The island of Jamaica has been portrayed to us as a tropical paradise. Happy, smiling black people are allowed to sing a chorus of “White folks been awful good to me.”;1 where they have a role in this imperial fantasy.
Xamaica, the Land of Springs, became a Spanish colony in the sixteenth century. The native Tainos or Arawaks spoke the same language as the Tainos on Cuba and Hispaniola. Under Spanish Imperial Law it was forbidden to enslave the natives. As with many things in imperialism this was propaganda and the actual practice was very different. There are no written records of Jamaican Tainos being rounded up and shipped to Cuba and Hispaniola; that would have been illegal.
There may possibly be a written record of Jamaican Tainos risking their lives to try to warn the Maya on the mainland of the threat from imperialism. The story of a canoe voyage from Las Islas Palizadas, on Jamaica’s south coast to the Yucatan Peninsula is told in History of the Conquest of Mexico.2
By 1655 the Jamaican Tainos had been fully assimilated by imperialism. Their memory had a place in history but it was more easily accessible in the mythology of the new Jamaicans. Their language was no longer heard in the Land of Springs. “... the end of a lang sang.”3
Jamaica's coat-of-arms shows fanciful representations of two Tainos; mis-leading images enslaved by an artist's brush.
In 1655 Jamaica acquired a new owner; a benign, enlightened owner; if you believe the propaganda. The English took over from the Spanish. England and Greater England (Scotland and Ireland) were under the benign and benevolent dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. Seeking to bring the benefits of English civilisation to the entire Spanish Empire, Cromwell sent a large military force to the West Indies. This expensive expedition heroically wrested Jamaica from the embrace of the wicked Catholics. In 1655 Jamaica entered the English family of nations; a thoroughly dysfunctional and unhappy family.
In 1657 Cromwell's man in Jamaica formally invited 'The Brethren of the Coast' to establish their version of free-trade in Port Royal. These unsavoury characters have a somewhat sketchy historical profile. They were pirates to the Spanish whose shipping they preyed upon. Their most famous leader, Henry Morgan, was described as being Welsh. In the English of Wessex (the West Country) 'wales' means foreign. The designation of Welsh is open to interpretation and the name of Morgan is not unknown in the Scottish province of Buchan. Piracy was a well-established trade in Buchan long before Cromwell's time.
The English preferred to describe their pirates as privateers and also as buccaneers. The origin of this latter term is uncertain. If the Buchan free-traders had compounded the name of their province of origin with their privateering trade they might well have called themselves buchaneers. Deliberately mis-pronouncing every language (especially their own) seems to be a symptom of the imperial disease. From buchaneer to buccaneer is a linguistically simple sound-change. The alternative explanation is more complex.
In 1707 the English state underwent a fundamental re-organisation when it formed a federal union with the state of Scotland; henceforth to be known as Great Britain. In Jamaica the English imperial flag was embellished with a few patches of blue to become the Brenglish imperial flag. On the mainland the Spanish robbed and enslaved the Native Americans. From Port Royal Scottish pirates under an arms-length English/Brenglish administration robbed and murdered the Spanish. If you look closely at the spectacular ruins that are left by empires you will find that they are stained with blood and cemented by despair.
The 1707 Brenglish imperial flag is constitutionally related to a state called Great Britain.
Concentration camps are generally thought to date from the 1860s. Their invention is credited either to the 'bad Spanish' empire in Cuba or to the benign, enlightened “Brutish Empire” 4, under great provocation, as a temporary measure, in Natal and Orange Free State, during the Boer War (1899-1902). Many Jamaicans believe that the first concentration camp was the island of Jamaica. At 100 miles by 50 miles it was also the largest.
The first African slaves in Jamaica were imported by the Spanish. Their descendants are the Maroons (from Cimarrones) of Jamaica's semi-desert interior. The English initially preferred to use people they described as bonded-servants to do the kind of ”Carry Go Bring Come”5 tasks that are beneath the dignity of imperialists. These people were from diverse backgrounds and anyone could volunteer for bonded-servitude which is also known as indentured-service. In reality bonded-servitude, a form of slavery 6, was used by deep-soothers to thin out the Celtic over-population of the north and west of England and other barbaric parts of 'ouwa islands'. They were really doing them a favour as they were incapable of supporting themselves; or so they said.
Many bonded-servants died on the passage to their new home on the Island of Springs. Once they arrived they were hard-working and cheap to keep. They had a bad habit of dying from tropical diseases; probably made more deadly by malnourishment and despair. By the end of their seven or eleven year bonds they were thoroughly acclimatised, addicted to rum and ready to join the pool of cheap labour in their new home. That was true for some but many had been promised that the bond-holder would pay for their passage home if they should survive their period of bonded-servitude. How convenient for the bond-holders if their servants should succumb to the effects of over-work, brutality and mal-nourishment shortly before the period of bondage was due to end. In this crucial detail the bonded-servants were in a worse position than the African slaves who were to replace them as the lowest strata of the English imperial class-system.
Although the use of Celtic slaves had many advantages in the building of England's tropical paradise, there were also many disadvantages. The high mortality rate was a serious drawback, many of them didn't live long enough to repay the cost of shipping. Wouldn't it be enlightened and inspired if we were to breed a race of servile people who had the meek and fatalistic qualities of the Celts combined with the psychological toughness and resistance to tropical diseases of West Africans?
Ideas of this type were not entirely good news for the Celts but they were certainly bad news for some of the peace-loving nations of West Africa. English domination of shipping and the West African trading-posts allowed them to control the supply of African slaves to their American colonies. Jamaica became a sorting-office for this lucrative trade. The Celts still had a place in the imperial plan. They became the plantation underseers who taught the Africans how to be productive members of an enlightened, christian empire. The Celts were still slaves (though one should not say so to their face) but they had now moved up one class in the imperial plan.
The task of turning the new recruits to the imperial plan into a productive and profitable work-force was complex. They had to be persuaded to give up their languages, cultural beliefs and sense of values. In return they were given a place in the civilised world of English-speaking imperialism; and a new name! Some Africans went along with 'cultural assimilation' while others resisted. The more humble and co-operative blacks tended to be considered ideal for onward shipping to other markets, including the American colonies. The selective-breeding programme in Jamaica, probably without realising it, was selecting for a rebellious, culturally-confident lower class of Jamaicans.
When, in 1776, a small group of trouble-makers temporarily withdrew the American colonies from the 'family of nations' the ever-patient mother-country still controlled all the shipping and access to foreign trade. There followed (until 1812) a period of benign and enlightened guidance to steer the American renegades back to the right course. The shipping of assimilated Africans from Jamaica continued for many years. At least 160,000 Africans were thus trans-shipped through Jamaica.7
The moral depravity inherent in this sad tale is difficult to evaluate; impossible to understand. The achievements of the Nazi regime in Greater Germany lasted for 5½ years. The imperial regimes in Jamaica lasted for 400 years; “400 years of the same philosophy”8. They have left a moral and cultural legacy that causes Jamaica to stand out among all the small nations of the world. Jamaican contributions to world music and track athletics are out of all proportion to the small size of the island's population.
The Celts, many of them Scots, who were caught up in this holocaust have contributed to the island's rich and restless heritage. Jamaica's flag is a saltire flag. Many Jamaicans have Scottish surnames. There are still communities on the island who see themselves as being of Scottish extraction9. Much of the power in the lyrics of Jamaican popular songs comes from their understanding of the evils of imperialism. Peter Tosh (Mackingtosh), Justin Hines (Innes), Bunny Wailer (Livingstone) and Prince Buster (Campbell) all make worthy attempts to describe and evaluate the imperial wasteland. The Honourable Marcus Garvey10, Jamaica's national hero, ranks alongside The Holy Prophet Mohammed in his contribution to shaping African cultural identity.
The problem the Scots need to overcome is that they are too close to the trees to see the wood. The empire that tortured and tormented 26-counties-Ireland for seven hundred years has broken and ignored the spirit and the letter of the 1707 Treaty of Union. In 1973 when Scotland, willingly, entered the European Union our legal system was not subordinate to a Brenglish High Court. There is no moral or legal reason why we should accept subjugation to English Law today.
The Empire-Loyalists who claim to be 'Unionists' will have a template for federalism; if they ever bother to read the 1707 Treaty. They could campaign in a positive way for the opening of The Scottish Exchequer; a provision of the Treaty. The oral propaganda that was the context for the signing of the 1707 Treaty is, in Scots Law, something they could bring before the courts. True Unionists, if they were serious, would be campaigning for the closure of the English Parliament and the, long-delayed, opening of the British Parliament, in York.
The talk-a-good-independence-at-election-time factions get a good press from the imperialists. They have set themselves up to repeat the history of the talk-a-good-socialism-at-election-time faction. If we are to have years to wait for the next step they should be years of planning, organising and hard work. The Americans, the Irish and the Jamaicans all gained their independence from the same evil empire. If you think it was easy you are not fit to live in a sovereign state.
REFERENCES
1 Harriet Beecher Stowe; Uncle Tom's Cabin;
2 Bernal Diaz del Castillo; History of the Conquest of Mexico; many translations; look for Yucatan Peninsula in the index
3 “That is the end of a lang sang”, was a contemporary comment on the 1707 Treaty of Union. I associate it with Fletcher of Saltoun but can find no reliable confirmation of this.
4 Stokely Carmicheal; attribution from Mark Kurlansky; Nonviolence 25 Lessons from ...; Random House; 2006; p. 169
5 Justin Hines (aka Justin Hinds); Carry Go Bring Come; Island Records; 196?
6 Eric E. Williams; Capitalism and Slavery; 1944
7 C. E. Long manuscripts; official records of human-trafficking into and out of Jamaica from 1702 to 1787; published by, Jamaica Family Search
8 Peter Tosh; 400 Years; Blue Mountain Music Ltd;
9 Ian Thomson; The Dead Yard;
10 Stanley Nelson; Look for me in the Whirlwind; Firelight Media; U.S.A. 2000
Amy Jacques Garvey; Garvey and Garveyism; 1935
Féderico García Lorca; The King of Harlem (Poet in New York); many translations; first published in 1940 as El Rey de Harlem
