Jamaican Joshua

"Joshua, Joshua," shouted the crowd of 75,000 at an agricultural fair west of Kingston last week, as the tall, ramrod-straight politician with the familiar features began to speak. Many Jamaicans once regarded their former Prime Minister, Norman Manley--who died in 1969--as a kind of Moses who helped lead them to the promised land of independence ten years ago. Now they see his son as an appropriate successor. Addressing the massive rally. Prime Minister Michael Manley, 48, set forth what has become a chief theme of his young government: "What freedom really confers is the opportunity to be totally responsible for one's own fate."

Energetic and articulate, "young Michael" Manley has brought new confidence, style and warmth to the traditionally conservative island politics. Swept to a landslide victory over the Labor Party last February on a platform of "love power," he has used his office to persuade his countrymen to shed some of the unhappier legacies of British rule. "One of the greatest tragedies of the whole postcolonial period," he told TIME'S Bernard Diederich, "is the tendency to come out of a dependent situation with a psychology of dependence." To help make the point, Manley has broken with the British shirt-and-tie tradition by wearing a kareba--a short-sleeved, open-neck jacket and matching pants outfit--in Parliament. He even wore one at his wedding last June to Radio and Television Announcer Beverly Anderson.

Manley has set himself no less a task than that of freeing his countrymen from the colonial assumption that "somebody else is going to do it all for me." When workmen in Kingston recently balked at cleaning drainage ditches, Manley himself took up a shovel and began to dig. "All sorts of people who had refused to work later joined me," he recalled. "But if I had gone down in jacket and tie and made a great speech about the dignity of labor, they would have said: 'That's for the birds,' and they would have been right."

Jamaica, like most of the Caribbean islands, is beset by an unholy trinity of poverty, malnutrition and unemployment. The islands' economies are often tied to single crops--sugar and bananas --that fetch low prices on world markets. They cannot mechanize agriculture to cut costs and raise incomes because that would only aggravate unemployment, which runs as high as 25% in Jamaica. The result is low productivity and per capita incomes that range from about $65 a year in Haiti to $555 in Jamaica, one of the more prosperous of the Caribbean islands.

Manley came to power proclaiming that "a man without a job is a man without rights," and he runs the risk of seeing his followers among Jamaica's poor turn against him unless he is able to fulfill some of the expectations he has aroused. The opposition Labor Party is in disarray; Manley's party controls 37 of 53 seats in the House. Even so, Manley has made only a promising start. He has launched several crash public-works programs, including new sidewalks for Kingston, and has appealed to Jamaica's own economists to find original solutions to the country's economic ills. One of the chief problems is agriculture; land reform, conservation and credit are all sorely needed. For the longer run, Manley is seeking to lessen Jamaica's reliance on exports of primary products and increase industrial processing, mining and tourism.

An "unabashed egalitarian," as he puts it, Manley grew up in an atmosphere of politics and art (his English-born mother is a sculptor). After service in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II, he studied at the London School of Economics, then went to work for the BBC. His heroes: "Dad, Martin Luther King and Harold Laski." Manley returned to the island in 1952, became a labor negotiator, and did not run for Parliament until 1967. Though Manley today is "looking outward" to Third World nations (including Cuba), he still has his mind set on launching Jamaica firmly into the technological age. "I think that the moment a nation becomes a nation," he says, "is the moment when it understands that to walk from here to there means that every man's foot has to move."

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