by Ian Thomson
‘Oh plenty time,’ he replied to me, smiling, ‘since eighteen, nineteen, maybe.’
‘1819?’
‘No, man, since I was eighteen or nineteen.’
‘Oh - a long time.’
‘Yeah, plenty long time.’
Did he not get scared at nights on his own here? The Rasta thought a moment. ‘There’s a very special eerie atmosphere,’ he conceded. Duppies? ‘No, I don’t see them. The stillness here, it help me meditate.’ The word ‘meditate’ seemed to remind him that lamb’s breath was just now what he needed. He fetched some from a pocket and began to build a spliff. Oh God no. After what seemed an unconscionable time he gave the Rizlas a tender lick and a roll, lit the cigarette and handed it to me by the thin inhaling end, which I declined.
He drew on the smouldering stick, exhaled, drew, exhaled. ‘A man can’t work without a likkle weed in him belly,’ he announced after a few minutes and, self-absorbed, smoked on. The Rasta, with his easy-going, brotherly communitarianism, had fetched up on an estate where (according to Lady Nugent’s horrified description of 1802) slaves had slept rough on the floor amid their own filth. Only the other day Land Office officials had ordered him off the premises. ‘And I would leave,’ the Rasta said to me through tartared, gum-shrunk teeth, ‘only I need proper warning, so I can take up my plants and banana trees and thing.’ I saw a kind of justice in his occupying a slave-driver’s property. As Jamaicans say: ‘What serves too long, serves another man.’
On the road to Kingston, hard by the ruins of Seville Nueva, I waited for Hugh Dunphy to arrive. The sun above me was hot as a stove as the cars sped by. I had met Dunphy and his Jamaican wife, Ouida, at a party in Ocho Rios, where they offered to give me a lift back to Kingston. They ran an art gallery in midtown, called the Bolivar.
Hugh pulled up in a Japanese car with Ouida, poised and haughty-looking, seated in front. Dunphy was, there was no denying it, eccentric-looking. With his white hair worn long in a ponytail, he suggested an ageing rock musician or yoga teacher. Arthur Koestler, in his travel book The Lotus and the Robot (1960), mentions Dunphy as a young English dropout who has retreated to a Zen temple in Kyoto. His eccentric appearance was, I suspected, a form of self-protection: Jamaicans had been more friendly to him, he told me, since ‘I’ve looked like a freak - Jamaicans like freaks’. Well, I got into the car.
The road to Kingston was narrow, and passed through spectacularly lovely waterfalls and lush hills. At one point we stopped and walked across a suspension bridge that swayed under our weight, the sound of water reaching us in a haze of spray. Along the way, Dunphy showed a keen eye for unusual shrubs (‘My God! An Amhurstia!’) and local curiosities of all kinds. At Castleton Junction he remarked of a woman standing by the roadside that her bottom was ‘steatopygous’, and explained what he meant by that: ‘Jamaican women have splendid posteriors but some of them can be quite alarming, sort of like shelves. Yes, steatopygous.’ Oiuda, after a silence, expressed her displeasure at Hugh’s sexist rudeness. ‘You are horrible,’ she said. ‘I’ve a good mind to hit you with my yardstick.’
Herman van Asbroeck’s house, situated near the nineteenth-century tourist attraction of Devon House, midtown, had razor wire over the main gates: nine times Herman had been burgled. Nowhere in Kingston seemed to be safe any more, he would say. Only the other day a youth had been shot dead in the neighbourhood as he tried to steal an orchid from a garden. Shot dead for a lousy orchid. But, the grimmer things became in Jamaica, the more Herman insisted on staying. ‘My business is here in Jamaica.’ He was unlikely ever to return to his native Belgium. He had been living in Jamaica since 1980: ‘Herman the German’, people nicknamed him.
I liked Herman. A lugubrious but good-humoured character, he managed to find a comedy in all aspects of island life. Jamaica had become for him a place that ridiculed analysis and took him beyond despair to a place of semi-comic bafflement. ‘Absurdistan’, he called the country, long before a novel about Russian immigrants in the USA, Absurdistan, appeared.
The door opened and Herman said to me absently, ‘Welcome back, Ian,’ then typically fell silent. I walked in with my bag. From loudspeakers upstairs wailed Ethiopian music of the 1970s by Mahmoud Ahmed. (Herman had a magnificent record collection.) His bearded, melancholic face, like that of a Degas absinthe drinker, regarded me blankly as I sat down. He had been eating supper with his partner Eunice, who looked up at me from the table as I walked in, and smiled in greeting. Eunice was from St Lucia in the eastern Caribbean and as strikingly black as Herman was white. Her cheerful manner contrasted with Herman’s occasional gruffness. As a professional picture-framer Herman’s reputation was for no-nonsense - even brutal - honesty. Difficult clients who did not mind getting ‘barked at’, as he put it, usually came back; Herman had the best rates in town.
The house, low-ceilinged and clammy, was filled with Congo fetishes and cabinets of African exotica and pre-Columbian Taino marvels. Herman’s curiosity seemed to be unlimited. Bizarre, rainbow-bright paintings by the late ‘Ras Dizzy’ Livingstone, a Rastafarian artist whom Herman had long championed, hung from the walls. I climbed the stairs to a room off a landing lined with books on African art and tribal custom, and went to bed. I slept fitfully. That night a sound of gunfire reached me from nearby Kingsway. The gunfire put a strain on my nerves, as did the sporadic barking. A bout of barking would end in a high-pitched yelp of (possibly) pain followed by silence - then renewed barking as the dogs started to fight again. Such was life in Absurdistan.
20
Police and Thieves
Next morning I woke up in a room jammed with art catalogues and paintings. Above the door frame was a portrait of Herman as a bearded African Christ figure. He was planning to visit an artist acquaintance of his, Andy Jefferson, who lived in Newcastle, an hour’s drive out of Kingston. Did I want to go? In Queen Victoria’s day Newcastle had served as a British army hill station; Anthony Trollope, visiting in 1859, had commented on the trim lawn planted with Union Jacks.
We left sharp at six. To Herman, behind the wheel, there was something reposeful, even magical, about the heights round Newcastle. The scenery reminded him of earlier days in Jamaica, when he had gone to Newcastle to escape the heat-trap of Kingston. But violence was creeping up from Kingston even to these idyllic lands. At Red Light, once a brothel town for the British troops, a pack of kids glared at us as we drove past. Murder was on their minds, said Herman; murder and money.
When Herman first came to Jamaica, in 1980, he worked for the United Nations ‘development’ office in Kingston. For four years he was absorbed by UN conferences and seminars; the European experts, with their talk of ‘moral responsibility’ and ‘intermediate technology’, were going to help Jamaica. But Herman began to doubt it. On the eve of the 1980 general elections he witnessed from the window of his flat an American remonstrating loudly with two Jamaican men by his poolside. One of the men took out a knife. ‘The guys then just walked away,’ Herman said to me; they had cut the American’s face from ear to ear.
Quickly, his idealism flattened into something like cynicism. He decried the American influence on Jamaica, with its emphasis on material comfort, disposable goods and gadgetry. And he spoke with exasperated disenchantment of Jamaica’s murder rate, which by 2008 had reached an average of five killings a day. ‘Something’s gone wrong,’ Herman would say. Fortunately he had found a new sense of purpose in collecting, cataloguing and promoting naïve or ‘intuitive’ Jamaican art. He became champion to self-taught Jamaican painters and sculptors, helping the poor ‘develop’ in more concrete ways.
Andy Jefferson’s home, a bungalow-shack on bare earth, was part of an informal bus-stop area called Cedars, which looked out across green hills to the Newcastle barracks. Jefferson had been expecting us. ‘Cup of tea?’ he asked in his cockney-Jamaican (he came from Plymouth but had lived in London). ‘Why not?’ we said, and Jefferson went off to boil a kettle. Disconcertingly his head, shaved, was covered
in hospital stitches where burglars had pistol-whipped him the other week. ‘I thought I’d be safe up here near the barracks,’ Jefferson explained, bringing in the tea. ‘Not a bit of it.’ The intruders - two men in ski masks - had tied him up and set about stealing his money, computer, camera and CD player. Blood was everywhere but Jefferson managed to drag himself into a room and lock the door, so protecting himself from further violence. One of the burglars he suspected as being the boy who tended the lawns at Newcastle. ‘A nasty boy,’ Jefferson said with emphasis (the boy was later prosecuted); but, incredibly, there was no hint of resentment or even hatred in his voice. A part of him, I guessed, had become inured to the violence.
As we sipped PG Tips we could hear, in the distance, the sound of the drums and cymbal-crashes of the Jamaica Defence Force beginning their morning drill. On a cream-coloured wall above the kitchen sink handprints showed where the burglars had prised open the window. Until the burglary Jefferson’s life, except for the occasional visitor, had been extremely isolated. What could keep him in Jamaica?
Justice, or the lack of it, said Jefferson. In 1993, he and his brother Mark had been out driving for the day near Kingston when a road block forced them out of their car. The muggers shot Mark dead; Andy survived, without injury. The same judge who later acquitted his brother’s killer also acquitted, the following year, a man who had ‘car-jacked’ Jefferson on the road to Kingston. ‘So where’s the justice in that?’ he asked us. Yet Jefferson said he would have to stay in Jamaica. ‘What else am I supposed to do?’ His passion for Jamaica - its African-inspired art and music - was very great. The Kingston ghetto especially, with its underlying Afro-Revivalist customs, was fascinating to Jefferson. In a series of acrylics and prints done in the 1980s he depicted the rise of Jamaican dancehall fashion and music. The paintings - The Don is Back, The Crack Den - sold well: Jefferson became a name in Jamaican art circles.
But since then he had endured more humiliations and violence. The ‘One Love’ Jamaica he had once known (fast expiring even in the late 1970s) was now dead. ‘Dead, I say, and it makes me so effing sad. The young blokes here, they don’t have the old sweetness any more. Gone, all fuckin’ gone.’ Bob Marley was Jefferson’s idol. But Jamaica had changed. Several of the original Wailers had died violent deaths. In September 1987 Peter Tosh was murdered; Carlton ‘Carly’ Barrett, the originator of the ‘One Drop’ style of drumming, was shot and killed that same year (apparently by his wife and her boyfriend). Twelve years later, in 1999, another original Wailer met a violent death: Junior Braithwaite was killed in Kingston by three armed men.
Jefferson’s solemnity deepened. ‘So I’m left with this love-hate relationship: I still love Jamaica, but I hate what’s happened to Jamaica, and what happened to my brother. Well, it’s a shame.’ A frown appeared on his white face.
Over at Newcastle a peace had descended on the parade square after drill practice. ‘I hope you’re not a copper,’ Jefferson said to me, half-joking, as he pointed to plastic pots of cannabis plant seedlings in a neighbour’s garden.
I had an appointment with DCP Mark Shields, a senior Scotland Yard officer on secondment to the Jamaican police. His office, situated on the first floor of a modern building in New Kingston, stood stark and cheerless on Oxford Road. A frosted glass panel on the main door proclaimed, in gold leaf, JAMAICA CONSTABULARY FORCE.
In reception a duty officer, his burly figure encased in regulation blue, asked me if I was carrying any firearms. ‘Sir, I have to ask you that for security reasons.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘A knife?’
‘No - no weapons at all.’
‘Good. Are you from England? Here on business?’ He was looking into my eyes, trying to read them.
‘Sort of - I’m researching a book. On Jamaica.’
‘It’ll have to have a catchy title. How about Everything Crash?’
‘Sounds a bit drastic,’ I said.
‘Well, Jamaica’s a drastic kind of country.’ He added banteringly, ‘How about Keep the Pressure Down?’
I could see that he was the talkative sort.
He went on, ‘Somebody once told me, he was a book-writer like you, he told me if you put the word nurse in a title, you’re guaranteed a million-dollar sale.’
I said, ‘Keep the Pressure Down, Nurse, for example?’
According to a report in the Gleaner newspaper (26 June 2005), most Jamaican police suffer from ‘clinical sleep pathologies’ and other ‘stress-related lifestyle diseases’. At any time, they ‘may be as highly impaired by fatigue as if they were legally drunk’. In their depleted state, underpaid, overworked, it is hardly surprising that some policemen take bribes and rake-offs from rackets. This has only helped, of course, to make some areas of Jamaica even more violent and poverty-stricken.
Mark Shields was reckoned to be tough enough for Jamaica. He had served in both the anti-terrorism unit of Special Branch and Scotland Yard’s Operation Trident, which investigates gun crime in London’s black community. In March 2005 he was appointed director of Jamaica’s counter-narcotics and ‘major’ crime force, Operation Kingfish. Many doubted he would last a week. He was not black, and while many Jamaicans, in their vaunted desire to reinstitute ‘British’ law and order, were happy to submit to a British law enforcer, others understandably were not. In January 2006 this letter was featured in the Jamaica Observer:It is disturbing that four decades after gaining independence we have to call in a foreigner to help us catch our wrongdoers. Have our present-day policemen no pride in their profession?
All the same, ‘Top Yard Man’ Shields quickly became a Jamaican hero, a sort of Clint Eastwood figure. Once installed in his Oxford Road office he was inundated daily with telephone calls, not all of them yielding hoped-for criminal intelligence (Shields has many women admirers). He made international headlines in March 2007 when he was appointed chief investigator into the death in Kingston of the Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer. Heart attack? Strangulation? Eight months later, in November 2007, the Woolmer inquest was closed by the coroner: murder had been overruled.
Shields was half an hour late - not bad considering the Kingston traffic. ‘DCP Shields,’ he said, extending his right hand and, passing the examination rooms with their wire-mesh windows, led me into his office. A detailed map of Kingston marked with coloured pins hung on one wall. He put down his takeaway cup of coffee on the desk, loosened his tie, said, ‘It’s hot today,’ and looked up at the clock on the wall. Ten minutes past eleven; he had to be downtown by half past: we had twenty minutes in which to talk.
I got to the point and asked Shields if he had suffered antagonism as a white Deputy Commissioner of Police in Jamaica.
He replied, with an air of finality, ‘No. None at all,’ explaining, ‘In a politically correct country like Britain we’re acutely aware of racial problems. But these problems are simply not an issue in Jamaica. Ninety per cent of Jamaicans have embraced me.’ But after a moment’s hesitation he said, ‘There’s an element in the Force who don’t want me here, but that’s not because I’m white. It’s because I pose a direct threat to their criminal activities.’ The benefits of corruption are known to every working policeman in Jamaica. Shields was determined to deal with the problem. ‘If a policeman’s got a suspiciously big house, or a flash Escalade or Hummer car, but no visible means of income, we’ll go after him.’ In some parts of Kingston, the police control where and how openly a gang can operate; they can put just about anyone in jail.
Shields went on, ‘People here are poor, they don’t have jobs, and there are, I believe, cultural reasons why Jamaicans kill each other with such ... frequency.’ It will take more than police action to bring down crime rates. Traditions of vengeance have been handed down the generations like family silver. ‘A murder might have occurred fifteen, twenty years ago,’ Shields explained, ‘and nothing happens until one day the dead man’s son decides to exact retribution.’ Jamaicans can be - increasingly, are - murdered
for a trifle. ‘I’ll give you an illustration - the other week in Kingston a bloke lifted up a woman’s skirt on the bus. This was seen as a major act of “disrespect”. A tit-for-tat killing situation ensued.’
An entire family was ‘rubbed out’ in order to avenge the affront. (Often, if a person marked for murder is not available, his women and children get hit, never mind their innocence.) Why - I was curious to know - is this disregard for human life not found to the same degree elsewhere in the English-speaking West Indies? Was there a specifically Jamaican predisposition to gun crime? Or was that too narrow an assumption?
Shields looked at me intently. ‘I really don’t know how to answer that. I do say publicly that these levels of violence are peculiar to Jamaica, and Jamaicans aren’t offended by that. I’m not going to be politically correct: I speak as I find.’ Some see Jamaican assertiveness - an assertiveness which can easily spill over into violence - as a delayed response to the cruelty of plantation life; Shields had little time for such niceties: all the theory in the world means nothing if you can’t read the street. ‘I don’t know about slavery, what I do know is that we’ve found all kinds of weaponry in Jamaica,’ he said, glancing at the clock again. ‘Rocket launchers. Grenades. Sophisticated stuff. Political? Well, the jury’s still out on that.’ In recent years, said Shields, the politicians have sought to distance themselves from the criminals. A new type of don - the narcotics don - has begun to dictate the terms to the politician, rather than the other way round. ‘All the same, the link between politics and crime is still very pronounced in Jamaica. Very,’ Shields concluded.
The political no-go areas of Kingston reminded Shields of Northern Ireland, only in Kingston the boundaries are not as clearly defined as in Belfast, which only made them ‘more lethal’. In the 1970s, when he had served with the Met in north London’s Stoke Newington, Shields had encountered Turkish-Cypriot gang warfare on Green Lanes. The problems he encountered then were not so different from the ones he was encountering each day in Jamaica. Only (Shields used the word again) they were more ‘lethal’.