‘Visionary’, ‘philanthropist’ and ‘great English eccentric’ are some of the descriptions given to Martin Dent, who died on May 3, aged 89.
I love the moment in Martin’s life when, in 1990, students at Keele University trooped forward after his lecture to sign a petition for his ‘Jubilee 2000’ campaign, calling for the cancellation of the unpayable debts of poor countries by the year 2000. The petition went on to attract over 24 million signatures, from 166 countries, a double world record, and the campaign secured the cancellation of $130 billion of debt, for 35 countries!
Martin’s background in the Colonial Service in Nigeria led him to describe as ‘grotesque… the suffering, sickness, hunger and loss of educational opportunity’ involved in severe poverty. Furthermore, the millstone of inherited, unpayable debt ‘imposes a crushing burden, diverting resources desperately needed for poor people’ and he described it as ‘a kind of slavery’.
Old Testament terminology
Martin’s humanitarian concern ‘was transformed into campaigning zeal by a powerful combination of reason and morality’ (Frank Judd) and he attached to the proposal for debt relief the terminology of ‘Jubilee’, the periodic cancellation of debts and release from slavery prescribed in the Old Testament. As a campaigning idea, it had a spark of sheer genius – and made more so by linking it to the approaching millennial year – hence ‘Jubilee 2000’.
This resulted in ‘a colossal mobilisation of opinion’ within the churches: ‘The secret of Jubilee’s success is simple but unfashionable: it is the Christian churches’ (Madeleine Bunting, UNESCO Courier, 2000).
To see the impact of debt relief, Google ‘YouTube A vindication of Christian advocacy’. It’s been ‘sweet’ to learn more about this great ‘Christian gentleman’. But it has been ‘bitter’ indeed to see how the wickedness and the crass stupidity of the treatment meted out to indebted poor countries was exposed so clearly 30 years ago, knowing that it continues unabated to this day.
