The Life And Times Of Joseph Hill and Culture

By Eric Doumerc

The recording biography of reggae artist Joseph Hill and his group Culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: APS Publications
• Release date: Sep 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393067603

Book preview

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOSEPH HILL & CULTURE

CONTENTS

Jamaican Oral Tradition

1976-1981

The 1980s: Trials and Tribulations

The 1990s and Beyond

Joseph Hill In The Oral Tradition

Legacy1

Bibliography

Discography

JAMAICAN ORAL TRADITION

According to Gordon Rohler, the Caribbean oral tradition is a heritage of song, speech and performance visible in such folk forms as the litanic work songs, chants, battle songs, Queh songs, hymns, thousands of calypsos, mentos and reggae songs, sermons of both the grass-roots and established churches, riddles, jokes and word-games (Brown, Morris and Rohler 3).

Writing about Jamaica more particularly, Carolyn Cooper opined that the oral tradition was conceived as a broad repertoire of themes and cultural practices, as well as a more narrow taxonomy of verbal techniques(Cooper 2). To understand how the Jamaican oral tradition developed in a context of struggle, the period of slavery has to be taken into account.

Caribbean Slave Society

On most Caribbean islands, the social structure was in fact comparable to a pyramid which was composed of three legally defined castes (Knight 122): the enslaved populations, the free persons of colour or the free coloureds, and the white persons. Each caste was then subdivided into classes or ranks.

First among the whites were the noble families and the rich owners of large estates: these families were the descendants of settlers who had arrived in the West Indies in the seventeenth century. These whites constituted the old plantocracy and were influential both at the local and at the imperial level.

Second were the nouveaux riches, who included planters, wealthy merchants, bureaucrats, army and navy officials. These whites constituted the new plantocracy, and they identified more readily with the West Indies whereas the old plantocracy considered England as their true mother country.

Third were the planters living in their great houses or noble mansions, famous for their profligacy and their extravagant life-style. In the older colonies, the planters were permanent residents, but in other colonies they were absentee landlords and their plantations were run by attorneys. These attorneys could be other planters or businessmen. The attorney could also be an estate manager who was paid by commission on the amount of sugar shipped to Europe.

Many planters did not consider the West Indies as their home and sent their children to the Mother Country to be educated. In London the West India Interest was a very powerful lobby. Many planters had coloured or black mistresses and the offspring from such unions were usually left with legacies and the planters provided for their education.

The middle classes included merchants, clergymen and doctors while poor whites included indentured servants in the seventeenth century. The number of indentured workers gradually declined as some of them became small planters, but most left to migrate to the North American colonies or even to become pirates.

At first the colonial authorities were worried by the possibility that black slaves might outnumber the whites and they passed Deficiency Laws(Ayearst 19). These laws stipulated that a fixed proportion of whites to blacks had to be maintained so that slave rebellions might be suppressed. In Jamaica a law passed in 1672 required that each estate should have a minimum of one white to every ten blacks (Ayearst 19). But in fact, the slaves soon outnumbered the whites.

Later on, these poor whites included small farmers, teachers, labourers, watchmakers, printers, shopkeepers, seamstresses, shoemakers, sailmakers, artisans and skilled workers. They had to put up with some fierce competition from the free coloureds.

These whites hoped to move up the social ladder by becoming small farmers and then planters. For instance, Henry Morgan, a poor Welsh indentured worker, became a buccaneer and then was made Governor of Jamaica. So, there was some scope for upward social mobility and Caribbean society was not as rigidly stratified as European societies at the time.

The free persons of colour originally were the products of the unions of European masters with their African or Creole slaves, but later came to include African enslaved people who had purchased their freedom, or who had been freed by their masters. They usually lived in towns. The free coloureds occupied an ambiguous position in Caribbean society as they occupied an intermediate position between the whites and the slaves. Indeed, they shared some of the privileges enjoyed by the whites (freedom) but on the other hand, they were not totally free as in many territories’ laws were passed to restrict the amount of money they could inherit or the acreage of land they could buy. Likewise, a free coloured person could be whipped for striking a white person. Their diet and dress were restricted, and in Jamaica bells tolled longer for whites than for coloured folk (Lowenthal 49).

The free coloured also lived with the constant fear of re-enslavement as whenever there was a slave rebellion, non-whites had to prove their free status by written certificate. In Antigua, a law stipulated that every person of that Complexion is to be supposed a Slave till authentic legal proofs to the Contrary are produced (Lowenthal 49).

Also, the free coloureds were barred from participation in government and were not allowed to vote. The whites believed that colour distinctions among the free were essential to maintain social control over slaves. But on the whole the free coloureds tried to emulate the whites’ lifestyle, and their dress and deportment signalled them as white. The free coloureds could be mulattoes or blacks, but most of them were mulattoes.

The mulattoes or gens de couleur tended to adopt their masters’ way of speaking and dressing and they were more creolised than the field slaves. These brown men and women included many freed slaves and lived in urban areas and in towns. For instance, in Barbados many freedmen had gravitated to Bridgetown in the decades prior to Emancipation. They often followed white norms of dress and behaviour, and many actually owned slaves. They tended to praise European culture and to despise local cultural forms which reminded them of Africa. In other words, they had become creolised.

In the West Indies the whites saw the free coloured as their natural allies and treated them as such because they were outnumbered by the blacks. That was not the case in the USA where the whites were numerically superior to the blacks. The whites in the West Indies lived in the constant fear of a slave insurrection, hence their tendency to treat the free coloured as allies. White West Indians considered free coloured people as superior to blacks, which was not always the case in the USA (Lowenthal 47).

Enslavement

On arrival the enslaved Africans, who belonged to various ethnic groups, were mixed to avoid the formation of any group consciousness and had to learn to communicate without the benefit of a common language. Then they were set to work on the sugar plantations and had to do a lot of planting, clearing and weeding. On the plantations, enslaved people first went through a process known as seasoning, to accustom them to the plantation routine and to get them to be familiar with the various tools to be used. During that period the slaves were also taught how to grow their own food on their plots of land. About 33% of the enslaved Africans imported into the West Indies died during that period. After going through that process, the slaves fell into the routine of plantation work which was divided into two main stages: From July to November, they were busy holing (a Jamaican term for digging cane holes), planting, manuring and weeding. The enslaved people were also kept busy building, cutting tree for timber and doing all kinds of jobs. In November, crop time began. Crop time involved the cutting of the cane and its processing into sugar. This was the hardest work of the year as the slaves had to cut the mature cane with a machete and then the cane had to be transported to the mill within 48 hours. Then the canes were crushed in order to extract their juice and the juice was then heated in a boiling house.

Crop time usually ended in July or August and then the whole cycle would start again. In fact, the enslaved populations themselves did not constitute a homogeneous group and were subdivided into several classes which corresponded to the field, domestic, and skilled slaves (Heuman 36).

The field slaves worked in the fields and did the hardest work: they worked from early in the morning until late at night. They were the most numerous groups and included more women than men. In many islands’ women constituted the majority of field slaves. The field slaves were subdivided into three main gangs. The first gang was composed of able-bodied men and women who did the hardest physical labour (digging cane holes and cutting cane). The second gang was made up of the elderly, the weak and children between 12 and 16 who carried water for the first gang