The Middle Passage (32 page)

Jamaica presents to the outside world two opposed images: the expensive winter resort – turquoise sea, white sands, reverential bowtied black servants, sun-glassed figures below striped umbrellas:
Tourism matters to you
is the theme of a despairing advertising campaign run by the Jamaica Tourist Board to diminish the increasing hostility to tourists – and the immigrant boat-trains arriving at London’s gloomy railway stations:
Niggers go home
painted in large red letters in Brixton and
Keep Britain white
chalked everywhere.

It is possible, though, to be in Jamaica for some time without seeing either the Jamaica of the tourists or the Jamaica of the emigrants. The tourists are on the North Coast, which is separate from the rest of the island and almost like another country. And the Jamaican middle-class world, in which the visitor moves, with its spaciousness and graciousness, its tradition of hospitality, its
PEN
meetings and art exhibitions, its bars expensive or bohemian, its clubs and hotels, its cocktail parties and dinner parties, is physically so disposed – almost by design, it appears – that one can move from suburb to suburb and never cease to be sheltered from offending sights. On drives to the country peasants can of course be seen; but these people have little in common with the desperate and rebarbative immigrant stereotype; their manners are gentle, they have a Welsh feeling for rhetoric, and they speak the purest English of all West Indians.

To see the Jamaica of the emigrants you have to look. And once you start looking, you can see nothing else. The slums of Kingston are beyond description. Even the camera glamorizes them, except in shots taken from the air. Hovels of board and cardboard and canvas and tin lie choked together on damp rubbish dumps behind which the sun sets in mocking splendour. More respectable and on drier ground are the packing-case houses, the tiniest houses ever built, suggesting a vast arrested community given over to playing in grubby doll’s houses. Then there are the once real houses packed to bursting point, houses so close in streets so narrow that there is no feeling of openness. Filth and rubbish are disgorged everywhere; everywhere there are puddles; and on the rubbish dumps latrines are forbidden by law. Pigs and goats wander as freely as the people and seem as individual and important. Outside each ‘yard’ there is a cluster of raised letter boxes – these Jamaicans, I was told, like writing ‘little notes’ to one another – and these letter boxes are like tiny toy houses which repeat the shape, number and often the positions of the buildings whose correspondence they receive. They emphasize the lilliputian aspect of the Kingston slum settlements, where everything has dwindled beyond what one would have thought possible. And wherever you look you see the surrounding Kingston hills, one of the beauties of the island: freshening now into green after rain, blurred in the evening light, the folds as soft as those on an animal’s skin. Against such a view lay a dead mule, its teeth bared, its belly swollen and taut. It had been there for two days; a broomstick had been playfully stuck in its anus.

Neuroses afflict communities as well as individuals, and in these slums the sects known as the Ras Tafarians or ‘Rastas’ have developed their own psychology of survival. They reply to rejection with rejection. They will not cut their hair or wash; and for this neglect of the body, this expression of profound self-contempt, they find biblical sanction. Many will not work, turning necessity into principle; and many console themselves with marijuana, which God himself smokes. They will vote for no party, because Jamaica is not their country and the Jamaican Government not one they recognize. Their country is Ethiopia, and they worship Ras Tafari, the Emperor Haile Selassie. They no longer wish to be part of that world which has no place for them – Babylon, the world of the white and brown and even yellow man, ruled by the Pope, who is really the head of the Ku-Klux-Klan – and they want only to be repatriated to Africa and Ethiopia. They are not interested in – indeed, some discourage – improvements in Jamaica, for such improvements might only encourage them to remain in slavery in Babylon. Already the Jamaican Government is compelling black men to go to England, where Queen Elizabeth I – reincarnated as Elizabeth II – and her lover Philip of Spain – reincarnated as Philip, Duke of Edinburgh – rule as the last sovereigns of white, black-enslaving Babylon. But the emancipation and triumph of the black man is at hand. Russia, the bear with three ribs mentioned in Revelations, will soon destroy Babylon. God is, after all, black; and the black race is his chosen race, the true Israelites: the Jews have been punished by Hitler for their imposture.

The Ras Tafari movement is not organized. It is split into various sects, and has no fixed hierarchy, doctrine or ritual. The movement had its origin in the back-to-Africa campaigning of Marcus Garvey (to whom several hundred speakers on the subject of racial harmony are indebted for that metaphor about the white and black piano keys). One of Garvey’s statements was that the deliverance of the black race would occur when a black king was crowned in Africa. In 1930 Haile Selassie was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia. The Emperor was a brown man, and in his country there were still Negro slaves. This was unknown or disregarded. Ethiopia was an African country; it was a kingdom; it was independent. Photographs of the Emperor went up in thousands of Negro homes throughout the West Indies. What followed remains a puzzle. Several Jamaican preachers, of a type in which the island abounds, after independent study of the Bible, Garvey and the newspapers, decided that the black race in the New World were Ethiopians, that Ethiopia was the black man’s promised land, that Haile Selassie was divine; and at more or less the same time began to spread this last message of hope through the slums of Kingston.

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was seen to fulfil certain prophecies in the Bible, and gave the movement impetus. Italian propaganda did more. Shortly after the invasion was set afoot, an Italian called Frederico Philos wrote an article alerting the white world to the existence of a secret organization of 190 million blacks pledged to exterminate the white race. The organization was headed by Haile Selassie; it was called
Nya-Binghi
, ‘death to the whites’, had an army of 20 million and unlimited supplies of gold. The article was reprinted in a Jamaican newspaper, and the news was received with considerable satisfaction by some of the Ras Tafari brethren. Niyabinghi groups were formed; their password was ‘Death to the whites!’

In Jamaica, burning with the enthusiasms of innumerable revivalist sects, it caused no surprise that one section of the community should have withdrawn into a private world of farcical fantasy, and until the mid-1950s the Ras Tafarians were regarded as harmless vagrant lunatics made more than usually repellent by their indifference to dirt. But the movement was growing; it was attracting, particularly from America, people who were more embittered than resigned; relations with the police deteriorated. And it was only when the movement claimed its first deaths in 1960 that its strength was realized. The attitude of the middle class was one of horror and shame. There were protests when a study team from the University College of the West Indies reported on the movement with sympathetic understanding: this, it was felt, was giving respectability to rabble. While I was in Jamaica one of the convicted Ras Tafarians was due to be hanged. The local evening paper, with its zestful accounts of last hours and last words, generated the atmosphere of the public hanging, almost, it seemed, as a warning to others. So that at last what was farce had turned into grotesque tragedy.

Nationalism in Surinam, a movement of intellectuals, rejects the culture of Europe. Ras Tafarianism in Jamaica is nothing more than a proletarian extension of this attitude, which it carries to its crazy and logical limit. It resembles African nationalism, which asserts the importance of the ‘African personality’, and is the opposite of middle-class West Indian Negro nationalism, which is concerned only to deny the existence of a specially Negro personality. It is regarded by the largely brown Jamaican middle class as a black lower-class contagion, a sort of backyard Mau-Mau. Your gardener begins to behave strangely; his talk becomes cryptic; he speaks of the promised land of Ethiopia or Saudi Arabia (still a slave country) or even Israel; he starts to grow a beard. The Rastas have got him: you ridicule him or you sack him: henceforth he is unemployable.

The movement awaits organization and exploitation, by communists (Cuba is just to the north) or by politically ambitious racists. It may, however, frustrate or destroy those who attempt to manipulate it; for Ras Tafarianism is like a mass neurosis and can respond positively only to unreason which is on its own level of unreason. This is its greater danger. On the advice of the University College study team the Jamaican Government decided to send a mission to certain African countries to study the possibilities of Jamaican immigration. This was like treating the symptoms of a neurosis: before the mission could leave, one of its Ras Tafarian members went to prison on a marijuana charge. Repatriation, even if it comes, will not magically remove the Ras Tafarian’s life-long sense of rejection and will not alter the social and economic conditions in Jamaica in which the movement flourishes.

Jamaica is eighty per cent black; and what cannot be denied is that just as in England the fascists frenziedly proclaim the racial attitudes of the majority, who are scandalized only by the exhibitionism, so in Jamaica the Ras Tafarians express the basic racial attitudes of the majority of the black population. Race – in the sense of black against brown, yellow and white, in that order – is the most important issue in Jamaica today. The hypocrisy which permitted the middle-class brown Jamaican to speak of racial harmony while carefully maintaining the shade distinctions that preserved his privilege is at last provoking anger and creating a thoroughly black racism which could conceivably turn the island into another Haiti.

The business enterprise of the Chinese and Syrian communities has aroused envy and hostility. And the rich white tourists, enjoying the private white sand beaches of hotels where the charges for one day exceed the average earnings of a Jamaican for a month, are a standing provocation; so that the Tourist Board is now equally concerned with attracting tourists and reconciling the natives to their presence. As someone connected with the ‘industry’ said to me: ‘Chappie pays a lot of money to fly out here. He goes into his hotel, slips into his little bermuda shorts and hot shirt, hangs his little camera round his neck, sticks a cigar in his mouth, steps out into this damned expensive Jamaican winter sunshine. And
bonk
! What does he see? A poster begging the natives to be nice to him.’

The
Sunday Gleaner
of 2 April 1961 carried a whole-page article on the race problem by a student at the University College. In its frank, brutal self-analysis it recalled the mood of the Negroes of British Guiana.