Jamaica

By: Alonford James Robinson

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Jamaica

Caribbean island nation that is a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Located south of Cuba and west of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, Jamaica is the third largest island of the Greater Antilles, the West Indian island chain that includes Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. Jamaica is divided into fourteen administrative districts called parishes, with the national capital at Kingston.

Afro-Jamaicans comprise the overwhelming majority in the island's diverse population. Of the estimated population of 2.7 million (2003), blacks made up over 90 percent; 7.3 percent were of mixed race, 1.3 percent East Indian, and less than 1 percent were white. The population also includes small numbers of Syrians, Lebanese, and Jews. Recognition of this diversity led the framers of Jamaica's constitution to choose as the island's motto “Out of Many, One People,” suggesting that despite racial and ethnic differences, all live united as Jamaicans.

However, racism and color discrimination—the legacy of more than three centuries of slavery—persist in Jamaica, although in a very subtle and suppressed way. Since slavery was abolished in 1834, blacks have achieved much upward social mobility, primarily through business ventures and education. They seem to control political power, especially since Percival Patterson became the first black prime minister in 1992. Economic power, however, continues to elude the black majority, and many racial issues have not been fully resolved.

European Conquest and Colonization

Archaeological finds suggest that the Native American Taínos were the first to settle the island of Jamaica, which they called Xaymaca (meaning “land of springs” or “land of wood and water”). Estimates for the Taíno population at the time of the Spanish arrival in the late fifteenth century vary widely, from 6,000 to 100,000. Villages were distributed throughout the island, mostly near the coast or rivers. The Taínos were a seafaring people who relied on fishing to provide a large part of their diet. They also were farmers, cultivating cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, and arrowroot, and they traded with Native American communities on neighboring islands in the Greater Antilles. For administrative purposes, the Taínos divided the island into provinces that were ruled over by a cacique (chief) assisted by subchiefs.

During his second voyage to the Americas, European explorer Christopher Columbus learned of Jamaica from the native people of Cuba. He landed in northern Jamaica, at present-day Saint Ann's Bay, on May 4, 1494. After defeating the Taínos' initial resistance, Columbus seized the island for Spain. In 1509, Spain launched its colonization of the island by sending Juan de Esquivel to establish a settlement. Sevilla la Nueva in the north was the first Spanish administrative center, but in 1523 the Spanish abandoned it for Saint Jago de la Vega (now Spanish Town) in the south. When it became clear that Jamaica had no gold, Spain lost interest in the island, which became a backwater in the Spanish Empire. Jamaica remained underdeveloped, poor, and sparsely populated. The Spanish lived just above subsistence level, developing a small-scale pig and cattle ranching economy and producing crops for their own use and for sale to the few Europe-bound vessels.

The Spanish colonists forced the Taínos to work for them. Although a Spanish royal decree outlawed slavery of native peoples in the Spanish colonies, the colonists could force the Taínos to work for them under the landowning and economic systems called encomienda and repartimiento. Overwork in the mines and fields, along with European diseases to which the Native Americans had no immunity, killed Jamaica's native population by the mid-seventeenth century.

As early as 1501, King Ferdinand authorized the governor of Hispaniola to import ladinos, or Christian blacks from Spain, some of whom were sent to Jamaica. These first black slaves did not come directly from Africa; they were Africans or the descendants of Africans who had been enslaved for a time in Spain. In 1518 Ferdinand's successor, Charles I, signed a four-year contract, or asiento, that allowed the importation of 4,000 African slaves a year to Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, and the Spanish began bringing slaves to the colonies directly from Africa. By 1611, Jamaica had a population of 558 black slaves, 107 free blacks, and between 1,200 and 1,400 Spaniards.

In 1655, an English expedition landed at the present-day coastal town of Passage Fort in southeastern Jamaica. This expedition had failed to capture Hispaniola but proceeded to claim Jamaica for England. The Spanish resistance failed because only about 500 Spaniards had weapons. The English ordered them to deliver all of their slaves and goods and leave the island. Some followed these orders, but a group led by Don Cristóbal Arnaldo de Isasi remained, fighting a guerrilla war against the English. Isasi freed the slaves, many of whom retreated with the Spanish rebels into the hills. From there, the Spanish and the freed blacks who had joined them frequently raided English settlements. Finally overwhelmed by English forces, Isasi fled to Cuba for reinforcements. Some blacks, who had fought with him, seeing that the Spanish cause was lost, defected to the English. A black regiment fighting for the English, led by a former slave named Juan de Bolas, contributed significantly to the final defeat of the Spanish, marked by Isasi's retreat in 1660. Jamaica's English-appointed governor Edward D'Oyley rewarded the black soldiers by officially recognizing their freedom and granting them land. Other formerly Spanish-owned slaves remained independent of the colonial administration, living in their own communities as maroons, or runaway slaves.

Spain officially turned Jamaica over to England under the Treaty of Madrid in 1670. The English established a representative system of government, giving white settlers the power to make their own laws through an elected House of Assembly. The Legislative Council, whose members were appointed by the governor, served an advisory function and took part in legislative debates.

Slave Trade and Plantation Economy

The English used generous land grants to encourage permanent settlement in the colony. In 1664 Sir Thomas Modyford, a sugar plantation and slave owner in the Caribbean island of Barbados, was appointed governor of Jamaica. He brought a thousand English settlers and black slaves with him from Barbados and promoted plantation agriculture, especially the cultivation of cacao and sugarcane. By the early eighteenth century, sugar estates worked by black slaves were established throughout the island, and sugar and its byproducts dominated the economy. Other economic activities, including livestock rearing and the cultivation of coffee and allspice, developed as well.

With the establishment of the plantation system, the slave trade grew. Slaves of both genders and every age were everywhere in the island's economy, in both rural and urban areas. They were laborers on plantations, domestic servants, skilled artisans (tradesmen and technicians), and wandering traders. The wealth created by the labor of black slaves in Jamaica has been estimated to equal more than half of the total produced by the entire British West Indies during the colonial period. Some historians have claimed that the so-called triangular trade—which involved sugar and tropical produce from the British Caribbean colonies, slaves purchased in Africa for manufactured goods, and the sale of slaves in the British Caribbean—financed the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

More than a million slaves are estimated to have been transported directly from Africa to Jamaica during the period of slavery. Two hundred thousand of these were sent on to other places in the Americas. Most slaves brought to Jamaica during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Akan, Ga, and Adangbe people from the region of Africa known as the Gold Coast, around modern Ghana. Not until 1776 did slaves from other parts of Africa—Igbos from southern Nigeria and Kongos from Central Africa—outnumber slaves from the Gold Coast. The demand for slaves required about 10,000 new imports each year, which meant that slaves born in Africa far outnumbered those who were born in Jamaica. African-born slaves made up more than 80 percent of the island's slave population until Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. When Britain abolished the institution of slavery in 1834, Jamaica had more than 311,000 slaves and about 16,700 whites.

By the mid-eighteenth century, planters were giving small plots of marginal land to their slaves, both men and women, to offset the cost of feeding them. Slaves could tend their own crops only during their limited free time, but still they were able to produce enough not only to feed themselves but also to sell in a vigorous marketing network that developed among the slaves throughout the island.

To the British, slaves were no more than property and merchandise to be bought and sold, and a system of laws developed to police them. In general, the notion that slaves were property allowed slave owners to treat them brutally. Slaves on large sugar estates generally suffered the harshest punishments, while those on smaller estates and in towns received somewhat better treatment.

Free Coloured Community

White men on the island often had relations with free or enslaved black women, giving rise to a coloured population. (In the former British colonies, the term coloured refers to people of mixed European and African descent.) Children of free women were born free, but those of slave women were born enslaved. Some coloureds who were born as slaves were freed through manumission, or formal release, by their fathers. Masters also manumitted black slaves for other reasons, such as reward for a lifetime of servitude.

Jamaica

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Free coloureds formed a middle group on the social ladder, between blacks and whites. They disassociated themselves from the slaves but were not accepted by the whites. The number of free people of color (including free blacks and free coloureds) increased significantly between 1722 and 1830, from 800 individuals to 44,000. Free coloureds were principally urban dwellers, participating in several phases of economic life. They were artisans, merchants, mechanics, and professionals—lawyers, schoolteachers, and journalists. A few inherited plantations from their fathers. Free coloured women excelled as traders, shopkeepers, innkeepers, and housekeepers. Many free coloureds were well educated; they valued education as the vehicle for upward social mobility and “acceptance” by whites. Some attended universities in Britain, and their children outnumbered whites at the Wolmers Free School in Kingston, established in the eighteenth century for the white population. Of the school's 500 students in 1837, for example, 430 were children of free coloureds.

Despite their numbers and the education and wealth that some of them obtained, free coloureds had no civil rights and were caught up in a constant struggle for equality. They protested primarily through petitions and publications rather than open, violent conflict. In 1813 more than 2,400 free coloureds signed a petition demanding the right to give evidence in court. It was delivered to the House of Assembly, which granted the right. Three years later free coloureds petitioned for full political and civil rights on the grounds that they were taxpayers but were not represented in government, threatening to cease paying taxes until they were granted these rights. Under pressure from free coloureds, the local authorities gradually removed legal restrictions, a process that ended on December 21, 1830, with the Act for the Removal of All Disabilities of Persons of Free Condition.

Maroon Communities and Slave Revolts

Blacks resisted enslavement in various ways. They engaged in work slowdowns, destruction and theft of property, absenteeism from work, and the covert murder of whites. But resistance also took the forms of large-scale rebellions and the establishment of maroon communities. Maroonage—the establishment of communities by runaway slaves—began with the slaves imported by Spain and continued throughout the period of slavery in Jamaica. The maroon communities waged relentless warfare against British colonialism. Beginning in the eighteenth century, two distinct groups of maroon communities emerged: the Leeward Maroons in the south-central, or leeward, part of Jamaica, and the Windward Maroons in the north and northeast.

The Leeward Maroons had an elected chief, and the villagers were divided into politico-military units. Social organization was based on ability, especially military ability, and a careful division of labor. Some individuals were skilled in attacking plantations to steal provisions and free slaves—they were especially eager to free female slaves because men outnumbered women in the maroon communities. Others hunted wild hogs, made salt for preserving meat, or cleared ground for the women to plant crops, such as plantains, sweet corn, bananas, cacao, pineapples, cassava, and sugarcane.

The Windward Maroons did not have a central leader. They developed a loose federation of somewhat independent villages, with a democratic political and military structure. Nanny Town, named after its legendary leader and now known as Mooretown, was said to have the 300 greatest warriors among the Windward Maroons. Both Nanny and the Leeward chief, Cudjoe, were notorious for their continued and relentless attacks on British colonization and slavery. Nanny fought uncompromisingly against slavery. In addition to being a feared warrior, she was said to be an obeah woman, possessing supernatural powers that she allegedly used against the British.

For reasons of security, maroon villages were located in the relatively inaccessible mountains, giving them a commanding view of the lowlands. Guards were posted at the entrance of each community. At the approach of the English, they blew the abeng, a conch shell or cow horn, as was the practice in parts of West Africa. The boldness of the maroons, their prowess in guerrilla warfare, and their knowledge of the terrain made them a serious threat to English colonization, the plantation economy, and slavery itself. Maroons plundered and burned plantations, captured slaves, took arms and ammunition, and killed English soldiers who ventured into the interior. Their continued successes against English forces inspired slaves, many of whom escaped the plantations to join maroon communities or found new ones. The maroons were such a formidable force that the English could not subdue them in eighty-five years of intense, bitter struggle. In 1739, the English admitted defeat, ending the First Maroon War and granting the maroons their independence and land. In return, the maroons agreed to halt all hostilities against whites, help the English in case of foreign invasion, destroy any new maroon communities, and capture and return future runaways. In this way, semi-self-governing free black communities evolved on the fringe of the slave-plantation economy established by Europeans. The economy and culture of these free black communities were partially based on African traditions.

An uneasy peace lasted until July 1795, when 580 maroons from the maroon community of Trelawny Town revolted against unfair treatment by the authorities. To suppress the revolt, known as the Second Maroon War, the British used 1,500 soldiers supported by several thousand militiamen and a hundred fierce bloodhounds imported from Cuba. In June of 1796, the government deported 568 maroon men, women, and children from Trelawny Town and confiscated their land. They sent the maroons first to Nova Scotia, in what later became Canada, and later to Sierra Leone. Afterward, fearing a similar fate, maroons in Jamaica cooperated fully with the authorities, especially in suppressing slave revolts. In 1865, for example, maroons cooperated with the government to quell the Morant Bay Rebellion. Agreements between the government and the maroons prevented the formation of new maroon communities, but some of the older ones still exist. Among them are Nanny Town, Scott's Hall, and Accompong (named for Cudjoe's brother, who had distinguished himself as a military leader of the Windward Maroons). Not all of them have preserved African cultural and political practices to the same extent.

Ethnicity was a key element of slave revolts, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with Akan slaves involved in most revolts. In 1673, about 300 Akan slaves revolted in the north-central parish of Saint Ann. An Akan rebellion involving 400 slaves broke out in the south-central parish of Clarendon in 1690. After setting the plantation on fire, the rebels fled to the hilly interior, from where they raided nearby plantations. In 1745, Akan slaves revolted in the southeastern parish of Saint Thomas.

Tacky, an Akan slave who had been a chief in Africa, led the most widespread slave revolt in Jamaica's history. The rebellion began in in 1760 the northeastern parish of Saint Mary and soon soon spread to a number of parishes and to the capital, Kingston. Inspired by the fact that the maroons had won their liberty, the rebels fought in the same manner, hoping to win their freedom. In the six months it took to suppress Tacky's revolt, the rebels killed sixty whites. Tacky was shot dead by a maroon, and the authorities executed nearly 400 slaves. Other revolts broke out in 1761, 1765, and 1766, but they were quickly crushed by the authorities with the aid of maroons.

The most violent slave revolt of the nineteenth century was the Baptist War, also known as the Christmas Rebellion, of 1831. Led by Samuel Sharpe, a Baptist deacon and domestic slave, the revolt began in Saint James and soon engulfed much of western Jamaica. In suppressing it, the authorities executed more than 430 blacks, including Sharpe. Anyone thought to have been associated with the revolt, including white missionaries, was imprisoned or killed. This revolt pushed the British toward emancipation of the slaves, as did antislavery activism by the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.

Apprenticeship and Emancipation

Full emancipation was a gradual process in the British colonies. The first step was an 1833 legislative act of the British Parliament that proposed a program known as apprenticeship; it became law in all the British colonies on August 1, 1834. Slaves' children under the age of six or born after this date were freed. All others had to undergo a transitional period as “apprentices” before full emancipation. The act sought to soften the effects of abolition on slave owners by giving them monetary compensation for their loss of property in slaves. The slaves received no compensation.

The apprenticeship program tied apprentices to their former masters. Fieldworkers had to work for their former masters for six years, other apprentices for four years. Each had to work for 40.5 hours per week in exchange for food, clothing, and shelter, but no wages, although they could be paid for any work beyond those hours. Officials called stipendiary magistrates were supposed to settle disputes between apprentices and planters. Apprentices strongly resisted this system, which was marred by abuses from the planters. In the parish of Saint Ann, for instance, apprentices went on strike, refusing to work without wages. They swore that they would rather “have their heads cut off, or [be] shot” than be bound apprentices. Armed soldiers were deployed to quell the resistance, and many slaves were whipped and sentenced to the workhouse. Resistance to apprenticeship appeared in other parishes as well.

On August 1, 1838, the British Parliament ended the apprenticeship program, which had become an enormous administrative burden, and granted full emancipation to more than 300,000 slaves in Jamaica. Planters and colonial officials expected the former slaves to become docile laborers on the sugar estates. To the former slaves, however, emancipation meant freedom from planter control and a measure of independence from the estates. The result was serious and irreconcilable conflict between employers and employees, the former slaves. Nonconformist missionaries, especially the English Baptists, tried to resolve disputes, especially those concerning rent, by creating “free villages.” The missionaries bought large holdings, most of them close to working estates, and divided them into small lots to sell to the former slaves. The aim was to prevent the establishment of African-type communities in the interior, away from white supervision. In the racist view of the whites, blacks would lapse into barbarism if they were allowed to wander off into the interior away from the estates and white influence.

Holdings under the Free Village System were inadequate for crop production and too small to satisfy the former slaves' desire for independence. Former slaves began fleeing from the estates and free villages, establishing themselves as small peasant farmers on land obtained through lease, rent, purchase, or by simply squatting (settling on land without title or payment of rent). By 1860, the small farms of the black peasantry had become a practical alternative to plantation agriculture. Meanwhile, the sugar plantations were reeling from the shortage of labor and from the fact that Jamaica was no longer Britain's chief supplier of sugar. Plantation owners began to import indentured servants, mostly from India but also from China. Between 1845 and the end of contract labor in 1917, more than 37,000 East Indians migrated to Jamaica. In general, the relationship between blacks and East Indians was relatively peaceful. Together, they made up the majority of the island's lower classes.

Blacks did not meet the property qualifications to run for political office, but by owning small landholdings, many gained the right to vote. In time blacks accounted for a majority of the electorate, and any candidate for office had to join forces with influential black peasant farmers to gain black votes. Two important black peasant leaders of the 1850s and 1860s were Samuel Clarke and Paul Bogle. Clarke was a carpenter and peasant farmer in the former parish of Saint David (now part of Saint Thomas). He mobilized black voters to support the Coloured candidates in the elections of 1851, enabling them to win the two Saint David seats in the House of Assembly. Clarke was elected to the Saint David Vestry, which ran the parish government, in 1853. From then until 1865, he carried out a program of political education among blacks, organizing public meetings in Saint David to discuss social issues.

Bogle was a peasant farmer and deacon of the Native Baptist Church from the district of Stony Gut, in Saint Thomas-in-the-East. He was a close ally and political supporter of George William Gordon, a coloured politician, member of the House of Assembly, Native Baptist minister, and champion of the black cause. As political and racial consciousness developed among black voters, they began electing representatives who were sympathetic to their cause, but they lacked direct political representation in the House of Assembly. Racial discrimination, exploitation, and social injustice continued. Blacks' access to land was severely restricted, and appeals to the authorities were denied.

Morant Bay Rebellion and Crown Colony Rule

The situation came to a head in October 1865 with the Morant Bay Rebellion, led by Bogle. In this revolt, about 500 black men and women from Stony Gut marched to Morant Bay, the parish capital, to confront the authorities over an earlier court case and an attempt to arrest Bogle. Rioting broke out and continued for several days. The government reacted with maximum force, declaring martial law. The combined forces of the British military, Jamaican militiamen, and the maroons executed nearly 500 individuals, including Bogle, Clarke, and Gordon. Countless others were shot at random, more than 600 were whipped, and an entire black village and other individual houses were razed to the ground, leaving thousands homeless.

Public outcry in Britain against the brutal repression of the rebellion led the British government to order a formal inquiry into the causes of the rebellion and the authorities' response. Britain then abolished the representative system of government in Jamaica, introducing the crown colony system in 1866. The new system increased the power of the British-appointed governor and replaced the old Legislative Council and House of Assembly with a single Legislative Council, whose members were appointed by the British crown. (Reforms in 1884 and 1895 provided for the election of some council members.) But although the new system took power out of the hands of the authorities who had abused it, it also prevented blacks and coloureds from gaining political power, and it reinforced institutionalized racism.

The new government acted to resolve land conflicts and restore the failing plantation economy. Landowners were required to produce clear titles of ownership or face eviction. Hundreds of peasants who held receipts but no titles to their land were ejected as squatters, beginning the decline of the Afro-Jamaican peasantry and the revival of the plantations. New production methods in the sugar industry improved efficiency, and the even more profitable banana industry, which the peasants had developed, came under the control of large-scale banana producers. The old planter class gave way to corporate ownership of plantations—for example, the Boston Fruit Company (later renamed the United Fruit Company) gained control of banana cultivation and the banana trade. Corporations imported increasing numbers of indentured workers, creating competition for jobs. As a result, the island's black population grew poorer. Fleeing dire socioeconomic conditions, thousands of blacks and East Indians migrated to Haiti, Panama, the United States, Cuba, Costa Rica, and South America. They found work on sugar and banana estates, on the construction of railroads and later of the Panama Canal, and in domestic and other services.

Black Mobilization

Many Jamaicans turned to religion as a way to challenge the state of affairs. Religion had long played a central role in Afro-Jamaican resistance to domination. The Native Baptist movement, started among Jamaican slaves by black American immigrants in the 1780s, mobilized slaves in the period leading to the Baptist War. One of the most popular Afro-Jamaican politico-religious movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Bedwardism, named for its leader Alexander Bedward, which developed within the Native Baptist Church. Bedward's church attracted thousands of followers with its call for social justice and its socioeconomic programs designed to aid the lower classes. Bedward fearlessly and openly challenged white racism and injustice. The government suppressed the movement by arresting Bedward and his followers during a 1921 march to Kingston and then confining him to a lunatic asylum, where he died in 1930. With Bedward confined, the movement lost its energy.

In the late nineteenth century, the Bahamian-born activist Robert Love encouraged black political involvement. Love edited the Jamaican Advocate, a journal that frequently challenged the colonial government. He also organized voter registration campaigns and in 1889 supported the election of Alexander Dixon, the first black elected to the Legislative Council. Love won a council seat in 1906. The struggle against white supremacy continued in the radical Pan-Africanist movement led by Marcus Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston in 1914. The anticolonial Garvey movement, or Garveyism, had roots in the intellectual tradition of Pan-Africanism. The religious counterpart of Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, glorified the African nation of Ethiopia and offered a spiritual basis for a shared Pan-African identity. Garveyism wanted to give black people around the world racial pride, black consciousness, black nationalism, and an acceptance of Africa as the homeland.

Rastafarianism

Garveyism and Ethiopianism were the basis for Rastafarianism, a religious movement rooted in social protest that took shape in the early 1930s in Jamaica. Rastafarianism also has links to Bedwardism—some Early Rastafarian leaders had belonged to Bedward's church. They wanted to reject colonialism and white racism, encourage black consciousness, and protest political and sociocultural oppression. Rastafarians view Africa, especially Ethiopia, as their homeland. In 1955, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I, revered by Rastafarians as the savior foretold in the biblical prophecies, invited all Jamaican blacks to live in Ethiopia, offering free land. A few Jamaicans, mainly Rastafarians, emigrated to Ethiopia in the 1960s, but their numbers were small. The Jamaican government, influenced by the Rastafarians, sought to establish an embassy in Ethiopia in 1969. Three years later Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley visited Ethiopia and met with the Jamaican community there.

Tobacco Farm  A small group of workers and children are photographed on a tobacco plantation in Jamaica sometime during the early part of the twentieth century.

Library of Congress

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The Reggae music that originated in Jamaica in the 1960s and 1970s came from a long tradition of resistance to white culture and domination. Rastafarianism was a major influence in the development of reggae as music of resistance, and the late Bob Marley, a Rastafarian, is by far Jamaica's most popular and internationally renowned reggae star. More than any other Jamaican musician, he transformed music from entertainment to philosophical musing on political and racial awareness.

Labor Movements

The new racial consciousness in Jamaica, from Garveyism to Rastafarianism, was apparent in the activism of the island's working class after World War I (1914–1918). Jamaican soldiers fought in the war with the West India Regiment of the British Army. When they returned to Jamaica in 1919, a wave of labor strikes and riots erupted but were quickly crushed by colonial forces. The deplorable living conditions of Jamaica's working classes worsened during the global economic collapse known as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Wages dropped significantly, unemployment was high, and workers' rights were virtually nonexistent. Popular protest grew as oppressed classes—black and brown middle classes, banana and sugar plantation workers, and urban workers—fought together for reforms. The result was the emergence of nationalist movements, trade unions, and grassroots political parties. Garvey founded Jamaica's first anticolonial political party, the People's Political Party, in 1929, and formed a trade association in the early 1930s. In 1935, Garvey left for England, but A. G. S. Coombs and Alexander Bustamante formed the Jamaica Workers and Tradesmen's Union (JWTU). Three years later the People's National Party (PNP), led by lawyer Norman Washington Manley, and its related workers union, the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU), headed by Bustamante, were formed. The party's manifesto addressed popular issues, including land settlement, voting rights, and social reforms. Manley and Bustamante, who were distant cousins, were coloured members of the middle class who sought to represent the black and coloured masses.

Kingston was founded in 1693 and became Jamaica's capital in 1872. This busy street was captured on film around the turn of the twentieth century.

(Library of Congress.)

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Also in 1938, labor and political unrest escalated throughout the West Indies, including Jamaica. Strikes and riots erupted all over the island, orchestrated in large part by Bustamante and black activist William Grant. Bustamante was jailed more than once for his activism. In 1942 he left the PNP, breaking from Manley on unfriendly terms, and in 1943 he formed the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), taking the trade union with him. This split in the labor movement meant that the two parties would compete for workers' loyalty.

England sent a royal commission to investigate the causes of the disturbances and recommend corrective measures. Among the commission's recommendations were the establishment of a Commonwealth Development Welfare Fund to improve social conditions. The commission also recommended a plan for representative government based on universal adult suffrage. In 1944, Jamaica held the first general elections under a new constitution that gave the vote to all adults. The JLP won the election and formed the new government. As leader of the JLP, Bustamante took office in 1945 as Jamaica's first chief minister, as the head of government was then called. Manley became chief minister after the PNP won a majority over the JLP in the 1955 elections.

Political Independence

With representative government in place, the next step was to seek political independence from Great Britain. The British government told Manley that independence would be granted but that it would be more practical under a collective West Indian state than for individual colonies. In January 1958, Jamaica joined nine other British territories in forming the Federation of the West Indies. However, Jamaica withdrew from the federation in 1961 after a majority of Jamaicans voted to do so, and the federation collapsed the following year.

Jamaica then negotiated directly with Great Britain for its independence. An agreement was quickly reached, and Jamaica became an independent nation on August 6, 1962. The JLP, having won elections held earlier in 1962, formed the government, with Bustamante as prime minister, the nation's first head of government. In an attempt to broaden the island's primarily agricultural economy, Jamaica invited foreign manufacturing industries and financial institutions, especially from North America, to establish plants. These newcomers were given tax breaks and were allowed to send their profits overseas. In addition, Jamaicans objected to their racist employment policies, which limited the black majority to menial, nonmanagerial positions, while foreign whites held supervisory and managerial posts. Racial tensions worsened. Hoping to avoid open conflict, the government set out to “Jamaicanize” foreign enterprises, but this plan failed to bring a significant number of black or coloured Jamaicans into management, and it also failed to address racism.

Rastafarians, militant urban poor, students, and radical intellectuals vigorously protested economic conditions and racism. In 1964, intellectual leaders established the New World Group, and three years later young lawyers formed the Jamaica Council for Human Rights. The Black Power Movement in the Caribbean developed in Jamaica during the 1960s as a direct response to white racism locally and a show of solidarity with black liberation and anti-imperialist struggles around the world. In 1968, students of the Mona, Jamaica, campus of the University of the West Indies donated money to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the United States “to assist its struggle against racism.”

One of Jamaica's chief supporters of Black Power was Walter Rodney, an Afro-Guyanese lecturer of African History at the University of the West Indies. He argued that Black Power was to be achieved through revolutionary activity based on black awareness, created by revising economic, political, social, and cultural life in terms of blackness. He developed strong links with the poorer classes of Kingston, discussing with them the idea of black liberation through a break with imperialism and white racism, the assumption of power by the black masses, and the cultural rebuilding of society in the black image. The government considered Rodney and the Black Power Movement subversive, and on Rodney's return from a conference in Canada in October 1968, he was prevented from reentering the island. His deportation led to mass demonstrations, which the government quickly suppressed with force. This action by the government was accompanied by a ban on all African American literature, refusal to let Black Power activists enter the island, and harassment of Rastafarians. But although the government succeeded in suppressing the Black Power Movement, the general population turned against the JLP. In the election of 1972, the people voted the JLP out of office, casting a majority of votes for the more progressive PNP, led by Michael Manley, the son of Norman Washington Manley.

Beginning in 1974, the Manley administration embarked on policies of “democratic socialism,” attempting to correct Jamaica's socioeconomic problems by, among other things, taking state control of some foreign companies and creating joint ventures between the government and privately owned foreign companies. It also revised employment policies—men and women, for example, were to receive equal pay for equal work. As a result, many more blacks gained managerial positions. When several companies that were dissatisfied with the government's policies sold out and ceased operating on the island, Jamaicans, including blacks and East Indians, bought or otherwise gained control of the companies, with aid from the government. These moves began the economic empowerment of blacks.

The government also began providing free public education from primary through university levels, which let blacks and East Indians of the lower classes gain access to higher education. Poor blacks entered the skilled professions—law, medicine, banking, and management—in greater numbers. In 1974, the Jamaica Movement for the Advancement of Literacy program launched a campaign to end illiteracy, which was high among the black population. The gains in blacks' socioeconomic and educational advancement paralleled their increasing political power.

Jamaica's socioeconomic and political changes met strong resistance from the local propertied class and foreign interests. People, especially middle- and upper-class professionals and entrepreneurs, left the island, taking their wealth and investments with them. The country slumped into a serious economic crisis, forcing the government to borrow from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF's strict prescription for economic growth, which included massive cuts in public spending and a sizeable reduction in the value of currency, caused undue suffering among the lower classes. Political violence engulfed the island, culminating in the bloodiest election in Jamaica's history in 1980.

The JLP crushingly defeated the PNP in the 1980 elections, and Edward Seaga, the Syrian-Jamaican head of the JLP, became prime minister. The JLP victory was seen as a victory for big business and conservatism, and as a return to power of whites and coloureds. Under Seaga, the government launched a program of national economic reforms to qualify for foreign assistance programs. Many of the social programs begun by the previous administration were discontinued or neglected.

In 1989 the Jamaican people again cast their votes in favor of the PNP, reinstating Manley to power. This time, however, the PNP acted more conservatively. When Manley retired in 1992, the party's conservative vice president and deputy prime minister, Percival James Patterson, became prime minister; he was the first black Jamaican to hold the office. In 2002, Jamaican voters elected Patterson to his fourth consecutive term. His reelections, and the control of parliament by black members who support him, show that blacks are gaining effective control of Jamaica's politics. Severe economic limits, however, have prevented the adequate funding of existing social services and blocked the development of new ones.

Foreign Affairs and Links with Africa

Jamaica is a member of the United Nations (UN) and its special agencies and has diplomatic relations with fifty countries. It sponsored the celebration of 1968 as the International Year of Human Rights. The following year, Jamaica joined the Organization of American States, strengthening links with Latin American countries.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Manley during the 1970s, Jamaica took a more active and aggressive role in international affairs, becoming known as a leader of affairs in the developing world. The country has taken strong positions on colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, and racial segregation and discrimination. For example, Jamaica supported the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa led by the African National Congress (ANC). Jamaica also supported African liberation struggles in Namibia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. As a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Jamaica sought to remain neutral during the Cold War between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Since the mid-1970s, the island has been a leader among the developing nations that demand a new international economic order in which the prices paid for agricultural and primary products from the developing world would bear some relation to the cost of manufactured goods. In February 1999, Jamaica hosted and chaired the Group of 15 (G15) summit in which seventeen member nations from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa repeated the call for changes in international trade and monetary systems that would give developing nations a greater voice in the global economy.

The island is also closely involved in the political and economic affairs of the Caribbean region. In 1968, Jamaica joined other English-speaking Caribbean nations in founding the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA) to promote development and economic independence. Five years later it signed the Treaty of Chaquarmas in Trinidad, which established the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM). This association, which seeks economic integration of the region, eventually replaced CARIFTA.

Jamaica has maintained strong relationships with many of the African nations and with Africans around the world. Many African heads of state and church leaders have visited the island since independence in 1962. Among these have been Haile Selassie I, the last emperor of Ethiopia, in 1966; Julius Kambarage Nyerere, independence leader and then-president of Tanzania, in 1974 and 1977; Kenneth Kaunda, then-president of Zambia, in 1975; Samora Moises Machel, revolutionary leader and then-president of Mozambique, in 1977; Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa in 1986; Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, in 1995; Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, in 1996; and Jerry Rawlings, president of Ghana, in 1997. Through these visits Jamaica has forged closer alliances with the African continent.

See also Apprenticeship in the British Caribbean; Independence Movements in the British Caribbean; Maroonage in the Americas; Nationalist Movements and Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean; Political Parties and Black Social Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean; Punishment of Slaves in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; Slave Rebellions in Latin America and the Caribbean; Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean; Transatlantic Slave Trade.

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