Inward Yearnings: Jamaica's Journey to Nationhood

By Colin A. Palmer

Inward Yearnings: Jamaica’s Journey to Nationhood is a pioneering case study of an Anglo-Caribbean island’s search for a racial selfhood, its nervous embrace of its African heritage and ultimately a nationalism that reflected those inner longings. These complex and interrelated processes manifested themselves with the founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association by Marcus Garvey in 1914,the emergence of Rastafarianism and the Back to Africa Movement in the 1930s,the People’s National Party’s adoption of self-government as its goal in 1940, and the appearance of numerous black consciousness groups in the 1950s.

The first half of the book excavates the roots of these inner struggles, and their expressions and roles in Jamaica’s society and culture. The second half examines Jamaica’s entry into the West Indies Federation in 1958 and its secession by means of a referendum in 1961. The Colonial Office had convinced the ten federating units that they were all too small to make their individual independence a viable option. The Jamaicans attempted to subsume their nationalism in formation into a larger West Indian nationalism but the process failed. A federal union had been constructed upon a watery foundation.

Palmer’s book is a carefully researched history of the federation’s failure and of Jamaica’s decision to affirm its own political identity and selfhood. The book is based largely on manuscript sources located in the British National Archives at Kew Gardens, the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town and the National Archives of the United States located in College Park. The Jamaican newspaper the Daily Gleaner also constituted an invaluable source.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9789766405939

Colin A. Palmer

Colin A. Palmer was a leading historian of the Caribbean and the African diaspora. He chronicles the history of the Caribbean in the wake of British and U.S. imperialism in the trilogy comprised of Freedom's Children, Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power, and Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean.

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INWARD YEARNINGS

The University of the West Indies Press

7A Gibraltar Hall Road, Mona

Kingston 7, Jamaica

www.uwipress.com

© 2016 by Colin A. Palmer

All rights reserved. Published 2016

A catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Jamaica.

ISBN: 978-976-640-591-5 (print)

978-976-640-592-2 (Kindle)

978-976-640-593-9 (ePub)

Cover photograph of Back to Africa demonstrators in Kingston, 1960, courtesy of the Gleaner Company, Ltd.

Cover and book design by Robert Harris

Set in Minion Pro 10.5/14.5 x 27

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Becoming Jamaican

2. African Dreams

3. Seeking Political Selfhood

4. Towards a West Indian Consciousness

5. The Federal Detour

6. Disunity in Unity

7. Saving the Federation

8. Jamaica, Yes

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I AM EXTREMELY GRATEFUL FOR THE ASSISTANCE I received from many individuals in my research and writing of this book. I should like to thank the staffs of the archives that I consulted. These included the UK National Archives at Kew, the National Archives of the United States at College Park, the Jamaica Archives at Spanish Town, the Archives of the West Indies Federation at Cave Hill, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Bustamante Museum in Kingston. Nelson Auburn and Sharon Howard of the Schomburg deserve my special gratitude. My friend and colleague Professor Franklin Knight read the entire manuscript, and I thank him for the magnificence of his spirit and his generosity over the years. The manuscript benefited enormously from his thoughtful and candid comments. Jobert Bienvenue typed the manuscript with humour and efficiency, and I am deeply appreciative of his contribution to making it a book. Special thanks are due to Allison Palmer for her assistance with the copy-edited version of the manuscript.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

JAMAICA BECAME AN INDEPENDENT STATE ON 6 AUGUST 1962. The island had endured a long history of colonial rule. Christopher Columbus declared it a Spanish possession in 1494, and it remained a part of Spain’s empire for 161 years. The English seized the island in 1655 and held it until 1962, approximately 307 years. Taken together, Jamaica was a possession of these two European nations for 468 years. It was the quintessential colony: productive, valuable, loyal, imitative in its habits and fervently patriotic. Africans had laboured in the island for 327 of those years, 1511–1838, as enslaved peoples. Slavery’s imprint was everywhere. It was reflected in the racial demography of the people, social relations, etiquettes of control and subservience, and a wounded and perverted sense of individual and racial identities.

This book is about Jamaica’s search for racial and political selfhoods in the mid-twentieth century, its extrication from the suzerainty of the British and its tortured journey to some degree of identity as a child of Africa. The island experienced a labour rebellion in 1938 that inaugurated important changes and reforms in its political and economic systems. The racial ethos of the society was more resistant to change and most Jamaicans still remained psychologically bound to the British Empire. In 1955, for example, Jamaicans celebrated three hundred years of British rule, with royal visits, patriotic speeches and all the pomp and pageantry befitting the treasured connection. This occurred at a time when anti-colonial sentiment was ubiquitous in the colonial worlds.

Jamaica’s colonial society was conceived, peopled and sustained by violence and coercion. The Spaniards had taken control of it violently from the indigenous peoples in 1494, and the English expelled the Spaniards as a result of a war in 1655. The African peoples, who had been brought to the island by the Spaniards and the English, were acquired principally by force and journeyed under awful conditions to the island on slave ships, manacled and reduced to chattel. The physical and psychological terrors that they endured cannot be genuinely captured in history books. The violent separation from kith and kin, the depersonalization of slavery’s victims and the assaults on their humanity defy our imagination. Some contemporary historians ascribe Teflon-like personalities to Africa’s enslaved children, conforming to current academic fantasies about the superhuman capacity of slavery’s victims to walk away from the institution unscathed, whole and without a backward glance. To assert that slavery had a negative impact on its victims is to affirm the humanity of the peoples of African descent. The white slave-owners were victims too, damaged by the violence of the institution over which they presided and contaminated by the racist virus that legitimized their claims to human property. No one escaped slavery’s blows, no one its haunting shadows.

The enslaved peoples did not accept their condition passively. Jamaica was the most violent slave society in the hemisphere, experiencing its last rebellion in 1831. The Sam Sharpe Rebellion, as it became known, hastened the end of slavery. Fearing that the successful Haitian Revolution could be duplicated in their slave possessions, and recognizing their declining profitability, British legislators passed the Emancipation Act in 1833. The formal end of slavery in 1838 did not bring a social revolution in its wake. The society was still structured to promote the interests of the former slave-holding elite, confining the majority black population to a subordinate status. The violent challenge to the status quo that occurred in Morant Bay in 1865 reflected the desire for change, but also the capacity of the colonial state to suppress such unrest with all the violence at its command.

But official violence could not stymie or eliminate the changes that were emanating from below. Over time, a few black Jamaicans began to inch their way into the middle class, becoming sensitive to the disabilities of race and class that they confronted. Trapped at the bottom of the social order, others started to discover and affirm Africa and their blackness. Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 to foster racial pride, and the Rastafarians, a group founded in 1933, rejected Jamaica as their homeland and promoted a return to Africa. These groups had small constituencies, but by the early 1960s a larger black consciousness movement was emerging in the island, attracting some middle-class support. On the verge of independence, many Jamaicans were forging a racial identity that ran corollary to, and existed in a dialectical relationship with, the political selfhood they were seeking to attain.

Two eminent Jamaicans wrote novels at mid-century that captured the complex process by which their countrymen began to claim their racial and political selves. Published in 1949, Victor Reid’s New Day tells the story of Jamaica’s journey to a new constitution with universal adult suffrage in 1944. Beginning in 1865 and with the Morant Bay Rebellion as the immediate context, the novel’s first narrative voice is John Campbell. He is a curious and sensitive eight-year-old as the novel begins, and he survives the turmoil of the rebellion and its brutal suppression. Johnny’s passage to adulthood and old age is also the story of Jamaica’s political evolution after the rebellion. It is a tale of struggle, disappointments, endurance, changes and optimism. New Day nicely demonstrates how a people’s search for political selfhood is intertwined with their quest for personhood, a theme that is affirmed in this book.¹

Roger Mais, the other celebrated novelist of the time, published Brother Man in 1954. Mais’s fierce opposition to colonialism landed him in jail in 1943 on charges of treason. An oppressive colonial state tried to silence him and the nationalist sentiments that he was espousing. The novel is set among the working-class residents of a section of Kingston. Mais humanizes them as they confront life’s challenges. His hero is the saintly Brother Man, a Rastafarian ascetic, humble, self-effacing and morally incorruptible. He is an object of curiosity in the community; his gentle goodness invites respect and a guarded affection. Ultimately, Brother Man becomes the object of the community’s rage, a victim of its incomprehension, fears and hate.²

Mais was using Brother Man to centre the Rastafarians in Jamaica’s search for a racial identity. The Rastafarians were the victims of societal discrimination, but Mais was justifying their centrality to a Jamaican identity. As Kwame Dawes notes, Mais has preserved, in Brother Man, the force that makes Jamaicans see Africa with hope.³ Inward Yearnings: Jamaica’s Journey to Nationhood builds on this insight and elucidates the island’s anguished discovery of Africa as it tried to discover and accept its racial self.

Separated by publication dates of five years, the two novels help to set the intellectual context for this book. How did some Jamaicans begin to define themselves as black? And with what consequences in a society where a black skin was not a badge of honour? The second question follows naturally from the first one. Did the emerging racialized self help to shape the people’s political choices? Did the complementary visions of Brother Man and Johnny reach their actualization in 1962, when the country celebrated its independence? These interrelated and interactive processes were not recognized or even understood on the eve of independence, but they were defining the new nation in formation.Inward Yearnings is a book about those Jamaicans who were discovering their racial selves during the mid-twentieth century, those who were developing a concomitant Jamaican consciousness, and those who were simultaneously embracing a larger but weaker West Indian political identity. It examines the historical forces that drove, limited or impeded their journey. Most Jamaicans were hardly sensitive to the dialectical relationships between these variegated and complex inward yearnings that were battling for the soul of an emerging Jamaicanness, its texture and content. For many of Jamaica’s 1.6 million people in 1962, this complex process remained in various stages of becoming and fulfilment.

The Jamaican people in formation had few nonviolent models in the hemisphere. Among the most prominent, Brazil and Canada had avoided the battlefield in their quest for nationhood. A century later, colonial Jamaica stood no chance of emerging the victor in any contest with the mother country. More importantly, there was no such talk, no occasion for such flights of fancy. Independence fever had begun to infect some, but in the mid-twentieth century most Jamaicans still found solace in a colonial embrace even if many thought that the bonds between the colonizers and the colonized should be severed. Inward Yearnings explores the dynamic interplay between racialized individual and political selfhoods in the island. In sum, by the mid-twentieth century, many Jamaicans had embraced a black selfhood and sought to express it politically by the creation of an independent nation-state.

Inward Yearnings is divided into eight chapters, comprising two interrelated sections. The first part consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 shows how Jamaicans began the struggle to define themselves as black, to sing the song of Africa. The Rastafarians provided the earliest voices for this song, derided at first, but eventually a chorus of black consciousness voices emerged, sometimes discord ant, but which could never be ignored. Reflecting the sense that there was something new and different occurring among some of the people, the councillors of the municipality – the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation – voted in 1953 to authorize the preparation of a history of the Island, but written from a Jamaican perspective. By 1958 Jamaica had seen the first history of its peoples appear as well as twenty-one black consciousness groups in succeeding months.

The second chapter underscores the embrace of their African heritage by some Jamaicans and the fledging incorporation of that continent and African peoples into the island’s political imagination and discourse. Pressed by local developments, the government even dispatched a mission to seven African countries to determine their willingness to accept Jamaican immigrants. It was, however, a slow dance of reconciliation as blackness seeped into the Jamaican consciousness in formation, the inner sanctuaries of the people’s being.

The third chapter focuses on the evolution of a Jamaican nationalism in dialectical relationship with the developing racial selfhood. It devotes much attention to the roles played by Norman Manley and the People’s National Party (PNP) in the construction of this nationalism. It examines William Alexander Bustamante’s and the Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) ambivalence to the question as well as the growth of a weaker West Indian nationalism among some people.

The second half of the book, chapters 4–8, addresses Jamaica’s unsuccessful attempt to attain political selfhood as a part of the West Indies Federation, as opposed to achieving it on its own. Chapter 4 details the construction of a federation by the legislative bodies and in meetings in the Colonial Office, but not in the market places of the local people. Chapter 5 provides an account of the general election that was held in March 1958 to call the new federal parliament into being. The Jamaican electorate largely supported candidates who were critical of the federation, a sign of the troubles the new union would confront.

The cracks in the weak federal edifice appeared within months of the inauguration of the parliament. Chapter 6 details the nature of the disputes and the largely unsuccessful efforts to solve them. A political marriage had been consummated before its lubricating emotional bonds had come to life. Chapter 7 follows the West Indian legislators, particularly Norman Manley of Jamaica and Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, as they struggled to maintain the federal dream as the union’s problems mounted and its supporters despaired of its future.

Chapter 8 deals with the federation’s denouement. The Jamaicans voted to secede from the union, initiating its practical demise. One from ten, leaves nought, declared Williams, suggesting that Trinidad and Tobago would follow Jamaica’s lead on the matter. The Jamaicans were claiming their political selfhood as they voted to embrace independence as a unitary state, and not as a part of a West Indies Federation. They chose Out of Many, One People as their motto, affirming the significance of race in their individual, political and national personhoods. The peoples of African descent constituted 92 per cent of the Jamaican population in 1962, but the new state’s leaders were unready to recognize and celebrate that reality and its implications over the long haul. Jamaica came into existence as a black nation-state, but many people dodged that affirmation.

Jamaica’s independence was not wrought by the violence of the battlefield as was the case of the United States, Mexico or Cuba. But as chapter 8 of this volume will show, it experienced at times a political discourse whose language was as metaphorically sharp and bloody as that unleashed by guns. The body politic was wounded, its soul deeply scarred. There was some physical violence too, tarnishing the new state’s birth and enough to invite worries about the political culture of the future.

The political landscape of the years covered by this study was dominated by the two brown skinned cousins, William Alexander Bustamante and Norman Washington Manley. They were not ideological blood brothers, but they had a major impact on Jamaica’s journey to political selfhood. The two rivals led the major political parties that existed and both served as head of the island’s government. Bustamante and Manley were the most significant elite voices of the people, but the cultural and social energies of the period came from below.

Inward Yearnings is based largely on manuscripts located in a number of archives. They include the British National Archives, the Archives of the United States, the Jamaica Archives and the Archives of the West Indies Federation. In addition, the Daily Gleaner, the island’s principal newspaper, was a source of much information. Although contemporary scholars maintain that race is a social construct, I use the term throughout this book in the way in which it would have been understood at the time.

Jamaica formally came into being as an independent state as a consequence of a referendum. The people’s decision surprised the federation’s advocates in the Colonial Office, the West Indies and in Jamaica. The new state, metaphorically sired by the referendum, was virtually unplanned. Neither political party, nor their leaders, had given much thought to the construction and configuration of an independent Jamaica. These were challenging times in the island’s history, tantalizing in their promise but uncertain regarding their actualization. The timing of Jamaica’s birth, for good or ill, was essentially an accident of history. Its fate would depend largely on the people’s capacity to imagine, design and build their own passageways to the future.

CHAPTER 1

BECOMING JAMAICAN

IT WAS THE LARGEST POLITICAL PROCESSION THAT KINGSTON had seen in a long time, according to the Daily Gleaner. William Alexander Bustamante, Jamaica’s chief minister, was returning home after attending Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation ceremony in London. Thousands of Bustamante’s supporters had gathered at the Palisadoes airport on 17 June 1953 to welcome their leader, joining him in a joyous procession to the Ward Theatre to listen to speeches and to express their love for him. Bustamante, the newspaper reported, looked fit and hale. He wore his coronation medal on his lapel and, smiling broadly, he took the roaring welcome in his stride. Edwin Allen, the minister of education, was effusive in his salutation to the leader: You are the glory of the past, the pride of today, the hope of tomorrow.

Bustamante enjoyed the adulatory tribute he received. When he addressed the cheering crowd, He called upon all who had respect and regard for the British Commonwealth to stand up and sing ‘Rule Brittannia’. The theatre shook with the sound of hundreds of voices, according to the news report. After the rendition of the famous patriotic British anthem, Bustamante proclaimed his intention to fight for self-government for the island and to have our own flag right beside the flag of Her Majesty the Queen within the British Commonwealth of Nations.¹

Bustamante’s invitation to the crowd to sing Rule Brittannia, the quintessential paean to British imperialism, and his simultaneous embrace of self-government for Jamaica reflected two competing and warring impulses. The gathering was probably not sensitive to the contradictions inherent in their celebration of the privilege of being a part of the British Empire, on the one hand, and the call for self-government on the other. Rule Brittannia extolls the invincibility of the British, and their proud assurance that they never will be slaves. It was an incongruous spectacle of black Jamaicans, whose ancestors had been enslaved by the white British, singing in wondrous praise of the fact that their former slave owners had never been chattel:

When Britain first, at Heav’n’s command

Arose from out the azure main;

This was the charter of the land,

And guardian angels sang this strain;

Rule, Brittannia! Brittannia, rule the waves

Britons never will be slaves.

The genius of British colonialism in Jamaica was that it relied less on physical force for its sustenance and more on its capacity to invade the inner sanctuaries of its victims, making them internalize their subordinate status and accept for the most part the normalcy of the abnormal.

The curriculum in the schools played a major role in socializing children into being good, patriotic citizens of the Empire. They learned patriotic songs such as Rule Brittannia and sang them on such occasions as Empire Day, scheduled to take place annually on 24 May. The schools did not always meet their obligations in this regard, either deliberately or through neglect, much to the chagrin of some people. L.A. Edwards of Cedar Valley, for example, was incensed when the children from four neighbouring schools could not sing Rule Brittannia on Coronation Day because they were unfamiliar with the lyrics. A good Anglophile, he immediately dispatched a letter to the Gleaner urging that the song be properly taught in all the elementary schools in the island.² This was not a unique position; it was an indication of the success of the colonial socializing mission.

The curriculum also emphasized instruction in English history. The history of Africa and its peoples was ignored, so the mostly black students knew nothing about their ancestral history.

The curriculum, however, offered some instruction in Jamaican history, or in civics, as it was called. The problem, to be sure, was the interpretive optic, the way in which the instruction was packaged and the story told. Governor Hugh Foot, for example, encouraged a group of boys in 1953 to study their history by the statues. He advised them to go over to Spanish Town, where you will see the statue of [Sir Walter] Rodney, the man who played such a great part in Jamaica’s history. Go over to Fort Charles, Port Royal, and read the sacred inscription ‘in this place dwelt [Admiral] Horatio Nelson’, one of the greatest sailors who ever lived. Whatever you do, know your history.³ These black Jamaican children were being urged to embrace the history of white Englishmen as their own.

The historiography of the West Indies was still in its infancy, and its emphasis was on the activities of Englishmen and other Europeans in the region, not on the black people who largely inhabited it. Accordingly, the students graduated from the schools knowing little about their past or even if they and their ancestors had a history. Governor Foot was not insensitive to the power of history and of its capacity to shape the consciousness of a people. If people have no pride in their country’s past, he told the Boy Scouts in August 1953, it is not likely that they will have much hope in the future.⁴ The governor’s admonition was well intended, but his view of what constituted Jamaica’s internal history differed from that of many people in a changing Jamaica.

The council of the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation took the lead in urging the teaching of Jamaica’s history in the schools, but from a Jamaican perspective. A resolution that the council adopted in 1953 reflected an important stage in the development of a Jamaican identity: a consciousness of difference and of the reclaiming of self. The extraordinary resolution reads:

Whereas any people aspiring to nationhood, it is of primary importance that they have knowledge of their history, and

Whereas the people of Jamaica are taught the history of other peoples but not of their own and Whereas the grim struggle of our forefathers for freedom … lit the pages of Jamaica’s history and knowledge of this is confined to the archives of the West Indian section of the public library, and

Whereas Jamaica is on the eve of obtaining Self-Government, it is imperative that the part played by our forefathers in securing freedom be made widespread among the people,

Resolved that this Council on behalf of the nation request Government to give financial assistance to a history from the time our forefathers landed here depicting their heroic struggle for freedom, right down to the present time

And be it further resolved that such a history be taught in both elementary and secondary schools and be made a compulsory subject in all examinations for School Certificates.⁵

The council’s wish for a history of Jamaica was fulfilled when Clinton V. Black’s A History of Jamaica appeared in 1958, but Jamaican history was never made a compulsory subject for those sitting examinations in the secondary schools.

The prevailing ignorance about Africa helped to shape its image in Jamaica as in many other societies. Africa and Africans had been depicted in negative terms for centuries, British writers being ranked among the principal purveyors of these misrepresentations.⁶ Animated by a genuine desire to uplift the benighted Africans, many Jamaican missionaries, teachers, and other professionals served in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in several West African countries, undoubtedly enlightening themselves about the continent and her peoples. For their fellow Jamaicans who never crossed the Atlantic, Africa, Negro, Congolese and even black were pejorative words in an island where nine out of every ten persons descended from the maligned continent.

The slavery that developed in the Americas had a racial core. Scholars divide on the genesis of the racism directed at black Africans. Eric Williams, the distinguished Caribbean historian and statesman, for example, maintained that slavery produced racism.⁷ Others have suggested that a European-derived racism preceded and legitimized the enslavement of African peoples.⁸ Ultimately, anti-black racism became entrenched in the societal DNA and the psychology of many peoples of the Western Hemisphere. One pernicious consequence of this development was that individuals of African descent were socialized into cultures that denigrated them as a people, assaulted their personhood and saw their skin colour as a visible badge of inferiority.⁹ African slavery was introduced into Jamaica by the Spaniards in 1511. Over time, approximately one million Africans served as enslaved persons in the island. Despite an annual rate of natural decrease in the enslaved population until the early nineteenth century, many of its members produced children who lived to adulthood, thereby adding to its ranks. The size of this locally born population cannot be reliably established in the absence of individual birth and death records for much of the life of the institution. It may be guessed that its number amounted to about a hundred thousand over the 327 years (1511–1838) that Jamaica existed as a slave society. This figure would constitute an annual average of about three hundred persons, not a particularly exorbitant number given the size of the enslaved population, particularly after 1730 when the plantation system and slavery expanded exponentially.

There can be no doubt that the institution had an indelible impact on the construction and fabric of Jamaican society. The sweat of these peoples from Africa and their children accounted for the growth of the economy, the foundation of the plantation system, and the engine of the island’s overall economic endeavours. The demographic configuration of the society tilted considerably in favour of the enslaved peoples, who accounted for 95 per cent or more of the inhabitants before 1838 and the subsequent entry of indentured workers from India and China. Jamaica’s cultural landscape had a decidedly African texture; its rhythm and soul were African.

But political and economic power resided elsewhere. They wore a white face, as did the aesthetic flavour of the island. Whiteness was the imprimatur of superior human worth; blackness was its antithesis. As colonial subjects absorbing the values and cultural ethos of their overlords, Jamaicans placed a premium on a white phenotype, straight hair and Caucasian physical features in general. Emancipation had not purged these disorders and may even have exacerbated them. Renowned British writers such as James Froude and Anthony Trollope fed and shaped the claims of their fellow whites to racial superiority by maligning African peoples. The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of the literature that promoted white supremacy.¹⁰

Jamaica was not immune to the effects of these ill-blowing winds. The zeitgeist of the society legitimized inequality based upon race and skin colour, justifying the oppression of one group by another. The ethos that defined the society corroded its fabric, making of it a site of untrammelled white rule, limited only by the threat of black resistance. Facing political disabilities and severe economic stresses, Jamaicans rebelled twice in the aftermath of emancipation. The first rebellion occurred in Morant Bay in 1865, when disgruntled people used violence in an attempt to ameliorate their condition. The colonial state responded harshly, killing several hundred persons. There was a second major rebellion in May and June 1938, as workers went on strike throughout the island, precipitating fundamental changes in its economic and political structures. The striking workers recognized their collective power as the days wore on, experiencing epiphanies of self-discovery. They were assaulting the power of the white barons of capital. It was an exciting embrace of the possibilities of a new order, one called into being by their own efforts.

The 1938 labour rebellion had dramatically called attention to the grievous neglect and resulting inequities over which the colonial state presided. A.F. Morley, the United Kingdom’s first high commissioner to Kingston, observed in 1963 that for a substantial part of the British connexion, we tended to neglect the West Indies. Morley reminded the Colonial Office of Anthony Trollope’s remark a century earlier that if we could, we would fain forget Jamaica al together.¹¹ Indisputably, the events of 1938 constituted a revolt of the dispossessed, the noisy sound of the hitherto voiceless, an assault on the roots of a morally ossified colonial society, and an enthusiastic embrace of the urgency of change. These motions from below had the potential to build Jamaica anew if only its political heirs had the imagination and the will to keep faith with their promise. The moment represented a psychological epiphany for its actors, portending a new beginning for themselves and their homeland.

For a people battered and bruised by the frequently invisible demons of racism, their first challenge was to develop a healthy pride in their individual selves and their race. Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), a native of St Ann and the founder of the UNIA, maintained that an internal rebirth was a necessary precursor for the development of race