Sweet Jamaica
In the Land of Wood and Water, Some Old Habits Die Hard
I. Grounation
The Jamaican capital of Kingston spreads out from the diamond-capped waves of its harbour, guarded from the Caribbean by the isthmus of the Palisadoes, before climbing into the lush Blue Mountains to its northeast. A visitor finds a metropolis humming with activity, where, along the Parade, as the square surrounding William Grant Park is known, vendors still loudly vie with one another for customers, while in and around the architectural jumble of the business district of New Kingston and elsewhere, the skyline is dotted by construction cranes that look down on the traffic-choked streets. Along Orange Street, which once hosted a myriad of vinyl record stores, almost all now closed, murals of reggae musicians like Big Youth and Dennis Brown remain, though many are fading. Heading west out of downtown, one encounters a labyrinthine assortment of struggling communities such as Trench Town, Denham Town and Tivoli Gardens, names resonant in the history of the island’s political battles. At night, in Port Royal across the bay (once the largest city in the Caribbean and a redout for buccaneers famed as the “wickedest city in the world” before being destroyed in a 1692 earthquake), one can enjoy stew fish while watching the urban lights twinkle through the palms.
Jamaica - the third largest island of the Greater Antilles after Hispaniola and Cuba - has been ruled by the centre-right Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) since March 2016, with Andrew Holness, member of parliament for the Saint Andrew West Central constituency (which encompasses and surrounds much of Kingston), serving as Prime Minister during that time. From an economic standpoint, it is hard to argue that things have not been impressive. From a debt that measured almost 150% of GDP in 2013, that number has been cut in more than half, to just over 68%. Following decades of high debt and low growth, last year Jamaica saw its real GDP expand by 2.9 percent, bringing it to pre-pandemic levels, with mining and tourism leading the way as the country’s unemployment rate dropped to 4.5 percent, the lowest level in the country’s history. Last October, the bond credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service upgraded Jamaica’s ratings from ‘B2’ to ‘B1’ and revised its outlook from Stable to Positive, citing the government’s fiscal policies and dramatic reduction in debt levels. A month earlier, Standard and Poor's had upgraded its own rating for Jamaica from B+ to BB-, with a stable outlook, citing what it said was the government’s “prudent fiscal policies.” Last year, Jamaica’s government even increased the island’s minimum wage by 44%, from $59 for a 40-hour workweek to $85, a move announced only days after teachers’ wages were also increased.
But there is more to the story of a nation than a balance sheet, and looking behind the numbers, a more complicated picture of modern Jamaica emerges.
II. The Stone That the Builders Refused
Driving west out of Kingston along the Spanish Town Road, one passes the May Pen Cemetery and rows of factories before traversing the span of a canal known as Sandy Gully. Greeted by tree trunks and utility poles painted orange, the traditional colour of the JLP’s left-wing opposition, the People's National Party or PNP (the JLP itself favours green), one enters Riverton City.
For many years, Riverton City was represented in Jamaica’s parliament by the PNP’s Dudley Thompson, widely viewed, along with the former JLP leader Edward Seaga and several others as one of the godfathers of the system of arming young cadres of supporters in the the slums in what became known as “garrison politics”. In the 1980s, the neighbourhood was the redoubt of a well-known and much feared criminal, Natty Morgan, later killed by police in a shootout in neighbouring Saint Catherine Parish. But the majority of the community, then as now, mostly consists of people struggling for a dignified life in a district where many residents make their living scavenging and repurposing items from the nearby city dump
“There’s more recyclable resources here, so you can make a living,” says 36 year-old Anthony Thorpe, who grew up in the nearby city of Spanish Town and has lived in Riverton City for 13 years. Despite the blazing sun, he wears heavy boots, long sleeves and a t-shirt wrapped around his head as a kind of protection for the difficult work of parsing the wheat from the chaff of Kingston’s cast-off detritus. Behind us as we speak flows a polluted creak upon which egrets flutter. Beyond that lies the dump, which has been the site of several massive fires in recent years.
“I do copper wires, brass, loom, iron,” Thorpe says.”It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.”
Regarded as an “informal settlement” by the government, Riverton City has no primary or high school, and young students have to trek to neighbouring communities for their education. Thorpe is conscientious about sending his children to school, though, to ensure they will have a better life than he did. It is a priority for many in the community.
“Because of how dangerous being a waste picker of scavenger is, the parents don’t want their children to do that, so they put a big value on education,” says 21 year-old Tavian Jones, a Project Coordinator with the nonprofit organization International Samaritan, which works to ameliorate the conditions of the neighborhood’s residents. “But some of the jobs that the PNP would be able to provide while they were in power are not available anymore, so people get laid off and they have to turn back to the dump or farming.”
Many of the community’s residents do feel left behind by the state, Anthony Thorpe explains.
“People see Riverton City as a dump community,” he says. “But violence begets violence, and once you don’t get justice you’re going to seek justice and that’s where the violence is. The justice system down here is way below average for civilized people and the easiest thing in life here in Jamaica is to get a gun. You can’t go to the police station to get justice, so most of the young guys resort to their own justice.
“But I’m not afraid of the gang members,” Thorpe continues.”I’m scared of the police. They target everyone at wartime even though you’re not a gang member. We need a lot of help here. The youth don’t have the resources to make the community better and themselves better.”
III. Political Fictions
Since Jamaica gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1962, the JLP and the PNP have alternated power in the country, with the rivalry between the parties sometimes turning violent during election times. As Jamaica picked its way through the treacherous post-independence Cold War landscape of the 1970s and 1980s, the JLP was led by Boston-born Edward Seaga, the scion of a Lebanese-Jamaican family and a former record producer. A disciple of Jamaica’s first Prime Minister, the pugnacious former labour leader Alexander Bustamante, in 1962, Seaga was elected MP for a West Kingston constituency that included Tivoli Gardens, a seat he would hold for 43 years. For its part, the PNP was led at the time by Michael Manley, the charismatic son of Norman Manley, who served as Jamaica’s first and only Premier before independence.
Manley’s first time as Prime Minister, from 1972 until 1980, was marked by intense political divisions in Jamaica, with Manley saying he was putting Jamaica on the road to democratic socialism as he cozied up to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, a leader and regime which Manley characterized as “a movement and a man, a catalyst and a rock” in the “struggle against imperialism.” With Manley saying in 1976 that his government would use “social engineering to eliminate the errors of private enterprise,” he also advised that “for anyone who wants to become a millionaire in Jamaica…we have five flights to Miami every day.” Seaga, meanwhile, thundered that Manley was a “communist.” Whether or not largess would shower on various districts depended on what party was in power. Both parties committed acts of violence against one another, including the January 1978 Green Bay Massacre, where five JLP supporters were set up and ruthlessly purged by members of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF), and the murder of Manley’s Deputy National Security Minister, Roy McGann, in October 1980.
The Manley years brought economic chaos to Jamaica. After two years of bowing down to the International Monetary Fund’s draconian policies for continued access to credit, Manley pulled Jamaica out of the body in March 1980. That year Jamaica’s foreign debt exceeded $1.3 billion. A blood-soaked election campaign in which at least 844 people lost their lives culminated in an October 1980 vote in which the JLP captured 51 of the 60 seats in Jamaica’s House of Representatives. As JLP leader, Seaga would serve as Prime Minister from 1980 until 1989. Jettisoning Manley’s “radical” alliances, he drew close to conservative world leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, supporting the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada after the assassination of its Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop, Despite Seaga's economic conservatism - which did largely pull Jamaica's financial house back from the brink - his policies also contributed to a sharp increase in the price of living, which also dovetailed with the elimination of thousands of government jobs. Back in as Prime Minister in 1989, a chastened Michael Manley pursued a more moderate course before stepping down in 1992 (He would die of cancer 5 years later). By this time however, some of the gunmen that had once been paladins of the PNP and JLP had expanded into transitional crime syndicates known as “posses” in the United States and “yardies” in the United Kingdom, one of the most famous of which, The Shower Posse, hailed from Seaga’s electoral constituency in Tivoli Gardens.
The PNP would hold power in Jamaica under the Prime Ministerships of P. J. Patterson and Portia Simpson-Miller until 2007, when they lost the general election and were succeed by the JLP’s Bruce Golding as Prime Minister. Golding served until 2011, resigning amid a roiling controversy regarding his government’s alleged to links to Kingston drug lord Christopher “Dudus” Coke whose base, Tivoli Gardens, was Golding’s parliamentary constituency. Golding’s government had initially tried to block a U.S. request to extradite Coke before raiding the poor community to arrest him in May 2010, sparking violence that claimed at least 73 lives. As the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF), the country’s national police force, delt with the hydra-headed descendants of these criminal gangs, the struggle between lawmen and badmen gave rise to a particularly Jamaican brand of law enforcement official, including such figures as former Assistant Commissioner of Police Keith “Trinity” Gardner (now serving as a defense attorney), former Superintendent Cornwall “Bigga” Ford and Reneto Adams, former commander of the JCF’s Crime Management Unit, who gained notoriety in 2003 for leading a controversial raid where two women and two men - possible unarmed -in the rural village of Kraal were killed.
Andrew Holness filled out the remainder of Golding’s truncated term before losing the subsequent election to the Portia Simpson-Miller-led PNP. He returned to the Prime Minister’s chair in his own right in 2016. Throughout these wild political gyrations, some of the most deprived communities in Jamaica were left to try and negotiate their own way forward through the myriad of challenges that confronted them daily. Many still do.
IV. Bad Card
The security situation Jamaica remains fluid. Last March, at the conclusion of a trial that lasted well over a year, 15 members and associates of the Klansmen, a criminal organization based in Spanish Town, west of Kingston, that police have said has been responsible for some 800 murders in the last decade, were found guilty under new anti-gang legislation introduced in 2021 under the name Criminal Justice (Suppression of Criminal Organisations) (Amendment) Act. The new act allows prosecutors to pursue gangs as an entity as opposed to criminals solely as individuals.
Jamaican organized crime has grown more sophisticated, with various manifestations of electronic scamming - often taking the form of a bogus lottery winning upon which victims (often U.S. citizens) are then pressed to pay “fees” or “taxes” - growing ever more prevalent on the island.
And despite the new police powers, the admirable economic stability the JLP has brought to Jamaica in recent years and the polished performance of Andrew Holness in such regional matters as hosting the recent CARICOM talks to help cobble together a transitional government in neighboring tumultuous Haiti, a whiff of lawlessness still clings to the party and to the Jamaican political system as a whole. In the most recent Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International, where a score of zero means “highly corrupt” and a score of 100 means “very clean,” Jamaica scored an underwhelming 44.
Jamaica’s Integrity Commission announced in its annual report last July that six parliamentarians and 28 other public officials were being investigated for illicit enrichment, while an additional seven legislators and 32 public officials were under investigation for providing false information to the commission, though none of the investigated parties were named. Last year, the Commission declined to press charges against Holness connected to allegations that, while serving as Minister of Education, he recommended contracts totaling nearly $140,000 to a company with whom he had previously shared business links. Documents submitted to the Commission by Holness covering the period up to the country's last general election in 2020 declared assets of approximately J$192 million (around USD $1.2 million).
The details of the sources of politicians’ wealth remain largely hidden from the Jamaican public, and the lack of transparency with which the asset declarations have been available to the public has been a subject of great controversy in Jamaica, with anti-corruption campaigners calling the official opacity om the subject of politicians’ wealth “very embarrassing” and “disappointing.” Meanwhile, some JLP members, such as Senator Abka Fitz-Henley,a former journalist, have been outspoken about what they charge is the commission's bias against the current government.
“The government is widely seen as having forfeited its moral authority to speak out on crime [and] parliament is trying to neutralize the commission charged with investigating corruption and bring it under political control,” says Anthony Clayton is the Professor of Caribbean Sustainable Development at the University of the West Indies.
“There’s still a fairly pervasive culture of corruption and neither party seems willing to clean house and purge corrupt members from their rank,” Clayton continues. “There’s very low level of trust in the police and the justice system is seen as irrelevant to the lives of many people so they’re much more likely to have recourse to violence to solve their problems.”
Controversy swirls around Jamaican politicians and, then, just as suddenly and mysteriously, seems to evaporate and disappear.
In 2012, for example, the JLP’s Daryl Vaz, then serving as the party’s chief spokesman on information and communications technology issues, was charged with breaching anti-corruption laws by pressuring police to drop a case against a businessman friend. Three years later, the case was dropped when the main witness, a police sergeant, recanted his testimony. In 2019, the the U.S. visa of Vaz, by this time serving as Minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, was revoked without explanation, only to be reinstated with a special waiver two years later, which equally little in the way of explanation. Vaz currently serves as the country’s Minister of Science and Technology.
Another JLP politician dogged by scandal without any apparent political ill-effect is James Robertson, who served as Jamaica's Minister of Mining and Energy from March 2009 to May 2011 and who has been an MP for Saint Thomas Western since 2002. According to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, in late 2006, Robertson appeared at the mission to meet with officials carrying no identification but rounds of ammunition in his pockets. A September 2007 the U.S. Embassy cable alleged, as per DEA sources, that Roberston had been “involved” with Norris Nembhard, a convicted drug trafficker. A June 2008 cable subsequently asserted that Robertson was “believed to have links to criminal organizations.” Robertson has always denied such links.
In November 2010, Ian Johnson, a businessman and JLP activist, fled to the United States, where he subsequently sought asylum, and issued a sworn statement detailing a conspiracy that he accused Robertson of being involved in, including, he claimed, Robertson ordering him to kill a businessman who was subsequently murdered. Robertson denounced the accusations as “wicked.”
Despite the Johnson allegations, the JLP stood by Robertson with Vaz, then serving as Minister of Information, claiming that Robertson resigning would “would be playing into these characters' hands,” referring to those leveling the accusations, while local JLP activists in Robertson’s constituency advised the populace to “pray” for him. Robertson appeared onstage at the JLP’s annual conference in November of that year with Kayon “Treasure” Campbell, one of the men Johnson alleged the politician was considering targeting, and who then told Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner newspaper “the allegation that he wants me killed is rubbish” In 2016, The Miami Herald reported that a former Scotland Yard detective who had served as assistant commissioner in the JCF had investigated Robertson due to accusations that he had attempted to arrange at least two murders and “found enough evidence that he recommended that prosecutors charge the politician.” Jamaica’s Ministry of National Security, the former assistant commissioner, Leslie “Les” Green, said, refused to protect a key witness in the case, who fled Jamaica, leading the case to fall apart.
Robertson resigned from his ministerial post in 2011 when it was revealed that his U.S. visa had been revoked for unspecified reasons. He subsequently sued Ian Johnson’s lawyer in a Florida court, but eventually dropped the action, with a statement saying that the politician acknowledged “there is no basis to proceed.”
Three men were subsequently charged in a a Jamaican court with conspiracy to murder Johnson, but the last news repots of the case stopped in December 2011. Holness appeared with Robertson at a campaign event in the latter’s district only last month.
V. Man Free
All around Jamaica today, one finds signs of progress interspersed with memories of the past. When one drives east out of the capital, a road takes the early-morning traveler passed the Alpha Institute (formerly the Alpha Boys’ School), proudly proclaiming itself “The Cradle of Jamaican Music” and whose school band produced some of the leading instrumentalists in ska and early reggae. Driving beyond Kingston’s General Penitentiary (immortalized in a 1979 song by the reggae group Black Uhuru) with the Caribbean glistening on your right, you see the looming factory of Jamaica Flour Mills Limited. Skirting Bull Bay, a new highway the JLP government has built has cut travel time in this southeastern corner of the island by half
Turning off just before reaching Morant Bay and ascending into the hills on a bumpy road beneath a canopy of trees, one finally reaches Stony Gut, the site from which, in 1865, Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon, led a violent uprising against the grindingly unequal and exploitative system that dominated Jamaica even after the abolition of slavery in 1834 in what became known as the Morant Bay Rebellion. At the bottom of a steep country lane, one finds a small clearing and modest marble plaque celebrating Bogle and his “protest against the oppression of the humble Jamaicans by the plantocracy.” It is an unpresuming spot, considering its historical significance, but the local people still clearly view it with pride and the area and grounds are kept immaculately clean and neat.
In Kingston’s eastern suburbs, just beyond the University of the West Indies at Mona, there is a neighborhood still suffused with the spirit of Paul Bogle, and that of a man inspired by his example. The community of August Town long held a reputation as one of Kingston’s most violent, so much so that in July 2020, the Holness government declared it a Zone of Special Operations (ZOSO), a designation reserved for areas where “rampant criminality, gang warfare, escalating violence and murder and a threat to the rule of law” exist.
Though at first, the measure met with a host of complaints of security force brutality to Jamaica’s Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) - something that has not entirely gone away - over time, the neighborhood began to stabilize, and one became less likely to hear the crackle of gunfire over the green hills and narrow lanes of the quarter.
“I’ve seen developmental changes in terms of physical infrastructure and also changes in the behavior of the people,” says 41 year-old Ricardo McCalpin, a police officer, resident and the president of the August Town Community Development Council (CDC), as we spoke in a quiet courtyard in the district on a recent Ash Wednesday.
“We grew up in an era when there was war, gang violence, community violence and all of that.,” McCalpin says. “But now, I’d say people are becoming more socially aware and more empowered.”
Far from a sure thing in terms of party loyalty, August Town is something of a contest come election time between the JLP and the PNP. When local elections were held in Jamaica last month, island-wide the JLP won the contest for control of 7 local authorities while the PNP won 6. Voter turnout was a dismal 29.6%.
“There are communities where you have a stronghold , and politicians are sure they will get the vote,” says Ricardo McCalpin. “But this community is not really a stronghold for either of the political parties. So the campaigning has to be robust. They can’t just take it for granted. They have to put in work here.”
August Town has long been associated with the life and teachings of Alexander Bedward, a revivalist preacher and admirer of Paul Bogle who had spent time in Panama and who is viewed by many as a precursor of the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey.
Bedward founded the Jamaica Native Baptist Free Church, whose philosophy became popularly knows as Bedwardism, and was repeatedly hounded by the colonial government for alleged sedition, and at times locked up in a local mental asylum. Bedward spoke of Jamaica’s “true people” and of a “white wall” and “black wall” interminably at odds and of a “government [that] passes laws which oppress the black people,...They take their money out of their pockets, they rob them of their bread and they do nothing for it.” As he advanced into his dotage, he told his followers that on New Year’s Eve 1920 he would ascended to Heaven upon a flaming chariot. Many followers gathered to witness this miracle, which never occurred. Bedward spent the last nine years of his life in a mental asylum, dying of natural causes in 1930.
Next to a winding road that snakes through August Town and under low, green hills, a once-grand building, now derelict, sits behind an iron fence. The building is what remains of Alexander Bedward’s church. Up the road still further, in what has become known as Bedward Cemetery (perhaps the only cemetery in the world that also boasts a football pitch), the tombs of Bedward and his wife have been lovingly restored by residents, and brightly-coloured headstones dot the ground beneath looming trees. Many in the community hope that sites like this can help build a base of community tourism in the neighborhood.
On the fringe of the cemetery, I spoke to Reverend Dorothy Price-Maitland, 65, who moved to August Town in the late 1990s and has since become justice of the peace and helped residents to open African Garden Juices, a small business that uses the fecund land surrounding us to help produce juices such as sorrel and irish moss (the latter actually mostly made of marine algae). In this proper place to grow wise in, if only that so many dead lie round, she sees a future for her community and her country.
“We have been doing a lot of footwork, not just only sitting down and having meetings but face to face meetings with the community,” says Price-Maitlan.. “We are focusing on the positive and we hope to go further with the development. It’s a hard fight, but we are not giving up.”