Peter Espeut I AM Kingston-born and bred (as were my parents and grandparents) and like most brown middle-class Kingstonians, I grew up thinking that Kingston was Jamaica. My parents often took us as children into the countryside, and as we drove through during the 1950s and 60s, we saw the ragged clothes and the wattle and daub huts, the misery and the idleness, and the ever-present train of children carrying wood and water on their heads. And in Kingston, so many of the people I met were born in country, who fled to Kingston and St. Andrew for a better life. Could I be blamed for growing up thinking that nothing good could come out of Nazareth?
And then the many jokes that town people make at the expense of country people, portraying them as lazy, baff-han bumpkins. Country come to town reinforced by Jamaican town-based comedians. Country was portrayed as a dark unhappy place, full of obeah and strange practices and superstitions. And that was where rolling calf and headless horseman and other kinds of duppies were supposed to abound.
THE BEAUTIFUL SIDE OF COUNTRY
But the folk songs and the Anancy stories I loved came from the country. And the countryside was so beautiful. It couldn't be as bad as some people made out. It all changed for me in the summer of 1968, when I spent two weeks at a church camp in the hills of Portland. There I encountered rural folk as real people, ate country food, bathed every day in the river, used a pit latrine, did without electricity, carried wood and water and entered into the lives and struggles of persons of the same nationality and faith as myself. I soon realised that levels of education were low because they were offered substandard education in substandard schools. I learned that they were poor because the Jamaican economy was so designed that their role was to provide dirt-cheap labour in low-status occupations. I saw how they were manipulated by politicians to believe that they should be grateful for a few chains of road work and the opportunity to break a heap or two of stones. These were hard-working peasant people.
FAR FROM LAZY
Later in life, I lived there for over a year assisting with community development. Often, I joined them in their fields in the mountains as they cleared land and planted and reaped red peas, bananas, coffee and a legion of other crops. Far from being lazy, the back-breaking work began sometimes before dawn and lasted until the late afternoon. And I took part in morning sport as dozens of men and women worked together to prepare a peas-ground or a yam-field accompanied by digging songs in glorious harmony, assisted by white rum. They worked hard and they prayed hard. I learned love and trust in God from these people who had so little but gave away so much. And they played hard.
For most of the 1970s and 80s, in a mountain hut, we celebrated 'Fus' a Augus' with many a Quadrille dance on a hard-packed dirt floor to the strains of guitar, banjo, drum, bass and peckeloo. The piccolo player was gifted, as were the others, and the bassman achieved his purpose grunting into a five-foot-long piece of two-inch PVC pipe. And the zella and nine-night which followed the death of friends were unforgettable experiences of song and dance. I sat at the feet of many a bush-lawyer, and learnt folk wisdom full of parables and double-entendre.
POOR PEOPLE WITH MONEY
At an early age, I learned that schooling and education, university degrees and intelligence, are not synonymous. I will never forget the tears shed by aged, intelligent hill farmers as they reflected on how their lives might have been different had they been born elsewhere. An important lesson for a young man born in privilege to learn is that rich people are only poor people with money, and there really is no difference between classes and races, except those created by bigoted men. Kingston certainly is not Jamaica; there is an authentic Jamaican experience which is wholly rural exciting and dynamic. But since political and economic power resides in Kingston, most of the development takes place in urban areas, forcing ambitious rural people to migrate to the towns and sometimes to foreign.
What has been done can be undone. I decided to make rural development my field of study and wrote my Master's thesis after living in the John Crow Mountains in Kumina Country. My work is to assist rural development among fishers and charcoal-burners in southern Clarendon and St. Catherine. I am still closely involved with my spiritual birthplace in Portland. I chair the school board of the local primary and junior high school (which had three Common Entrance passes in the previous 20 years) and visit at least twice each term for board meetings. And there are the funerals. My wife Velia and I spent last weekend in the community at the nine-night and funeral of an 89-year-old friend of ours, a stalwart of the community. Our rural culture and landscape are changing. There was no zella, and the nine-night was almost unrecognisable; surprisingly it was dominated by dozens of young men who played the music (keyboards, electric bass and trap set) and led the singing (of choruses rather than Sankey). Hundreds of people turned out for the dominoes and singing and food was served at about 3:00 a.m. (If you serve it earlier, people will go home, we were told); we left at 5:00 a.m.
Although Miss Maud is now gone, Miss Maudy and Mawgah Maud are still around, as is 93-year-old Miss Lucille and so many others. Despite the poverty, they are long-lived people. The use of agricultural chemicals has changed the quality of the river water, and the river mullet are no more. Red peas is no longer a main crop (cheap imports have killed that); large coffee farms now provide employment and small farming is giving way to wage work. But there is electricity and running water (even though people still bathe and wash in the river), and everyone has a cell phone with them in the bush. There has been some progress, but has there been development?
Peter Espeut is a rural sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
