Jamaican Independece 2025

It’s 5:16pm, the sun is preparing for tomorrow leaving an array of warm tones in its departure. I look down from my window seat past the stream of loose clouds and I see a lush formation of green hills below the wing of the plane. I know I am home. My country, Jamaica, has always offered the warmest greetings — not just through its people and the scent of Scotchies, but through the breathtaking grandeur of its nature that grabs you the moment you exit the plane. We are nature, Xaymaca, The Land of Wood and Water. 

My earliest and fondest memories of exploring all of nature’s offerings in Jamaica wasn’t (yet) at Dunns River Falls but close enough - an extremely long but peaceful road that is known as Fern Gully. Once a historic riverbed, Fern Gully is now a three-mile stretch of narrow road, densely canopied by ferns, winding through St Ann — the home parish of the Honorable Marcus Garvey. The sights are serene, giving display to a home of many shades of green, tall and enveloping ferns. Landscapes like this, a riverbed turned road - it offers glimpses into Jamaica’s layered history and geography.

Due to the lack of exposure and minimal publishing in the academic world on the ecology of Jamaica written by Jamaicans, my interest in this area had not been stirred. Growing up in London, I was particularly interested in Geography - a short lived passion due to my schooling experience that I have spoken about before. In my teenage years wildlife documentaries were a niche I consumed hours of, tearing up midway at the screen, as wildlife spun yet another merciless round of nature's laws. The same weekend, I would then be at another family or friends BBQ, somewhere outside, somewhere green. As I explored my relationship with land, culture, and the outdoors, I began to confront a shared question: why does London offer so few accessible green spaces for people like us? 

As descendants of the African diaspora, the lands here in the cosmopolitan cities especially London have their limits. The bricks that laid the foundations of the space we used for playing out, on top of the familiar scent of engine fumes from buses as we commute, the routine of asking your neighbour for the ball back because the garden space is just wide enough to stretch both hands: the call for more access to space for a better quality of life has never been more necessary. The short lived curiosity around Geography reared its head again during my BA of African and Development Studies during 2018, and I opted for a module in Law and Nature the winter before I was about to leave for New Zealand. Here, I hoped to reconcile urbanised Blackness, an experience far from unique to London, with a broader view of land, access, and how space shapes quality of life and even education especially within the context of colonialism, genocide and settler colonialism. Land is political - not inherently, but through the powers that shape it. It is like saying a certain area is posh, this doesn’t reflect the contents of the land but the often intentional economic and social influence people have in that particular location. 

The more I studied, I came to an awareness that the delineation of people in relation to land is at the heart of how we then see who is worthy of having access to land and who is not. Foreigner, owner, indigenous, Indigenous, settler, refugee, descendant, nomad, citizen… the list goes on. These terms convey status, and therefore a pre-determined and fixed category of who is seen worthy of space and therefore belonging. I set the task of committing myself to write a dissertation about the treasured Maroon community from an ecological perspective - looking back through history at how we have tended to our lands, outside of the plantocracy and plantation economy that dominates much of our literature. My dissertation won the inaugural Walter Rodney Prize in 2019 just before I graduated - it was the least I could do to honor the ancestral relationship we have long ignored in the West. 

The month is February 2023, and we have just finished running around Richmond Park in the rain, capturing stills of deer, trees and other elements of the stunning outdoors. In fact, the space is ours entirely and the film team manages to get some wonderful close ups. All our hopes and clips for the day are stored in our minds and memory cards with burning anticipation for the film’s release - Family Ties Family Trees, a short narrative film exploring cultural memory, death and nature. My close friend Bethany, who is also of Jamaican heritage, at the time warmly volunteered her voice to speak about her late parents’ relationship to the land and how this has been passed down to us. It was a beautiful remembering, paired with visuals and we screened it that summer. It brought back to us the knowledge that land is shared, ancestral, and always in a process of responding within human bounds. 

Jamaican Independence is a celebration marking Independence from the British in 1962, and it goes without saying, sits outside of the reality of settler colonialism, the original theft of land from the Indigenous Taino community of Jamaica. Also outside of this celebration that starts to unveil itself as sheer Western re-affirmation is the Coral Gardens Massacre of April 1963 that eclipses the joy and so called independence from Western ties, a meagre year before. The land, as history will continue to remind us, is always in between unrelenting insatiable imperial powers and the people. Coral Gardens was part of the Rose Hall estate, a larger property on Jamaica’s north coast near Montego Bay, which was owned by landlords and developers aiming to convert it into more tourist infrastructure. At the time, the Rastafari community were accused by the protectors of the State, the police for lighting fire to a gas station, and in retaliation tortured hundreds of the Rastafari community and forced them to cut off their locs. This act was in a series of events torturing the Rastafari community. At the base of this, is that Rastafari had established small-scale farming settlements on that land, which the state and landowners perceived as an obstacle to their development plans, and therefore as a means to justifying the ends - used large scale and unforgettable violence against them. It took over five decades for any formal recognition of this violence to occur, a reminder of how slow justice can be, especially when land is involved. As of yesterday, decades later the government of Jamaica has transferred lands to members of the Rastafari community, following a 10 million JMD fund set up in 2017 for the survivors. 

We cannot divorce the political nature of land, the violence of the state acting in private interests, the most obvious settler colonialism, or capture land from the relationship many of us have with our homeland of Jamaica today. I hope to come back soon to the idea of land ownership in Jamaica at a later time, amidst the rising policing of land that is at the heart of many disputes, not to mention the lack of free access to many of the beaches many are acutely aware of.

My hope going forward for Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean is that we continue to push against the rise of private interests, the underside of the economy that fuels the West, better known as industries of mining, extraction, and parts of tourism. This 2025 Independence, let us reflect on the nature of freedom - as we heal from centuries that carry legacies of harm into the very lands we seek refuge in. Let us always think rural, think sustainably, think herbal first. Our best asset is the land, when we practice everyday to have a relationship with the environment and our communities, the better our world and future becomes.