The Message is Change: A Perspective on the 1972 General Elections

by Olive Senior

98 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1972

About the author

Olive Senior was born and brought up in Jamaica in 1941 and educated in Jamaica and Canada. She is a graduate of Montego Bay High School and Carleton University, Ottawa.

She is one of Canada's most internationally recognized and acclaimed writers having left Jamaica in 1989, spending some years in Europe and since 1993 being based in Toronto.

Among her many awards and honours she has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and F.G. Bressani Literary Prize, was nominated for a Governor-General’s Literary Award, and was runner up for the Casa de Las Americas Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. In 2003, she received the Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award for Excellence (preservation of cultural heritage – Jamaica). Her body of published work includes four books of poetry, three collections of short stories and several award-winning non-fiction works on Caribbean culture.

Reviews

[Gorfo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Message is Change gives a detailed overview of the 1972 elections in Jamaica. Senior conducts a stellar comparative analysis of the campaign strategies used by the Jamaican Labor Party (JLP) and its opposition-- the People's National Party (PNP). The book delves into the cultural, political and economic reasons why the JLP lost and why the PNP won. Senior also documents Manley's cabinet appointments and the goals of the new government in its first year.