Global IssuesRights Activist Challenges Jamaica's Status Quo
For the last 50 years, Jamaica's modern history has been shaped by two powerful parties - the Jamaica Labour Party and the People's National Party. Although dozens of others have periodically emerged, the political graveyard has inevitably been their final resting place. Betty Ann Blaine appears undaunted by this fact. A historian, university lecturer, children's rights advocate and talk show host, Blaine took the plunge in August, launching the New Nation Coalition (NNC). She hopes to prove the sceptics wrong and emerge victorious when Jamaicans go to the polls in the next general election, constitutionally due in 2012.
The daughter of a market woman from rural Jamaica and a well-to-do white father, Blaine grew up relatively poor in what is now one of the more depressed areas of the capital, Kingston. 'Because my father, who was a white-skinned Jamaican, decided to marry my mother, who was a black country woman, his family didn't want to have much to do with us. We literally became the black sheep of the family. While his family lived very comfortably, we grew up relatively poor... his side of the family was really ashamed of us,' she told IPS.
Blaine received her early education in Jamaica and in 1971, she migrated to the United States where she attended Hunter College and then Columbia University for postgraduate studies and became active in the Afro/Caribbean movement. On her return to Jamaica years later, Blaine focused on the rights of children, working mainly in the poorer neighbourhoods of Kingston. Best known as the founder of the lobby group Hear the Children's Cry, Blaine eventually made her way onto the political scene in 2001 when she became a founding member and vice president of the now defunct United People's Party (UPP). Blaine, who recently quit her job as a talk show host, believes that the time is right for her to enter the political arena.
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service