The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  I liked ‘Motty’ Perkins more in person than on the radio, a tall, amusing man whose humour belied grave concerns. Perkins has received death threats and, by his own count, been sued fifteen times for libel. ‘I don’t disregard the death threats, but I hope not to be paranoid about them, either,’ he told me. At the gates of his Kingston home an armed security guard sometimes walks ‘Motty’ to his car. There are certain things in Jamaica, he contends, that Jamaicans don’t talk about. ‘Not in public, anyway.’ Such as?

  ‘Such as our rapine political order. Yes, rapine,’ said Perkins. Jamaican politicians and businessmen had been drawn into the state’s parasitic embrace and metaphorically ‘raped’ the poor. Independence from Britain had been a ‘squandered opportunity’. Forty years of unbroken ‘democratic’ constitutional rule had failed, in Perkins’s view, to bring true democracy. Instead Jamaica had a winner-takes-all mentality, where the political elite were always asking themselves cui bono? (Who benefits?) What can we get out of the people?

  Perkins refilled his glass with whisky. ‘The British did terrible things in Jamaica, but whoever said we have a fair society in Jamaica today? True, we have reasonably open elections, but political oppression here is real.’ Perkins was not, it seemed to me, making a general complaint about a government - the PNP - that might have taken up the struggle of the poor but had not done so. It was something more specific, a complaint that all Jamaican politicians (not just Michael Manley) had exploited the poor for their own purposes, in what Perkins saw as a pattern stretching back through the three centuries of slavery.

  The attitude to power in Jamaica, Perkins said, remains that of the plantation system, where brutality is meted out against the defenceless, and every little shanty-town Napoleon wants to be an overseer with a team of servants at his call. ‘The Jamaicans who live in the great houses today - black, brown, yellow, white - man, I tell you, they look down on the man in the street.’ Perkins added, ‘The prime minister, his cabinet, they’re contemptuous of the poor. And the police, they despise those niggers down there, the poor.’ It was a law of nature to ‘hate those we oppress’, said Perkins, and it was hard to disagree with him that Jamaicans had inherited a lot of social contempt from slavery. Or, as Perkins put it (a touch pretentiously): ‘Our minds are riveted to the plantation paradigm.’

  The book I had to read if I was to understand Jamaica, said Perkins, was The Plural Society of the West Indies (1965) by the Jamaican social anthropologist M. G. Smith. Post-independence Jamaica, as viewed by Smith, was an immovably hierarchical society riddled by anxieties (created partly by the slave-owning British) about social caste and colour. Jamaica is identified as a ‘plural society’, where groups of differing race, rank and colour might rub shoulders in the sugar, bauxite or tourist industries but - and this was Smith’s point - without a common social will. The European, Chinese, East Indian and African Jamaican populations of Jamaica ‘mix but they do not combine’; instead they are kept apart through opposed material interests and a ‘division of labour along racial lines’. The upper strata of Jamaican society, Smith concluded, are characterised by the snobberies and racial prejudices attendant on the plantation great house - ‘of which modern versions are still being built (though in different style)’.

  One could argue, as Perkins repeatedly does on his radio show, that Michael Manley, far from ridding Jamaica of plantation inequalities, merely reproduced them. His politics of Black Power and racial equality had encouraged ‘top ranking’ ghetto dons to become the new lords of the manor; the privilege and money of the plantocracy was coveted now by a frustrated, angry people who wanted a say in their world.

  While Perkins was emphatically not (he said) a colonialist, he claimed to find much to admire in Britain’s colonial stewardship of Jamaica. ‘Colonialism was in some ways a wonderful thing,’ he said. ‘It exposed the Jamaican people to opportunities - railways, education, democratic institutions - which we might not have been able - in fact, have not been able - to take up and develop ourselves.’

  Surely, in identifying so much to admire in the Empire, there was a danger of ignoring the arrogance, racism and authoritarianism at the heart of the British imperial project? In Jamaica, as in the Raj, the British had professed libertas but practised imperium, subjugating the population to Britannia’s rule in the name of freedom. Behind Perkins’s admiration for aspects of Empire-era Britain, I suspected, was a question of colour. Perkins was a mixed-race or ‘browning’ Jamaican; and, as such, he thought of himself as middle class - middle class in the Jamaican way, meaning essentially British, with a pride at being a remnant of the old colonial ‘brown’ class. Such a class regarded all things West Indian as of inferior quality. British is best: education, food, health, the British Empire (even as it became moribund) was the definition of the very best.

  Perkins is especially riled by Rex Nettleford, vice-chancellor of the University (or ‘intellectual ghetto’, as Perkins calls it) of the West Indies in Kingston. As an ideologue of Black Power and ‘blackness’, Nettleford had been the PNP’s philosopher-in-residence during the 1970s and acted as something of a guru to Michael Manley, who consulted him on matters of Revivalist and Rastafari ritual. Nettleford’s many books on Afro-Jamaican culture - The Story of Jamaican Dance, Rex Nettleford: Selected Speeches - are hard to read, being full of circumlocutory jargon and large, sonorous epithets. Perkins cannot abide them. ‘Nettleford wastes a bitch of an amount of time talking about Africa and plantations, and all kinds of nonsense,’ he judged, impetuously. Yet the desire to ‘disrespect’ Nettleford involved Perkins in contradictions and inconsistencies, as he too spoke a good deal about ‘Africa and plantations’, albeit in quite a different way to his rival.

  For an Afro-centrist such as Nettleford, Africa forms the very bedrock of Jamaican culture: the rules in colonial Jamaica may have been British, but the subterranean ideas were African. Even the Jamaican deference for titles, far from being a British inheritance, derives from African honorific tribal forms of address. (Nettleford in fact is very mindful of titles and their correct use.) With his thick gold neck chain and fastidious Oxford accent, Nettleford invites a certain amount of ridicule (‘Sexy Rexy’, Jamaicans call him). But unlike ‘Motty’ Perkins, with his cynical demolition of Jamaica and Jamaican achievement, Nettleford has at least achieved something. In 1962 he founded the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica with the specific aim of introducing a Caribbean choreography to Jamaica. The company, now almost half a century old, was a not insignificant part of the PNP’s project to ‘decolonise’ Jamaica of European influence. Nettleford reserves his greatest contempt for Jamaica’s brown class. ‘The “brownings” put on airs and see themselves as the natural heirs of the Raj,’ he told me. ‘We call them “Bounty Bars”- white on the inside, black on the outside.’ He included in that ambiguous category Wilmot ‘Motty’ Perkins.

  The red-brick Victorian church in Willesden, north-west London, was hung with wreaths for the bicentenary of Mary Seacole’s birth. It was a spring day in 2005, and the pews were packed with uniformed nurses come from the former British West Indies to celebrate the occasion.

  Mary Seacole, the Jamaican nurse and entrepreneur, was born in Kingston in 1805 to a mixed-race parentage. Her memoir, Mrs Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands (1857), is justifiably upheld as an Afro-Caribbean masterwork. And Seacole herself has been appropriated posthumously as a ‘black British icon’, with her life story now on the National Curriculum in British primary schools. Seacole’s was the first autobiography to be published in Britain by a non-white woman, yet it is hard to construe the book as an advertisement for ‘black British literature’, as political correctness demands one should.

  For Seacole was not British - she was Jamaican. The argument might seem tortuous: Jamaica was part of the British Empire, and Seacole’s identification with Britain was in many ways inevitable. Yet neither Paul Bogle nor Marcus Garvey has qualified for the label ‘British’ (they are simply �
�Jamaican’). Why? Because Bogle and Garvey had rebelled against the British establishment, whereas Seacole was an apologist for the British Empire who, moreover, lived in some denial of her African Jamaican roots. A rare chink in her self-constructed British persona is her endorsement of African slave remedies; Seacole knew how to apply herbal poultices to comfort the injured or dying, like a Maroon ‘bush doctoress’.

  In that curiously British church setting, however, with its air of Anglican pageantry, Seacole’s patriotic spirit and ‘service’ to the mother country were enthusiastically applauded. She had been fearless under Russian fire in the Crimean War and rode to the front lines to help wounded British troops. She had gone to the Crimea in 1854 under her own steam, moreover, as the War Office in London (almost certainly on racial grounds) had turned down her application to serve there as an official nurse. For sixteen months in war-torn Balaklava she worked as a sutler (camp follower) by providing Britain’s beleaguered troops with food and rum. It was in ‘scenes of horror and distress’, she firmly believed, ‘that a woman can do so much’. Seacole was fifty-two when she set up the ‘British Hotel’ outside Balaklava and was admired for her cheerful and practical compassion.

  After the war, in 1856, ‘Mother Seacole’ settled in London, where thousands of British ex-servicemen remembered her as their saviour. A bust of her was carved by Queen Victoria’s nephew, Count Gleichen, and supposedly she acted as masseuse to the Princess of Wales. In 1881, following an ‘apoplexy’, or a stroke, she died and was buried in St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, the future resting place (before he was repatriated to Jamaica in 1964) of Marcus Garvey.

  It was not until 1954, with the centenary of the Crimean War, that Mary Seacole was officially honoured in Jamaica (a ward at Kingston Public Hospital was named after her). By that time, thousands of Jamaican women had migrated to Britain to work or train as nurses in the National Health Service. Many of them regarded nursing as a calling and honoured Seacole as the ‘true mother’ of their profession. Leeka Champagnie, ninety-two, has been recognised by the Jamaican government for her services to nursing. She lived in the ‘Golden Retreat’ retirement home off Seymour Avenue, Kingston, and I went to see her there one evening. Small and frail, with cataract-coloured eyes and a fluff of sparse white hair, she approached me down the hall on a Zimmer frame.

  Britain in the early 1950s was, Champagnie recalled, derelict, dark and half-ruined after the war, the interiors of railway carriages and buses black with grime. Bomb damage was still visible round St Leonard’s Hospital on Kingsland Road, east London, with bulldozers raking up the remains of the paediatrics block destroyed in 1941 by German bombs. On the men’s ward where Champagnie worked she was surprised to find so many poor white patients. (That poor whites existed at all was a surprise to her.) The patients were fascinated by the underside of her hands - why were they pink when the rest of her was black? They wanted to know how you could tell if black people had jaundice. ‘You have to look into the eyes,’ Champagnie told them. ‘It’s the eyes that go yellow.’

  Champagnie’s arrival in Britain coincided with the West Indies’ historic triumph at Lord’s in 1950. This was a defining moment, not just in cricket, but in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean. England had been beaten by the West Indies on home ground at the game they, the English, had invented. Thousands of Caribbean ‘immigrants’ (according to The Times) calypso-danced round the Eros statue in Piccadilly armed with ‘guitar-like instruments’. Champagnie was among them. Afterwards, at a victory party held in Fulham Town Hall, she joined Jamaicans in singing Lord Kitchener’s calypso, ‘Cricket, Lovely Cricket’, written for the occasion.

  England was beaten clean out of time

  With the spin bowling of Ramadhin and Valentine

  To me, Champagnie spoke of Mary Seacole as a ‘pioneer and a beacon’ to nurses everywhere. Between 1948 and 1969, the formative years of the NHS, Seacole’s idea of service had been perpetuated by Jamaicans working in Britain with little expectation of much pay. Champagnie thought the NHS was ‘marvellous’; some Jamaican women worked for the organisation all their lives. It offered a form of socialised medicine which accorded well with Seacole’s vision of service to Britain and her injunction to fulfil one’s societal function. ‘The NHS allowed me to help people and give something back,’ Champagnie said, in terms now unfashionable.

  Jamaica’s own public health service, founded in 1966, has not shown up so well. Universal health care is said to be the mark of a civilised society - one concerned about the well-being of its citizenry. In the 1970s under Michael Manley, accordingly, government expenditure on the health service increased more than 30 per cent. Yet in parts of the Jamaican countryside where ‘bush medicine’ is still practised, government health provision has yet to arrive.

  More and more trained Jamaican nurses are migrating to North America or the Bahamas, or choose to work in the private sector. The Victoria Jubilee Hospital, a women-only hospital built in Kingston in the fifty-fifth year of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1892, has one of the best midwifery schools in the West Indies. (The most promising students receive the Leeka Champagnie Award for Excellence.) Yet the infrastructure is crumbling and staff shortages are now so acute that specialist teachers have to be recruited from Cuba and Nigeria. The doctor-to-population ratio in Jamaica is currently 1 to 5,240, one of the lowest in the world.

  The Sir John Golding Rehabilitation Centre, however, is a national treasure. Set up in 1954 to provide care for victims of a Jamaican poliomyelitis epidemic, the centre has served as a sanctuary and place of healing for half a century. Now that polio has been eradicated from Jamaica, most of the ninety patients today have been admitted for spinal cord injuries or congenital abnormalities such as muscular dystrophy. Nevertheless such medical care is wonderful to see. It was a Friday afternoon when I was taken on a tour of inspection, and an end-of-the-week cheer pervaded the centre. Work of some sort - sewing, tailoring, soldering - is provided for all the patients. Their handiwork is later sold in tourist gift shops; thus the long-term patients have an economic life and a purpose. Everywhere they went about their tasks, stitching together national flags, making laminated table mats. Minute tasks: one man was sterilising and repairing Air Jamaica headsets - thousands of plastic headsets were hanging out to dry on racks, their wires trailing like blue spaghetti. The atmosphere, friendly and full of industry, filled me with me a mood of optimism.

  I was keen to see the place where the reggae album, The Same Song, by Israel Vibration, had been conceived. Bulgin, Craig and Spencer were three Rastafarians confined to wheelchairs by polio at the Sir John Golding centre - yet they managed to create a music of extraordinary hope. Released in 1978 on EMI’s ‘progressive’ Harvest label, The Same Song was intended partly as a social commentary on Michael Manley’s soured Jamaica, with its ‘bandoolos’ (crooks) and other compromised characters. Yet it also celebrated - with finely crafted harmonies and a spiritual Rastafarianism of unalloyed sincerity -- the very human qualities of forbearance and overcoming of adversity that the Rehabilitation Centre nurtured.

  Care, government-funded medical care of the simplest sort, was possible here; why could it not be extended to others in Jamaica? I wondered why it had to be a foreigner who had made this possible; John Golding, a man of culture, was an English Jew, a lecturer in orthopaedics. Was there something innately vulnerable - helpless, even - in the post-colonial condition that required it to seek an outsider’s hand?

  22

  Scotland Yard

  One of the great books to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain by Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, it sympathetically conveys the plight of Jamaicans who, lost amid alien signs in Britain, tried to settle and earn a crust. The book is made up of a series of interviews with Jamaican (and other West Indian) migrants in Britain, interspersed with social commentary. The author is described on the dust jacket as a ‘Jamaican-born
journalist and former London bus conductor’.

  A recurring theme in the book is Hinds’s discovery that Britain was not only unmindful of the Commonwealth but disinclined to help Jamaicans. Italians in Britain after the war selling ice cream and confectionery were made to feel more welcome, despite having fought on Hitler’s side in the conflict. The antipathy was especially galling to Donald Hinds, who as a teenager in Jamaica had read Dickens and Wordsworth, and watched endless genteel films - ‘Tea Party Movies’ - from the Gainsborough Studios. But, for all his immersion in British culture Hinds was, he recalled, ‘struck dumb’ on his arrival in Britain in 1955.

  I met Hinds in a café in Eltham, south London, in 2006. He was looking relaxed (if ready for a run) in a pair of trainers and a tracksuit. His wife was a retired Jamaican nurse who had trained at the Victoria Jubilee Hospital in Kingston. Hinds spoke of his days on the London buses with nostalgia, even amazement. At London Transport’s Brixton garage his driver, a Woodbine-smoking First World War veteran, was happy to have a Jamaican on board. ‘I fought alongside a lot of coloureds in the trenches,’ he would say.

  Jamaicans were not numerous in 1950s London and an entire week could go by on the double-deckers without Hinds seeing another black face. Passengers, astonished to encounter a black ‘clippie’ (bus conductor), asked him if they could pat his hair for ‘good luck’. After the Civil Rights Movement asserted itself in America, Hinds came to resent such curiosity. Yet London Transport played its role, he now believes, in breaking down race prejudice in post-war Britain; the buses provided the British public with an opportunity to encounter West Indians for the first time and even (heavens!) talk to them. The sense of camaraderie did not last.