanity. That was the source of her politics. Her life is a long and distinguished narrative of resistance to colonialism, sexism, racism and other forms of oppression that blighted humanity anywhere in her time, for she did not only organise resistance wherever she found herself, she helped to develop solidarity with similar struggles unfolding in many places across the world.

EARLY LIFE

Jessica’s entry into politics was neither instantaneous nor light-hearted. She grew up in Bagotstown and in Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana, which is located a few miles to the north of her birthplace. Her parents were ordinary working people. She attended primary and secondary school, showed academic promise, but left before taking her secondary school exams because her family could not afford the fees. She later took shorthand and typing classes in the evenings.

The 1930s and 40s were not easy times in Guyana and the Caribbean. In 1838, African Guyanese, Jessica’s forebears, benefited from a partial but significant victory in their fight against enslavement. They were not fully emancipated from the depredations of enslavement and the plantation by the law that came into effect on 1 August 1838. But they would embark on an energetic and visionary struggle of making freedom against the determined opposition of the ruling class of mainly European planters who wanted to retain as much of the conditions of plantation enslavement as they could get away with.

Little had changed by the time Jessica was growing up. Wages remained stagnant, the ruling class still dictated the terms of most conditions of labour, prices were high and the mass of the people were denied participation in making the decisions that governed their lives. There were hardly any prospects for improvement. In 1938, exactly one hundred years after they were supposedly emancipated in some versions of history, working people in Guiana rebelled. It was part of the workers’ rebellion that swept through Britain’s Caribbean colonies in that year. Planters remained powerful. Much later, in the 1950s, some of her colleagues in the original People’s Progressive Party (PPP) would be served with trespass notices banning them from visiting the sugar plantations where large numbers of their own constituents resided.

Entering the world of work ensured a direct exposure to the systematic racism, sexism and class exploitation that defined industrial relations in Guyana and other colonial territories dominated and exploited by Europeans. Awareness bred resistance among the vast majority. In a smaller group awareness extended itself to empathy, outrage, a hatred of injustice and a determination to work for change. Some understood the need to organise and work. Jessica was one of these. Leadership initiative had come to her from an early age. She would soon emerge as one of the leaders of the people of her land.

POLITICS

Jessica had experienced the racism, sexism, exploitation and lack of organisation when at her own workplace. She also made her first trade union contact. When the idea of the Women’s Political and Economic Organisation (WPEO) was floated she was ready.

There had been women’s organizations in Guyana before the WPEO, such as the Women’s Institute and the British Guiana Women’s League of Social Services (BGWLSS), which was formed in 1940. These organizations concentrated on social issues and their leadership represented mainly the charitable sensibilities of the middle and ruling classes. The WPEO was different. It represents one of the clearest expressions among the middle class of the new level of consciousness of colonial oppression then sweeping Guiana and a greater determination to organize with the working people and struggle against it to the end. The WPEO was founded on 9 July, 1946. It was formally launched three days later. It was immediately marked down for destruction by the colonial authorities.
Jessica Huntley was among the leaders. Others included Janet Jagan and Winifred Gaskin, the two main organizers, Vesta Lowe and Frances [Sara"> Stafford [von Batenburg">, a local white woman of considerable economic means, being the owner of the Trent House Hotel.

In emerging in the leadership of the WPEO Jessica and the others signalled an insistence on the inclusive role of women in developing and applying solutions to the challenges of existence in colonial Guiana. As one of its most radical members, she recognized that women in Guianese society were generally oppressed in terms of gender, race and class. They also determined that women had to organise their own liberation while simultaneously, as part of their liberation, contribute to the processes of national liberation from colonialism and the construction of a new kind of society in which women were included as equals.

The dissolution of the WPEO caused Huntley, Gaskin, Jagan, Vesta Lowe, Frances Stafford and others to relocate their political aims for gender organisation into the Women’s Progressive Organisation (WPO), the women’s arm of the original Peoples Progressive Party. They established that organisation on 27 May 1953.

It is of the greatest significance that both Jessica and Eric were founder members of both the Political Affairs Committee (PAC), which was also formed in 1946 and the original People’s Progressive Party (PPP) which was launched in January of 1950. The role of the PAC was to prepare the way for the PPP. So successful had it been that when the PAC transformed itself into the PPP the latter became the first mass-based, multi-class and multi-racial political party in Guyana. Less than three years later, in April of 1953, the party won 18 of the 24 seats in the colonial legislature in the first elections based on universal adult suffrage. The Guyanese left was coming of age. It was the leading tendency in the original PPP and the emerging nationalist movement which was harnessing the energy of various social forces and organising them into a single broad anti-colonial political force.

Jessica won recognition as a very effective speaker and was soon a regular on the PPP’s platform. She recounted the story of her former head teacher congratulating her on her performance on a podium while still regretting that she had not completed her studies. He was proud to claim her as an effective public speaker but reluctant to associate with this uncertified young woman! In those times it was not an inconsiderable achievement for an uncertified young woman to earn the plaudits of a headmaster.

In the 1957 general elections Jessica was asked by the PPP leadership to contest the unwinnable seat in New Amsterdam against WOR Kendall in his pocket constituency. This was an era in which women were organising and empowering themselves inside and outside of the PPP. Much progress had been made within the party. But like all other political parties in the country, it has never made it a policy to have equal representation of women. History may well ask why Jessica, who was both a woman and a worker and therefore by background alone a genuine representative of the two largest and most underrepresented social forces in the country, was not provided with a better chance of having a voice in the colony’s legislature. It may be of some significance that in 1953 Martin Carter was asked to fight Kendall in that same seat while Rory Westmaas, his friend and close colleague in the ‘Ultra Left’ of the party, was asked to fight an equally unwinnable seat in the far North West District of the country, close to the border with Venezuela. Was this a perhaps unconscious pointer to the priorities of the PPP hierarchy? In this era some of the most radical fighters against colonialism learnt from direct experience that struggle is internal as well as external.

LONDON

The couple, who arrived in London in the late 1950s in search of betterment, were therefore people who politically very aware, articulate, fearless, experienced in organisation and mobilisation – they were well practised in the science and arts of politics. Eric had migrated in 1956; Jessica joined him two years later.

They had landed in the belly of the beast. It may appear to be one of those ironies of life that the best place to seek liberation from oppression is in the very heart of the system of oppression itself. Jessica and Eric were part of generations of migrants to the United Kingdom, fleeing from harsh conditions created by the British ruling class in their own countries and attracted by the less harsh conditions and comparatively greater possibilities for advancement offered by residence in the metropolitan centre of the colonised world. Many had come before: students, soldiers, sailors, teachers, civil servants, persons of many skills, much knowledge and many experiences, propensities and capabilities. Such Guyanese political leaders as John Carter, Rory Westmaas, Keith Carter and Forbes Burnham had studied in England before. Cheddi Jagan had studied in the USA. Nkrumah of Ghana, Kenyatta from Kenya, Banda from Malawi and numerous others had all studied in London. In Jessica’s generation these migrants included of course her husband Eric and also Lionel Jeffrey, John La Rose, Sam Selvon.

OLD FRIENDSHIPS, NEW ALLIANCES AND THE FIGHT AGAINST OLD FORCES IN NEW FORMS

The rest of Jessica’s life story is more known; much of it has been highlighted in the many tributes which have poured forth since the news of her transition.
In London she and her young sons Karl and Chauncey were reunited with Eric and the family resumed making life together. A supportive network of old and new friends proved important to survival. Cecily Haynes-Hart, her childhood friend, and John and Irma La Rose were outstanding. Jessica became part of the Black Parents Movement that opposed the ‘sus’ law, which disproportionately targeted black youth with ‘stop and search’ tactics, and fought for it to be scrapped. She saw black people as one family and it was not surprising that she would be active with the Caribbean Parents Group; and when in 1981 13 young people lost their lives in an arson attack that became known as the New Cross Massacre in 1981, she was involved in the Action Committee that organized one of the biggest demonstrations of black people ever seen in London – the Black People’s Day of Action when on 2 March that year some 20,000 people marched from south-east London to Hyde Park expressing outrage at press bias and inaction by the authorities.

Jessica was a tireless advocate for working people and organized action to improve black people’s lives. She not only took initatives but joined with others at every opportunity to give support, solidarity and patronage to a wide range of causes that included the Keskidee Centre in London (Britain’s first Afro-Caribbean arts centre), and international campaigns such as those to end apartheid in South Africa, to free the US political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, and against political repression in Guyana.

In 1968 the radical Guyanese historian and scholar Walter Rodney was banned from re-entering Jamaica in 1968 to resume his position at the University of the West Indies after attending a conference of radicals in Canada. The news of this decision - which was prompted by his advocacy with the grassroots population and his consciousness-raising teaching particularly among Rastafarians - led to riots and a worldwide movement in support of Rodney. In London the Huntleys joined the fight for him to be unbanned, and his text ‘The Groundings with my Brothers’ would in 1969 become the first book published by Bogle L’Ouverture Publications (BLP), the company the Huntleys founded and named in honour two Caribbean resistance heroes, Toussaint L’Ouverture and Paul Bogle. BLP would go on to publish Rodney’s seminal work ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ in 1972.

Education was a key part of Jessica’s strategy for the betterment of black people in Britain, and to this end she put much energy and commitment into the emerging supplementary schools movement, not only with an ideological perspective but also using the practical space of her West London sitting-room - until complaints from neighbours forced the bookselling activities to be re-located to premises in Ealing that would later be renamed the Walter Rodney Bookshop, after his assassination in 1980. There was a dearth of relevant educational material to positively inform black students; so, following the lead of John La Rose’s New Beacon Books, the pioneering black publisher/bookshop set up in North London in 1966, the Huntleys helped to fill this need, by producing through BLP material to support students and teachers alike, with the bookshop becoming an indispensable cultural, political and educational resource over an 18-year period.

Jessica was instrumental in the origins of the legendary International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, of which she was joint director with John La Rose when it first took place in 1982.

PUBLISHING

Jessica through the BLP list provided an outlet over the years for many other significant authors, among them Andrew Salkey, Linton Kwesi Johnson. Valerie Bloom, Donald Hinds, Phyllis and Bernard Coard, Odette Thomas, Lucinda Roy, Faustin Charles, Beryl Gilroy, Imruh Bakari, Cecil Rajendra, Robin Walker, John Lyons, and Maureen Roberts.

Jessica and Eric’s sizeable archives, spanning the history of struggle of black people in Britain over more than a half-century, were made available to the London Metropolitan Archives in 2005. Drawing on this material, an annual conference has been hosted at LMA since 2006. At every step of the way Jessica was proactively involved and in keeping with her commitment to educating and uplifting black youth the last two Huntley Conferences focused on young people. She was not done with publishing either, albeit in a modest way, the breadth of her concerns being evident in the most recent titles to appear under the Bogle-L’Ouverture imprint – Joyce Trotman’s ‘The Proverbs of Guyana Explained’ (2006), ‘Pulling the Punches: Defeating Domestic Violence’ by Luke Daniels (2010) and ‘Caribbean Workers Struggles’ by veteran Caribbean activist and educator Richard Hart in 2012.

CONTRIBUTION TO OUR PEOPLE

It is not at all possible to assess the contribution of Jessica Huntley to struggles in modern Britain and its colonial periphery, especially Guyana, without mentioning that of Eric, her husband for more than 60 years. Yet, as an African Guyanese woman from among the working people, a mother and wife who became a leader in women’s liberation and a national liberation struggle, a community organiser and mobilizer, revolutionary book publisher, organiser of a black radical international book fair and mother of an entire community, Jessica Huntley’s story is a very distinctive and special one that represents the interests of many sections of humanity. It is true that a great tree has fallen in this forest of our human endeavours. It is imperative that her story not be lost to upcoming generations.

*Kimani Nehusi, Margaret Busby and Luke Daniels

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