by Ian Thomson
Now, as the dream of Third World revolution has unravelled (except, perhaps, in Bolivia and Venezuela), one can see to what a ruinous state Jamaica had been brought in the 1970s and 1980s. In the election year of 1980 alone, a shocking 900 Jamaicans died in episodes of political violence. Manley’s policies had begun to hurt those whom the PNP sought to help the most - the poor - and alienated the residue of the middle class.
Yet, for all his faults, the half-thought thoughts and rash designs, Michael Manley had urged Jamaicans to take pride in their country, and for a while it looked as if he could lead them into the radiant future of his promises. Many of his projects contributed beneficially to welfare in education (free secondary and higher education), health, equal pay for women, and the empowerment of other disenfranchised groups, among them young people and domestic servants. Impressively, too, Manley helped to create a black entrepreneurial class and enabled a black managerial group of mostly women to prosper in the growing financial sectors of New Kingston.
But something else needs to be said. Manley, a tall, back-slapping man’s man, was fortunate to possess the (not unusual) facility for mixing sex with politics. He had a reputation as a philanderer, and this earned him the honorific nickname ‘Housewife’s Choice’ (the title of a popular Jamaican song of the 1960s). He married five times, moreover, across the Jamaican race spectrum, from black to white to mixed-race to Chinese. All this counted for much in a country where a sector of the electorate is illiterate.
Until his re-election in 1989 Manley remained faithful to the ideology of the party, the PNP, which his father had founded four decades earlier in 1938. His fall from grace, in part the result of mismanagement and political naivety, was all the harder for his followers to take because, in the early 1970s, there had been a genuine popular support and a willingness to make sacrifices. Michael Manley, the voice of impatient reform, remains for many Jamaicans a revered figure.
Curiously, his political experiment had been foreseen sixty years earlier by the playwright George Bernard Shaw who, invited to Jamaica in 1911 by the British Governor General (a fellow Fabian, Sir Sydney Olivier), complained to the Gleaner newspaper:What is wrong in Jamaica is that you produce a sort of man who is only a colonial ... If a Jamaican wishes his son to be a fully civilized man of the world in the best sense - to belong to a great intellectual and artistic culture - he has to send him to Europe. Now that’s not a necessary state of things. On the contrary, it ought to be far easier to build up a Jamaican culture than it is to civilize a Camberwell Cockney. Jamaica for the Jamaicans, say I.
Well said: Jamaica for the Jamaicans. ‘The politics of participation’, Michael Manley had called it. Such was his dream, a dream of almost universal goodwill. And what Manley had hoped to offer by this dream was not merely a Jamaica fully independent, but a Jamaica governed by the people for the people. It was a model of self-reliance now, sadly, gone sour.
16
Nanny Knew Best
Much romantic nonsense has been written about the Maroons, or runaway slaves, of Jamaica. In the 1970s during Michael Manley’s socialist experiment, Maroons were hailed as forerunners of Black Power, and the world’s first black freedom fighters. Even today, descent from Maroons is regarded by some Jamaicans as a mark of noble background. Marcus Garvey claimed Maroon ancestry as has, more recently, the British Jamaican hip-hop celebrity Ms Dynamite.
The truth is, Maroons fought only for their own liberty, not for the overall liberty of enslaved Africans in Jamaica. As a condition of their freedom (and in return for land and other privileges), they had to agree to return other fugitive slaves to the imperial British and even help quell slave revolts. Infamously, Maroons had helped to put down the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, acting as bountyhunters for Her Majesty’s murderous Governor Eyre. Thus the surviving Maroons in Jamaica are left with an ambivalent legacy as both heroes of, and traitors to, black freedom.
The mountains and waterfalls east of Port Antonio provided an ideal refuge for the Maroons and their descendants who, on first encounter, seem to look and live much like the Jamaican majority. Unlike most Jamaicans, however, Maroons have conserved a unique subculture of African language, music, divination and spirit animism. The African lore has been handed down the generations by the Maroons’ Ashanti (Asante) and Fanti slave ancestors. These tribes, the Ashanti and Fanti, were called ‘Coromantees’ by the British after the slave forts which held them captive on the Koramantine coast of Africa prior to their deportation to the West Indies. A minority of Maroons can still speak the Asante-Twi and Fanti languages of what is today Ghana.
During the Maroon Wars of Jamaica, which lasted from 1673 to 1796, the most repressive measures were taken to crush a people whom the British regarded as on a level with ‘savages’. Cuban mastiffs trained for manhunting were unleashed on the runaways in the west of Jamaica. In 1796, 600 of them were herded on to ships for Nova Scotia in present-day Canada for re-settlement. The transportees who survived the harsh North American winters were later transferred to the ‘experimental’ free colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa, where they formed the nucleus of a tribal elite whose descendants still dominate that country.
Maroons have existed throughout the Caribbean, notably in the English settlement of Surinam, ceded in 1667 to the Netherlands. Tall and athletic, their name derives from the Spanish cimarrón, meaning ‘wild’, originally applied to cattle in the wilds of Hispaniola or present-day Haiti. In Portland parish they were led by a ‘Coromantee’ tribeswoman known as Nanny, who fended off British troops (according to the - possibly Jamaican - legend) by catching bullets in the cleft of her buttocks. Even today, the idea that this Boudicca figure used her rear (or, according to another tradition, her vagina) to catch enemy bullets is offensive to some Jamaicans. In all likelihood, the bullet-catching legend was contrived by agents of British colonialism with the intent to ridicule. It is just as likely that Nanny, in the folklore of Jamaica, lifted her skirts to moon at the Redcoats - a gesture of extreme contempt, signifying ‘batty man’.
Nanny - ‘Grandy Nanny’ - is now a Jamaican national hero; and although no contemporary images of her survive, her imagined likeness appears on the JA $500 banknote (‘Give me a Nanny!’ street beggars implore). In 1994, her regal status was enhanced when the patwa words ‘Nanny a fi we Queen’ (Nanny for our Queen) were found spray-gunned on to the entrance of the university campus in Kingston, shortly before Queen Elizabeth II was due to visit. The graffito, the work of anti-royalist Jamaicans, was hastily removed.
Some theorists see Jamaica’s Maroon history as interwoven with the island’s mountainous landscape and with the ‘defiant’ Jamaican character itself. Among them is the Guyanese author and publisher Eric Huntley. When Huntley first came to England in 1956, it was the Jamaicans who by their defiance and willingness to confront authority dominated West Indian expatriate life and urged Huntley to ‘stand up’ for his rights. ‘Jamaicans had this grit, this cussedness that really was like a Maroon rebelliousness,’ Huntley told me. In Huntley’s view, the Maroons were ‘the first true anti-colonials’.
Parts of Portland parish are backed by fantastic mountain shapes. ‘You should take a look,’ Huntley urged me. ‘All those mountain ridges misted and aloof - a proper setting for guerrilla strikes!’ The terrain certainly offered scope for resistance. ‘In Guyana, though, we have no mountains to speak of, so we don’t have much of a runaway slave culture either.’ In 1968, taking a leaf out of the Maroon book, Huntley set up the Bogle-L’Ouverture Press in west London, named after the freedom fighters Paul Bogle of Jamaica and Toussaint L’Ouverture of Haiti. One of its earliest authors was the British-Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose irate protests against the British authorities (‘Inglan is a Bitch’) Huntley saw as an inheritance variously of Maroon culture, Rastafari militancy and the Black Power ideology of Walter Rodney (another Bogle-L’Ouverture author).
Moore Town is home to one of Jamaica’s four existing Maroon communities and is a
ccessible by bus from Port Antonio. As I waited at the bus stop on Williams Street (opposite the blowsylooking Top Hat nightclub), Vic Taylor’s sorrowful 1969 song ‘Heartaches’ welled up from a taxi radio. Moved by it, I watched a promenade of locals on their way to Sunday morning church as a group of higglers meanwhile gathered by my side.
‘How long before the bus comes?’ I asked one of them.
‘Nine and a half hours,’ came the reply.
After a careful pause I said, ‘Things don’t move fast in Jamaica.’
‘No, my dear,’ she agreed, ‘they don’t move at-all at-all.’
After a couple of hours the bus arrived. It had a slogan painted on the side: ‘SMILE - IT INCREASE YOUR FACE VALUE’, which I had seen on a Revivalist church in Haringey, north London. The bus was driven by a young East Indian with a miniature gold imitation revolver hanging from a necklace. The higglers hailed him ‘Coolie Bwoy!’ and I sat in the passenger seat next to him. He turned out to be a deportee from the United States and, with unabashed relish, he explained to me how his deportee status had arisen.
‘I went down for aggravated felony in Miami, 1991,’ he said, as we creaked and crunched out of Port Antonio. That year saw a crack epidemic in the big US cities and ‘Coolie Bwoy’ spent two years in a Miami jail for selling the stuff. Air Jamaica flew him home. Apart from the detectives to whom he was handcuffed at the back of the plane, only the stewardesses knew he was a criminal. On his return to Port Antonio, ‘Coolie Bwoy’ felt nothing but shame: the mere sight of him was offensive to the police. ‘Everybody saw me as a failure - and motherfuckin’ right I was a failure! I’d been to the richest country in the world and come back a dip [deportee].’ His eyes swept quickly across the road. ‘To be a dip in Jamaica is to lose face.’
After months of searching for a job he was taken on as a bus driver and was now grudgingly accepted by his family who had come over from Calcutta in 1912 on the same day the White Star liner RMS Titanic went down. Each year an average of 3,600 Jamaican nationals are deported from the United States, Canada and, increasingly, Britain. Many are flown back for non-violent offences and not considered a threat. Into this category fall drug couriers and ‘overstayers’ - Jamaicans working abroad without a permit. A handful of deportees are extremely dangerous.
The most notorious in recent years was the Jamaican boxing champion Trevor Berbick. Convicted in the United States for sexual assault, theft and burglary, in 2006 Berbick was deported to his birthplace in Portland parish, only to be murdered there by members of his own family over a land dispute. Deportees with gangland connections can cause local crime rates to soar, the more so if drugs are involved. Invariably each new import of narcotics into a community coincides with a run of the sales on the cocktail cabinets and widescreen televisions at the local, yellow-painted Courts furniture store that dominates every Jamaican town.
After eight miles of driving we pulled up in front of a roadside bar called the Monte Carlo Club; passengers got out to empty their bladders, quench their thirst or smoke a cigarette. Below us were the slow-moving waters of the Rio Grande where Errol Flynn had gone rafting. Here, British Redcoats had been tracked by armies of invisible opponents, who laid pit-traps concealed by branches and hid out in ‘back-o-water’ caves. The eerie wail of the abeng, a ram’s horn used by Maroons to communicate over distances, warned the British that a marauding party was on the way to plunder plantations - they were easily ambushed, outwitted by the Maroon scout networks.
Betrayal was a constant danger in the Maroon Wars and even today Moore Town’s 2,000-odd inhabitants remain suspicious of outsiders or obroni as they are known in Asante-Twi. ‘Trust no shadow after dark,’ cautions a Jamaican proverb; a Maroon might add, ‘Trust no one, ever’. Every five years Maroons elect a new colonel to arbitrate in land disputes, minor court cases, disputes over taxes and even marriage, as well as guard against the incursions of obroni. In spite of their secretiveness, Maroon settlements have been infiltrated by anthropologists, chief among them Kenneth M. Bilby, an American, who arrived in Moore Town in 1977.
At first Bilby was taken for a CIA agent. Those were the fear-ridden months of Michael Manley’s second term, when the United States (or right-wing forces operating within Washington) seemed intent on destabilising Manley and the PNP. Eventually Bilby, having won the trust of the local colonel, was given free passage through Maroon territories in the east of the island. His book, True-Born Maroons (2005), based on hundreds of taped interviews, provides an extraordinary oral history of Afro-Atlantic slave custom. For Bilby, the Maroons were not ‘traitors’ to black freedom, but representatives of a defiant New World blackness, who dealt a lasting blow to the British Empire and British rule in the West Indies. True-Born Maroons, a record of a fast-vanishing culture, has a valedictory tone that moved me. While in London I had contacted Bilby, who provided me with an address in Moore Town where I could stay.
Moore Town was a beautiful, shabby place under the high peaks of the John Crow range of the Blue Mountains. I got off the bus on the far side of a river. A cluster of shacks emerged from the morning haze, and then I heard my name. An old man was calling it, gesturing at me from a porch. ‘Ian!’ He was hollering now. ‘Oyea!’ He turned out to be Leonard Pryce, a tall man of about sixty, my Bilby contact.
He welcomed me into his house, a concrete bungalow built in 1975, and by local standards spacious, with four bedrooms leading off a white-painted corridor. The remains of old Maroon shacks with galvanised zinc roofs stood nearby, unoccupied. Leonard introduced me to his wife, Gene, a reticent presence. I was to have a room at the back that belonged to one of her three sons, all of them making a decent wage for themselves now in London, she said.
The walls were covered with posters of jacked-up American cars with gold wheel rims and one of Al Pacino as Tony (‘white powder’) Montana in Scarface. I had to remind myself that I was in the house of ‘true-born Maroons’: Nanny’s children were drifting from their ancestral moorings. Above the bed was a photograph of Gene’s sons standing outside the Guardian newspaper on Farringdon Road: gold earrings, high-tech puss boots, black Nehru jackets.
After a shower I made my way down the corridor to the kitchen stacked with cooking utensils left and right, including a pot of something Gene had prepared for lunch. ‘Tripe,’ she explained, ‘with garlic.’ While I ate, she and her husband pottered round the kitchen, chatting.
‘Things used to be lovely here in Moore Town,’ Gene said to me as I picked at the tripe. ‘Now it’s gone rotten.’ When old-time Jamaicans survey post-independent Jamaica, often they see nothing but chaos and ruins. ‘You right, Gene. You is so right,’ her husband agreed. ‘PNP fight JLP. Kingston politricks have come to Moore Town. Well, it was never like that.’
‘Is it really that bad?’ I asked.
Leonard nodded. The Jamaican capital, with its gangland murders, its vitriol-throwing, its rapes, used to be considered the reverse of Maroon territories, where you could walk from village to village without fear. All that changed in the late 1990s, apparently, when a kind of undeclared war broke out between Moore Town’s PNP and JLP factions.
Matters deteriorated further in November 2003, when UNESCO donated US $1 million to help Moore Town preserve its African culture and African language. Much of that money, according to the Pryces, was stolen. ‘Moore Town is becoming just as bad as the city. Slowly but surely’, said Leonard.
Isaac Bernard, a fete-man or Maroon elder, lived in Castle Comfort village three miles distant from Moore Town. Apparently he could speak the ‘secret’ African language of Asante-Twi and had the power to cure sickness or bring about evil.
Next morning along the trail to Castle Comfort, Maroon settlements drifted into sight through the morning river mist. A smell of earth rose heady from the rain-soaked land, and not for the first time, the beauty of rural Jamaica exhilarated me. The Rio Grande was out of sight, but the slopes of its great jungle-like valley, its green hillocks and scattered groves of palms
were caught in brief brush-strokes of lilac, green and grey. At Alligator Church a swingbridge took me across the river dashing white over rocks a hundred feet below. From somewhere in the hills Tenor Saw’s dancehall anthem of 1985, ‘Ring the Alarm’, welled up like a Maroon war cry. Hey, woah, ring the alarm. Another sound is dying ...
The high, forested cliffs of the John Crow Mountain showed in the distance and, closer to, wide acres of ripe cane. I had to pass through Cornwall Barracks village, an old Redcoat outpost. Here the sun glowed red in a clear sky, the air burning hot against my skin. The barracks were little more than a crumbled stone wall choked by weeds. The British troops stationed here were believed to have had children by Maroon women, and brown-skinned Jamaicans inhabit the village today. Half-Maroons are known in patois as waitamigls, or ‘white-a-middles’.
A buzzard flapped heavily through the air as I approached Castle Comfort, my destination. On the outskirts a man was lolling coolly against a tree. He called out to me in the voice of a plantation overseer, ‘Bwoy! Come here!’ He added, ‘What’s up, bwoy, you have some business here?’
I asked him if that was a question.
‘It’s a question. What mission are you on?’
‘I’m looking for Isaac Bernard.’
‘Who is Isaac Bernard?’
‘Isaac Bernard? He’s a fete-man.’
‘You sure of that?’
I knew Jamaican hostility but this felt like open aggression. Actually, as I later found out, the stand-off was a Maroon tactic designed to confuse or ward off outsiders. Runaway slaves had used jijifo - an Asante-Twi-derived word meaning ‘evasive manoeuvres’ - to mislead and trap the Redcoats. This verbal sparring was intended to wrong-foot obroni like me.