Jamaica
(JamaicaRN1.2)
James D. Fearon
David D. Laitin
Stanford University
This is one of a set of “random narratives” to complement our statistical findings in
regard to civil war onsets. This is a draft completed on July 7, 2006; comments welcome.
Our model shows that Jamaica had a two-year period, just after
independence was granted, where it was nearly twice as susceptible to a civil
war as the average for all country years and nearly three times as susceptible
as the regional average. After that short period of being a new state,
Jamaica’s probability for a civil war was negligible, far below the world and
regional average. Over the course of its independent existence, Jamaica did
not have a civil war onset, an outcome by-and-large correctly predicted in
our model.
This narrative will first give an historical background to violence and
politics in Jamaica, showing that arguments pointing to repertoires of
contention would fail in this case. Second, it will address the issue of the
transition to independence, when our model gives Jamaica a relatively high
chance for a civil war onset.
Finally, the narrative will survey the years 1964-1999 to address a
disjuncture between our model and standard historiographical accounts of
Jamaica. From our model’s point of view, civil war was out-of-the-question
due to Jamaica’s political stability, full democracy, lack of oil, insufficient
mountainous terrain to matter for insurgency, relatively high GDP per
capita, and small population size. Yet, from the involved actor’s point of
view, the country was often on the brink of generalized violence. The
narrative weaves between these two perspectives. What is noteworthy is the
high levels of political violence (as Jamaican historiography addresses)
combined with the social reality that this violence would not escalate into an
anti-regime insurgency (a factor that our research addresses). Of the
variables in our model that we think are doing the “work” in holding back
escalation, we focus on Jamaica’s small size and stable democracy (two
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 2
variables that went into the model directly) as sources of peace. But foreign
aid was a key to state strength – and although this aid wasn’t recorded in our
data, it helped increase state strength, a factor we say is crucial for staving
off civil war. We will also raise the issue of political strategy to stave off
rebellion, a factor raised by one analyst that is not part of our model, but
seems of some consequence in this case.
I. A Violent Preindependence History
The systematic examination of non civil war states such as Jamaica
provides a continual challenge to those who claim that a country’s historical
path yields fundamental insights into contemporary affairs. Heuman’s
opening sentence in his study on the tradition of protest is Jamaica (1993,
151) reads: “Jamaica has a long history of resistance…” In the words of
Werner Zips (1999, 41) “Jamaica holds a unique record in the collective
slave revolts within the context of Caribbean history.” And the Library of
Congress country study speaks of a tradition going back to the 17th century
that symbolizes “the fervent, sometimes belligerent, love of freedom that is
ingrained in the Jamaican people as a result of both their British tutelage and
their history of slavery (Library of Congress, chap. 2).
Jamaica’s preindependence past carries with it a history of two
rebellious groups, the Maroons and the slaves. The Maroons were runaway
slaves, many from the period of Spanish occupation, who resisted British
attempts to re-enslave them after the forces sent by Oliver Cromwell in 1655
allowed for a renewed colonization of the island. Resisting foreign rule, the
Maroons perfected a system of ambush and hit-and-run attacks on British
military forces. In what has been called first Maroon War that started in
1720, guerrilla tactics such as relying on friends, former shipmates, and
relatives still living on plantations for information (especially of troop
movements and transmitted through talking drums), the British conventional
tactics were unable decisively to put this rebellion down. After eighteen
years of frustration, Gov. Edward Trelawney in 1738 commissioned Col.
John Guthrie either to destroy Maroon leader Kojo’s main settlement or to
seek peace. Guthrie chose the latter. In the treaty with the Leeward Maroons
(a similar treaty was subsequently signed by the Windward Maroons),
separatists were granted the right to plant 1,500 acres of coffee, cocoa,
ginger, tobacco and cotton, to breed livestock, to sell their goods in the
marketplace, to hunt wherever they pleased, and to self-police. In return, the
insurgents agreed to serve in the army of the colony against slave uprisings,
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 3
to capture all future runaways for a premium, to allow road access to the
British without fear of ambush, to grant two white “diplomats” rights of
residence, and to recognize the right of the governor to nominate future
Maroon commanders.
The Second Maroon War of 1795-96 was ignited when a new
Governor broke the spirit of the earlier treaty, and humiliated some Maroons
by having them flogged by a slave for their law-breaking activities. A
conciliation team of Maroons to the Governor was tricked; they were
arrested and chained. The Maroons responded by burning their village and
retreating into the forests. But since only a single village was fighting (one
that traced itself back to Kojo, and was called Trelawney, in honor of the
Governor-General who signed the treaty), while other Maroon villages
remained neutral, and one village, Accompong (the village founded by
Kojo’s brother, Accompong), joined with the British, the rebels surrendered
with the British offering the rebels a peace treaty that was less generous than
what was received after the First Maroon War. Again the rebels were
tricked. The Governor, while amid negotiations with the rebels, had them all
deported to Halifax, and the Governor then deported them to Freetown,
Sierra Leone, where they rose in the local hierarchy. Thus the Maroons had a
long tradition of rebellion and betrayal by the British.
Slave rebellions complemented those led by the Maroons (Heuman
1993 152-4). The first slave rebellion was in 1673 by 300 slaves in the
parish of St. Ann. They murdered their master and fled, and formed the basis
of a new Maroon community. As far back as 1690, more than 500 slaves in
Clarendon rebelled, and many of them joined the Maroons. In the 19th
century, rebellions were “endemic”, occurring on average once every five
years. In 1760 Tacky’s Rebellion erupted when the British were diverted in
the 7-years war. This rebellion lasted 6 months, killed 60 whites and over
1,000 slaves. In 1831 (seven years before emancipation) the most serious
slave rebellion in Jamaica’s history began, and was called the Christmas
Rebellion or the “Baptist War”. Later on in the 19th century, however, with
the end of sugar duties for non-British colonies in UK, planters sought to
depress wages, making the workers fear again a reintroduction of slavery.
There were also grievances on the estates about the tax rates and toll-gates,
and these factors were used in justifying the low-level insurrections in
several communities in the 1850s. There was then an economic turndown,
with scarce food; but the even bigger story was the pressure from the AntiSlavery Society in Britain, and the attempt by the Crown to restrict practices
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 4
in the West Indies. White owners talked openly about revolution. By hearing
the whites complain, the slaves surmised that they would not face military
resistance if they rebelled, and these factors led up to the Morant Bay
rebellion.
The Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 was a short challenge to British
authority that was brutally suppressed. The story behind this rebellion goes
back to 1862, when George William Gordon, a wealthy businessman and a
Member of the House of Assembly (but someone who identified with the
poor), left the official Presbyterian and joined the Native Baptist Church. He
wrote to Gov. Eyre (and petitioned the Queen) protesting conditions of the
blacks in his parish. He was summarily dismissed as Magistrate of St.
Thomas. He linked with Paul Bogle, a Minister in his new church, who led a
march of 200 into Morant Bay to protest, and when the police tried to arrest
him, the peasant marchers attacked the officers. Bogle then sent his men to
attack the vestry of Morant Bay in which 18 were killed, and 51 prisoners
were freed. The crowd then rioted, burning the courthouse and killing
fourteen vestrymen, one of whom was black. Rumors of re-enslavement, and
that Jamaica would be joining the US as a slave state, exacerbated the
problem. Rumors abounded as well that the Queen would be on the side of
the rebels against the white/brown upper classes. The state declared martial
law, attacked St. Thomas (and the adjoining parish of Portland), and the
militia killed 1,000. Gordon (who was seen as an accomplice) and Bogle
were both hanged. Failing to obey an order to disperse, the demonstrators
were fired on by the militia, and seven protesters were killed. In all during
this rebellion, 439 people were killed, 1,000 houses burned, and 600 people
were flogged. The slaves as well as the Maroons had a complete repertoire
of rebellion, a factor often forgotten in explanations for peace (Wilson 1980,
139-41).
II. No Civil War at Moment of Independence
We have proposed a commitment mechanism that explains the
vulnerability of new states to rebellions by minorities. If there is no group
that was especially privileged under the ancient regime or especially
threatened by the consequences of majority rule for an independent state,
then it would be quite difficult to activate this mechanism. A reading of
West Indian historiography suggests that there was such a group, viz., the
Maroons. In fact, their peace treaty with British set them into structural
conflict with the slave population. In return for peace, the British received
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 5
from the Maroons a commitment to return all future escaped slaves and to
help support the colonial order. As Zips points out, “The peace treaties
…turn[ed] the tables. Slaves had fought on the side of the colonial militia for
payment; now Maroons could themselves serve as mercenaries against
slaves who sought freedom.” As mercenaries, the Maroons participated in
crushing subsequent slave revolts, and became defenders of the status quo.
In Jamaica’s largest slave revolt in 1832, with 20,000 slaves mobilized, the
mercenary service of the Maroons turned the scales. Again, the Maroons
were crucial in defeating the peasant revolt of 1865 that followed from the
Morant Bay incidents.1 In 1842, understanding the problem of unequal
rights, the colonial ruler tried to invalidate the special status of the Maroons,
to make them subject to the same laws as the Jamaicans, but this failed. As
the commitment logic would expect, the Maroons had disdain for the
Jamaican nationalists in 1962, and wanted to have special dealings with the
Queen rather than the Prime Minister, who was subordinate legally to the
Queen in the Commonwealth (Zips, 113ff; 120).
An independent Jamaica was indeed a threat to the Maroons, who
insisted on their inherited rights of sovereignty and tax exemptions. Their
long-ago economic advantage (in getting rents from capturing slaves) gone,
and suffering from poor roads to market for their agricultural goods, the
Maroons in the 20th century were in economic decline. In response to new
opportunities, the Maroon communities went into ganja production, and this
would put them in direct conflict with a central government that sought
international legitimacy. They were right in their fears. In 1988 local
residents to protect their sector shot a policeman who had confiscated ganja
from a Maroon house in Accompong. In response to incidents of this sort
and international pressures, the state began to use airplanes and helicopters
to poison the ganja plants, forcing many young Maroons into emigration as
the last chance for economic survival. If the Maroons had acted decisively
and early, they might have won long term autonomy from control by
Kingston.
Compare Jamaica to the similar situation in Suriname. In Suriname, in
July 1986 (to be sure eleven years after independence), a Bush Negro (the
local term for a Maroon) insurgency began, led by former soldier Ronnie
Brunswijk. The insurgency went after inland economic targets at first. The
1
. This conflict is reflected in 20th century popular culture. In Bongo Man of Jimmy Cliff, there is a
Rastafarian woman who accuses the Maroons of treachery to those on the plantations.
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 6
army quickly responded by ravaging villages and killing Brunswijk’s cadres.
Bush Negroes by the thousands found refuge in French Guiana. The
Surinamese Government in 1989 decided to scale down the conflict, and
negotiated a treaty, the Kourou Accord, with Brunswijk.2 But there was no
such rebellion in Jamaica.
To be sure, our model provides a probability of only .034 of a civil
war onset in each of the first two years of independence, so there is no need
to account for its failure. Yet this was Jamaica’s highest point of risk and we
have identified those who might have exploited it. They did not do so. A
partial answer to this “failure” will be provided in the next section, in the
discussion of the role of the UK in the transition and the political strategy of
the ruling elites.
III. Thirty-five years of Peace with No State Breakdown
From 1964 to 1999, our model predicts a probability of civil war onset
in Jamaica that is indistinguishable from zero. And there was no onset.
Lack of a civil war onset does not imply that Jamaica has been a
peaceful paradise. In fact, violence has been endemic all through this period
in Jamaica’s history. A decade of this violence is astutely analyzed by Lacy
(1977). The book goes beyond official statistics, analyzing 1,935 violent
incidents resulting in 1,960 casualties (746 killed and 1,214 wounded) that
were compiled for the leading Jamaican newspaper, the Daily Gleaner. The
data show an increase in violence during the 1960s that challenged the
capabilities of the security police charged with maintaining order. The
sources of most of the violence were in the lumpenproletariat, a class that
comprises about 150,000 Kingstonians living mostly in the western districts,
and constitutes youth gangs, political gangs, and (the quasi-religious order
that worships the once Ethiopian emperor) the Rastafarians. In the violent
confrontations in the streets, the officials from the two competing parties
(the PNP and JLP) initially armed these groups. Others developed into local
terrorist groups, fighting against the entire political system.
A series of “sparks” that might have – given other conditions – set off
a civil war were lit from the eve of independence. The first was in 1958 at a
2
. Background Note: Suriname, U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/1893.htm
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 7
convention in Back-O-Wall (in western Kingston). Three hundred Rastas
hoisted flags in Victoria Park and declared that they had captured Kingston.
They were forcibly evicted by the police. Then came the Henry rebellion of
1959-50, led by Reverend Claudius Henry of the African Reform Church (a
Rastafarian group). This religious group was linked with the First Africa
Corps, a militant group from New York that got its weapons from bank
robberies that were masterminded by a black policeman. The First Africa
Corps and the ARC-militants joined forces in a guerrilla training camp in the
Red Hills of Jamaica. Overcoming a preemptive police raid in which
Claudius was arrested (based on intelligence from New York handed over to
British authorities), Claudius’s son took over the movement. His armed
group had one violent confrontation with the police, in which two British
soldiers were killed.
After independence in 1963, a gang of six Rastafarians attacked a
petrol station in Coral Gardens, and then attacked the police that pursued
them. Eight people were killed. This was reported in local media as a
Rastafarian uprising, and thus it had big political significance.
Political warfare became endemic in 1966-67 with political violence
escalating between gangs supporting PNP vs. those supported by JLP. (To
raise the tension level, associated trade unions stood behind their own
parties, and on their behalf, supported a wave of strikes). In the run-up to the
1967 elections, violence escalated to the point of a State of Emergency. In
August 1966 the newspaper of record (The Gleaner) reported that PNP men
were unpacking revolvers. Ed Seaga, an MP from the JLP, responded in a
radio broadcast saying that this should be dealt with “with a surgeon’s
knife”. A series of local shootings in west Kingston neighborhoods followed
(by mid-September, there were thirty-nine separate cases, with four dying of
gunshot wounds), and in September both JLP and PNP headquarters were
attacked. In October, Rudolph Lewis, the lead JLP gunman was shot dead.
His alleged attacker was murdered two days later, and on that day there was
a bomb attack inside a theatre, and this escalated into other incidents injuring
twenty that night elsewhere in west Kingston. At that point, the JLP
government declared a state of emergency in Western Kingston, with a
curfew, and the army given right to special search and arrest. Police
investigations found arms caches in the headquarters of both parties. The
state of emergency was lifted in early November, and a series of killings to
settle scores followed, leading up to shots being fired into the motorcade of
Norman Manley on February 13, 1967, a week before the election. The gang
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 8
brawls turned against the security forces of the state in anticipation of the
election. After the election, the political violence diminished, but was
replaced by general criminal violence, not directed against the other party,
but against new targets.
In 1968 the “Rodney riots” or “October Revolution” undermined the
tenuous military stalemate. These riots were incited by the government’s
denial of entry to Jamaica of Walter Rodney, a radical lecturer who had a
position in the UWI. He was without cause sent “back” to his Guyana
homeland. The ensuing violence was the first post-independence political
violence that was not associated with one of the two competing parties. The
incidents began as student protests, but this was picked up by urban
lumpenproletariat in Kingston, whose riots caused immense property
damage, and involved much looting. These demonstrations showed the deep
antagonism against the government held within the urban ghettoes. But this
movement had no legs as the alliance of privileged students and street gangs
was short-lived.
Electoral violence continued. As summarized in the Library of
Congress study (chap. 2), “almost every general or municipal election since
independence has been preceded and followed by gang warfare, street
outbreaks, and occasional assassinations.” And the numbers of killed kept
rising. The election that brought PNP to power in 1972 was relatively
peaceful, but the run-up to the 1976 general election (with Prime Minister
Manley employing some of the same tactics of rewarding partisans and
blocking political enemies from public goods) set the scene for Jamaica’s
second State of Emergency. The by-elections in 1975 were already violent,
presaging a return to major violence in 1976 general elections. In the Wilton
Gardens section of southwest St. Andrew, an anti-JLP organization called
South-west St. Andrew Citizens Association was formed with a socialist
orientation and reported that the JLP was training youth for guerrilla
warfare. In March 1975 Winston Blake, a shock-trooper for the PNP, was
assassinated; the funeral procession passed the JLP stronghold of Tivoli
Gardens, and when it passed, a gun battle raged, wounding eight. In early
January, 1976, when the new voter enumeration lists were made public, and
in the presence of an IMF Conference with many reporters in town, political
gangs began assassinations, and by January 6, bombs were set off, and men
with rifles set off fires. Meanwhile, PNP supporters were attacking the US
Embassy (as there were rumors that the CIA was supporting Seaga, against
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 9
Manley’s alleged pro-Cuba policies). Several people were shot, one fatally,
and two police were murdered in the general gang violence.
Shortly thereafter, PNP’s office in St. Mary was destroyed by arson,
and this led Manley to form a party defense group (much to the worry of the
government Security Forces) that could secure some 2,000 PNP sites and
fifty-three constituency headquarters. The JLP saw this as an upgrading of
the “Garrison Gang” of intimidators, and the Jamaica Manufacturer’s
Association called this the “institutionalization of private armies” in
Jamaica. And violence continued through February, including attacks on the
police. Party headquarters again became hosts for arms cashes.
Between January 1 and June 19, 1976, 151 citizens and 19 police
officers were killed in violent conflict. Manley intimated that this was CIA
inspired. Wilson surmises that in this period the JPL, with or without CIA
help, indeed sought to “disrupt the social order”. He cites the case of Herb
Rose, once a PNP member and then a JLP organizer, who at this time
resigned from the party accusing it of seeking the violent accession to
power. In these conditions, Manley declared a State of Emergency. With this
decree, JLP executive members were detained, and this dampened the JLP
electoral effort. The JLP further alleged that on election day, December 15,
1976, thousands of JPL supporters were apprehended, and vehicles carrying
JPL officials were seized for the day. Violence persisted despite the State of
Emergency, up to the election, and a near assassination of Bob Marley at a
government-promoted reggae concert added to the violent mix (Wilson
1980, 300-337). And without a State of Emergency in the run-up to the next
general election of 1980, some 800 people were killed (Gray 2003, 77).
Violence was set off not only by elections but by economic conditions
as well. Roadblocks and bonfires were set up during protests over a twenty
percent jump in fuel prices in 1985 in which four demonstrators died in
confrontation with the police at roadblocks; a fifth was killed in a farm
thirty-five miles west of the capital (Treaster, 1985, A8).
And the violence goes beyond gangs reacting to economic hardships
or serving the needs of those involved in electoral competition. As explained
in the Library of Congress volume (1987, chap. 2), “there had been
occasional subversive incidents on the island in the 1980s and several armed
groups had been linked to such activities. The Seaga government tied several
subversive and criminal activities in Jamaica to Cuban-trained extremists. In
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 10
a speech to Parliament in 1984, for example, Winston Spaulding, then
minister of national security and justice, blamed the violence against
policemen on the Hot Steppers Gang. The minister described gang members
as ‘specially trained and highly motivated persons who constitute a special
threat to Jamaica's security,’ and he linked the group to drug trafficking and
Cuba, which, he alleged, provided guerrilla training for gang members.”
The standard explanation for the near epidemic in violence is popular
frustration. As Gray (2003, 73) practically assumes, the crisis of violence in
Jamaica is due to “the failure of economic policies, near-weekly accounts of
human rights abuses, and recurrent disclosures of the corruption of power,
the political bosses have retained their predominance, and the political
apparatus that supports them has remained largely unchanged…” Or in the
words of the Library of Congress (1987, chap. 2) study, “The nation's
political violence derives from the socioeconomic structure of Jamaican
politics, that is, social stratification along racial and economic class lines.
Increasing political, social, and economic polarization in Jamaica has
contributed to both political and criminal violence.”3
And economic grievances, when quantified, suggest great frustration.
Inequality is a sad fact of Jamaican life. In 1960 61 percent of the national
income went to the top 20 percent of the population, and the balance
worsened in the period after independence. Similarly with land, as 64
percent of the land was owned by 10 percent of the population as of 1961.
Income was higher and public services (especially health care) far better in
the urban areas than in rural Jamaica. These inequalities widened as a result
of the neo-conservative economic policies adopted in the 1980s (Library of
Congress, chap. 2, “Equality”).
More specific charges have been leveled. First is the fact of “blocked
migration”. In 1962 the British passed the Commonwealth Immigration Act
that made it extremely difficult for Jamaican workers to migrate there.
Changes in the American immigration law in 1965 provided Jamaican
workers with an alternative escape hatch. However, this migration to the US
was more of a brain drain of skilled labour, but not an opportunity for the
working class migrants that UK had taken. Because of these restrictions on
the movement of labor, by the mid 1960s, the Jamaican unemployed could
3
. In a fine book on violence in Jamaica, Lacey (1977) assumes a grievance story in the structure of the
book. Part 1 is called “The causes of frustration”; Part 2 is called “The manifestations of frustration”; and
Part 3 is called “The containment of frustration.”
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 11
not be accommodated by openings abroad. As emigration fell, the
percentage of youth in the population increased, and the percentage living in
Kingston, largely youth that had in past generations emigrated, increased
similarly. Another way to look at this is from 1957 to 1960, the potential
labor force fell from 650,000 to 607,000, but then went to 750,000 in 1968
and 822,000 by 1972. This computes to an annual figure of 40,000 school
leavers attempting to join the labor force in the 1960s. Unemployment was
about 12.7% in 1960 and 30-31% in 1969 (Lacy, 1977, chap. 1; Wilson
1980, 2-5).
These unemployed youths unable to find jobs in Jamaica and
restricted from international migration, became a form of a lumpenproletariat. They lived in an environment of urban poverty, and in that
environment, they developed a culture, in the analysis of Wilson (1980, 183)
that “completely rejects the legitimacy of the social order…within the subculture of violence there is an irreverence for life. Life is not perceived as
something of value…Their relationship to the larger society is a predator
relationship…They connote terror in the minds of the affluent elite…[as
they] are as elusive as political guerrillas…it would not be an exaggeration
to say that there exist a state of war between the police and the lumpen
purveyors of violence. The enshrined custom of this sub-culture is not to
cooperate with the police. One does not volunteer information of any kind to
the representatives of the ‘unrecognized state.’”
Parallel to blocked migration was the blocked trade in ganja. There
was profit for small peasants in the international marijuana trade (ganja), but
this created a sector that was anti-police, and necessarily connected with
organized crime. It turned hungry peasants seeking to eke out a living as
enemies of the security apparatus of the state (Lacy, 1977, 25).
Despite the frustrations in the population, as our model correctly
ignores,4 there was little mobilization for insurgent action against the state.
As Gray reports in a somewhat astonished tone, attempts to confront
economic failure, for example in the Disaffected People’s National Party
(former Workers Party of Jamaica activists) and the New Beginning
Movement, made up of defectors from the JLP – have stirred little public
enthusiasm. The popular response to crisis in Jamaica has been indifference.
4
. We found in other narratives the fact of blocked migration to be potentially significant in inducing civil
war onset. We have interpreted this factor to be not a reflection of grievance, but one of labor supply for
insurgencies.
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 12
Elsewhere he reports that amidst state terror, “a motley collection of
politically inspired gangsters, heroic bandits, and left-wing gunmen made
armed confrontation and derring-do their deadly vocation…they robbed
banks, challenged the security forces with hit-and-run tactics, and mocked
the rule of the two parties. Yet for all their disruptiveness such groups were a
minority among the poor and their cultural extremism and ultraviolence
provided widespread revulsion” (Gray, pp. 73, 90). This of course leads to
the question of why our model turned out to be right while many observers
looking at Jamaica from close up were surprised to see that the country, like
similar states in the impoverished third world, did not fall into warlord-ruled
anarchy.
Our theory points to a set of related factors that cauterized frustration
and thereby prevented civil war. These have to do with the high degree of
control over society that the Jamaican state was able to exert. On one side of
the coin, the task for Jamaica’s rulers was not as great as it is for many rulers
of postcolonial states. The Jamaican population is low, with an average over
the independence period of 2.5 million, which puts it in the bottom twentieth
percentile of the observations in our dataset. The median population of
country/years in which there was a civil war onset is 12 million. There is a
clue in the Jamaican case on how size matters to lower the probability of
civil war. From the late colonial period, Jamaican politics has pitted the JPL
against the PNP, in what has amounted to as a bitter struggle for power and
patronage. The founder of the JPL was William Alexander Bustamante, a
moneylender in the capital city of Kingston who had formed the Jamaica
Trade Workers and Tradesmen Union (JTWTU) and captured the
imagination of the black masses with his messianic personality. His
opponent was Norman W. Manley, whose PNP was largely supported by the
mixed-race middle class and the liberal sector of the business community.
Riots in 1938 spurred the PNP to unionize labor, with its Trade Union
Congress (TUC) in opposition to the JTWTU. The PNP declared itself
socialist in 1940, subsequently joining the Socialist International and making
alliances with the social democratic parties of Western Europe. But Manley
was hardly a doctrinaire socialist, but more in line with the politics of the
British Labour Party. But ideological similarity did not reduce the fierceness
of the party competition in Jamaica.
Despite the bitter struggles between these parties, reflected in ugly
street violence at virtually every electoral competition, both Bustamante and
Manley were light-skinned, affluent, aristocratic, and distant cousins. In the
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 13
1940s, Manley (unsuccessfully) argued Bustamante’s brief in court,
defending him against British charges that linked him to the labor riots of
1938, and then looked after his union organization during his imprisonment.
The close network ties of the ruling class, in which all potential rulers were
socially connected, hardly blocked internal struggles, but held all parties
back from self-destructive civil war. To take an example, in the wake of a
State of Emergency that severely limited his party’s ability to campaign, Ed
Seaga’s JPL lost decisively. Yet Seaga was gracious is defeat. He told the
country, “I think the PNP scored a very clear and decisive victory” (Wilson
1980, 337). This suggests that while the elite incited its mass base to fight
each other tooth and claw, the ruling elites had an implicit contract (a
possible contract given tight social networks and small size) to set limits to
how high up the SES scale they would allow violent conflict to rise.
Jamaica’s small size made for a relatively unified ruling class with a clear
sense of its vulnerability if competition became too intense.
Perhaps more important than its small size, Jamaica’s population is
largely urban, which facilitates riots and popular protests, but not sustained
insurgency. Furthermore, despite inequality in landholding, the countryside
does not have a landless peasant class seeking to ally with urban intellectuals
who promise massive redistribution of land. Planters in Jamaica failed in
their attempt to convert slaves into tenant farmers. Instead they hired rural
labor both from ex-slaves and by recruiting workers from India, China, and
Sierra Leone. Ex-slaves not working for wages settled in small inland
communities doing subsistence and cash-crop farming (Library of Congress,
1987, chap. 2). To be sure, in the late 1930s and 1940s there was some land
grabbing, but there has been in the independence era a large wage-earning
peasantry that is unionized, well-versed in industrial sabotage (e.g. through
the burning of sugar cane), but not hungry enough to squat on the lands of
latifundi (Lacy, pp. 24-25). Thus, a small population, largely urban, with no
landless peasantry to mobilize in rural areas, makes the task of control by the
state a relatively easy one.
Finally, in regard to the capacity to control, Jamaica’s relative wealth
plays a role. Jamaica had the second largest GDP of the Commonwealth
Caribbean, behind only Trinidad and Tobago, an oil exporter and thus
having the kind of wealth that brings problems for social control, at least in
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 14
our model. This wealth allowed for a sustained patronage system in which
nearly all potential defectors could easily be bought off.5
On the other side of the coin, Jamaica came into independence with a
relatively strong state apparatus. As far back as 1662, realizing that tropical
diseases would for the long term keep the settler population low, Jamaica’s
second governor, Lord Windsor gave nonslave Africans the rights of
Englishmen and in so doing, he “laid the foundations of a governing system
that was to last for two centuries: a crown- appointed governor acting with
the advice of a nominated council in the legislature. The legislature
consisted of the governor and an elected but highly unrepresentative House
of Assembly” (Library of Congress, chapter 2). Precisely 300 years later, on
the eve of independence, a government minister responded to a query of a
reporter from The New York Times (“Jamaicans Proud of Independence”
December 18, 1962, p. 4) about how people feel about being independent.
“We’ve been preparing for independence for so long,” he answered, “that
the change in barely discernible.” With this institutional framework, Jamaica
has never faced political instability as we code it (that is, change in degree of
democracy).6 This stable framework deters potential insurgents who are
incentivized to mobilize when the state appears to be weak.
This well-institutionalized state supported a well-trained security
apparatus. The Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) and the Jamaica Defense
Force (JDF) were the core regular units for security, backed by auxiliary
units (e.g. the Island Special Constabulary Force, ISCF), and private security
organizations. The JCF had about 2,300 personnel in 1960 and 3,100 in
1968. Auxiliaries added another 3,000 (Lacy chap. 6). Jamaica, with its
well-trained personnel, provided the largest Caribbean contingent (250
5
. Given the low scores for mountainous terrain (only 2.8% of landmass with a world average at 22%), it
would be consistent with our theory to claim that this too made control easier. But the facts on the ground
belie this inference. Kips (1999, 78ff) reports, e.g. that the Maroons relied on the Blue Mountains in the
east (with peaks reaching nearly 2,300 meters) and Cockpit County in the west which is pitted karst with
deep hollows and limestone hillocks. Both regions were covered with dense evergreen rainforest, and with
high humidity there were deep sinkholes that make marching through the terrain (especially with heavy
arms) treacherous.
6
. In the model of Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson, we should not have expected good institutions built
where European settlers could not survive; yet in Jamaica, or so it is claimed in the standard historiography,
good institutions were successfully implanted without a significant settler population. See Robinson, James
A., Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making
of the Modern World Income Distribution." Working Paper, 2002. On the ratio of settlers to slaves, see
Orlando Patterson (1967) The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and
Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: McGibbon & Kee), who suggests that the reason that
Jamaica had such a high rate of rebellion is the very low ratio (1:13 in the 19th c.) of whites/slaves.
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 15
troops) to the American-led force in Grenada from late October 1983 to June
1985. The government of Edward Seaga, in fear of a revolution like
Grenada’s, sent his troops to participate in regional military exercises, under
the watchful eye of the Americans. In addition, Jamaica cooperated with the
United States and the Regional Security System (RSS) – where member
states collaborated on regional security matters. Saega also had Jamaican
forces hold joint military and narcotics interdiction exercises in the context
of the RSS (Library of Congress, 1987, chap. 2, section on “National
Security”).
The national security apparatus is strengthened by active support from
the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. At the dawn of
independence, the UK retained troops in substantive posts in the JDF and
there was a large British Joint Services Training Team in Jamaica
throughout first decade of independence. In 1965, Brigadier Crook and
twenty-one of the British officers who had colonial command positions
changed their formal role defined in the colonial period and became the
British Joint Services Training Team. (This helps explain why there was no
attempted insurgency in 1962 – the imperialists, from the point of view of
the provision of order, did not leave). Meanwhile there were regular
“exchange training schemes” that brought Jamaican troops to the UK and
UK forces to Jamaica, including the 1st Battalion of Lancashire Fusiliers and
the York and Lancaster Regiment who conducted jungle training. British aid
also supported a Police Training Team (by sponsoring officers to go to UK
for further training), and a command and co-ordination structure for the
Jamaican security forces. In a parallel fashion, once Prime Minister
Bustamante made clear that Jamaica would have nothing to do with Cuba,
the US Military Assistance Program gave $1.1 million between 1964 and
1967 for the JDF, and in 1966 began a technical assistance program to the
JCF through the AID Public Safety Program. In June 1963 Jamaica and US
signed a defense pact. Canada also played a prominent role in promoting
security assistance (Lacy 1977, chap. 8).
The JCF and the JDF were regularly involved in joint police-military
operations with a domestic security slant. However, the police aspect of
security is far less supportive of the “strong state” view than is that of the
constabulary. Although the police have received positive reviews for
professionalism, they have become implicated in partisan politics. Most of
the police were partisans of the PNP, and when the JLP ruled through the
first decade of independence, there was trouble. After a JLP march in 1965
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 16
that resulted in violence, the police charged Saega (then a government
minister) and eight other party members with riot and assault, charges that
were thrown out in court due to unreliable witnesses (who were probably
threatened by JLP party hacks). The police were so scared of party-induced
violence in Western Kingston (in electoral districts that were quite volatile,
yet decisive for electoral outcomes) they were reluctant to make arrests to
stem pre-election violence in fear that both sets of gangs could turn on them.
Relations between police and government got so bad that the police went on
strike (in a “sick out”), and the government ordered the JDF to man the
police stations (Lacy, chap. 7).
The partisanship of the police helps explain high levels of urban
violence. Americas Watch reported an average of 217 police killings a year
from 1979 to 1986, representing about fifty percent of Jamaica’s total
killings. A Jamaica Council of Human Rights report computed 289 persons
killed by the police in 1984. This is exacerbated by the continued fear of the
police to investigate electoral violence (Library of Congress, chap. 2, “The
Police”). However, urban violence pits gang against gang, but not a guerrilla
group against the state. Overall, then, a powerful security apparatus
supported by generous international assistance complements a highly
institutionalized political structure to lower the expected returns to
insurgency.
A compelling political interpretation of the cauterization of potential
insurgency takes a different tack from ours. Rather than pointing to the
conditions that disfavor insurgency, Obika Gray (2003) emphasizes the
brilliant strategy by party elites through their dramaturgical use of the
cultural trope of “badness-honor.”
The key to the strategy is “granting cultural recognition to AfroJamaicans, promoting the social power of the militant urban poor, and
placing tight control over efforts to convert cultural social power into
citizenship-driven political power.” In the early 1960s the two opposing
political parties co-opted young criminals in Western Kingston to become
“notable” political enforcers and shared the state’s largesse with them. Gray
sardonically reports that “accustomed to urban gangster politics, seasoned in
the parasitic and menacing ways of the criminal underworld, these worthies
were key targets for politicians’ solicitations.” Thus, he argues, the state
brought in criminal gang power to help sustain a middle-class centrist
democratic regime.
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 17
Both the Harvard educated Seaga and the LSE graduate Michael
Manley (son and heir to Norman) adopted the cultural symbols of the
gangster poor, and this resonated in the ghettos. In a brilliant strategic move,
according to Gray, the brown- and white-skinned party bosses co-opted the
politically subversive practice of ‘badness-honor’ – a “dramaturgy in which
claimants to respect employ … norm-disrupting histrionics – ‘badness,’ …
to affirm their right to an honor…denied.” The implication of relying on this
cultural trope was that for “politicians, urban dance halls, makeshift
recording studios, petty commodity marketplaces…were … legitimate
venues for recruiting supporters…” Jamaica’s leaders used this dramaturgy
to win support in the ghettos, but also to forestall without compromise any
challenge to their rule. The leaders gave ghetto voices cultural power in their
expressions, but no political or economic power to complement it. Violence
was consequently not directed vertically, but horizontally within the ghetto.
Thus stability in Jamaica according to this interpretation is based on a
“fusion of warlordism, political gangsterism, and democratic politics [that]
tapped powerful cultural sentiments in the society and the marriage had
broad appeal. Jamaican statecraft embraced repertoires that ensnared
clashing groups.” To be sure, there were excesses. For those who did not
comply, state terror was unleashed against the mobilized, rebellious black
urban poor who were not co-opted under the protection of a political party.
Even amidst state terror, however, Gray reports (noted earlier) that those
who challenged the system were a minority among the poor and had almost
no political following. Thus the strategic use of “badness-honor” worked.
Jamaica avoided the descent into anarchy that was the fate of other poor
patrimonial states due to this form of cultural co-optation (Gray, 2003, 7294).
Gray’s interpretation helps account for the “failure” of the Maroons to
take advantage of Jamaica’s moment of weakness in 1962 as a new state. In
line with the political leaders’ identification with ghetto culture, all Jamaican
governments have treated the Maroon communities with respect as their
badness gave them honor. The Maroons enjoy a virtual dual nationality.
This respect is ritually portrayed. Nanny, Kojo’s wife and a cultural icon, is
called in Jamaican political discourse “Queen Sovereign Mother Nanny.”
She was declared a national heroine and appears on the $500 bill. A
monument to Kojo was erected by the Jamaica national trust. The Maroons
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 18
were co-opted dramaturgically by the state as a mechanism to reduce its
commitment problem.
Gray’s is a compelling interpretation, and shows that effective
political strategy must complement conditions that disfavor civil war, even
when the probability of an effective civil war is, by our model’s predictions,
quite low.
IV. Conclusion
When a model predicts a low probability for civil war and no civil war
takes place, the model probably had it “right”. This is indeed the case with
Jamaica, in both the negative and positive sense. On the negative ledger, the
narrative points out that a long history of rebellion and defiance of authority
is not a good predictor of civil war; nor are economic grievances, based on
the data showing continued and even growing inequality.7
On the positive ledger, we have noted the importance of a strong state,
neither anocratic nor unstable, with foreign aid provided to the state, in a
highly urbanized small country as conditions that would highly disfavor the
growth of insurgencies. While the standard histories of Jamaica focus on the
conditions that favored urban violence, our discussion has highlighted the
conditions that disfavor the escalation of violence into civil war onset. Our
interpretation of the key variables in our model as reflecting a strong state
capable to containing insurgencies is largely confirmed in our interpretation
of post colonial Jamaica. But we have also noted that government strategies
to co-opt the discontented, giving them both honor and patronage, played a
role in sustaining peace in Jamaica, and this is a factor that our model
ignored.
7
. It could be argued that here is a case where our model would have profited from including ELF, due to
Jamaica’s extremely low score on ethnic fractionalization (.05). This figure is based on a coding rule that
shows 95 percent of the population is of African descent. However, if Jamaica is coded as having 75
percent of the population as of African descent, 15 percent with Afro-European descent, 4 percent AfroAsian descent, 2 percent East Indian, and 1 percent Europeans (and 3 percent others), Jamaica would have
been coded as highly fractionalized with an index of .41. And given a single large group of 75 percent and
a second group greater than 10 percent, some models would have seen Jamaica as especially vulnerable to
ethnic violence.
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 19
References:
Gray, Obika (2003) “Predation Politics and the Political Impasse in Jamaica” Small Axe
13: 72-94
Heuman, Gad (1993) “From Slave Rebellions to Morant Bay: the tradition of protest in
Jamaica” in Wolfgang Binder Slavery in the Americas (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann)
Lacy, Terry (1977) Violence and Politics in Jamaica: 1960-70 (Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass)
Library of Congress (1987) Caribbean Islands: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.:
Library of Congress, Federal Research Division) chapter 2.
Patterson, Orlando (1967) The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins,
Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: McGibbon &
Kee)
Treaster, Joseph (1985) “Brief Spell of Unrest Slows Jamaica Tourist Business” The New
York Times January 25, A8
Wilson, Basil Winthorpe (1980) “Surplus Labour and Political Violence in
Jamaica: The Dialectics of Political Corruption, 1966-1976” Ph.D. Thesis,
Political Science, Graduate Faculty, City University of New York
Zips, Werner (1999) Black Rebels: African-Caribbean Freedom Fighters in Jamaica
(Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers).
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 20
Pr(onset) for JAMAICA
.04
.03
.02
.01
0
1960
cname
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
JAMAICA
year
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1965
pr
.0336846
.0336846
.0060858
.0057769
.0055694
.0054559
.0053797
.0049543
.0048033
.0047579
.0046549
.0041333
.0045228
.0044187
.0044449
.0046539
.0047746
.0049786
.0051487
.0054185
.0054292
.0054073
.0054146
.0055053
.0057793
.0057894
.0056349
.0054034
.0052576
.0052477
.0054445
.0054772
.0054585
.0054253
.0054555
.0055482
.0056778
1970
gdp~l
1.81
1.81
1.809
1.98
2.104
2.179
2.234
2.497
2.604
2.645
2.724
3.099
2.838
2.922
2.916
2.787
2.719
2.601
2.508
2.362
2.366
2.389
2.395
2.354
2.215
2.218
2.308
2.443
2.533
2.545
2.44
2.455
2.466
2.493
2.485
2.439
2.374
1975
1980
1985
start year of war/conflict
pop
1669
1692
1716
1741
1766
1791
1816
1843
1869
1896
1925
1955
1985
2013
2039
2063
2086
2109
2133
2158
2185
2211
2236
2260
2282
2302
2321
2339
2356
2376
2470
2471.6
2496
2522.1
2538
2554
2576.66
mtn~t
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
2.8
Oil
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1990
ins~b
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1995
anocl
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2000
Random Narratives, Jamaica, p. 21
JAMAICA
1999
.0057519
2.342
.
2.8
0
0
Variable |
Obs
Mean
Std. Dev.
Min
Max
-------------+-------------------------------------------------------pr |
38
.0067476
.00645
.0041333
.0336846
gdpenl |
38
2.431789
.2958247
1.809
3.099
pop |
37
2128.685
276.3592
1669
2576.66
mtnest |
38
2.8
0
2.8
2.8
Oil |
38
0
0
0
0
-------------+-------------------------------------------------------instab |
38
0
0
0
0
anocl |
38
0
0
0
0
Variable |
Obs
Mean
Std. Dev.
Min
Max
-------------+-------------------------------------------------------pr |
1175
.01337
.00935
.0003045
.0634642
gdpenl |
1175
2.863283
1.86085
.562
11.738
pop |
1187
13595.62
24721.73
621
165873.6
mtnest |
1210
22.25446
17.80127
0
57.59999
Oil |
1210
.1363636
.3433162
0
1
-------------+-------------------------------------------------------instab |
1210
.1950413
.3963963
0
1
anocl |
1210
.3570248
.4793203
0
1
Variable |
Obs
Mean
Std. Dev.
Min
Max
-------------+-------------------------------------------------------pr |
6327
.0165329
.0229956
2.09e-10
.4913677
gdpenl |
6373
3.651117
4.536645
.048
66.735
pop |
6433
31786.92
102560.8
222
1238599
mtnest |
6610
18.08833
20.96648
0
94.3
Oil |
6610
.1295008
.3357787
0
1
-------------+-------------------------------------------------------instab |
6596
.1464524
.353586
0
1
anocl |
6541
.2256536
.418044
0
1
.
0