It amazes me that my most inconsequential writings are often the ones that seem to generate the most interest so I must thank all of you who called and offered interpretations to my dream of last week. Today I want us to seriously reflect on the nightmare that Anguilla has become for some of our young people and for their victims who may also be the perpetrators of the violence experienced in their lives. Then we need to engage with all of them in sharing the vision and realizing the dream for the Anguilla that we all want.

Last week’s issue of The Anguillian published a piece by Pastor Ellis Harrigan that I thought was a most insightful and practical analysis of the situation of marginalized youth in Anguilla. Not only must we join forces with Brother Harrigan, but I also want to encourage some public spending to reinforce his initiative of going to groups of young people at risk and developing relationships of trust that will enable more of us to engage them in thinking about and acting to change their own living situations. This will require community support and technical assistance needed to train others to work with high risk groups and to enhance services aimed not only at rehabilitation but at transformation of incarcerated youth. It is becoming more and more obvious to me that if young people keep going back to prison, then prison is not being effective either as a punishment or a deterrent. I know that there has been improvement in terms of the educational offerings there, and that some counselling also takes place, but simultaneously parents and families on the outside need the quality of support that will make for a changed environment to which young people will return on completion of their sentences.

I believe that as a society we must begin to recognize positive behaviours among young people and in this vein I commend the new column being started by Jason Allen. However, I want us to go further by recognizing the entrepreneurial and leadership qualities wherever they reside in young people and to deliberately engage those for positive outcomes. The gang leader must therefore be recognized as a leader and the drug seller must be recognized as someone engaged in commercial though illegal activity. What if we could help set up another kind of shop and train youth to manage it instead of fines, imprisonment and no opportunity for change? Anguilla must recognize that leadership qualities among youth are not defined only by clean shaven youth, going to church, dressing in jacket and tie and having the kind of education which enables them to articulate in Standard English. Some of those who cannot talk as we want them to are astute and critical thinkers and they see and feel injustice and inequity keenly. Youth leaders of informal groups may be just as influential, perhaps more so, for the outcomes of their behaviours impact strongly on our communities and on our society as a whole. Many young people are making their own decisions about how to get from life what they want without parental guidance or without the kind of parenting that instilled the values which send us into shock when they find it necessary to own a gun and engage in violent crime. When this extremity is reached, we recoil in horror but as the good Pastor reminded us, they are still ours.
On June 16th the Rastafari community observed the birth of Leonard Percival Howell who first preached the divinity of Haile Selassie I in Jamaica. As a young man Howell’s preaching that Ras Tafari was the “messiah returned to earth” resulted in his coming into conflict with the planters, the trade unions, the church, the police, the local and the colonial authorities and his repeated arrest, trials for sedition and confinement to prison and mental hospitals. Nevertheless this movement prospered, and today Rastafarians exist worldwide. June 16th also commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, when young people in Soweto demonstrated against the Apartheid regime’s decision that schools should teach in Afrikaan, the language of the downpressor. Young people and children lost their lives in that protest and are today remembered as martyrs and heroes. On June 17th as Iwandai I eulogized the late AG, one of Anguilla’s veterans of the Anguilla Revolution, I realized not for the first time, that fifteen and sixteen year olds were in the vanguard of that signature point in Anguilla’s development. They bore arms for the nation then, so how can we not go to the lengths required to help that same age group, reflect on why they feel the need to arm themselves now. Yes, youth action can have a lasting impact on development and violence is often a precursor of change. Violence effectively gains our attention but it is not what we want. We want the change.

From my vantage point, the institutions of home, school, church, judicial system and social services have not changed their practice in the revolutionary and timely manner required for transformation. We make the analysis all the time at conferences and in informal groups but then it seems as though we think that if we talk long enough and loudly enough there will be transformation. Wrong! We keep on doing things the same old way without evaluating whether we are being effective or not. We get some young people into a room and we think we have consulted. I see more new G number plates but we seem unable to mobilize resources for transformative youth development. We are stopping short of reaching where it matters most.
Anguilla is not Soweto – it is by a stretch that Apartheid can be compared with Anguilla but there are young people here who are abandoned, alienated, disenfranchised, disillusioned and discriminated against, not on the basis of race but on other kinds of difference. No one has to tell them that they are being “dissed” and I believe that much of the negative behaviours we see are reactions to these feelings. Laying blame is a waste of time so how can we engage as fellow-stakeholders in Anguilla’s present and future to rock the boat in a manner that prevents the ship from sinking. Last week on the BBC I watched dreadlocked youth in Soweto, enrolled in a jewelry school, finally getting their hands on a teeny fraction of South Africa’s resources in processes of productive employment. We can still see the vestiges of Apartheid but youth power helped to dismantle that viciously wicked system. Next year will be forty years after the Anguilla Revolution. Do the yardsticks by which we measure our progress include all of our young men and women and if not, how do we justify those who are being left behind? They must be the focus of our new Anguilla or we may find that in spite of all the shining edifices we really have gone backward.

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