Last days. As a rule, they tend to be good. I become emotional and everything feels very meaningful. Also, it tends to be sunny, although this is hardly out of the ordinary in Jamaica.
So it was no surprise that my last day in Jamaica was action-packed. Perhaps my piss-poor planning had something to do with the fact that so much stuff got lumped into the final 24 hours (or thereabouts). Perish the thought…
I was leaving Friday afternoon.
Wednesday night was spent the way every single Wednesday night of my time in Jamaica was spent: at the Pegasus hotel in Kingston. I have no reason to believe that any IJCHR intern that has ever existed has spent their Wednesday night in any other way. In a set-up wholly typical of our gregarious boss, interns at the IJCHR were permitted entry to a special weekly one-hour ‘party’ where free booze and delicious snacks were dutifully handed out. It was not an arrangement to be scoffed at and normally provided an ideal kick-start to an evening which consisted of moving upstairs to another bar at the Pegasus and discussing possible plans which, after being doused in a sea of gin, rum and Red Stripe, invariably failed to take off. As this was my penultimate night, there was a traditional sending-off ceremony involving a cake (with personalised icing), Jamaica-themed presents and, most important of all, a certificate to prove that all this had actually happened.
An evening of drinks and merriment was wrapped up late into the night, although I couldn’t take the traditional English approach to things and drink until I couldn’t walk, partly because I knew I had some big stuff to do the next day. I had to deliver a lecture to a group of about 70 new police recruits about what the use of force and human rights. I’d never done anything like this before.
Also, there was my scheduled visit to the Bobo dread rasta camp. Jason, the second of the IJCHR’s permanent staff, had promised to take me several times, and failed each time. This was his last chance.
Jason was both a sounding board and gateway for prospective Jamaican adventures. His response to my casual proposal to go photographing around Tivoli gardens, one of Kingston’s most notorious slums, was typically to the point:
-- Admas dem a KILL you.
We kept coming back to the idea of going to Tivoli Gardens, at least partly, I felt, because Jason so enjoyed the dark humour of this particular piece of forecasting. I also found it very entertaining. I would suggest variations on the adventure that would tease out ever more dramatic predictions of the future or, even better, tangential insights into the Jamaican street. Couldn’t I just hide the camera?
- Admas dem spot you a foreigner.
But… how can they tell?
- Every ting. Way you walk.
Jason then went on to demonstrate how a homegrown Tivoli ‘badman’ might strut and contrasted this with an impression of my walk – which looked really geeky. Did I really walk like that? Everybody in the room laughed loudly, anyway. Much to the amusement of Jason (and anyone who happened to be around) I carried on practising the badman walk and Jason, not a man who gives out compliments easily, was moved to tell me that by the end of my time, my badman walk had gotten ‘better’.
In the interim, I had learnt a fair bit about the different ways people I can tell I’m a foreigner; my walk, certainly (even Jamaicans who had lived abroad and then returned to Jamaica can apparently be spotted immediately…) but also the way I look around (gawping wide-eyed at everything instead of looking coolly ahead as if I’d seen it all before) and of course the way I talk (Excuse me, do you have any Dennis Brown?).
My plan was soon dead in its tracks in any case because, coincidentally, just days after I had the idea (and felt like I was slowly getting Jason down off his high-horse), the US government went and spoiled it all by issuing an extradition request for the don who ran the area, the most influential gangster in Jamaica. Instead, I had to entertain myself by watching the Jamaican government perform the difficult balancing act of dragging out the extradition for as long as humanely possible while not looking like it was taking political hits for the benefit of a gang lord. It would take a book to cover the issue in the detail it deserves, but here are two facts to chew on; a) in Jamaica, gangsters have for decades guaranteed the political loyalty of garrison communities for Jamaican politicians; b) Tivoli gardens is the Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s constituency. Those with sharp ears may notice that even when being interviewed by the BBC, Jamaica’s PM doesn’t go as far as deny a link between politics and criminality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5I8IWCL_Bk
Phew, what a diversion. Where was I? Oh yes, the Bobo dread. I had to go and see them. Every time I mentioned it, Jason grinned with enthusiasm at the prospect of introducing me, Ebte Selassie, as the prophet born again come to emancipate the rasta man dem and normally spent a few minutes doing impressions of some well excited Rastamen.
-- Raaaaaaas claaat, Ebte Selasie!
Unfortunately the trip was quite short because I had to rush back to the office to sort out some stuff for my lecture – pretend gun, pretend baton, stuff to say… The Bobo dread would have been delighted to have me stay overnight or for a few days but instead me and Jason hung out in their reception and had some serious chat about their world. Basically, their whole raison d’etre, as they saw it, was to organise the repatriation of all Bobo rasta to Africa. Asap. That was it. This was the crux of their entire ideology, their other political views and their understanding of history. Everything seemed to either lead to or stem from this central idea. One of the members talked to me and Jason for a good thirty minutes non-stop; the idea seemed to consume him in that half-compulsive, half-disturbing way that political ideas can take over people.
The community had their own little world, shut behind a locked gate.
Everyone was greeted with the title ‘Prophet’ – so I became Prophet Admas. Their world was a pleasant one and their décor and clothing had clearly been infected by the rich spectrum of the Jamaican countryside. Bright reds, yellows, greens and blues unapologetically danced around. On our way up to the camp, we had seen a Rastaman strutting around comfortably dressed in a rainbow-coloured man-dress kind of thing. He walked past again while we were inside listening to the lecture and gave us a warm greeting; “Blessed love, Prophet Admas, blessed love”. It really did feel like a different world.
The head rasta man explained, in painstaking detail, the steps that had been taken by the Jamaican and foreign governments to frustrate the goal of repatriation to (an unspecified) Africa and the burning need to effect the Bobo dread’s goal with the intensity of someone who was haunted by truly sincere political beliefs. I was interested in what his beliefs reflected about him more than the beliefs themselves. Actually, I drifted off, as I often did in Jamaica, into the natural beauty of the country – our setting was incredibly tranquil with lush, verdant hills rolling off in the background, clear blue skies, butterflies innocuously flitting around outside. This all provided a somewhat comical setting for our host’s burning desire to get the hell out of Jamaica. There was a striking absence of national pride in the man’s ideology.
After a quick fire forty minutes or so in the camp, Prophet Admas had to zoom back to the office, collect a gun and baton lovingly made out of cardboard, silver foil and plastic bags by his colleagues and then off to the police recruit training centre to deliver a lecture on the use of force and what ‘oooman rights’ (this denotes a class of organisation as well as a set of principles in Jamaica) have to say about it.
In the event, the lecture went well. I achieved my main goal, which was to try and get a reading on what the new recruits actually thought about human rights. Interestingly, while professing to find it distasteful and incapable of extending its universalism to the welfare of police officers, they did actually agree with all the content I covered. I came away from the session – there had been some fantastically energetic debating – with the feeling that the new recruits were a largely untapped force for good as far as Jamaican society was concerned.
After a long day, I rounded off my last day at work by attending a drinks reception at the British High Commission. With the kind of painful irony that is only possible in environments of the highest seriousness, the reception was being held to celebrate the arrival of a senior police officer on secondment to assist the worryingly trigger-happy Jamaican Constabulary Force; this was none other than Cressida Dick, the police chief who oversaw the Jean Charles de Menezes operation.
Being brought along to such events was one of the many perks of working at the IJCHR. One of the best conversations I heard was between Yvonne Sobers (a remarkable lady who ran an organisation called Families Against State Terrorism that campaigned against police brutality in Jamaica) and the senior judge of the Court of Appeal, Jamaica’s highest court. Pleasingly, despite (or maybe because of) her unremittingly serious day job, Yvonne was a rambunctious chatterbox of a woman, constantly giggling. The judge and her were having the kind of discussion about COMPUTERS that creates inter-generational conversation gulfs that are simply unbridgeable; I was reduced to a nodding smiley face. The senior judge, free of his court outfit and the look of constant exasperation that he wore whenever exercising his duties, had been recast as a slightly bumbling, rather cute old Jamaican man. The conversation started with some basic chat about computer literacy, which naturally enabled the judge to demonstrate just how great his mastery of Microsoft OFFICE and EMAIL were, following which things got more light-hearted:
- But this is the really important question – this shows how in tune you are with computers –
- Yes?
- Are you on FACEBOOK?
Sadly the Commissioner’s wife had, it appears, gone slightly ‘cold’ on the IJCHR intern cohort. Allegations that it had something to do with individual interns’ behaviour at the last party we attended at the Commissioner’s house have yet to be substantiated (but the assumption is yes).
Anyway, that’s it. Stories of Rastitutes, my thespian side, solicitors wearing panties and barristers wearing boxers, entire afternoons spent in the sea bobbing around to Gregory Isaacs and near-addiction to straight rum will have to wait for face-to-face conversations, sometime, somewhere.
Jamaica. What a country.
