Roger Mais

Roger Mais (11 August 1905 – 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.

Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School.

He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner; his topics most frequently were the social injustice and inequality suffered by black, poor Jamaicans. He appealed to his local audience on grounds to push for a national identity and agitate against colonialism.

Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most appearing in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais' play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on a politician and martyr of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character. In conventional colonial history Gordon was described as a rebel and traitor, but on the centenary of the rebellion, he was declared to be a Jamaican National Hero.

On 11 July 1944, Roger Mais published, "Now we Know", a stinging denunciation of British colonialism in Public Opinion, in which he explained that it was now clear that World War 2 was not a fight for freedom but a war to preserve imperial privilege and exploitation:

"That the sun may never set upon privilege, repression and exploitation and upon the insolence and arrogance of one race to all others ...That the sun may never set upon the great British tradition of Democracy which chains men and women and little children with more than physical chains, chains of ignorance and the apathy of the underfed, and the submissiveness, which is a spiritual sickness in the thews and sinews of a man; chains them in dungeons of gold mines and silver mines and diamond mines, and upon sugar plantations, and upon rubber plantations and tea plantations. For the great idea of Democracy which relegates all “niggers” of whichever race, to their proper place in the scheme of political economy"

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