JAMAICA: Busfa Wins Again

When shaggy-haired William Alexander Bustamante tours the Jamaican countryside, field hands from the cane and banana plantations crowd around him singing a native song called We Will Follow-Bustamante Till We Die. Last week it was clear that the chorused pledge was something more than a catchy calypso lyric. In the British island’s general election, Bustamante and his Labor Party squeezed back into power for a second five-year term. It was Bustamante’s faithful plantation workers, overpowering the heavy urban vote rolled up by the rival socialist People’s National Party, who saved the day.

Close Call. For gaunt, 65-year-old Bustamante, the election was another close call in a public life that has been a succession of escapes and escapades. Since he rose to power in Jamaica as a spellbinding union boss (he is president “for life” of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union) he has been interned for sedition, charged with manslaughter (later acquitted) and engaged in any number of lesser scrapes with Jamaica’s British rulers.

This year’s general election promised from the outset to be a stern test for “Good Old Busta.” Since his election to the House of Representatives in 1944, conditions on the island had deteriorated. Unemployment was widespread; the cost of living had zoomed higher (up 300% since 1939).

There were charges of graft on government contracts. Busta’s hodgepodge Labor Party, loosely held together by adulation for “De Chief,” was beginning to come apart. By contrast, the rival socialist P.N.P., led by able, Oxford-educated Barrister Norman Washington Manley, seemed in good working order.

But Busta handled his campaign with the skill of an old ward-heeler. Convinced that urban Kingston with its higher percentage of literates would go against him, he stayed away from the capital and worked the rural areas.

Close Race. He told the descendants of slaves in the country parishes that P.N.P. socialism would mean a return to slavery. He dared P.N.P. leader Manley to a £5,000 bet on the election outcome. Manley haughtily brushed off the wager as “racecourse conduct” but the flamboyant challenge helped spread the word that Busta himself had not given up hope. In the last stage of the campaign, he made a dashing foray into Kingston. “The P.N.P. say I have run away,” he cried. “Here I am.”

Two days later, when the votes were counted, the P.N.P. had won 13 seats, a gain of eight in the 32-member house since the last election. But Busta, with 17 seats and the support of one elected independent, still held a working majority.