by Ian Thomson
We pulled up in front of Rema’s community centre. Painted over the entrance was an effigy of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of Jamaica. Her face, beneath a gimcrack tiara, bore the pockmarks of bullets. The building, weed-encrusted and splashed with urine, seemed part of the nightmare. I followed Pastor Bobby to the entrance, where a short, sleek man with a scarred face was standing draped in Nike-brand clothes and gold neck chains. A Rema don, I guessed, ranked by his labels. I kept a distance while the pastor went up to him and began to speak. ‘But it retard progress!’ I heard him say in reference, I guessed, to the morning’s killing of Courtney. The man lowered his head, then flicked me a hostile look; instinct warned me not to hold his gaze.
Upstairs we met Ziggy Soul, a fellow evangelist, who had a box-like recording studio where teenagers were encouraged to lay down their beats and rhythms. The walls were pasted with big adverts urging the love of God. ‘If the kids can’t record, all they talk about is dissing people up,’ said Ziggy Soul, a self-styled ‘Distributor of the Holy Writ’. Violence was now so deeply ingrained in the local culture of ‘respect’, Soul went on, that to be in charge, you had to ‘batter’ people. ‘That’s the way it goes’ - Soul’s voice was casual but I could see the concern in his eyes.
Presently a tall thin man called Sledge Hammer (not, need one say, his baptismal name) turned up. ‘Yo, wuzzup?’ he looked at Pastor Bobby, then at Ziggy Soul, but not at me. Sledge had embraced Christianity under the pastor’s guidance, but if he knew something about Courtney’s murder, he was not going to say. Informers are despised in Jamaica; they can take the brunt of the rage that is always unleashed in a community following a murder; the rage is directed against the police, the judiciary, the undertakers - anyone involved in the Jamaican death business. It is best to keep quiet about what you know.
Sledge was a big man about my age - forty-five - but he looked younger. He was supposed to be a law-abiding sort now that he had found Jesus Christ. Bobby asked him how the world was treating him; Sledge lit a cigarette, said, ‘Okay, pastor.’ His sister Deborah worked in a literacy school nearby, Operation Restoration. She might know something about Courtney’s death. ‘You cyaan ask her.’ Saying which, Sledge exhaled smoke, standing his ground.
At Operation Restoration the principal was distraught. ‘Pastor!’ She made a sharp noise with her breathing. ‘I’m tryin’ to keep my thoughts orderly. What’s goin’ on?’ She stamped her feet. ‘The police kill a man - you know that? And now Courtney’s got killed. A war’s on, Bobby, and the children are getting’ scared and aggressive.’ Apparently they had begun to jab at each other with pencils.
Sledge’s sister was nowhere to be found. For the moment, only the bullet holes above the entrance showed how lethal the area could be. Pastor Bobby said to the principal, ‘I’m as much ’fraid as you are, Lorna, plenty ’fraid.’
Lorna Stanley, a Jamaican in her late fifties, kept a poky office, with the blood spots of squashed bugs on the wall under a sign, ‘Relax. God is Control’. She made to cross her heart. ‘It give me the chills,’ she said; a rumour was circulating that Sledge had killed Courtney. ‘If Sledge is out there again, we might as well forget about it.’ Sobs broke up her sentences as she sat down and dialled a number. ‘Sledge? ... That you? Oh Sledge. If you’ve left us ... I beg of you, Sledge, please ...’
Pastor Bobby was about to say something when the phone rang again. Lorna grabbed it. ‘Operation Restoration. No, them nevva kill Courtney for drugs.’ Courtney, well liked locally, had disrespected somebody. ‘Now what must I do?’ Stanley bit her lip. ‘Even if the gunshots are audible out there, at least the children are safe in here with us. So we’ve been blessed. And I’m holdin’ straight. But today for the first time I feel like giving up.’ Suddenly her head was on the desk and she was crying.
For thirty years Stanley had worked in Florida as a journalist on the Palm Beach Post. Thousands of Jamaicans had migrated to Florida in the 1930s and 1940s in search of work. They ended up, many of them, on cane fields and citrus groves, where they created distinctive communities. By the 1990s, however, their reputation had become tarnished by Yardie gunmen, who gave the majority of honest, law-abiding Jamaicans a bad name. (As long ago as the 1970s in Canada, a police ‘ten most-wanted’ list included a picture of a dreadlocked man described as ‘a Rastafarian’.) Jamaica’s increasingly negative image abroad distressed Stanley so much that she decided to go home and set up as a social worker in Trench Town. Her life’s task, she said to me (with a touch of rhetoric), was to ‘help the forsaken of the ghetto’.
The day she opened a kindergarten in 1994 in Trench Town a turf war broke out. ‘There was like a barrage of shots - all day long. Rat-tat-tat-tat. Oh my golly G!’ Parents, fearing a full-scale gang battle, kept their children at home, which meant taking time off from work and losing money. Some children became gun-carriers or sold drugs for ‘top rankers’ high up in the distribution chain.
Guns, said Stanley, provided the ‘respect’ the poor so badly needed. ‘The moment you’re walking with steel,’ she said, ‘is the moment you have the power to boss it over others. Yes, a youth with a gun is a youth to be feared and looked up to: murder is his badge of honour.’ She paused, nodded staunchly. ‘But a child who can read and write, well that’s different, that child is less open to the bad man’s bidding; less gullible. I mean, look at Pops,’ Stanley suddenly announced, looking up at the boy who had entered her office carrying a tray with a plate of rice and peas. Pops, the school cook, put the food down in front of me to eat, while Stanley explained, ‘Pops used to flip hamburgers for a living, but then he knifed someone nearly to death. Now Pops has dropped his fistfight ways and he’s learnin’ to read and write. Ain’t that right, Pops?’ Pops replied mechanically, head bowed, ‘Yes, Miss Stanley. I used to feel like a dog, but now I don’t feel like a dog no more.’
‘See?’ Stanley said to me with an air of triumph. ‘Pops used to be dark [meaning ‘ignorant’] but now he feels good, he knows the book is better than the gun.’ Pops gave Stanley a sidelong glance, then drifted away.
In Stanley’s view, Jamaican politicians had kept the poor in ignorance because it paid them to do so. It is much easier to manipulate the unlettered and use them (in Stanley’s expression) as ‘election fodder’. Illiteracy rates in Jamaica currently stand at between 13 and 15 per cent of the population, reaching 70 per cent in the Kingston ghetto: this ranks among the highest in the English-speaking Caribbean. Stanley said she was no longer so sure which politicians controlled which gangs. ‘All I know is, there are four gangs out there within a whisper of each other, and they’re killing each other for nothing - for nothing at all.’ In this degraded world, cash ruled. Twenty thousand Jamaican dollars will be a man’s reward for killing someone (what Jamaicans call doing ‘a little ting’). Stanley said, ‘That’s a lot of money. Well, what would you do?’
At that precise moment Sledge’s sister Deborah happened to walk in; tall, slender, she had corn-rowed and beaded hair.
‘This gentleman a friend of yours?’ she asked Stanley.
‘We never saw him before,’ Stanley replied, ‘but he know Pastor Bobby.’
Deborah said ‘Oh,’ and shrugged.
Stanley, getting down to business, asked Deborah, ‘So who killed Courtney?’
‘You asking me? Ask Pastor Bobby. I don’t really know.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘Keep asking,’ said Deborah. She was staring Stanley down.
‘I’ll ask you another one: can you swear Sledge isn’t involved?’
Courtney was killed by persons unknown, Deborah said eventually, and he was killed because he defected from one gang (the Ninjas) to another (the Action Pack).
‘A traitor?’ I said.
‘Pathetic, yes,’ Stanley said to me, ‘there’s no escaping it, but things like that happen here all the time.’
Time was when Deborah used to ‘preach badness’ herself: she hid guns from the police, she so
ld drugs. She was not a fallen woman exactly - she had nowhere to fall to. Then, like her brother Sledge, she saw the Christian light, divorced her gunman husband and joined Operation Restoration. Her almost Victorian story of self-help was one of many in Trench Town. Stanley put it this way: ‘The can-do spirit in Jamaica is amazing. Who says Jamaicans aren’t reformable? We’re the best at everything. The best athletes. The best musicians. Well, yes, the best murderers, too.’
With Deborah’s help, Stanley ran a pressure group, ‘Strong Woman of Trench Town’ (SWOTT), which campaigned to keep guns off the streets. What was incongruous to me - Jamaican women taking on Jamaican men - was less so to Deborah and Lorna. ‘We as strong as men,’ Stanley laughed. ‘We break heads, we mash up people same as men do.’ Caught up in a ‘district code’ warfare, where turfs are respected on pain of death and the trigger for death is sprung tight, Jamaican women had to be strong.
‘The Yardies call the shots,’ Pastor Bobby told me; he should know. In 2000 a church mission in south London, the Ascension Trust, had appointed him its ‘Jamaica consultant’. The director of the Trust, the Reverend Les Isaac, had begun to despair of the number of black youths he was having to bury in London following ‘Jamaican-style’ gang murders - death by gun; death by knife: every fifty minutes in London, a knife crime. South London gangs such as the Cold Hearted Crew and Beg For Mercy were fighting over the control of postal districts. Though most members were - are - substantively British (the grandchildren of post-war West Indian migrants), they were copying the personalities and methods of Jamaica’s homicidal narcotics trade; and, once armed, were dangerously empowered.
The Reverend Isaac felt he needed to go to Jamaica to see how broken homes - absent fathers - were giving rise to generations of angry teenagers disengaged from society. Roadblocks of blazing tyres greeted his arrival. ‘I thought I was in a war zone,’ he told me from his office in Brixton. ‘All that was missing was Martin Bell of the BBC.’ More than the barricades, however, Isaac was shocked by the virtual absence in Trench Town of the elderly. ‘Once a kid’s so much as touched a gun,’ he explained, ‘his life expectancy’s down to zero.’ Almost half of Kingston’s population - an astonishing 42 per cent - is below the age of twenty. The usual way out of the ghetto (by now it was obvious) was prematurely in a coffin.
The levels of despair and hopelessness in Trench Town struck Isaac as incurable. The church, the police and other powerful establishments had moved operations uptown. Thus the Jamaican state was failing to provide human security for its poorest population. Charities, free-food programmes and other inner city agencies no longer wanted to go downtown: they were too frightened. Parts of downtown have become a state within a state, where the residents pay no rent or utility bills; and the dons give themselves titles like ‘President’, because they pretty much rule the place. The only hope for downtown - the Reverend Isaac reckoned - lay in churchmen like Pastor Bobby, who were taking the gospel out to the street. ‘Everything is politics,’ he added. ‘Including the word of Jesus.’
In some respects twenty-first-century Jamaica, with its mass poverty, its social resentments, its skewed distribution of wealth, is like pre-Revolution France; only in Jamaica there is no sign of a revolutionary movement, no glimmer even of organised political protest. So the wealthy will have nothing to fear: the poor are too disorganised, too ill-educated, for social revolution. There is, however, something far worse: thousands of empty, wasted lives, and an endemic of violence, in which God is a US-import Glock.
3
Strictly Come Dancehall
I was sitting in a bar on Marcus Garvey Drive called Oysters and Conch, trying to refresh myself with a pineapple Ting and ice. It was Saturday morning, and a thick sticky heat was closing in off the Kingston waterfront. The bar was a hang-out for youths who liked to come here to listen to the latest chart hits and, true to stereotype, talk about sex, money, what kind of rims to put on their cars, but above all music.
In Jamaica, music is the vital expression. Night and day, amid the heat and narrow lanes of downtown Kingston, rap, ragga and reggae boom from giant loudspeaker cabinets: a heavy musical beat. Few know more about Jamaican music than Gladwin ‘Gladdy Wax’ Wright, who ran a record shop in Stoke Newington, north London, not far from the gang-blighted Somerford Grove Estate. The shop, stacked with collector’s vinyl, had served as a meeting place for Jamaicans living in London and a place to exchange news of home. I was an occasional customer, and before I left for Jamaica I went to see Wright.
We were sitting at the counter drinking instant coffee with condensed milk - Jamaican-style - when Wright said to me: ‘How can anyone not like Jamaican music? Man, it give you a big lift up of the spirit.’ He rocked slightly on his chair as a bass-heavy sound pulsed from speakers on a high shelf. Wright had grown up outside Spanish Town in the early 1960s, but had lived in England now for over forty years.
His father had come over in 1955 on the SS Auriga, a converted Italian troopship. Norman Washington Manley had just become prime minister in Jamaica, and his party, the PNP, was encouraging Jamaicans to provide labour for the mother country. The British presence in Jamaica was apparently for the benefit of Jamaicans, and Britain’s greatness - as measured by its possession of Jamaica - was a source of pride to many Jamaicans. Over a quarter of a million Jamaicans - one-tenth of the island’s population - migrated in the 1950s.
Wright’s father, working first as a carpenter in the north-west, bought himself a house in Birmingham for £1,800. Ten years later, in the winter of 1965, his five children came to England accompanied by their mother, who was Cuban. At Southampton the family were directed to a ‘boat-train’ destined for Victoria, where they were met by a relative, who drove them up to Birmingham in a borrowed car. That year saw one of the coldest winters on record in Europe. ‘It was so cold,’ Gladwin recalled, ‘that me and my brothers had to wear pyjamas under our Terylene suits.’
In Birmingham, a city with an already large West Indian community, Gladwin and his family settled in his father’s house on Hatfield Road. Jamaicans had first moved to the area in the 1950s because of the opportunities for work. Between 1953 and 1958 the West Indian population of Birmingham had swelled from 8,000 to 30,000. But in the grey, inhospitable Midlands of those days, Jamaicans found most social clubs were reserved for whites, with pubs excluding black drinkers from their lounge bars. So Jamaicans held ‘bashments’ or ‘blues parties’ at each other’s houses: in festively crowded front rooms West Indian mento and American R & B would be played into the early hours. Wright spent most Saturday nights standing by stacked speaker boxes, tie loosened, foot tapping, with a can of Harp in hand (Red Stripe came later).
In 1967, he installed a sound system in his father’s sitting room. ‘It had a 10-watt valve amplifier,’ he recalled, ‘and it made a good impression.’ Competition was fierce among rival sound-men on Hatfield Road, so the ‘Gladdy Wax’ sound-system grew ever more loud. Complaints from neighbours were ignored: the idea was to ‘blow the street to full watts’.
With West Indian expatriate life teeming in 1960s Birmingham, skinheads began to listen to Jamaican ska, a speedy jazz-tinged shuffle-beat. Ska had begun in the early 1960s as a Jamaican twist on black American dance music - ‘upside-down R & B’, as the guitarist Ernest Ranglin put it. Scooter-riding Mods had originally adopted it as a supplement to their diet of imported American soul, and soon a taste of Trench Town swagger was brought to Britain, through such Jamaican groups as the Skatalites, and the Jamaican singers Derrick Morgan and the late, great Desmond Dekker.
Oddly, given their racial antagonisms, skinheads rarely beat up Jamaicans (by ‘niggers’ they usually meant Pakistanis). Ska’s driving, dance-floor rhythms appealed to their passion for uptempo black music, sharp clothes, short hair. Sometimes, if suitably dressed in crombies and two-tone Trevira suits, Jamaicans were even allowed to join skinhead gangs. Jamaicans were seen as less satisfactory when they ‘acted clannish’ or ‘kept to themselv
es’: in other words, when they failed - like the ‘Pakis’ - to assimilate into British culture.
Ska was, triumphantly, a Commonwealth music, that took hold in Britain’s inner cities where Caribbean migration was at its most dense. ‘My Boy Lollipop’, sung by Millie Small with a pert underage suggestiveness, was one of the earliest pop-ska hits. It swept Britain in 1964, followed by other novelty ska numbers such as Prince Buster’s ‘Al Capone’. For a while this sort of music brought the poor whites and poor blacks of Britain together. By the early 1970s, however, with football hooliganism a fact of British life, skinheads were increasingly seen as National Front recruits. Enoch Powell had evoked images of a sanguinary race war in his 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and life in Britain no longer seemed so tolerant of minorities.
Gladwin Wright meanwhile had witnessed ska evolve into its languid offshoot of rocksteady (a rhythm said to have been adapted from waves hitting the sides of a slave ship), and finally into reggae, which, with its slowed-down, marijuana-heavy beat, would absorb happily into the middle-class hippie culture which the skinheads professed to despise. The word reggae, originally spelled ‘reggay’, had first appeared in 1968 with a Leslie Kong-produced hit called ‘Do the Reggay’ by Toots and the Maytals, and is believed to be of African - possibly Yoruban - origin. ‘Reggae really is an African music,’ Wright said to me, beating out a rhythm on the shop counter. ‘Its heart belong to Africa. Its beat to Africa. Yes, man, it’s the rhythm of the heartbeat - of the African drum beat.’
When Wright first came to London, in 1981, he recalled that he was ‘bedazzled’ by what he found. ‘Trafalgar Square! Where’d I been all this time?’ The stone lions on the Embankment were symbolic, in his star-struck imagination, of the Rastafari Lion of Judah, otherwise known as King Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the Rastafari Black Christ. In between jobs Wright worked at ‘Ital Records’, a Jamaican music shop at 112 Stoke Newington High Street, run by two dreadlocked aficionados, Judah and Burt. Wright began to take the ‘Gladdy Wax’ sound system to Notting Hill for the summer carnival, his huge speaker boxes blasting out roots reggae by Gladdy and the Groove Syndicate, and the Pathfinders, his own bands.