Manley and the PNP won the 1972 election, and two years later Seaga became JLP leader. When the JLP were returned to power in 1967, Seaga was promoted to become minister of finance and planning, in which role he set up the Jamaica stock exchange and created Jamaica Citizens Bank, the first Jamaican majority-owned commercial bank. He did, however, remain a champion of Jamaican music, and one of his first acts as a minister was to arrange for ska artists such as Prince Buster and Peter Tosh to appear at a World Fair in New York. By then other Jamaican musical entrepreneurs such as Clement Dodd were taking the ska revolution a step further and Seaga, now consumed by political duties as a cabinet minister responsible for development and welfare, decided to sell WIRL to the musician Byron Lee. When self-rule finally came in 1962, he was elected a JLP member of parliament for the Western Kingston constituency as his party won a majority in the new parliament. In tandem with his business ventures, Seaga had also begun a political career in 1959 when Sir Alexander Bustamante, the trade union leader and founder of the JLP, appointed him at the age of 29 to serve as a JLP representative on the legislative council, a body charged with establishing a framework for Jamaican independence from Britain. That led him to produce more commercially minded recording sessions by local artists for other companies, and in 1959 he set up his own label, West Indies Recording Limited (WIRL), which kickstarted the early 1960s boom in home-grown ska music. On returning to Jamaica in 1955 he did anthropological research and oversaw the recording of an album of the island’s music on the Folkways label. When their son was three months old they returned to Jamaica, where Edward attended the Wolmer’s boys’ school in Kingston before returning to the US to study at Harvard University, gaining a degree in social sciences in 1952.Įdward Seaga interviewed by Steve Barrow in 1995 about his involvement with Jamaican music Seaga was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where his wealthy Jamaican parents, Philip Seaga, a businessman of Lebanese descent, and his wife, Erna (nee Maxwell), of mixed European and African heritage, had been living at the time of his birth. While he continued with the JLP as leader of the opposition until 2005, he was unable to become prime minister again. But many of those in the electorate who had overwhelmingly supported the JLP’s new direction in the 1980s came to feel that at best his policies had made little difference to the country’s fortunes, and at worst had exacerbated already yawning inequalities across the nation. As soon as he became prime minister he pursued a domestic agenda of privatisation and deregulation, while in foreign policy he realigned Jamaica firmly with the west, including through support for the US invasion of Grenada and the severing of links with Cuba.īy the time Seaga lost power in 1989 he had changed the local landscape to such a degree that even the PNP was unwilling to return to the leftist ground it had once occupied. With Manley’s People’s National party (PNP) intent on a steadfastly non-aligned socialist course, Seaga decided that the country must make a rightward shift under his leadership. Seaga’s Jamaica Labour party (JLP), which had originally emerged from the island’s trade union movement, had been part of that consensus until he took over as its leader. Seaga’s election as prime minister in 1980 marked a critical moment in the island’s history one that broke the left-leaning consensus of its post-independence politics and set the country on a more conservative path that gained the approval of allies such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Bob Marley’s One Love concert in 1978, with recollections by Edward Seaga