by Ian Thomson
The race ‘disturbances’ of 1958 dramatically altered the way Donald Hinds looked at Britain. Tensions erupted first in Nottingham, then, more grievously, in west London. White youths (‘Teddy Boys’ to the press) went out to beat up West Indians in Shepherd’s Bush and the area then known as Notting Dale between the factories of Wood Lane and the newly claimed middle-class streets of Notting Hill Gate. Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and other ‘Keep Britain White’ parties were rallying working-class youths to go out ‘nigger-hunting’. So began four days of the worst rioting the United Kingdom had ever seen.
The Times, in a now celebrated editorial of 4 September 1958, ‘A Family of Nations’, announced: ‘The time has come to admit that there is a coloured problem in our midst.’ The following year, on the night of 17 May 1959, a thirty-two-year-old black carpenter from Antigua, Kelso Cochrane, was fatally stabbed under a railway bridge in Paddington. His killers have still not been found.
Cochrane’s funeral in Kensal Green Cemetery adjacent to Mary Seacole’s grave was attended by over 1,000 mourners, black and white. The show of white support did little to prevent the notion, fast growing among Jamaicans, that the mother country was not so welcoming. As Hinds put it to me: ‘After Cochrane’s death we had to rethink everything, we had to revise our faith in the Union Jack.’
Between shifts on the buses, Hinds began to write for the West Indian Gazette, Britain’s first black newspaper, founded in 1958 by the Trinidad-born civil rights activist Claudia Jones. It was through the efforts of ‘Miss Jones’ (never ‘Claudia’) that Hinds became more politically aware. He interviewed Marcus Garvey’s first wife, Amy Ashwood, in London, and offered trenchant reports on life in post-war black Britain. In her newspaper office at 250 Brixton Road (now the ‘Marvellous Fried Chicken’), Claudia Jones received guests at all hours, like an alternative West Indian High Commissioner. Downstairs was London’s first black music shop (‘Theo Campbell’s’), where Jamaican mento and boogie by Laurel Aitken and Monty Reynolds sold in quantities. Black London was finding a niche for itself. The Barbadian cricketer Gary Sobers, Donald Hinds recalled, made a point of visiting the record shop during the 1963 Test at Lord’s.
Gradually, Hinds’s reverence for Britain and the Empire diminished. As he and his mother stayed on in Brixton at their house on Crawshay Road, he noticed the shelves in white-owned grocery shops begin to stock tins of Jamaican ackee and Jamaican carrot juice. The ‘Jamaicanisation’ of London quickened apace after independence when more Jamaicans came to Britain and London was poised to become the most Jamaican city in Europe. Britain’s indigenous culture is now so influenced by Jamaica that a Jamaican inflection is hip among white British teenagers. Black Jamaican culture is youth culture in London.
Donald Hinds, for his part, was proud that Jamaicans were predominant among West Indian migrants. They were, he let slip, ‘better’ than (certainly ‘different’ from) their British Caribbean brothers. Meaning? Well, he replied, apart from the accident of their having been under British control, Barbadians, St Lucians and Guyanese have very little in common with Jamaicans. ‘Superimpose a map of Europe on the West Indies,’ Hinds explained, ‘and Jamaica is Edinburgh, Trinidad is north Africa, Barbados would be Italy - that’s how far apart we are.’
As Hinds spoke the Polish owner of the café called out from the counter: ‘Excuse me, where is Jamaica?’
As Jamaica is predominantly black, it might be thought that racial prejudice does not exist there. Jamaicans were always reminding me that they had no ‘colour prejudice’, only ‘class prejudice’. Snobberies had been rife among British planters, as they ranged down the social scale from attorney to overseer to bookkeeper. But these were not British class distinctions (the typical Jamaican planter preferred to forget his class origin): rather, they were a variant designed by men who needed to keep their ‘position’ in West Indian society as a reward for their self-exile.
Planter snobberies were inevitably shaped and defined by colour (or, more properly, ethnicity). In order to bolster their social status, planters evolved an elaborate ranking of skin beginning with their white eminences at the top, and descending to the ‘salt-water Negro’ at the bottom. Between true black and pure white were mustees, mustaphinos, quarteroons or quadroons, octoroons, and Sambos (children of ‘mulatto’ and African mix). These names have a strange poetry in their sounds, but they conceal a mean-minded prejudice. Consequences of this ‘racialised’ system - the minutely calibrated hierarchy of skin tones devised by the British - have survived in Jamaica to the present day.
It is a nonsense to claim that ‘colour prejudice’ does not exist in Jamaica. Prejudice is strongest not between white and black, but, I came to realise, between black and ‘browning’. Mixed-race Jamaicans, though ‘structurally black’ (in anthropologist’s jargon), often seem more pugnacious in their disapproval and derision of Africa and African ‘mumby-jumby’ than white Jamaicans. Most ‘brownings’ who stayed on in Jamaica after abolition thought of themselves as staunchly British. Their Britishness was part of what it meant to be a cut above the poor, patwa-speaking Jamaicans who said ‘Inglan’ instead of ‘England’. Even freed Jamaican slaves were at pains to reject their African origin; Anthony Trollope, in his travel account The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860), wrote of how they refused to eat, drink or even work alongside slaves newly arrived from Africa. Their faces scarred with Congo tribal distinctions, these Africans were reckoned to lack British manners and upbringing, what Jamaicans call ‘broughtupsy’.
Inevitably, in their move white-ward mixed-race Jamaicans identified with planter-class Englishmen. (There were even some ‘brownings’ who joined white slave-drivers in resisting emancipation.) On the other hand, many white Jamaicans today happily lapse into Afro-Jamaican patois; they have no reason to fear the mark of Africa. Such are the intricacies of skin colour in Jamaica.
Mary Langford, a Jamaican writer and historian of the island’s Quaker movement, is the sister of the author Evan Jones. Like many of her mixed-race class and colour, she lived in a smart Kingston house jammed with mahogany furniture, silver polo trophies, silver tea pots and, above all, maids. The maids were very black, and their blackness, contrasting with their pink blouses and pink skirts, served to highlight the ‘whiteness’ of their employers. Likewise, wealthy black Jamaicans may choose to exhibit their equality with whites by employing white servants imported from Eastern Europe.
In much of what Mary Langford said I detected a sense of ‘African embarrassment’. She told me, ‘I’m not afraid ipso facto of Africa, or of African culture. But there’s too much ganja, too much dancehall, and too much sleeping in the afternoon.’ She sighed. ‘The yout bwoys, they have no work but what they do have is a gun.’ That word ‘yout’ - youth, but with a connotation of delinquency - was a bad word with these brown people: it meant underdeveloped, non-English: in a word, African.
I asked Mary Langford, with one eye on the polo trophies: ‘So Jamaica was better off under the British?’
‘Oh I don’t know about that,’ she said with a cautious air. ‘Mark you, there was better law and order. The British police were marvellous. They didn’t boss it over others like the Jamaican police do today. Black Jamaicans - not that I have any prejudice - are just not as good at keeping law and order.’ The PNP under Michael Manley, with its black nationalism and project to ‘decolonise’ Jamaica of its British influence, had taken Jamaica too far in the direction of Africa, said Mary Langford. ‘Where is the place for us in Rex Nettleford’s Afrocentric outlook? Where do we fit in?’ Cecil Langford, her husband, had served in Edward Seaga’s JLP government and was part of the middle class, from which Jamaica’s political elite was drawn following independence. The world had moved fast for him and Mary Langford: what had long been consolidated by them - the status, the property - was being menaced by a new class risen up from the ghetto and the gulley. They found it uncomfortable to have to jostle for position with the newcomers.
F
our dogs - Rhodesian Ridgebacks - bounded up to me as the Langford chauffeur came to take me back midtown. He was wearing a khaki drill uniform to signify his owners’ wealth and he opened and closed the door for me, addressing me as ‘sir’.
A white skin in Jamaica is associated with wealth and high social rank, yet there are exceptions. Scattered across Jamaica are pockets of poor white country folk sometimes known as ‘rummers’ after their fondness for drink, or ‘redskins’ from their sun-reddened skins. These white Jamaicans challenge the stereotype of dispossessed blacks and all-powerful whites.
Poor whites are to be found everywhere in the Caribbean. In Barbados they live in conditions of near-destitution along remote Martin’s Bay; in Haiti is a community of moun rouj (red people), believed to be descended from the Polish troops sent out by Napoleon in 1803 to help quell the slave revolt. Most of the 2,570 Poles defected and, in 1806, following Haitian independence, they were granted the right to stay on the island and own property. But they would have to count themselves as part of the black majority; to my knowledge, this was the first time in history that the term ‘black’ had been used in an ideological sense.
Two distinct communities of poor whites exist in Jamaica: one is notionally ‘Scottish’, the other ‘German’. The Scots live along the south coast in the parish of St Elizabeth, the Germans in Westmoreland parish deep in the interior. The whites of St Elizabeth - ‘St Bess whites’ - have Scottish surnames such as Heron, Hamilton, Paterson and (easily the most common in Jamaica) Campbell. They live in villages with Scottish names: Culloden, Scott’s Cove, Ballards Valley.
The Germans are descended from indentured labourers drafted in by the imperial British during the 1830s as a ‘civilising’ presence. As white, conscientious, God-fearing folk, they were expected to set a good example in pre-emancipation Jamaica and, if necessary, take up arms in defence of the planters should the slaves revolt. Among the 1,500 original settlers were gunsmiths, metalworkers, clothweavers, stone-carvers, teachers, tinsmiths and cobblers. The British administration had promised them an amount of arable land in return for their labour. Inadequate preparation had been made for their reception, though, and before long Jamaica’s extremes of heat and hurricane overwhelmed them.
Some 250 of the Germans were settled on a wild tract of land owned by Lord Seaford, a white Jamaican whose family had been on the island since 1685. In Seaford Town they cultivated yam, plantain and ginger. ‘We was all of us poor in them days,’ Olga Gardner, a ninety-two-year-old Seaford Towner, told me. ‘Life was hard - hand to mouth - yes, we come from hungry-belly history.’
Bizarrely, some of their descendants later appeared as film extras in the prison saga Papillon, based on the novel by Henri Charrière and starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The film was shot partly in Jamaica, in 1972. The extras were required to play the part of prison inmates in French Guyana. Each day fifty of them were bussed to locations in Kingston and the north coast. (‘There was no place for Negroes in Papillon,’ one of them said to me. ‘If some of us was too dark - if we had mixed Negro and German blood - we got floured up.’) Filming went on for three weeks. Father Francis Friesen, the Catholic priest of Seaford Town, features in the film as the priest who administers the last rites to a poor devil about to be guillotined for attempted escape. Neither he nor any of the ‘convict’ extras is credited in the two-hour-long epic. Father Francis complained to the director, but to no avail, and when he died in 2006, at the age of eighty-five in his native Holland, apparently he was still aggrieved.
Today, only 157 ‘full white’ descendants of the original German settlers survive in Seaford Town. The German word Heimat - homeland - occasionally occurs in their speech, which contains traces of Westphalian and Rhenian dialects. But most Seaford Towners have no idea from where in Germany their ancestors came. Some of their houses, with their lattice-work gables and pastelcoloured verandas, nevertheless have a Germanic aspect. Inside, certain items of furniture and kitchen utensils (ceramic-tiled stoves, scrubbing boards, sausage-making tools) enhance this impression. One elderly woman I met had been making pastry with a Nudelroller and the grey dough clung to her hands. Her maiden name was Hacker. From a cupboard she removed two porcelain milk jugs with a pink floral pattern, which her great-grandparents hadbrought over in 1835, from Gottingen, perhaps. Holding one of them up to the light, she tried to remember the prayer she had been taught as a child. The prayer was recited, she said, during illness and natural disasters. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them - the words had come back to her:Ich bin klein.
Mein Herz ist rein,
Soll niemand drin wohnen
als Jesus allein.
She translated: ‘I am small. My heart is pure, nobody may live in it but Jesus.’ The hymn had gone down the generations of Seaford Town like the porcelain jugs as a talisman of Heimat. Yet, at this late hour in Jamaica’s history, the fate of the ‘Germaicans’ is uncertain. In Seaford Town, cousins often marry cousins; and there are a number of deaf-mutes. ‘Cousins boil good soup,’ goes the Jamaican proverb.
Exactly when the ‘Scots’ came to St Elizabeth’s is not known. But the isolation of the parish - with swamps to the east and west, mountains and desert savannah to the north, and sea to the south - has helped preserve them as a people apart. Legend has it that they came off a shipwreck some time in the seventeenth century, stayed and left their ‘Scottish’ names.
The first wave of Scots arrived as slaves to English planters in about 1655. A second wave, in 1745-6, was made up of Jacobite rebels captured after Culloden. Yet a third wave, in the years after Culloden, went voluntarily and comprised doctors, engineers and sugar estate managers. As professionals, they planned to return to Scotland as soon as they had discreetly amassed a fortune or, in the expression of the time, a ‘comfortable independence’. Young Scots hoping to escape economic depression scoured the Caledonian Mercury and Edinburgh Advertiser for news of Jamaica-bound ships. Among them was the poet Robert Burns, who in 1786 was offered the position as a bookkeeper. Jamaica was then at the peak of its slave-based sugar boom, but Burns never took up the post.
The Scots, like the English, were ardent capitalists and agents of Empire. Yet they perceived themselves as oppressed by Empire and their Calvinist morality often recoiled against the luxury and dissolution of the English planter class. Zachary Macaulay, the future abolitionist, arrived in Jamaica from Scotland in 1784 at the age of sixteen. He began work as a plantation bookkeeper and, subsequently, rose to assistant manager. He was not initially opposed to slavery, yet he flinched from whipping the slaves in his care and disdained (so he later wrote) the ‘grossly vulgar manners’ of the English masters. After four years in Jamaica he returned to Scotland, apparently in disgust.
Other Scots were not so lucky. They failed to accumulate sufficient capital to go home and, seduced by the tropic warmth and women of the island (or their Calvinistic conscience silenced by drink), became ensnared. Tobias Smollett, the Glasgow-educated Scottish writer, aptly described Jamaica as ‘the grave of the Europeans’. By the 1750s, Scots were estimated to form nearly a third of Jamaica’s white European population. Place names in Scotland today attest to their migration: Jamaica Street in Glasgow; Jamaica Bridge over the River Clyde.
For years the ‘whites’ of St Elizabeth had kept to themselves along a fifteen-mile stretch of coast between Parottee Point and Great Bay. Ballards Valley, a little way inland, is still distinctly ‘white’.
Lena ‘Dimple’ Henry, a Jubilee-trained nurse, lived in a house in St Elizabeth hung with pink curtains ruched into swags. She and her three sisters, Blossom, Puxie and Cherry, had been raised by their white grandmother, Lina Hyam, in the St Elizabeth village of Berlin. For the slightest misdemeanour ‘Miss Hyam’ would flog her charges; above all she prohibited them from mixing with black boys. The ‘Quashees’ had to know their place but, Miss Hyams complained, they were always trying to ‘marry up’ - marry lightskinned women in order to ‘improve’ the social
colour of their children - and to add ‘a bit of cream to their coffee’. As the only ‘white’ inhabitants of Berlin, the Henry girls would have to watch their backs.
One of the first St Elizabeth ‘red men’ to marry a black Jamaican was Zimroy ‘Zim’ James, a fisherman in the Treasure Beach area. His wife, Chrisida, had come from Brown Hill up country where no whites lived. ‘Yes,’ James said to me, ‘she was a dark lady and I married her. Lord, everybody was fussing back when it happen, said I was spoiling the family by marrying a black. Well, what happened happen - it can’t unhappen.’ Chrisida was among the early wave of Jamaicans who moved into the area in the 1950s as the bauxite industry expanded. St Elizabeth’s demography changed as more outsiders came to work in the mines and tourism. As late arrivals - black, at that - they often found themselves unwelcome; today things have improved.
White Jamaican prejudice towards black Jamaicans works both ways. Sheila Hamilton, now seventy-three, is a Justice of the Peace in Treasure Beach, and regards herself as a woman of ‘Scottish’ descent. ‘Sometimes people call me black,’ she said. ‘Maybe we Hamiltons do have African race in us - well, most Jamaicans do - but I’m not black. I’m brown. A light-brown lady.’ She paused. ‘Actually I’m virtually white.’ In the 1950s, when she worked as a nurse in Mandeville Hospital, the black nurses there called her ‘Redskin’, ‘Mulatto’, ‘Red Nurse’ or ‘Redibo’. (‘Redibo’, in modern Jamaica, designates a person of reddish-yellow complexion, and is usually derogatory.) ‘We clear-skinned folk were thought to have advantages which the blacks couldn’t have or get.’ Such as? ‘Well, the full-blacks were jealous of my skin and my tall [straight] hair.’
Mrs Hamilton concluded ruefully: ‘Our Scottish colour’s dwindling down - we’re all getting Jamaicanised now.’ Let us hope so. Colour prejudice in Jamaica is as subtle as it is pernicious. Eunice (‘Cherry’), Lena’s younger sister, has worked since 1979 in the Passport Office at the Jamaican High Commission in London. She said to me, ‘There’s no one more prejudiced than black Jamaicans. Why, blacks are prejudiced even against themselves.’ Even the black Jamaicans of her acquaintance did not like being called blacks, she said. ‘Maybe some of the young people. And those radicals. You know, Rastas. But not Jamaicans my age. Even people who really are black, they don’t like it.’