Jamaica 2021, what a blast!

 As much as I love the convenience of living in the USA, nothing can equal my annual visit to my homeland, Jamaica.

 To begin with, I always try to coordinate these visits with mango season, especially when East Indian mangoes are coming in, as that is my top favorite. Boy, did I ever get a whole heap this year. I was tempted to smuggle some in but luckily, I didn’t as I traveled through Miami airport and they dug up my luggage on my return.

Ass holes.

This year was extra special though, since it was the first time in years that my visit coincided with that of my daughter and granddaughter. Naturally my brother and sister-in-law were already there, so we all stayed with them at their home in  Silver Sands most of the time.

We had a wonderful time using Trelawny as our base. As usual going fishing was on the top of our list of activities and for the first time in my life, I caught a fish that was probably close to a pound!

We didn’t stray much from Silver Sands, as it has the best beach in the island, in my book. Before the younger ones arrived, my brother, sister in law and I journeyed over to the center of the island to the world famous mineral spa at Milk River, as some of us not so young ones were having some aches and pains. 

Milk River spa

We didn’t know it before we drove there, but it had just reopened after having been flooded a few days earlier when the country was inundated with rains. As a result, the water was not as hot as normal, but soothing none the less.

Milk River bath was established some 300 years ago, after a runaway slave who had been beaten half to death by his wicked slave master, found a stream in the hills, bathed his wounds and was miraculously healed. Subsequent tests revealed that the stream coming out of the hills, 

had one of the highest radioactivity levels of any mineral spring The water is promoted as being good for a long list of ailments and although the pool is closed, there are six private baths open for use. 

After leaving there, we headed along the South Coast highway (built in the 1970’s) which is almost impassable today, to visit the manatees, called sea cows locally.

They are endangered, and a family is kept at Alligator Hole but unfortunately, we never saw them as the keeper said they were up river.

Incidentally, Alligator Hole is in a swampy section of the Milk River and there are crocs in it but they don’t interfere with the gentle manatees. 

A correction though, for while the sign there says Alligator Hole, there are no alligators in Jamaica, only crocs!

From there we wended our way gingerly on the badly

 deteriorated South Coast highway over to Little Ochi where the food was great as usual.

A few days later, I jumped on the convenient Knutsford Express to visit friends and family in Kingston. 

Thanks to my knowledgeable cousin Dor, I was introduced to some marvelous improvements taking place in downtown Kingston.

These range from strategically placed info boards on many historic buildings to a sculpture of two important founders of our nation, Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley  and the unbelievable transformation of Water Lane. 

For blocks intersecting with that street, outstanding Jamaican artists have given their skills to create murals depicting Jamaican life all around.

A dramatic and most welcome turn around in the entire area.

When the kids arrived, we visited the Puerto Seco beach and although it has been nicely upgraded and child-friendly, it’s just not as lovely as the good ole Silver Sands beach.

They being adventurous, visited Mystic Mountain, but because of my dislike of heights, I hung out with my friend Chris at her beach house nearby, until time to pick them up. 

They had a ball there and at Dunn’s River falls before joining us on the lyme by Chris.

Silver Sands beach

We separated for a few days as Michele and Maddy wanted to hang out in Kingston with the Williams clan who celebrated her recent milestone. That was her earning a PhD  after many years of dedicated study and sacrifice. While in Kingston they boated over to Lime Cay to swim before returning to the country to join me for a few days a Bahai Principe in Runaway Bay. It’s not a bad hotel but boy do they need a good chef or two!

While they were away, we journeyed to Seaford Town in the hills of Westmorland, a place I had always wanted to visit. This settlement is called locally, German Town as after the Abolition of Slavery (Aug. 1, 1834), many planters had a shortage of labor so imported indentured workers.

A section of Seaford Town

One was the establishment of a European settlement by Lord Seaford, then owner of Montpelier Estate and Shettlewood Pen which were located in St. James. Over one thousand Germans were brought to Jamaica with the promise of being granted accommodation, land, and employment. 

This township was entrenched on five hundred acres of land. However, over the years, through assimilation and migration mostly to Canada, (I understand they left in droves during the turbulent 70's when the communists tried to take over Jamaica), there are no more true blooded Germans there anymore and the use of any German language has virtually disappeared. 

When I asked a young lady at the gas station there where the Germans were, she pointed to the burial ground beside the Roman Catholic church there.  😅

A  visit to the cemetary and a cursory glance at the tombstones, definitely confirms that this area was once inhabited by Germans, due to their names. 

That is the only evidence that this rural middle-class village was ever populated by those nationals.

As usual, this visit home was as interesting and invigorating as expected and I cant wait for the next East Indian mango season.

 Talk Jamaican: Milk River - YouTube

Memorie

Milk River where the manatees are kept

DON'T DILUTE OUR CULTURE!

I couldn’t agree more with the late great Marcus Garvey more, when he said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."

 One’s culture is the sum of the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements and cannot be revised or changed willy nilly.

 A lot of our Jamaican culture has been solidified and expressed through Mento/folk music.

 Mento is Jamaica's first recorded music and it evolved from the musical traditions brought by enslaved West African people. The lyrics of mento songs often deal with aspects of everyday life in a light-hearted and humorous way. They were put to catchy tunes and sung by the slaves or those who did backbreaking labour in the fields during the brutal Colonial British colonial period, to make their chores feel less onerous.

 I am on this topic, as I noticed recently that some Facebook users are determined to dilute and change one aspect of our culture. That is, how land was obtained and farmed immediately after slavery was abolished. This they are trying to do by changing some words of a popular mento song "Sammy Dead."

 This song begins; “Sammy plant piece a corn dung a gully, an it bear till it kill poor Sammy.” However, modern-day the revisionists have been changing it to “Sammy plant peas an corn dung a gully…….”

 They almost had me convinced too, until I fact-checked it with an expert in the field of Jamaican culture. That is Colin Smith, a foundation member of Jamaica Folk Singers and currently leader of Tallawah Mento band.

 Smith, spent many years at the feet of the late, great social anthropologist, Dr. Olive Lewin, OD OM, studying Jamaica folk music and literature. She died in 2013.

 Wikipedia describes her thus; "Lewin was the author of several books and has made numerous recordings of folk music, performed by the Jamaican Folk Singers, which she founded. She was honoured by the Government of Jamaica, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Government of France and by academia for her outstanding lifelong contribution to the arts. In 2001 she was awarded the Jamaican Order of Distinction."

 Regarding whether Sammy planted piece a corn or peas and corn, Smith was emphatic. “It was piece a corn.”

He then went on to explain the conditions that prevailed when that song was written. In those days, freed slaves who wanted to farm, had no land of their own, so they had to rent/lease piece a land from their former slave/colonial masters. On this small holding, they would plant, piece a cane, piece a pumpkin, piece a cane, piece a yam, etc. (In some areas small yam holdings are known  as yam grung) Those who planted tree crops described their holdings as walk. Hence you have walk mango walk, orange walk etc.

On the other hand, large land barons planted fields or plantations, so their holdings were called cane plantations, banana plantations etc.

This other folk song called “Missa Potta” confirms the use of the word piece in reference to small farming Smith.:

 He sang;

“Good mawning Missa Potta ,good mawning to yu sah,

A plant a piece a red peas a Red Sally Lan

Mary Jane an Pidgen cum eat it aff sah

Cum out a mi yaad  mi  nebba call yu yah

Fa yu house rent money no dun pay fah.

Smith, a St. Elizabeth farmer in his own right, also explained that it is not unusual to plant peas and corn together as red peas has an excessive amount of valuable minerals mainly- magnesium, calcium, sodium, potassium and iron, hence the trash is used to fertilize the corn which matures later. Corn and gungo are also planted together, as St. Elizabeth has always suffered from chronic water shortage, so the trash from the corn which matures earlier, is used to mulch the gungo.

Anyway, if this was the aspect of farming that was being referred to in the song Sammy Dead, the lyrics would be; an dem bear till dem kill poor Sammy, for the plural of it is dem!

Talk Jamaica • A podcast on Anchor

Talk Jamaican: our culture - YouTube

(268) JAMAICA'S cultural music - YouTube

Jamaica independent? Really?

Thanks to the performance of the Jamaican women's 4x100 metre  team on  Independence Day Friday 6th August 2021, we really had something exceptional to celebrate.

These ladies, Briana Williams, Elaine Thompson-Herah, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson also clocked a national record 41.02 seconds for Jamaica's first gold in that event since 2004. So, building on the other gold medals won  by Parchment and the ladies in the 100 metre, plus the silver and bronze medals brought home by the other star performers in the previous days, our athletes once again wowed the world and made us so proud.

What a wonderful gift for our struggling nation on the 59^th anniversary of our ‘independence’ from Britain!

While I, like everyone else, was overjoyed by the performance of those who medaled, I would like to take this opportunity to celebrate all the elite athletes who represented Jamaica at the 2020 Olympics, whether they medaled or not.

For just qualifying to reach the top of their careers by qualifying to compete in the Olympics is an outstanding feat. While we tend to only see the final results, their success did not come by accident but it took years of dedicated training and discipline to qualify.

 I am therefore personally proud and thankful for all our young athletes who mek Jamaica tek shame outta wi yeye as we celebrate another year of ‘independence’.

For apart from the prowess of these disciplined individuals year in year out, when one reflects on the counter-productive political shenanigans which landed us with economic disasters like FINSAC and the violence ridden society that we have built since independence, there is not much else to celebrate.

Look at the per capita income in US$’s of some other Caribbean islands which got independence after us; Bahamas- 23,671, Barbados-16,237, Antigua $16,176, Trinidad 15,459, Dominica 7,091, Jamaica $4,934.

Fact is, we have the lowest per capita income of all the former British colonies in the Caribbean!

So here we are, though blessed with a myriad of natural resources, yet we have really failed to gain a modicum of economic independence and social stability during those 59 years.

Apart from the economic and social failures, the question I keep asking is how can we be called independent when we, the first English speaking Caribbean country to declare ‘independence’, remain so steeped in mental slavery that we insist on retaining a foreign head of state?

And not even a good foreign one either, when we consider the brutality with which Britain treated our ancestors during slavery and colonialism!

This unacceptable situation remains although both parties, JLP and PNP, which have alternated in government since independence, have at one time or the other promised to enact the necessary constitutional change to correct that unsavory situation. But guess what they say is holding up the process?

The PNP wants an executive president while the JLP wants a ceremonial president. In the meantime, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and soon Barbados, (once known as Little England) have not dithered on the issue.

One the other hand, as if to entrench this love for the racist British monarchy, our own prime minister Andrew Holness in July 2021, accepted appointment to the British Privy Council!

All this is the midst of Caricom now taking a decisive and cooperative approach in demanding reparations from Britain for their brutality, rape, murder and exploitation of or ancestors during slavery and colonialism and their continued oppression of our people during what is now proven to be the Windrush scandal!

My dislike of the current relations​​hip with Britain has nothing to do with the present queen who has been quite unobtrusive and benign. However, she will not live forever and the thought of a foreigner with Charles' reputation and character being the head of state of my country, is even more intolerable.

Anyway, regardless of who it is that sits on the racist British throne, 59 years is just too long for us to claim to be independent while that situation prevails. 

https://youtu.be/oCqHflj4SNE