Origins

Jamaicans come from an island in the Caribbean Sea, located 140 kilometres south of Cuba. The island of Jamaica, with its 10,990 square kilometres, has a largely mountainous landscape that poses formidable challenges for farming and inland transportation. While lush vegetation, white sand beaches, the sea, and sunshine have established Jamaica’s reputation as a tourist mecca, the island also lies in the path of disastrous storms, so that periodically its main crops (bananas, citrus, sugar cane, coconuts, and other fruits and vegetables) as well as its housing and physical infrastructure are destroyed or severely damaged by floods, hurricanes, and on rare occasions by earthquakes.

Sometime at the beginning of the seventh century C.E., Jamaica was settled by the Arawak people who called this island Xaymaca. Nearly a millennium later, Christopher Columbus landed and in 1495 claimed the island for Spain. This began the first of two periods of European colonial rule in Jamaica. Under the Spanish, the Arawak population was extinguished within a few decades as a result of war, European diseases, poor conditions under enslavement, and deportation. The population was replenished by the importation of African black slaves, although under the Spanish Jamaica remained little more than a sparsely populated way station for ships en route between Cuba and other nearby islands.

In 1655 Britain, Spain’s main rival in the Caribbean region, captured Jamaica and inaugurated over three centuries of British rule. For about a decade, the British allowed Jamaica to become an outpost for pirates who harassed other Spanish colonies in the region. It was not long, however, before the British turned Jamaica into a vast sugar plantation. Plantation owners and their slaves were recruited from Barbados. They were followed by a steady, annual influx of slaves, mostly from West Africa, so that by the early decades of the nineteenth century an estimated 750,000 blacks had forcibly been brought to work as slave labour on the sugar plantations of Jamaica. The British government, especially during the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the second half of the seventeenth century, also used Jamaica as a dumping ground for white criminals, prisoners of war, prostitutes, and other undesirables, but this had only a minimal impact on the island’s demographic structure. By the time the slave trade was abolished in 1807, blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of ten to one.

From the very outset of British colonial rule, the blacks of Jamaica rejected their dehumanized status and rebelled against their owners. As early as the 1670s, several slaves fled their Spanish owners and retreated to the mountains where they created a fierce fighting force that came to be known as the Maroons. Eventually, they coalesced into two main regional groupings – the Trelawnys in the western part of the island, and the Windward or Nanny Town Maroons in the east. The latter took their name from a legendary female chieftain named Nanny, who in recent decades has been added by the government to the roster of national heroes as a fitting tribute to the undaunted spirit of the women of Jamaica.

The Trelawnys under their foremost chief, Cudjoe, developed into a formidable guerilla force. For nearly four decades, they inflicted heavy casualties on the British forces until both sides signed a peace treaty in 1739. Dissatisfied with the colonial administration that continued to whittle away their rights, the Maroons launched a full-scale revolt in 1795, but were forced to accept a dictated peace treaty that same year.

Protests against slavery did not end with the Maroons, however. In 1831 the so-called Baptist War led by the lay preacher Sam Sharpe culminated in a massive revolt in western Jamaica followed by brutal repression. Despite its defeat, the 1831 revolt together with the unprofitability of slavery and the growing abolitionist movement in Britain resulted in the abolition of slavery in 1834.

After their emancipation, the former slaves fled to the hills where they worked the land as small-scale independent farmers. To make up for lost labour, the plantation owners adopted the system of indentured labour that between 1848 and 1917 attracted newcomers from what are today India and Pakistan and, to a lesser degree, China, in particular from among the Hakka people, a branch of the Han Chinese.

Competition from other sugar-producing countries and regions and the impact of free trade contributed to the decline of Jamaica’s sugar industry and the traditional plantation system. The second half of the nineteenth century was characterized by the rapid growth of an independent peasantry and the expansion of banana cultivation. Aside from diversification of local food production, these changes resulted in a sharpening of political tensions between the traditional white plantocracy, seeking to preserve the status quo, and the brown or coloured middle class (the offspring of white planter class and black slaves) which called for reform. This increasingly educated brown middle class, which wanted political (although not necessarily social) reform, was to be afforded opportunities for leadership when the predominantly black working class (organized in a strong labour union movement since World War I) staged a riotous insurrection in 1937–38.

The upheavals of the late 1930s were the result of the convergence of several phenomena: the failure of the British colonial administration to meet the growing expectations of the largely black proletariat for an economically better and politically less restricted life; the return of Jamaican émigrés from the United States and Latin America with new ideas and experiences; and the heightened race consciousness and politicization of disenfranchised masses stimulated by militant views of the Jamaican-born émigré, Marcus Garvey, who returned to his homeland in 1927. The revolt of 1937–38 also gave birth to new nationalist-oriented labour movements from which evolved two major political parties: the Peoples’ National Party (PNP) led by Norman Washington Manley and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) led by (Sir) Alexander Bustamante, both of which drew their support from several trade union organizations.

Under the pressure of these two parties, the British government finally granted in 1944 a limited form of self-government and adult suffrage known as the Westminster system. The growth of the Peoples’ National and Jamaica Labour parties also gave the country “political unionism,” that is, a system characterized by the direct involvement of trade unions in politics and government. Jamaican society thus evolved into two great political “tribes,” and it has become an ongoing tradition of the political culture that no “political tribe” should enjoy the fruits of office for more than two consecutive terms. Jamaicans, moreover, have tended to take their politics seriously, as attested by the remarkably high voter turnout (77 to 87 percent) in general elections since the late 1960s. Jamaican migrants to Canada, therefore, have been accustomed to a democratic system with vigorously competitive and highly partisan politics that operate within the formal framework of a bicameral parliamentary system consisting of an elected house of representatives and an appointed senate and headed by a prime minister.

In 1958 the British government established the West Indies Federation, a self-governing union of five Caribbean countries, including Jamaica. Three years later, however, Jamaica voted to withdraw and, after further negotiations with Great Britain, declared its independence in August 1962. Both before and since independence, the governments of Jamaica, led successively by the Peoples’ National and Jamaica Labour parties, have adopted both capitalist and non-capitalist policies in an effort to raise living standards.

During the 1970s, the Jamaican government, led by Prime Minister Michael Manley of the Peoples’ National Party, adopted a policy of democratic socialism (state capitalism) that emphasized property redistribution and other populist/egalitarian measures aimed at relieving mass unemployment. This period proved to be the most turbulent in the post-independence era and witnessed a flight of domestic capital as well as a large number of Jamaican entrepreneurs to Canada and the United States. Despite Manley’s policy changes, the living standards for the majority of the population continued to decline.

The level of poverty for the masses worsened still further during the 1980s, when the Jamaica Labour Party under Prime Minister Edward Seaga moved away from state intervention in favour of a more open market-driven economy. Since the 1990s, Jamaica has been ruled again by the Peoples’ National Party, but under an economic philosophy that favours a market economy and a much more limited role for the state.

The present-day population of Jamaica are the descendants of transplanted peoples, primarily from Africa. Of Jamaica’s 2.3 million inhabitants (1991), 90 percent are black, 7.3 percent of mixed race, and 2.2 percent Asian Indian, Chinese, Lebanese, and European. Despite their small numbers, European Jews (both Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal and English and German Jews), Chinese, and Lebanese have had an especially strong influence on Jamaica’s commerce, industry, and the professions.

Jamaican culture is predominantly African in form and content. The adaptation of the rhythmic framework of African music, expressed through drumming and percussion, constitutes the underlying or deep structure of Jamaican music, while European musical forms, including melodies, lyrics, and instruments, form the surface structure. Jamaican reggae music may be considered Jamaica’s major “culture industry” export since the advent of Bob Marley in the 1960s.

A deep and abiding religiosity is another fundamental characteristic of Jamaican society. According to the 1991 census, 74 percent of Jamaicans declared a religious affiliation. Of those, two-thirds belonged to ten Christian denominations, in particular to Protestant evangelical and non-conformist churches (Church of God, Seventh Day Adventist, Baptist, and Pentecostal).

Although not among the mainstream religions, Rastafarianism has developed as a significant cultural force in Jamaica. It arose in the 1930s as a result of the ideas of Marcus Garvey, who argued that African culture, religion, music, and language are inseparable aspects of Jamaican culture. The central and unifying religious tenet of Rastafarianism is a belief in the divinity of the late Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia as the Living God, or Christ incarnate, and as the heir to the Hebrew King David. Analogously, African peoples in the western hemisphere are considered the descendants of the ancient Israelites. At first, Africa in general, and Ethiopia in particular, were viewed as part of the divine heritage of African black peoples the world over, and repatriation to the motherland was considered their way to redemption.

During the 1970s, however, Rastafarians began focusing on the building of Africa in Jamaica. At the same time, the Rastafarians moved out of the ghettoized areas and succeeded in making a significant contribution to Jamaican nationalism (black consciousness and black power). This has been achieved through music, as Bob Marley became an international reggae music superstar, and through language, as Rastafarian-talk, with its unique perception of the self, life, and the world, began to make a significant impact on the lexicon of Jamaican speech.

Although English is the official and formal language of communication, all Jamaicans speak patois (pronounced patwa), or what Jamaican intellectuals call “Jamaica talk.” This speech form grew out of the necessity for Africans coming from different parts of West Africa to develop for themselves a common language of communication which would be incomprehensible to their English-speaking masters. Jamaica talk came to embody subtle changes of rhythm, inflection, and lexical borrowing from a variety of languages – African, English, Spanish, even French and Portuguese – as well as simplification of syntax and the transformation in the meaning of words to respond to Jamaican conditions. For example, since the English word “oppressor” suggests by sound the word “up” (upwards), this cannot be correct, because oppression means keeping someone down; for the Rastafarian the right word would be “downpressed.” Thus, “downpress” replaces “oppress” and the “oppressor” becomes the “downpressor.”