Summary
Before leaving Jamaica in 1905, he attended primary school and did private studies. Overall he received little formal education in Jamaica and was disdainful of a plantation apprenticeship, which would have led him to succeed his father as an overseer. He migrated to Cuba where employment opportunities were expanding in the sugar industry; there he also served in the Spanish army. From Cuba, [ALEXANDER BUSTAMANTE] went to Panama where he spent almost ten years; he met Mildred E. Blanck. While on one of his shorts trips back to Jamaica, they were married in Kingston. They then traveled to New York City, where he worked in a hospital before returning to Jamaica in 1932. In his travels, he noted the indignities, the exploitation and racial oppression of colonialism, so back in Jamaica, he campaigned for worker's rights and never lost sight of the suffering and abject poverty of masses of his people.
"I say that the mission of my generation was to win self government for Jamaica; to win political power which is the final power for the Black masses of my country from which I spring." Those were the words of [Norman W. Manley] who was born on July 4, 1893, a time when the British ruled Jamaica as a part of its evil empire. Later on, when Jamaica gained its independence, Manley said that the mission was reconstructing the social and economic society, and the life of Jamaica. And this he did along with many other freedom fighters including his cousin Alexander Bustamante with whom he sometimes traveled different, but parallel paths that were aimed at the same goal-the independence of Jamaica.Manley's PNP lost the next election to JLP, so that when Jamaica gained its independence, Bustamante was in charge and thus became the country's first prime minister. Thereafter, Manley again became fee leader of the opposition party. He retired from politics in 1969 and was honored as a 'National Hero of Jamaica' along with Bustamante, [Marcus Garvey] and others.Perhaps Jamaica's most flamboyant and charismatic politician, Bustamante*s father, Robert Constantine Clarke, was the White overseer of a small, mixed-crop plantation called Blenheim, on the isolated northwestern coast of the island. Because of the second marriage of his grandmother to Alexander Shearer, he became distantly related to Norman W. Manley, Michael Man ley and Hugh Shearer-all of whom would eventually be chief minister and/or prime ministers of Jamaica.See the full content of this document
Extract
Bustamante and Manley
SIR ALEXANDER BUSTAMANTE-"The First Prime Minister of Jamaica, and one of the most influential political figures in the West Indies"
Born William Alexander Clarke in 1884, he became famous as Alexander Bustamante (a name he adopted in honor of an Iberian sea captain, who befriended him in his youth), a tireless labor leader with the ability to motivate his fellow countrymen; the first chief minister with an elected legislature but under limited self-government; and the first prime minister, and one of the architects of Jamaica's independence from Great Britain. For much of his life, he live...See the full content of this document
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