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Sizzla Says It’s Time Jamaica Leave The UK Privy Council

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sizzla-kal-1
Sizzla

Sizzla Kalonji has come out in support of attorney-at-law Hugh Small, who, days ago symbolically burnt his old white horsehair wigs, which are a part of the garb worn historically, by lawyers and judges in the criminal courts of Britain and its colonies.

Sizzla shared a part of a video clip of Small calling for Jamaica to leave the UK Privy Council and stand on its own, just before he ignited the three headpieces, known as perukes, and which were made popular after King Louis XIII began wearing them in 1624.

“Time to leave the privy council and stand on our own, time to leave colonialism and stand for one world of black people. Time to leave Babylon and go to Africa 🌍,” Sizzla wrote on his Instagram page, under a video snippet of Small’s symbolic burning.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CbC0P9QDZug/

“Big up all ma reggae music fans…  Get up stand up that’s all we need to do, help to make the world community a better place.  More education more music… Dance hall a fiwi sitten,” he added later.

The full video of the wig-burning shows the lawyer, who turns 81 this year, instructing an assistant to pour a flammable liquid on the three old wigs.

In the video, Small is heard saying that one of the three wigs, all yellowed with age, belonged to his late father, Senior Puisne Judge Ronald Small, while the other was his while a barrister, but that they were relics of Jamaica’s colonial past.

“These wigs here my fathers wigs from 1934.  This was my wig which was 1963… and as a symbol of our need to stand on our own, and get outta the Privy Council I am going to sacrifice them.  On behalf a di Jamaican people, light dat afire.  Time to leave the Privy Council and stand on our own,” Small who also served as a judge in The Bahamas, told his aide.

Days later whilst speaking with Dionne Jackson Miller on Radio Jamaica, Small, when asked what prompted the burning, said he had carried out the exercise as he prepared to relocate from St Elizabeth to the Corporate Area.

He said he had recorded the video and sent it to family members via WhatsApp, but had no idea that it would have reached social media, as it was supposed to be a private affair, and was surprised when he got a call from a journalist regarding the video.

“I was living in Malvern in St. Elizabeth where I spent part of my childhood.  I was living on the same piece of land; I built a home there and I decided that I was going to sell it and come back to Kingston, so I was packing up my things; it was a lot of stuff that I had in what was a rather spacious house and moving into an apartment… I said look, I am not going to carry these things with me and I thought about and I said, you know, why did we have to wear wigs and what did it really symbolize?  It was a very private act that I had no idea would have gone viral,” Small explained.

“I sent it to family members and one judge – a former judge.  I did not publish it,” Small, who was called to the Jamaican Bar in 1963 and appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1975 said.

With respect to the Privy Council, Small had said that Prime Minister Andrew Holness ought to take decisive steps toward removing the Queen as Jamaica’s Head of State and the UK Privy Council as its final appellate court.

He had also said that Holness should use his contribution to the budget debate on Thursday to update Jamaicans on the plans made toward this process.

In addition, he had said that Holness was in a unique position since he was the first Prime Minister born after Jamaica gained its independence from Britain and had already “made certain promises about the matter”.

As for the headgear, Jamaican judges and lawyers stopped wearing the horsehair headgear, almost a decade ago.

However, the practice of people strutting around in the wigs in hot climates, has been a bone of contention, and a source of ridicule for some time.

According to media reports, in April 2011, Justice Ekaterina Trendafilova had asked lawyers to shed their wigs next time they appeared before her at the International Criminal Court, at the Hague in the Netherlands, after some attorneys attended court in traditional black gowns and white horsehair wigs for a preliminary hearing, in a case dealing with violence after Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election.

“This is not the dress code of this institution… In this quite warm weather maybe it will be more convenient to be without wigs,” she had admonished.

Lawyers and judges of African descent have also been similarly lampooned about the wearing of the wigs.

In September 2017, the Independent, in an article titled Why African judges still wearing wigs is a glaring symbol of British colonialism, noted that opponents of the colonial outfit were not just arguing against inconvenience, but against a tradition that African judiciaries appear to be embracing.

“The British gave up their last colonies in Africa half a century ago. But they left their wigs behind.  Not just any wigs. They are the long, white horsehair locks worn by high court judges (and King George III). They are so old-fashioned, and so uncomfortable, that even British barristers have stopped wearing them,” the article noted.’

Also in September 2017, The Washington Post had questioned why so many African judges were still wearing wigs, “50 years after the British left”, noting that “the wig survives, along with other relics of the colonial courtroom: red robes, white bows, references to judges as ‘my lord’ and ‘my lady’.”

It noted that an editor of the Nigerian Lawyer blog had written that wigs were not made for the sweltering Lagos heat, where lawyers wilted under their garb, but that in Kenya, when a former chief justice appealed to remove the wigs from the courtroom, arguing that they were a foreign imposition and not a Kenyan tradition, many of his compatriots had objected.

“He swapped the traditional British red robes for ­“Kenyanized” green and yellow ones. He called the wigs “dreadful’,” the article noted.

“But that outlook wasn’t shared by many Kenyan judges and lawyers, who saw the wigs and robes as their own uniforms, items that elevate a courtroom, despite — or because of — their colonial links.

“It was met with consternation from within the bench and the bar,” the article quoted Isaac Okero, president of the Law Society of Kenya as saying.