For a long time, I had no idea who The Folkes Brothers were but I knew every beat, every drum lick of their 1960s hit song, Oh Carolina. It was the song that once you heard it at a party, you knew two things: it was late (or early morning, depending on your point of view), and it was time to go home. I’m really not sure how it got that designation.
Oh Carolina, The Folkes Brothers
The Folkes Brothers, John, Mico and Junior, were a group that played mento – Jamaican folk music. Oh Carolina was written by John Folkes and produced by Prince Buster, the first hit record for him. Oh Carolina is regarded as pivotal in the development of ska, rocksteady and reggae music. Prior to the release of the song, Jamaican musicians copied Rhythm & Blues music from the U.S. Oh Carolina was the first to depart from what was the norm. By incorporating African drumming and chanting, done superbly by Count Ossie, a legendary Rastafari drummer, it created a new Jamaican sound.
In 1993, Oh Carolina was re-released by reggae singer, Shaggy. It goes without saying that I prefer the original version. After Shaggy’s version became an international hit, Folkes and Prince Buster went to court over its authorship – Folkes prevailed.
I’ve become fascinated by the variety of flowers, including wildflowers, that grow in Jamaica. When I asked about this one and heard that it was the Spanish Needle, I thought of a poem I learned years ago in school.
Spanish Needle
The poem, The Spanish Needle, was written by Jamaican poet, Claude McKay, who certainly thought a lot of the lowly wildflower. McKay was born in 1889 and moved to the U.S. in 1912, where he became a seminal figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Besides poetry, he also wrote the novels Home to Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom, short stories and autobiographical books.
This is what he had to say about The Spanish Needle –
Lovely dainty Spanish needle
With your yellow flower and white,
Dew bedecked and softly sleeping,
Do you think of me to-night?
Shadowed by the spreading mango,
Nodding o’er the rippling stream,
Tell me, dear plant of my childhood,
Do you of the exile dream?
Do you see me by the brook’s side
Catching crayfish ‘neath the stone,
As you did the day you whispered:
Leave the harmless dears alone?
Do you see me in the meadow
Coming from the woodland spring
With a bamboo on my shoulder
And a pail slung from a string?
Do you see me all expectant
Lying in an orange grove,
While the swee-swees sing above me,
Waiting for my elf-eyed love?
Lovely dainty Spanish needle,
Source to me of sweet delight,
In your far-off sunny southland
Do you dream of me to-night?
I was also surprised to learn (but really, I shouldn’t have been) that the medicinal qualities found in the roots, leaves and seeds of the Spanish Needle can be used to treat a variety of illnesses including malaria, headaches and arthritis. It is used widely in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Sir Alexander Bustamante was born William Alexander Clarke on February 24, 1884 in Blenheim, Hanover. Along with his cousin, Norman Washington Manley, he is considered one of the founding fathers of modern Jamaica.
Sir Alexander Bustamante, circa 1960
As a young man, Bustamante was restless and traveled extensively between 1905 and 1934, going from Panama to Cuba and the U.S. He tried his hand at a variety of jobs, including hospital attendant, police, beekeeper, and dairy farmer.
It is well known that Bustamante created stories about his background to suit his own purposes, including one that a Spanish sailor adopted him and brought him up. The truth is that he was a part of the privileged planter class. When he returned to Jamaica, he established himself as a money-lender.
The Jamaica that Bustamante returned to was still a crown colony. Under this system, the governor had the right of veto and often exercised it against the wishes of the majority.
Pay and working conditions were poor. Falling harvests and the lay-off of workers resulted in an influx of the unemployed into the city. This mass migration did little to alleviate the unemployment situation.
Bustamante realized the social and economic ills that the crown colony system engendered and began mobilizing the working-class. He started a letter writing campaign to the local newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, and occasionally to British newspapers, calling attention to the social and economic problems of the poor and underprivileged.
In time, Bustamante became a well-known advocate of the cause of the masses. Soon, he started traveling around the country, making speeches and getting to know the people.
By 1938, there was much labor unrest and protest by the people against the poverty and degradation that they faced. At a rally in Kingston, when the army threatened to open fire on the crowd, Bustamante is said to have opened his shirt, bared his chest to the soldiers and told them to shoot him and leave the innocent people. He was arrested later that day and was bailed by his cousin, Norman Manley, an attorney. The charges were subsequently dropped.
On September 8, 1940, Bustamante was detained at Up Park Camp, for alleged violation of the Defence of the Realm Act. He was released seventeen months later.
In 1943 he founded the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), with himself as head. The first general election under Universal Adult Suffrage came in 1944 and the JLP won 22 of the 32 seats.
Bustamante was knighted by the Queen in 1955. In 1962, became the first prime minister of independent Jamaica. He retired from active politics in 1967 and was named a national hero in 1969. He is the only national hero to receive the honor while still alive. Bustamante died on August 6,1977, at the age of 93.
The Bustamante backbone or Busta is a hard candy that was named for Bustamante as he was considered by many to be like the candy, of “firm character.”
Food is an integral part of our lives. And on Thanksgiving, we give thanks with one of the biggest feasts of the year.
Thanksgiving isn’t an official holiday in Jamaica though some Jamaicans who’ve returned home have brought the tradition with them. What we have that’s similar is harvest. At the harvest, members bring produce to their church to receive a blessing from the priest.
Honey bananas
These bananas are called honey, because they’re naturally sweet, sweeter than regular bananas. They are also smaller than average bananas, probably a half or two-thirds in size, and are quite popular in Jamaica. Honey bananas sell fast despite the fact that they’re usually more expensive than regular bananas.
Green bananas
These bananas are called green to differentiate them from the yellow ones, which most people are familiar with. Green bananas are boiled and often eaten with steamed fish, ackee and salt fish or other meats. It’s also used to make porridge, dumplings or put in mannish water soup, a soup that is made from the head and intestines and other parts of the goat. It is believed to be an aphrodisiac.
Avocados
We picked these avocados at the home of one of my cousins. Since they weren’t quite rips, we wrapped them in newspaper to speed up the process.
Breadfruit
The breadfruit was brought to Jamaica by Captain William Bligh between 1780 and 1786. Roasted, it is is the perfect accompaniment to ackee and salt fish, our national dish. It can also be eaten boiled, fried, used in soups, and made into chips. For roasting, I prefer them a little ripe or turned. They are a little sweeter and softer. In soups, I prefer them what we call, young, meaning not ripe. Breadfruit can also be referred to as full, ready.
Ackee
The main ingredient in ackee and salt fish, our national dish, ackee was brought to Jamaica from West Africa. It’s ackee season now and the trees are laden with fruit. Ackees contain a poisonous gas and must be opened before they are picked.
Jamaican cooks and chefs have been experimenting with how they prepare ackee. Moving away from the traditional marriage with salt fish, ackees can be curried, or used in bruschetta and cheesecake.
A basket of food
A bountiful harvest of fruits, vegetables and produce. Happy Thanksgiving!
On Monday, November 21, REDJet, the Caribbean’s first budget carrier, landed at Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport.
REDJet
With tickets priced as low as US$9.99 and increasing in increments of US$10 as seats are sold and departure dates approach, the airline could shake up air travel in the Caribbean.
Speaking at the launch, Ian Burns, REDJet’s chairman and chief executive officer tried to allay fears that the low cost carrier will draw passengers away from established airlines, like Caribbean Airlines and LIAT.
REDJet cites its single class of service, its one aircraft type and point-to-point service as among the factors that minimize cost and maximize efficiency. Passengers can purchase meals on board and pay for their bags at the airport.
REDJet had been eyeing the Jamaican market for four years, Burns said, but the country was in the throes of divesting its national carrier, Air Jamaica, and regarded the low cost carrier as a threat. Jamaican authorities however attribute the delay to concerns over safety.
In addition to Jamaica, REDJet offers service to Antigua, Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago.
Norman Washington Manley was born in the parish of Manchester on July 4, 1893. He was a Rhodes scholar and athlete, soldier (First World War) and lawyer.
During the labor unrest of 1938, Manley identified himself with the cause of the workers and donated time and advocacy to the cause. In September 1938, he founded the People’s National Party (PNP) and was elected its president annually until his retirement in 1969.
Norman Manley
Manley and the PNP supported the trade union movement, then led by his cousin, Alexander Bustamante, while leading the demand for Universal Adult Suffrage. However, when it came, Manley had to wait ten years and two terms before his party was elected to office.
Manley was a strong advocate of the Federation of the West Indies, established in 1958 and Jamaica’s participation in it. But when Sir Alexander Bustamante declared that the opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), would take Jamaica out of the Federation, Manley, already well known for his integrity and commitment to democracy, called a Referendum, an unprecedented move in Jamaica, to let the people decide. The vote was decisively against Jamaica’s continued membership of the Federation.
After arranging Jamaica’s orderly withdrawal from the union, Manley set up a joint committee to decide on a constitution for separate independence for Jamaica. He chaired the committee with great distinction and then led the team that negotiated the island’s independence from Britain.
That settled, Manley went again to the people. However, he lost the ensuing election to the JLP and gave his last years of service as leader of the opposition, establishing definitively the role of the parliamentary opposition in a developing nation.
In his last public address to an annual conference of the PNP, Manley said: “I say that the mission of my generation was to win self-government for Jamaica, to win political power which is the final power for the black masses of my country from which I spring. I am proud to stand here today and say to you who fought that fight with me, say it with gladness and pride, mission accomplished for my generation.
“And what is the mission of this generation? … It is… reconstructing the social and economic society and life of Jamaica.”
Norman Manley retired from politics on July 4, 1969. He died on September 2. 1969. His second son, Michael, served as prime minister in 1972 and 1989.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jamaica’s first National Hero was born in St. Ann’s Bay on August 17, 1887. He was the youngest of eleven children born to Marcus Garvey, Sr., and Sarah Jane Richards.
Garvey’s father, whom he described as “severe, firm, determined, bold and strong, refusing to yield even to superior forces if he believed he was right” influenced him greatly. The elder Garvey had an extensive library where young Marcus learned to read.
Marcus Garvey
At age 14, Garvey went to Kingston where he worked as a printer and later published a small newspaper, The Watchman. While in Kingston, he became involved in union activities and took part in an unsuccessful printers’ strike in 1907.
From 1910-12, he traveled extensively throughout Central America observing and writing about the poor working and living conditions of black people. He later traveled to the UK where he attended Birkbeck College and worked for the African Times and Orient Review, which advocated Pan-Africanism.
Fueled by these experiences, Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1914 and started the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The goal of the organization was to unite all the people of the African Diaspora to “establish a country and absolute power of their own.” The UNIA also encouraged self-help economic projects and protest against racial discrimination.
In 1916, Garvey settled in Harlem where he began a branch of the UNIA. He spoke across the United States, encouraging African-Americans to be proud of their race and return to Africa, their ancestral homeland. By 1918, he began publishing the Negro World newspaper to help spread his message.
In 1919, the UNIA launched the Black Star line, a shipping company that would establish trade between Africans in Africa and the rest of the world, and provide transportation back to Africa and started the Negro Factories Corporation to encourage black economic independence. He tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Liberian government to grant land on which black people coming from the Americas could settle.
By 1920, when the UNIA held its first international convention at Madison Square Gardens, in New York City, it boasted 4 million members. Speaking to a crowd of 25,000 people from around the world, Garvey exhorted them to have pride in their African heritage.
While Booker T. Washington, with whom he corresponded, and A. Philip Randolph supported Garvey’s views, W.E.B. Dubois called him “the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America.” The U.S. government also viewed his activities with disapproval.
In 1922, Garvey was arrested for mail fraud in connection with the sale of stock in the Black Star Line, which had now failed. Although there were irregularities connected to the business, the prosecution was probably politically motivated, as Garvey’s activities had attracted considerable government attention. He was sent to prison and later deported to Jamaica.
Back in Jamaica in 1927, he continued his political activities, forming the People’s Political Party in 1929. He was unsuccessful in national elections but won a seat on the Kingston & St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC). Unfortunately, the world of 1930s Jamaica was not ready for Garvey’s progressive ideas and he left for England in 1935. He died there on June 10, 1940. He was buried in England because of World War II travel restrictions. In 1964, his body was returned to Jamaica where it was re-interred at the National Heroes Park in Kingston.
Garvey’s memory and influence remain. His message of pride and dignity inspired many in the early days of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In tribute to his many contributions, Garvey’s bust has been displayed in the Organization of American States’ Hall of Heroes in Washington, D.C. The country of Ghana named its shipping line the Black Star Line and its national soccer team the Black Stars, in honor of Garvey.
A petition, started earlier this year to urge President Barack Obama to clear Garvey’s name, was reportedly rejected by the White House.
Before Millie Small was catapulted to fame in 1964 with the hit song, My Boy Lollipop, she had been part of a duo in Jamaica that had some minor success.
Millie Small
She went to London in 1963 to record My Boy Lollipop, the song that put both her and Island Record on the map internationally. My Boy Lollipop reached number on the UK and US charts and was the first hit song for the Chris Blackwell’s fledgling label. It was only recently in an interview with Blackwell at the New York Public Library, that I learned that the song had been released originally in the US by Barbie Gaye.
Small’s hit was recorded in the bluebeat style, the genre of Jamaican music that predates ska and reggae.
Although she continued to tour into the 1970s, Small never had another hit on the order of My Boy Lollipop.
In August this year, the Governor-General conferred on her the Order of Distinction for her contribution to Jamaican music.
Millie Small or Little Millie Small as she was called back then, was born Millicent Dolly May Small on October 6, 1946 in Clarendon, Jamaica. She resides in the U.K.
A Jamaican breakfast is usually a pretty substantial meal. It can consist of any of the following: boiled green banana, fried plantain, dumplings, Johnny Cakes, roasted breadfruit (when in season), Festival (a Johnny Cake made of flour and cornmeal), avocado (when in season) and yam with either steamed fish, ackee and saltfish, callaloo or callaloo and saltfish, corned beef, sardines, etc. Sometimes, there might be porridge made from oats, cornmeal, banana, plantain, peanut, etc.
Ackee, saltfish, dumplings, roasted breadfruit and avocado
I took the photo of a breakfast I had a few weeks ago at Max, a Jamaican restaurant in Hackensack, New Jersey. I went there specifically for the ackee and saltfish, a true treat, and No. 2 on National Geographic’s Top 1o National Dishes. I had it with Festival, fried roasted breadfruit, boiled dumplings, a slice of yam and a slice of avocado. Needless to say, I couldn’t finish it!
George William Gordon was born in 1819 to a slave mother and a planter father. In 1834, the year slavery was
George William Gordon
abolished (on August 1st), he was elected to the House of Assembly for the parish of St. Thomas. He was 23 years old. Gordon was also a leader of the Native Baptist Movement.
The termination of slavery brought freedom and the right to vote but the majority of the black population did not qualify as they could neither read nor write or afford the high fee that was required. Seeing that many had no land to farm, Gordon subdivided his own lands and sold farm lots to them as cheaply as possible. He also organized a system through which they could sell their produce at fair prices. Gordon built several churches at his own expense and ordained ministers.
When a severe drought worsened economic conditions for the people and rumors of a return of slavery began circulating, Gordon urged them to protest. As a result of his activism, Gordon developed a reputation as a critic of the colonial government and in particular, Edward John Eyre, Governor of the island.
Eyre denied the terrible conditions the people lived in when in 1865, the secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society of Great Britain, Dr. Edward Underhill, wrote to the Colonial Office in protest on their behalf. Eyre also sent his comments with another letter that was sent by farmers in the parish of St. Ann asking Queen Victoria for Crown lands to cultivate as they could not find lands on their own. The Queen’s reply that they should work harder made it clear that Eyre had influenced her.
Jamaican $10 note bearing the image of George William Gordon
On October 7, 1865, Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon, led men and women to the Morant Bay Court House to protest the issuance of warrants for the arrest of several men of the area and the general conditions under whish people had to live, Gordon was not in St. Thomas and had no knowledge of the protest.
That fact notwithstanding, he was arrested and charged for complicity in what is now known as the Morant Bay Rebellion. He was court martialed illegally and, despite a lack of evidence, convicted and sentenced to death. Gordon was executed on October 23, 1865, Paul Bogle a day later.
The execution of Gordon and Bogle and nearly 500 others caused an uproar in Britain. Those who sided with Eyre, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and others, noted his decisive action in stopping the rebellion and restoring order. John Stuart Mill, who was against Eyre, created the Jamaica Committee, which included Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and others. They called for Eyre to be tried for murder. He was charged twice but the cases never went to trial.
As a result of the rebellion, Jamaica became a Crown Colony.
In 1960, the House of Assembly, now the Parliament building, was named George William Gordon House (Gordon House) his honor.
In 1965, Gordon was accorded highest honor Jamaica bestows, that of National Hero.
In 1969, his image was placed on the Jamaican $10 note, now a coin.
Several groups such as Culture, Steel Pulse and Third World 1865 96° in the Shade have paid tribute to him in their music.
