A Jimmy Cliff Life Class**
A Subannah EduConsulting National Reflection
Leadership is courage shaped by conscience.
And conscience is most valuable when the world is most uncertain.
— Dr. Luther C. Brown, Subannah Reflections (2025)
Jamaica grieves the transition of The Honourable Jimmy Cliff, O.M.
Yet we mourn not only the artist of extraordinary genius, but a moral voice who shaped the Jamaican imagination for more than sixty years. Jimmy Cliff is gone. And now his life stands before us as a curriculum — a life class — on how a Jamaican from any station can lead with courage, clarity, and conscience.
You Can Get It If You Really Wa…
In this moment of national vulnerability — as our Caribbean nation rebuilds its sense of self after Melissa’s environmental upheaval and ongoing civic and economic strain — Cliff’s life offers something urgent and enduring:
an invitation to consider what leadership looks like when it is rooted not in position, but in moral decision-making.
And as we examine that record, one truth emerges:
Jimmy Cliff lived the kind of leadership that has always defined Jamaica’s greatest figures — those who shape not only culture, but the nation’s moral trajectory.
Leadership as a Posture- Not a Position
One of the core ideas in Leading From Where We Are is that leadership is a posture — the courage and consciousness we bring to whatever place life situates us. Jimmy Cliff lived this principle so naturally it needed no explanation.
You Can Get It If You Really Wa…
His “stations” were many — Somerton, Kingston, London, New York, Johannesburg — yet each broadened his vantage point without diluting his conviction. Whether singing in parish halls, negotiating record deals, performing under apartheid, or helping global cinema discover the Jamaican soul, Cliff demonstrated a leadership grounded in moral clarity.
Without invoking their names, he carried the same decisive courage we associate with Bogle, Nanny, Garvey, and Sharpe — a modern practitioner of their ethos. His leadership did not require a platform.
It operated on conscience.
Reading the World Before the World had words
A defining quality of Jamaica’s most consequential leaders is the ability to discern injustice early — to respond before consensus forms.
Jimmy Cliff possessed this gift. You Can Get It If You Really Wa…
He was among the first Caribbean voices to condemn the Vietnam War with piercing moral clarity. Vietnam captured the human cost of conflict so truthfully that Bob Dylan once described it as the finest anti-war song he had ever heard.
Earlier still, in 1961, when Hurricane Hattie devastated Jamaica and later Belize, Cliff named the storm not as spectacle but as existential warning. Long before “climate justice” entered global vocabulary, he understood the precarity of Caribbean Island nations.
Through Save Our Planet Earth, he spoke an environmental ethic into being decades ahead of the global movement.
And when apartheid’s machinery threatened artistic freedom and basic human dignity, Cliff insisted on performing for racially mixed audiences — despite warnings from powerful governments. He refused to let fear, diplomacy, or public opinion silence his conscience. This is what moral leadership looks like:
courage enacted in real time, without waiting for permission.
Cultural Healing Through Songs
Jimmy Cliff accomplished something rare: he helped a nation see itself differently.
You Can Get It If You Really Wa…
You’re My Miss Jamaica, often misread as light romance, is actually a rebuke to colonial beauty standards. In a society where whiteness and near-whiteness shaped desirability, Cliff affirmed the beauty of everyday Jamaican women.
This was not mere affection. It was cultural reclamation — delivered with tenderness.
Academic texts often struggle to do what Cliff accomplished with melody:
give the nation a new imagination of worth.
That the song became a national favourite suggests Jamaica was ready — perhaps ahead of its time — to embrace a definition of beauty rooted in self-love.
In Bongo Man, he invoked African ancestral memory.
In Rebel In Me, he taught that resistance need not be angry — it can be ethical, principled, and focused.
In Footprints, he returned us to accountability:
Every act leaves a mark. Every choice echoes.
Cliff’s songs were not entertainment.
They were cultural theory set to melody — shaping national identity with a scholar’s precision and a poet’s gentleness.
Cinema as National Mirror
Through The Harder They Come, Jimmy Cliff gave Jamaica something it had seldom been granted:
a cinematic reflection of its own complexities.
You Can Get It If You Really Wa…
The film exposed systemic injustice, explored the tension between ambition and structure, and globalized the local struggle of the poor. It offered Jamaica a language to describe its contradictions — one that resonated far beyond our shores.
This, too, is leadership:
the ability to tell the truth about a people, even when the truth is uncomfortable.
Oneness — Leadership Through Inclusion
Cliff’s band, Oneness, offers another lens on his leadership.
He assembled exceptional musicians from Jamaica and beyond — not for novelty, but to deepen the sound.
You Can Get It If You Really Wa…
His philosophy was simple:
Unity is not uniformity.
Oneness is shared purpose, not sameness.
This inclusive practice — deliberate, principled, generous — models the very ethic Jamaica needs in this moment of global and local fragmentation.
Why Jimmy Cliff Calls Us to Reflect on Leadership, Nationhood & Honour
When we examine the qualities that define Jamaica’s most revered leaders — clarity of purpose, courage in action, global consciousness, cultural grounding, ethical conviction, and distinguished service — we find those qualities radiating through Jimmy Cliff’s life.
Not in abstraction.
In practice.
You Can Get It If You Really Wa…
His life is a Jamaican leadership praxis — lived, tested, refined, and offered back to the nation.
And a quiet truth emerges:
He stands among those whose lives have shaped the moral arc of Jamaica’s history.
The point does not need argument.
It is evident in the record he leaves behind.
A Closing Reflection…
Jimmy Cliff lived at the intersection of culture, justice, spirituality, and global responsibility. His transition is not simply a loss — it is an inheritance.
He showed us that leadership can emerge from practice, from movement, from conscience. His life reminds us that courage is possible, conscience is necessary, and transformation is within reach.
You Can Get It If You Really Wa…
And he reminds us:
You can get it if you really want.
But you must try.
Cliff leaves us this lament and benediction, Oh Jamaica:
Oh Jamaica, oh Jamaica, oh Jamaica,
you’re always on my mind…