My journey to Jamaica began in 1990 when I took a girl home for the first time and I was embarrassed to play her my heavy metal music cassettes. Luckily a roommate had a couple of Bob Marley cassettes lying around, so I played those albums for the entire weekend: ‘Catch a Fire’ (1973) and ‘Kaya’ (1978). The girl, Huwaida Jibril, was visiting from Somalia and when she disappeared into the bloody civil war of Somalia, which intensified in 1990, I started listening to the lyrics of Bob Marley. I never saw her again and those songs were all I had. I also discovered war had not ended with World War 2.

In the same year I started paying attention to the music my neighbours were blasting from their balconies. Within months I taped albums of Shabba, Buju, Ninja and discovered a whole new world. That of dancehall, by the late 1980s basically a form of digitalised reggae music with heavy bass and wild dance floor antics. Since the early 1990s I knew I had to visit Jamaica one day. In this post I am collecting ideas for my upcoming journey.

Spanish conquest and slavery

As many Jamaicans are living outside Jamaica in diaspora, as on the island: almost 3 million, more than 92% of them are descendants of West-African slaves. On his second voyage in 1494 Christopher Columbus briefly visited the island south of Cuba only to shipwreck on the island on his fourth journey. The Spanish settled on the island in 1509 and managed to wipe out the Arawak, or Taíno, population within fifty years. The Spaniards replaced the Arawak Indians with African slaves. Some of them escaped and settled in the wild interior country of Jamaica together with last remaining Arawak.

The Spanish never managed to develop their settlement and when the English landed on the island in 1655 the Spaniards soon surrendered. This can only be understood in context of the Anglo-Spanish War (1654–1660). A few decades later the English had named the island Jamaica, planted sugar cane to satisfy the new sugar rush back in England, and imported African slaves to work on the plantations. 400 years after the start of the slave trade Jamaica gained independence from the British on 6 August 1962.

But after a short economic boom due to foreign investments in the 1960s, the economy stalled. In the 1970s the country faced braindrain when many qualified people left the island. According to Jamaican government statistics between 2012 and 2017 the household poverty incidence was between 13,7 and 21,6 percent in rural areas. Before the recent pandemic tourism contributed to a third of GDP.

James Bond and early tourism

Dr No is mostly remembered for its scene on the beach with Ursula Andress. The beach is located in Oracabessa on the north coast and has changed quite a bit because of tourism. The movie scenes from Dr No were partly responsible for the tourism boom.

Sadly, many beaches are not accessible by the locals. The law that regulates Jamaican rights to access the beach and use the sea is a colonial era law called the Beach Control Act of 1956. In 2020 the Jamaican government stated that “In Jamaican common law […] there is therefore no general right of bathing, or to walk along the foreshore, except where acquired by custom or prescription, nor is there any general right to fish except as provided in Section 3(3) of the Beach Control Act, 1956.”

To protest this colonial law a people’s movement called JAMAICA BEACH BIRTHRIGHT ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT is advocating for an amendment of the Jamaican constitution.       

Mountain hiking

Jamaica is also famous for the Blue Mountains national park. One starting point for hiking could be Newcastle JDF Camp, about 28 kilometers from Kingston downtown. Along the road are many guesthouses.

You can map Jamaican artists on the map. Barrington Levy spent his early days in the parish Clarendon and went back to the village James Hill in later years.

Seaview Gardens is a somewhat notorious neighbourhood home of Bounty Killer, Shabba Ranks & Elephant Man. I am not sure how safe it is to walk into alone.

Food

This part of this post will be long. From YouTube: Yvonne & Whitneys Kitchen. Address: Station Lane, Old Harbour Bay, St. Catherine, Jamaica. This small restaurant is run by Whitney (daughter) and Yvonne (mother) and by the look of it, the food seems amazing: curried goat, steamed fish and bammy and more.

From Kingston it takes well over half an hour to get there (40 km).