The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  ‘Yes,’ Myra Lindo turned to look at me again, ‘in all my international travels I’ve never seen a synagogue so beautiful.’ At either side of the Ark, two perpetual lights flickered red to symbolise the unity of the Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities; and in tall, golden letters across the Ark was the Old Testament injunction in Hebrew: ‘Know Before Whom You Stand.’ A place of wonder and reverence. ‘But we’re short of members,’ the old woman continued, ‘we’re dying off.’ Her voice, somnolent and weary-sounding, seemed to come from a long way off.

  In the early 1960s, when Kingston briefly became a refuge for Cuban Jews fleeing Havana under Castro, Jamaica’s Jewish community had grown to between 3,000 and 4,000. But now there were only 200, at most 300, practising Jews left in Jamaica. The young had left for the United States, for Canada or Britain. ‘And they’ll never come back,’ said Myra Lindo. So many people in independent Jamaica had become exiles, or sought that status; why should they ever come back? Jamaica seemed to excel in all the negative indicators: lowest literacy, highest murder rate.

  As Kingston today has no rabbi, the Shabbes (Sabbath) prayer was intoned by the community’s ‘spiritual leader’, who swayed from side to side with both arms raised, chanting His words in antiphonal responses. After the service, the congregation retired for the ritual ‘breaking of the bread’. In a brightly lit room at the back of the synagogue, braided loaves were piled on a table draped in a white cloth. Candles flickered as wine was sipped from kiddushcups. Someone tendered me a plate of fish paste sandwiches. I took a couple, and after a moment a tall, bearded man came up to me.

  ‘Shabbat Shalom.’

  ‘Shabbat Shalom,’ I said.

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘England. London.’

  ‘You are welcome.’

  The man gave his name as Patrick Mudahy and, stroking his lionlike beard, said, ‘My ancestors came to Jamaica from Palestine in 1734.’ I was impressed. As a young man, Mudahy had drifted from his Jewish roots and became a Rastafarian. The Jewish experience of suffering and exile, he said, with its emphasis on deliverance and redemption, had much in common with the pseudo-Judaic sect of Rastafari (named after the holy Ethiopian oligarch and semidivinity Haile Selassie’s pre-coronation title of Ras Tafari Makonnen). Like Judaism, Rastafari observes strict dietary laws and indulges in hair-splitting or ‘reasoning’ of Old Testament scriptures. (Israel Vibration, one of the great reggae bands of 1970s Jamaica, was aptly named.)

  Mudahy had even met Haile Selassie. ‘It was in 1966,’ he said. ‘Kingston. State visit.’

  For Mudahy, the Ethiopian ruler was then nothing less than a messianic manifestation of the one true God and a bulwark against ‘Babylon’ (in Rastafari iconography, the biblical whore of St John’s Apocalypse; more loosely, oppressive colonial society). Was it possible that this diminutive Ethiopian, this Ras Tafari, was the Saviour whose coming had been foretold in the Old Testament? Repatriation to Ethiopia - the one true ‘Zion’ - seemed in 1966 not merely necessary but inevitable.

  ‘And now?’ I asked Mudahy.

  ‘And now I’m a practising Jew again.’

  Outside the synagogue, night had descended to usher in the Sabbath.

  A damp Thursday morning in Kingston, April 1966. Over 100,000 Jamaicans - Rastafarians as well as merely interested bystanders - swarmed Palisadoes Airport in the hope of catching a glimpse of Haile Selassie. The Ethiopian ruler was due to stop in Kingston en route to visit François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier in Haiti. Banners showing the Ethiopian Lion of Judah rippled amid clouds of ganja smoke as drum-beating and chanting welled up alongside the motorcade’s route into the city. Though it was raining, the Rastafarians reminded themselves: ‘When God comes, the sun will come out.’ Selassie was the first African head of state to visit Jamaica since independence; he offered, among other things, an alternative to the new ‘white imperial overlordship’ as represented by the United States or Britain.

  Unfortunately the Ethiopian Airways flight was delayed by two hours. When the plane finally touched down, hundreds of restless Rastafarians crashed the VIP line of Cabinet ministers and Opposition leaders. Converging round the plane even as the propellers were still turning, they sang praise to the Ethiopian god in human form who had come to redeem his Jamaican people dispersed from Africa. As foretold, the sun came out. ‘It was as if Kingston had been bathed in the light of Addis Ababa,’ Patrick Mudahy recalled.

  Selassie remained locked inside his private aircraft, but after half an hour, ‘tearfully overwhelmed’, said Mudahy (or maybe just frightened), he ventured down the steps to greet the crowds. Cheers erupted as he was whisked off under police escort, and from the roadside Rastafarians cried out to the royal motorcade: ‘King of Kings! Lord of Lords! Prepare a place for me in thy kingdom!’ Not since Marcus Garvey returned from New York in 1927 had there been such an overwhelming mass of well-wishers in the Jamaican capital.

  That evening, at 10.30 p.m., a reception was held on the lawns of King’s House. Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari provided a drum recital, while schoolchildren chanted Jamaican folksongs. Selassie, decked with medals, watched in silence from an upstairs balcony as a dreadlocked Jamaican began a vociferous and unscheduled speech in praise of the royal visitor. The Jamaican was Mudahy; his exclamation was swiftly drowned out by a military brass band.

  The next day, Haile Selassie laid a wreath in King George VI Memorial Park (now National Heroes Park), before visiting the prime minister’s residence at Vale Royal. There he attended an African folk art exhibition which, by the pointed absence of the Union Jack and other trappings of colonialism, served to emphasise the threadbareness of imperial Britain. During the exhibition Mudahy shook Selassie’s hand. ‘The Roaring Lion was very quiet, very nice,’ he recalled. Afterwards Selassie was shunted along Jamaica’s (now defunct) railway to Montego Bay on the north coast. At all points along the line, police and military stood two deep with bayonets fixed. Rastafarians held up their babies to the royal coach’s windows in the hope of a blessing.

  The effect of Haile Selassie’s four-day state visit would last for many years, inspiring Rastafari poems and songs (one of which, ‘Rasta Shook Them Up’, by Peter Tosh, contained introductory words in Amharic, the Ethiopian language which Selassie had used to address Rastafari elders in Kingston). Not only had Selassie’s visit confirmed the place in Jamaica of Africa and African culture, it had provided an antidote to the ‘defilement’ of the British imperial period and regenerated hopes of black redemption.

  The visit was judged a success (a ‘roaring success’, joked Mudahy) even by the Jamaican authorities. Days prior to Selassie’s arrival, graffiti had gone up on buildings in Kingston attacking Jews, Chinese and Lebanese as ‘white oppressors’. The Jamaican government, alarmed by the rise of Black Power and Black Freedom Movements in the United States, had begun to deny entry visas to American black leaders and banned radical black literature. As confidence in Britain’s power waned, so the ‘spectre’ of Black Power in Jamaica increased. With Selassie’s official welcome, however, the authorities were able to appease the Back-to-Africa brethren and, by bringing them into King’s House, lend them a respectability which previously they had been denied.

  It may seem puzzling that present-day Ethiopia, with its political corruption, its poverty and famines, could ever have been revered as a land of milk and honey. Yet the idea of Ethiopia, with its place in the Old Testament and the romance of its imperial past, understandably exerts a hold on the imagination. In the mid 1950s, when Jamaican migration to Britain was at its peak, Ethiopia was not considered as a destination. Ten years later, however, Ethiopia was hailed as the country to deliver Jamaicans out of ‘Babylon’.

  Sixteen Jewish cemeteries are believed to lie scattered across Jamaica, most of them now either inaccessible or, in a few cases, desecrated. The oldest is situated off Spanish Town Road, in the depressed Hunts Bay area. Hundreds of Jews are said to have been buried there, unwept-for and
disregarded since the seventeenth century, making it one of oldest Jewish cemeteries in the Western Hemisphere. I had to apply to the Red Stripe brewery for permission to visit as the cemetery stands on their land.

  ‘We’ll have to provide you with an armed guard,’ company security told me on the telephone. ‘It’s Red Stripe policy.’

  ‘Will just one escort be enough?’ I asked.

  ‘Should be - if not, we’ve got plenty more.’

  Ainsley Henriques, a Jamaican Jewish historian, and his wife Marjorie Lamont accompanied me there. Like many Jamaican Jews, Henriques had contravened the Talmudic injunction against intermarriage. All the same, he could trace his Jamaican Jewish roots back to the 1740s. His scholarly, unworldly air was nevertheless deceptive; Henriques was a well read, well travelled, comfortable citizen of the world, with friends and interests in the United States, Britain and Israel.

  With Henriques perspiring at the wheel of the car, we inched along the traffic-congested Spanish Town Road, stopping off to buy a litre of water in case we fainted. At the entrance to the Red Stripe brewery off Hunts Bay an armed guard came to greet us. ‘Is that thing loaded?’ Marjorie asked him, pointing at his pump-action. The guard answered ‘Yes,’ as he climbed in the car. After a few moments we arrived at a stretch of perimeter fencing nailed with placards declaring ‘No Firearms Allowed’. Henriques drew in his breath; we were alone in the great silence of the marshy plain. There was no road.

  ‘Careful, honey, there’s all sorts of ditches here,’ Marjorie warned her husband as we dipped and lurched through muddy water. Would the jolting set off the shotgun in the back? In the distance there emerged a collection of shacks with a sordid, desperate air; this was the squatter settlement of Backtu, sprawled out along Jamaica’s long defunct railway line (the ‘Back-to’ of Damian Marley’s 2006 dancehall reggae hit, ‘Welcome to Jamrock’).

  We continued over rough ground until the land became too marshy for the car. Then we got out and walked. The guard was some distance ahead of us, shotgun at the ready. It seemed he was lost in some military fantasy of his own, but presumably there was a real risk of being of shot at - from Backtu. Red Stripe did not want a PR scandal on their hands.

  The cemetery came into view on the far side of stagnant water, a moss-covered discontented place, the tombstones sweltering in the soupy light. Henriques began to photograph the strange-shaped stones that marked the graves, pointing out the Portuguese legend on one tomb: ‘S.A.G.D.G’, Sua Alma Goze da Gloria: May His Soul Enjoy Eternity. Other stones, cracked and fissured over the centuries, showed a mortuary symbolism of hourglasses, skulls and crossbones. The earliest decipherable inscription that we could find dated to 1672, seventeen years after Cromwell’s invasion. Though the burial-ground was dilapidated, the many Europeans laid to rest here attested to the days when Kingston was a busy cosmopolitan port. But only an archaeologist could find beauty in this mutilated and hopeless-looking place. In a mood of anti-climax we drove back across the stinking, marshy plain to the Red Stripe brewery, where we dropped off the armed escort.

  Hope Road (2004) is the account of a Jewish life spent first in England, later in Jamaica. Maurice Stoppi, the author, had grown up in London’s Jewish East End in the 1930s. His Polish grandparents, Golda and Moishe Stupai, had settled in the 1880s in the Jewish community north of Whitechapel Road and anglicised the name Stupai to ‘Stoppi’. Maurice Stoppi’s London childhood - pickled fish, Yiddish theatre - is recollected with affection and a regard for family. Every Friday before the Sabbath Maurice was taken by his father to the Hackney Baths on Mare Street for a steam sauna. Hackney was a step up, socially, from Whitechapel. At his school Stoppi shared a desk with a boy called Harold Pinter, later his friend.

  How had a scion of East London’s Jewish diaspora settled in Jamaica of all places - itself a land of polyglot confusion? In 1958, after a spell in Israel on a kibbutz, Stoppi was sent to the West Indies as a quantity surveyor. Pre-independence Jamaica, with its caste and colour rankings, struck him as a colonial extension of the Raj. Little had he imagined that the island would become his home. Strange Oxford-accented voices could be heard extolling the virtues of Oxo cubes and Cherry Blossom boot polish.

  Officially there was no colour bar yet Stoppi noted that the Kingston tennis club - that Mecca of social life among the British upper crust - had no black members. Native-born Chinese, by virtue of their lighter skins, had made headway in this stratified society however. As a Jew, Stoppi found an affinity with this familyorientated, commercially minded minority. And in 1965, after seven years in Jamaica, he married a Jamaican Chinese. It was then that a strange counter-process began; in England his faith in Judaism had faded, but in Jamaica it revived.

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Good question,’ Stoppi answered me. ‘I’ll have to have a think. You see, having survived the Hitlerite storm, we English Jews didn’t want to be reminded of our Jewishness. I myself became a very buttoned-up sort of a Jew, ashamed of what had happened to my people - but in Jamaica ... it was different.’ To Stoppi’s amazement, not only had Jamaican Jews survived, they had actually thrived. His Jamaican co-religionists were ‘sunshine Jews’, he said, who impressed him with their vitality and confidence. Ainsley Henriques had previously been married to the Jamaican Chinese actress Sheila Chong (star of the 1952 film Island of Desire). It was through Henriques that Stoppi became involved in Kingston’s Jewish community and, in time, was made to feel part of an ancient New World Jewry.

  The conservatory of Stoppi’s house in the Kingston hills was clammy in the afternoon heat. Stoppi was in shirtsleeves and he looked worried, his face pale and serious (with a touch of Peter Sellers about it). He went over to the bar and poured out a jolt of soda and lime. ‘I wouldn’t leave Jamaica now for all the world,’ he said. ‘I love this place like it was my birthplace.’

  Oddly, having lived in Jamaica for half a century, Stoppi bore no trace of a Jamaican accent. ‘I wish I did! - then I could cuss up and play dominoes with the boys downtown.’ Stoppi took out a handkerchief and wiped the palms of his hands. ‘When I first came here I couldn’t understand why Jamaicans spoke so loudly. Then I understood: the raised voices were connected to the ghetto. In the ghetto, see, competition for space is so fierce, the moment you’re born you’re competing to make yourself heard. Yes, Jamaicans can be aggressive,’ Stoppi added, ‘but there’s a need for it - it’s a form of self-defence, it’s part of the jungle politics of reward and revenge.’ Jungle politics? Jamaica was not, in Stoppi’s view, a true democracy. ‘If it was,’ he said, ‘we’d be ruled by the masses down there, but we aren’t and probably never will be.’

  Jamaica was now his journey’s end. ‘I’ve come a long way,’ Stoppi said, peering at me through his thick-lensed glasses.

  ‘But what, in the end, do you make of Jamaica?’

  Stoppi smiled at the touch of pretension in my question. ‘I’ll tell you what I make of Jamaica. Jamaica’s like an old heirloom that’s been handed down by an uncle to a relative. Yes, the Jamaican people inherited a piece of real estate from Great Britain, good for sugar and bananas, but not for much else.’ He had a clearer grasp of Jamaica’s predicament, it seemed to me, than many politicians. Jamaica is no longer a chief player in the world sugar and banana markets. Instead tourism has become the mainstay of the island. But can tourism alone sustain the economy? Stoppi, for one, doubted it.

  8

  Maximum Black

  Rastafarians have long been despised by the Jamaican establishment as work-shy, narcotically impaired troublemakers. They live in constant expectation of some punishment or hardship. A milestone in the Rastafari night of martyrdom was Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) in 1935. The plundering of Haile Selassie’s sub-Saharan kingdom by Fascist Italy gave Jamaica’s fledgling Rastafari movement impetus and a cause. The Fascist ‘Babylon’ was defeated by the British army and, in 1941, the Lion of Judah was allowed to return home to his throne in Ethiopia.


  At the height of the Ethiopian war in 1935, news had reached Jamaica of a secret warrior organisation apparently headed by Selassie himself called Niyabingi (‘death to the whites’). The organisation’s avowed aim was to extinguish the Caucasian race, no less. The white Jamaican establishment received news of its existence with considerable satisfaction, as it provided justification for the continuing presence of the British in Jamaica.

  The prospect of a race war seemed never more real in Jamaica than in 1968, when the young Guyanese historian Walter Rodney gave a series of lectures in praise of Rastafari and Black political militancy. The lectures, delivered off-campus to groups of the urban poor in Kingston, sparked the greatest upheaval in Jamaican society since independence in 1962. In his lectures, Rodney held up ‘Syrians’ and Jews as ‘oppressors’ and ‘lackeys of imperialism’; but he concentrated his attack on Jamaica’s Chinese who, unlike their brothers in the People’s Republic of China heroically ‘fighting against white imperialism’, were merely part of the ‘white West Indian social structure’ intent on chaining black Jamaicans in a ‘Babylonian captivity’. If the Chinese did not relinquish their privileges voluntarily (meaning their shops and businesses), they would have to be ‘deprived’ of them forcibly. Only then could they be re-integrated into a society ‘where the black man walks in dignity’, judged Rodney.

  Rodney, as a Marxist, was hardly without bias, yet he was right to point out that the abolition of slavery had not led to a recognition of African culture and traditions in Jamaica (as it might have done), but to an intensification of European values and Anglo-Christian ‘imperialism’. Rodney gave renewed voice to the dispossessed of Kingston and Spanish Town. His nine lectures (published in Britain in 1969 as The Groundings with My Brothers) constitute a landmark in Rastafari self-assertion; ‘beauty is the very essence of black people’, Rodney proclaimed. He was influenced by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s book, Black Power (1967), which called for a recuperation of ‘African consciousness’ in the mind of the modern African American (a strategy that has evolved to its unsophisticated form in today’s obsession with ‘respect’).