Peter Espeut

One thing that works about Jamaica is our culture. It has certainly penetrated the global market. There will be few places in the world where Jamaican culture has not penetrated: reggae music, the dreadlocks hair style, jerk seasoning, to name just a few elements. How did we develop such a winning culture? Is it just co-incidence? And why did such powerful expressions develop here and not elsewhere in the Caribbean, or elsewhere in the world with a similar history and ethnic mix?

Here on this rock Britain and Africa met; their cultures and their genes met and merged; but the same thing happened in Virginia and Antigua and Ghana with different results. Why are we different? We don't know the whole story, but there are theories which might help to explain part of it. Of course, it is an ongoing, evolving story.

One factor is that on this rock Britain and Africa met the Tainos, an Amerindian people of Asian origin who had been resident here for at least 500 years. They are no longer around as a people, but elements of their culture certainly survive to spice our Jamaican way of life: I am talking about callaloo and guavas and tobacco and fishing canoes and the fishpot design we use, and so many other things.

One of the reasons our ethnic mix is unique is because it contains so much more than Africa and Britain. Let us not forget the French (masters and slaves) who brought us quadrille; and India which gave us curried goat and ganja; and China which gave us fried rice and drop pan (and a whole new way of interpreting dreams). A Jamaican Chinese person who now lives abroad told me recently that she prefers the Jamaican Chinese food she grew up with here, to the more 'authentic' Chinese food prepared in China or by more recent immigrants. The truth is that every ethnic group that came here brought something with them; but they saw it slowly change over time as it interacted with the powerful Jamaican culture already here. The process has been called 'creolisation'.

Our situation is complex, for we have no one Jamaican culture: we have creolised African and creolised European and creolised Indian and creolised Chinese cultures, all in a potpourri as Jamaican culture - not blended, but enfolded, so you can taste the different elements.

But the dominant ingredients are Britain and Africa, and the type of mix between them has evolved over the decades. I am impressed by the analysis of the evolution of Jamaican culture by Australian anthropologist Diane Austin-Broos in her 1997 book "Jamaica Genesis". The uninitiated will find it hard to read, but let me share with you some of her analysis, for more than anything else she tells us about the here and now.

Her starting question is, why is it that the Pentecostal Church which arrived in Jamaica in the second decade of the 20th Century, had become within a few years the largest single Christian denomination? Previously the English Baptists had been dominant after their role in the Emancipation process and in the Free Village movement post-Emancipation. Why did Jamaican culture embrace this new religious movement coming from the United States with such alacrity? Such a big shift must be understood if Jamaican culture is to be understood.

But she has to incorporate into her analysis the first dramatic shift. At the time of emancipation, the vast majority of African-Jamaicans were practitioners of (animist) African religion. In the period up to the Great Revival of 1860-1861 - in about the same number of years - almost all the former slaves abandoned animism and adopted (dissenting) Protestant Christianity. Such dramatic changes require explanation for any understanding of the dynamism of Jamaican culture.

I will present her explanation of both phenomena next week, with my own observations.