Weaving to the reggae rhythms of Jamaican Carnival, the eighteen-foot Mocko Jumbies twirl and tower above the richly intermixed sea of faces, who visibly illustrate the National Motto “Out of Many, One People”. Together with the Obeah spirits (of island magic) and fable-hero Anansi the “spider-man”, these Jumbie spirits of the stubborn dead, are the purveyors of generations of oral folklore. Strongly linked to African beliefs of 17th and 18th century slaves, these icons of folk-wisdom and island history are as implicit to today’s Jamaica as “the land of wood and water” was to the Xaymaca of Arawak ancestors.
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The start of European colonization, from Columbus’ annexation of the island for Spain in 1494, also marked the end of aboriginal civilization on the island. Arriving in two great migrations from today’s Guyana and Venezuela (600 A.D. & 900 A.D.) the peaceful Arawak Indians were soon to be joined by their much fiercer rivals, the Caribs. However, both tribes were to face near total decimation at the hands of Columbus and Spanish Conquistadors. Exposed to disease, plunder, torture and slavery, tens of thousands of Arawaks would become extinct within fifty years of first contact.
Though Columbus was later stranded on the island’s north coast (1503-4), Jamaica was not to experience formal European occupation until the 1509 arrival of Juan de Esquival and the establishment of New Seville, at St. Ann’s Bay. Hardships of terrain and climate forced the migration of the colonists and the construction of Santiago de la Vega, today’s Spanish Town. Despite the beginnings of sugarcane cultivation in 1520 and the arrival of African slaves a few years earlier, the island continued to be considered a backwater colony. Of inessential worth given its lack of precious minerals (gold and silver), Jamaica remained largely underdeveloped during the 150 years of Spanish rule, even after it was given to the Columbus family as a personal estate in 1540. However, this was all to change on May 10, 1655.
Failing to overtake Hispaniola’s city of Santo Domingo as ordered by Oliver Cromwell, English fleets landed at Jamaica’s Passage Fort (in Kingston Harbour). Without much difficulty the Spaniards offered a quick surrender and Spanish Town fell to the British. Joining a few earlier escapees, armed slaves of the Spanish were too flee into the mountains of today’s Montego Bay or the rugged limestone area known as “Cockpit Country”, thus initiating one of the most intriguing populations within the island’s shores, the Maroons (from the Spanish cimmaron or wild). Like their Spanish predecessors, many of the British were to suffer disease and harsh conditions of the land. Governing Generals Sedgwicke and Brayne would themselves succumb while fortifying against feared reprisals by the Spaniards from nearby Cuba. One of the greatest Spanish attempts against the British came with 1658 battle at Rio Nuevo led by (last Spanish governor) Don Cristobal Arnaldo de Ysassi and his guerilla forces. However, deserted by Maroon allies, the defeated Spanish were to finally flee the troops of English General Doyley and return to Cuba. The Spanish would remain a constant threat until the failure of a counter-invasion in 1670, whereupon Jamaica became a permanent colony of the British Empire.
The arrival of a British Commission in 1661 marked the beginnings of active colonization of the island, under the formal appointment of General Doyley to Governor of Jamaica. By 1664 the first British House of Assembly had passed a governing legislation of 45 laws. Amid the vagaries of British administration, the 1660s also mark the beginnings of British attempts to suppress the Maroons. Rumored to live within the mountains and interior forests with wild abandon, killing any white-skin to cross their path and subject to no law save their own, the Maroons became the focus of many a military campaign. The first, led by ex-Maroon and British ally Juan de Bolas, ended in defeat for the English, who would thereafter initiate an unsteady and short-lived peace with their opponents.
The slave-trade, already in full swing, was aided by the transport of thousands more slaves with the arrival of Barbadian planter Sir Thomas Modyford and the later migration of 1,200 settlers from Surinam. Helping to protect hundreds of British pirates under ex-buccaneer Henry Morgan at Port Royal, Modyford reinforced Jamaica’s agricultural worth by promoting increased cultivation of coca and sugarcane. Morgan would see himself thrice elevated to the position of Lieutenant-Governor, rooting out his former pirate brethren while staging intermittent attacks against the towns of nearby Panama in the company of notorious outlaw wreckers. Sir Henry Morgan would be immortalized in, physician (to later Governor, the Duke of Albemarle), Sir Hans Sloane’s writings on Jamaica and would be buried with honours in Port Royal.
The chief city of Jamaica, Port Royal was reputed to be the home of one of the most wildly decadent populations in the region. A contradictory settlement of parliamentarians and buccaneers, boasting substantially built stone buildings and pirate-taverns, the city came to be known as one of the wickedest places in the Empire. However, all this was to change on the forenoon of June 12th, 1692. Hit by one of the island’s largest earthquakes, the majority of the city was to sink into the sea which also claimed the lives of thousands of its inhabitants. Later efforts to rebuild the city would perish within a fire of 1704.
With growing economic success from world demands for Jamaican sugar, increasing slavery also led to growing discontent. Unrest, revolts and demands for freedom led to frequent standoffs between English troops and plantation laborers. By a slave revolt in 1690, followed by the execution of its leaders, the Maroons were to see a consistent swelling of their ranks and become a trenchant threat to plantation-owners. However upon the signing of a Treaty, after the British attack on Nanny Town (named for the chieftainess of the Windward Maroons) in 1739, the Maroons agreed to a cessation of fighting in exchange for autonomy.
Britain’s abolition of the slave-trade in 1807, led to greater abolitionist efforts throughout the colonies. On the night of December 27th, 1831 slaves, anxious for freedom (and believing that slavery itself had been abolished), set fire to the trash house at Tulloch estate in Kensington. Alerted by the blaze, slaves from neighbouring plantations rose up against the minority whites. Following their put-down by British troops, over 80 slaves were hanged including spiritual and resistance leader, Sam Sharpe, for whom the (Montego Bay) town-square where they died is now named. This revolt is largely credited with the coming of formal Emancipation on August 1st, 1838, in Jamaica and throughout the rest of the Caribbean.
Eighteen thirty-eight also marks the beginnings of the island’s peasant history and the arrival of indentured labor from India. Lied to, lured or kidnapped by former slave-traders, this new set of unwaged plantation workers were quickly made to fill the void left by emancipated slaves. They would soon be followed by lesser numbers from China, who likewise came in hopes of surviving the dire conditions of their homeland. Many ex-slaves turned to a life of farming, cultivating small crops of cocoa and bananas, in the mountains or on small parcels of land near plantations. A familiar story to post-Emancipation settings, former slaves quickly discovered a life of devastating poverty, social marginalization and political disenfranchisement. This situation was eventually to culminate in the famous Morant Bay Rebellion on October 11th, 1865 and the institutional murder of its leader, Paul Bogle. Their pleas for fair treatment ignored by the governor of Spanish Town, the highly literate Baptist deacon and a group of farmers from Stony Gut next came to blows with British troops during the trial of two black men. At the conclusion of a final fight at the Morant Bay courthouse, about 20 of Bogle’s people were killed as well as a number of English guards. Captured and put to trial, Paul Bogle was hanged among the burnt ruins of the courthouse along with 438 others (including White sympathizers). Far from ending civil unrest, this was to remain a defining event in the fight for Jamaican rights and equality.
A British Crown Colony in 1866, Jamaica was to finally achieve Independence almost a century later, eighteen years after all adult Jamaicans were conceded the right to vote. Home to a large bauxite-mining industry, Jamaica is perhaps better known for its illegal marijuana, or ganja cultivation, beginning with the post-Emancipation indentureship of laborers from India (who revered it as a holy plant). Apart from the many groups of the Maroon nations, Jamaica has also become the epicentre of Rastafarianism. Claiming former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as their spiritual leader, the dread-locked Ras Tafaraian sect was founded within the Black Consciousness Movement of famed leader Marcus Garvey. Believing in a one-day return to African-ancestral roots of Zion, the system espouses the belief of universal spiritual one-ess “I is I”, with provisional acceptance of the Bible as a holy book.
Itself a figure in the anti-colonialist struggles of Latin America and the Caribbean, Jamaica boasts many heroes who have likewise helped to shift the tides of European Imperialism, among them Nanny, Sam Sharp, Paul Bogle, Marcus Garvey, (the late) Socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley and perhaps its greatest known son, musician and political hero, Bob Marley. Both a major tourist site, and a place of growing poverty and debt, Jamaica continues to display a character and spirit of multiplicity and resistance.
Caribbean tales is proud to feature many Jamaican-Canadians in its Storytellers Section: Makeda Silvera, Olive Senior, Pamela Mordecai, Masani Montague, Rachel Manley, Nalo Hopkinson, Lorna Goodison, Honor Ford-Smith, and Afua Cooper.
Lucayan:
[Bahamas] Another name for the Arawak Indians who arrived in the Bahamas around the ninth Century A.D. from the Lesser Antilles and the aggressive Caribs. Arhceological evidence (pottery, stone tools, bone fragments) suggests that they were a peaceful farming culture living in thatched huts, with a nevertheless advanced political, social and religious system. Subject to slavery, disease and other horrors, they would be wiped out almost twenty-five years the arrival of Columbus onto the Bahamian island of San Salvador in 1492.
Siboney:
Derived from the Arawak word for “stone-people, the Siboney were a Meso-Indian nation, known for their craftsmanship of stone and shell tools and arts. Relics have been found in various places believed to be settlement sites of the Siboney i.e. Antigua (c. 2400 BC).
Capital:
Kingston
Physical Geography:
Mountainous terrain with narrow, discontinuous coastal plain Reaching a summit of 2,256 m at its highest point of the Blue Mountain Peak, Jamaica’s 120 rivers flow from the mountains to the coast, surrounded by fertile agricultural lands, towering cliffs, magnificent waterfalls and dense tropical forests.
Population:
The majority of Jamaicans are of African ancestry, followed by those of East Indian heritage, European, Chinese, mixed and other.
Languages:
English (official), most commonly spoken is Patois, composed of several historical influences (English, African, Spanish, Irish and Rastafarian). The original inhabitants of Jamaica were the Arawak Indians.
Governmental Structure:
Representative democracy; bicameral Parliament with 21-member Senate and 60-member House of Representatives; representatives elected for maximum 5-year term; 14 parishes, Kingston-St. Andrew constitutes the corporate area.
Main Political Parties:
PNP (People's National Party)
JLP (Jamaica Labour Party)
NDM (National Democratic Movement)
Religions:
Christian denominations include Protestant, Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventists and United Church (Presbyterian). There are also numerous Evangelical groups as well as Moravians, Mennonites, Plymouth Brethren, Unity and Jehovah Witness. Other religious groups include Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Bahai's and Rastafarians.
Climate:
Tropical climate; hot, humid; temperate interior, hurricanes (especially between July and November)
Currency:
Jamaican dollar (JMD)
Natural Resources:
Bauxite, gypsum, limestone
Exports/Commodities:
Alumina, bauxite, sugar, bananas, rum, marijuana.
News/Links:
Government of Jamaica: http://www.jis.gov.jm/
Jamaica Observer: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/
Jamaica Gleaner News Online Since 1834: http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/
The Jamaica Star: http://www.jamaica-star.com/
Television Jamaica (TVJ): http://www.televisionjamaica.com/
The Commentator: http://www.thecommentatorjm.com/news/
40 years worth of rich, pulsating Jamaican music, Reggae and Dancehall: http://www.iriefm.net/
RJR Communications Group News: http://rjrnewsonline.com/