Michael Manley
Michael Manley was prime minister of Jamaica from 1972 to 1980 and from 1989 to 1992, the son of the founder of the People's National Party and of the nation. He was a trade union leader of six foot four whom the crowds called Joshua and who carried a rod of correction that Haile Selassie had given him. His first government was the Caribbean's experiment in democratic socialism and its lesson in what the experiment cost. The programme was the bauxite levy of 1974, which multiplied the country's take from the American aluminium companies seven-fold and paid for the rest. There were the minimum wage, the free secondary schooling, the literacy campaign, the land lease, the maternity leave, the equal pay, the abolition of illegitimacy in law, the sugar cooperatives, and the friendship with Castro, whom he flew to Algiers with in 1973 and who sent doctors and built schools. Washington answered with the aluminium companies' cuts, the tourists' fear and, the party believed, the CIA's money for the other side. The election of 1976 was won under a state of emergency. The four years after it were the collapse. The bauxite market fell, the capital fled. The IMF's terms of 1977 and 1978 were taken and then, in 1980, refused. The dollar was devalued by half, the shelves emptied. The election of October 1980 was fought with guns, eight hundred dead in the campaign, and lost to Seaga by fifty-eight per cent to forty-one. He was born in Kingston, the son of Norman Manley and the sculptor Edna Manley, served in the Canadian air force, and read economics at the LSE under Laski. He was a journalist and then the negotiator of the National Workers' Union. He entered the Senate in 1962 and the House in 1967. He took the party from his father in 1969. The second government, from 1989, was another man's. It was reconciled to the market, the IMF and Washington, deregulating what he had regulated. He resigned in March 1992 with cancer and handed over to Patterson. He died in Kingston in March 1997. The country buried him as it had buried his father, with the argument about him unfinished.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 1997 CE
- Nationality: Jamaican
- Roles: prime minister, trade unionist, politician
