Senor Nice (21 page)

The noise of people preparing breakfast and coughing outboard motors mingled with reggae tunes as I walked back into the bar of Morgan’s Harbour Hotel and Beach Club. I drank a jug of freezing fruit juice. Prescot, every bit as well-dressed as the night before, joined me.

‘Sleep well, Niceman?’

‘A bit disturbed. I think the buccaneers must still be around. Has anyone else felt haunted here?’

‘Ah huh. I don’t think there’s anyone who has been here who hasn’t. Now you know why Leroy will never stay the night here. The place is full of duppies. Nothing else can scare that brother. He just called me to say he will be here in an hour or so.’

‘Duppy’ is a Bantu word meaning ghost. Duppies are part of everyday Jamaican life, and their reality is not questioned. Each person has two souls after death; one goes to heaven while the other, the duppy, stays on earth. Spanish colonists
sometimes supposedly hid valuables and money in pottery jars buried under roots of trees. The African slave who dug the hole was killed, and his duppy would stay on guard for eternity. Obeah, the belief that spirits can be used to harm the living by using spells and amulets, accords with the belief in duppies. Henry Morgan regularly consulted obeah practitioners during his dying days.

I ordered a breakfast of ackee and saltfish, finishing it just as Leroy walked up to my table.

‘Sleep good, mon?’

‘Sure. I’m not scared of duppies.’

‘Yo afi be careful round dem duppies, yah. Dem can control yo body and yo mind.’

‘Do they only come out at night?’

‘Dem duppy come out anytime dem feel like. Dem live ina cotton tree and look like man or animal. An dem laugh like witch and talk ina dem nose. Dem only count to three. When duppy ride donkey, dem sidown backway.’

This was too much. I started laughing.

Leroy gave me a look intended to kill. I could sense his blood boiling so changed the subject.

‘So what’s the plan for today, Big Man?’

‘Wi ago dong a Trench Town, den wi a go Nine Mile. Yo afi go pay respect to Bob Marley pilgrimage. Yo shoulda listen Bob Marley album,
Duppy Conqueror
. Dat wi teach yo someting. Learn about Old Hige Annie Palmer, white witch of Rosehall who leave her skin anight and drink baby blood. Learn about Rolling Calf – dat is when a butcher dead, im turn ina Rolling Calf. Dat is de worse duppy yo wan fi deal with. Learn about di Three-Foot Horse, and di Whistling Cowboy. Yo wa fi talk an laugh about more duppy. Den wi ago look fi where Henry Morgan im live. A di same part a di island. Wi no af a whole heap of time if yo ago leave Jamaica tomorrow.’

‘How the hell do you know I am leaving tomorrow?’ I had told no one of my travel plans.

‘Mi know wen yo come and go. A fi mi town dis. Mi know everyting wa go on in a dis country. Mi friend dem always keep mi up to date. Mi af connection everywhere, mon, in a di police, an custom, an Air Jamaica, you name it. Mi hav it. If mi no know it, mi know a man who can.’

‘Cool.’

Leroy deliberately placed the car’s no smoking sign in a more prominent position and sporadically polished the dashboard as we drove on the Palasidoes back towards Michael Manley International Airport and Kingston.

‘Look de si di smoke over deso, mon?’

On the right-hand side, between us and the sea, police were watching and feeding a bonfire. White smoke rose into the sky.

‘A deso dem bun di weed that dem tek from people.’

‘They burn all of it?’

‘Shit! No.’ Leroy laughed.

We were soon in the centre of Kingston, then in Trench Town, so named because of a large sewer trench from Old Kingston running through it to the sea.

‘Dis where everyting start, from di ghetto. Now reggae music cover di world from man like Bob Marley, Toots Hibbert, Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Ken Booth, Leroy Sibbles, the Heptones and Jimmy Cliff.’

We passed the Queen’s Theatre where Bob Marley – known locally as Tuff Gong – and the Wailers first played. The streets smelled of piss. People were living in shipping crates, fish barrels, oil drums and on the ground. Pit latrines provided less than basic sanitation, and collective yard kitchens produced the food. There was little evidence of plumbing or electricity, and the area reeked of overpopulation, disease, malnutrition and infant mortality. Bob Marley and Elvis Presley might share many qualities, but this place could never become Graceland. Just minutes away by car lay tropical paradises, beaches and cliffs, waterfalls spouting out of hills, clear streams and organic free food on trees everywhere. It made no sense.

Three miles from Trench Town at 55 Hope Road is the Bob Marley Museum, a wooden plantation house bought by Chris Blackwell – who was once saved by a Rasta from a near-fatal boating accident – as a home for Bob Marley. Tour buses crammed the recently paved parking lot. Leroy stayed in the car while I went for the guided tour. Marijuana plants grew in the herb garden; a rehearsal room sported holes from bullets meant for Bob.

Despite being feared by the government for his influence and militance, and his promotion of black pride, Bob Marley has become part of the collective consciousness of the nation. Of mixed parentage, he was acceptable to both races and could speak about exploitation from the moral high ground. His life was short and bright.

We left Kingston and drove west on the Sir Alexander Bustamente Highway through Spanish Town to May Pen, where Leroy stopped at a coconut stall.

‘Cold jelly, mon.’

Cold jelly is chilled coconut. The stallholder trimmed two coconut shells with a machete, deftly opening a hole at the top of each. The milk was instantly refreshing and tasted healthy. When we had finished drinking, the coconut man hacked out a scoop from each shell and broke the nuts in two. We used the scoops to dig out the soft coconut flesh.

At May Pen we headed inland through Morgans, Morgans Pass and Arthur’s Seat.

‘Leroy, this is one of the places where Henry Morgan must have lived. Can we get out and have a look round?’

‘Noting no de, yah, mon. Believe mi, mi check everyting and knock pon every door ask a whole heap of questions just two day ago.’

A quick drive around confirmed Leroy’s description. We carried on inland to the Bob Marley Mausoleum, a tasteful extension of Marley’s birthplace, at Nine Mile, where I dutifully paid my respects while Leroy again stayed in the car
park. When I returned, he had been joined on a bench by a Rasta whom he obviously knew. I smiled at the Rasta. He smiled at me, took two joints from his pocket and gave me one.

‘Peace, Niceman. Mi name Mo.’

Mo and I simultaneously lit our joints and took slow deliberate lungfuls of ganja. I could tell that Mo, like me, was marvelling at a herb that could make you feel so good about yourself and others with just one breath. We held the precious breath inside us. Mo breathed out, sighing ‘Jah’ with reverence. I did the same. We both felt the warmth and fullness of our open hearts and surrendered control.

Reggae, ganja and Rastafarianism are tightly interwoven in today’s Jamaica, but their beginnings were independent. Back in around 1,000 BC wise King Solomon lived with 700 wives and made love to a further 400 queens and 600 concubines. His sexual skills and spiritual strength attracted beautiful women from all over the Middle East and Africa, including Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, who bore Solomon his favourite son, Menelik. For many years father and son lived in Jerusalem, where Solomon built the First Temple to house the Ark of the Covenant, the holy of holies which has inspired so many religious poets and Hollywood film directors. Almost all accounts agree the Ark contained the original stone tablets of the Ten Commandments as given by God to Moses as well as some manna from heaven. It is believed to be the resting-place of the spirit of God and to exist simultaneously both in heaven and on earth.

Believing his father was promiscuous and misusing his sexual energy, Menelik stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple of Jerusalem and took it to the ancient Ethiopian city of Aksum, 400 miles north of today’s Addis Ababa. The Ark, it is claimed, now rests inside the city’s Church of St Mary Our Lady of Zion, which was built on the site of Ethiopia’s oldest Christian church. Near Aksum in the Ethiopian highlands
there was a community of African Jews called Falashas who claim descent from Solomon and adhere to a form of primitive Judaism based on the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, written by Moses. Now all living in Israel, they observe the sabbath, practise circumcision, worship in synagogues and abide by Jewish dietary laws.

Born in Jamaica in 1887, Marcus Mosiah Garvey envisaged a free Negro race and believed that the descendants of slaves should return to Africa to set up their own nation state. Organising strikes and riots in Kingston, he quickly gained a reputation for his powerful oratory. Rural black Jamaicans did not adapt well to working in urban environments and learned to survive by street scams picked up from the hoodlums and freed prisoners who continued to arrive in Trench Town and other West Kingston ghettos. Gradually the area turned into a battlefield for the often corrupt politicians raging against the injustices of the establishment. Garvey had prophesied that a black king, crowned in Africa, would rise to lead all Africans, wherever they might be, out of bondage, and in 1930 Emperor Haile Selassie I, known as Ras Tafari – the feared prince – was elected the 225th monarch of Ethiopia. Garvey saw Ethiopia, the oldest monarchy in the world, as a symbol of freedom, sovereignty and African spirituality, and kick-started Rastafarianism, the spiritual nationality of Jamaica and the island’s most compelling cultural force.

Jamaicans now had an ideology that recognised their ancestry and respected the dignity of Africa. Many acclaimed Haile Selassie as the living God and saw Marcus Mosiah Garvey, whose middle name was a combination of Moses and Messiah, as a prophet and the forerunner of Haile Selassie, as John the Baptist had been to Jesus. They identified with the Jews, who had spent generations in captivity and slavery and who had been forcibly scattered throughout the world. Jamaicans were the lost tribes of Israel who had been sold into slavery in Babylon, which is not a place but the sum of all the
institutions and thinking that keep people economically, politically, mentally and spiritually enslaved.

The pioneer of Rastafarianism in Jamaica was Leonard Percival Howell. Despite his surname and having a son named Cardiff, I could find no other Welsh connection. In 1940 Howell and Joseph Hibbert, ardent believers in the divinity of Haile Selassie, set up Pinnacle, the first Rasta commune. African music was played continually to the 4,000 formerly homeless members, who lived on the productive land in thatched huts. Howell based his sermons to the early Rastas on the Old Testament, particularly Psalms and Proverbs, teaching that if God was any colour, he was black, and that the first human beings were Ethiopians. In defiance of materialistic values and vanity, the Rastas wore torn clothes and began wearing dreadlocks, which, following the biblical precept ‘for no razor shall touch the heads of the righteous’, are washed but not combed, brushed or cut. Dreadlocks remind them of God and connect them more directly with him. Wearing matted or twisted locks of hair is widespread in Africa. The Masai of Kenya and groups in Somalia, Ghana, Senegal, Gambia and of course Ethiopia, have all worn them.

The Rastas eschewed meat and shellfish for ‘I-tal’ food – grains, fruit, roots and vegetables – and shunned alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, caffeine, sugar, processed foods and the use of pesticides or fertilisers. Many believed themselves to be the true Jews and began wearing the Star of David. They also expropriated the colours of the Ethiopian flag: red symbolising blood spilled; gold, hope for victory; and green, the fertile land. The Rastas beat their drums, sang about love and freedom, and quoted from the Bible. Although each family was responsible for itself, a programme of unpaid communal work ensured social benefits to the community. Strictly apolitical, they refused to pay taxes to the government. Pinnacle survived several brutal British raids during which the authorities locked up the Rastas, and cut off their dreads. It
was finally destroyed in the late 1950s. The Rastas, with nowhere else to go, fled to West Kingston, where they found their soulmates in the Burru people, who shared the same passion for drumming and Africa.

Neither Haile Selassie nor any members of the Falashas nor the Ethiopian Christians smoked ganja. Marcus Garvey described it as a harmful weed and regarded Rastafarians, particularly Leonard Percival Howell, as crazy fanatics. Stemming from a multiplicity of beliefs, Rastafarianism is fraught with troubling paradoxes. Not all Rastas have dreads or are vegetarians or read the Bible or are faithful to their women or approve of reggae. Rastafarianism has no churches and is not legally recognised as a religion in Jamaica. It is a state of mind and soul arrived at through spiritual growth and awareness of inner divinity. A devout Christian, Garvey never believed in the divinity of Haile Selassie – neither had Haile Selassie – and in later life became critical of him. In 1935, Mussolini’s Italy invaded Ethiopia, occupying it for five years while Haile Selassie endured comfortable exile in England. In Garvey’s opinion Haile Selassie had betrayed his people to fascists and opted for a life of personal luxury. His dream was shattered and he died a sad man. But all this had little or no effect on Jamaica’s growing numbers of Rastafarian devotees, who continued to revere Haile Selassie as the living God and to smoke ganja in his honour. When Haile Selassie first visited Jamaica in 1966 at the invitation of Mortimo Planno – later Bob Marley’s manager – his aeroplane was greeted by over 100 Rastafarians, some wearing white robes and chanting, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David.’ They threw large spliffs at the emperor’s feet. Haile Selassie was so astonished, he had to retreat to his plane for a while to recover.

The blame or, rather, credit for Rastafarian ganja can safely be given to Howell, one of the finest growers of marijuana the world has known. For over a decade, Pinnacle’s cash crop had been ganja, the Indian word for marijuana. After the British
abolition of slavery in 1834, the plantation owners had no one to work the fields, and ships from India brought workers to British Guyana, Trinidad and Jamaica. They were regular users of marijuana and introduced the plant to Jamaica, where it became popular among fishermen and farmers. There was no connection with Ethiopia.