Michael Manley

Michael Norman Manley was born in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica, on the tenth of December 1924, the son of Norman Manley — also placed in this archive — and the sculptor Edna Manley. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War, took his undergraduate degree at the London School of Economics (1949) where he was mentored by Harold Laski, and returned to Jamaica to work as a trade-union organizer for the National Workers' Union.

He inherited the leadership of the People's National Party from his father in 1969 and served three terms as Prime Minister of Jamaica: 1972-1980 and 1989-1992.

His first government undertook the most ambitious social-democratic program ever attempted in the post-colonial Anglophone Caribbean. The 1974 Bauxite Levy quadrupled Jamaica's revenue from the bauxite industry and was, at the time, the most significant nationalization of foreign-owned natural resources by any small Caribbean state. The 1974 Education Act introduced free secondary and tertiary education. The National Housing Trust (1976) and the National Insurance Scheme were established. Jamaica became one of the founding states of the Non-Aligned Movement under his leadership.

The 1976-80 destabilization period — characterized by CIA-supported political violence (over eight hundred Jamaicans killed in the 1980 election year), the withdrawal of U.S. private capital, and the IMF austerity program that followed — broke the political coalition. He lost the 1980 election to Edward Seaga's Jamaica Labour Party.

He returned to office in 1989 in a markedly more centrist position, oversaw structural-adjustment reforms required by the IMF, and resigned on health grounds in 1992.

He died in Kingston on the sixth of March 1997, age seventy-two.

He is honored here as the social-democratic Prime Minister whose Bauxite Levy reshaped Jamaican sovereignty over its resources.