We’d seen the dereliction of Haiti with our own eyes half an hour before, just after take-off from Port-of-Spain. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the island that was once known as Hispaniola. The straight-line border between the two countries is an arresting sight. On one side, the Haitian side, the land is brown, stripped bare by deforestation and soil run-off; on the other, the Dominican side, it appears verdant and sparkling, as Columbus described Hispaniola five centuries ago (though the green is the green of cane plantations rather than forest). It’s as if the land itself were a map, the political divide coloured in by environmental catastrophe.

The man in the aisle seat was right about the danger of deforestation in Jamaica; but the big youth at the window had a point too. Compared to the desperate poverty and political instability of Haiti—a country that seems to have drifted away from equatorial Africa and been shipwrecked in the Caribbean—Jamaica, like the Dominican Republic, is not doing so badly. Following independence Jamaica hung onto European-style political institutions, making a successful transition to autonomy after enduring one of the longest-lived slave-based colonial regimes in modern history. Today the country squeezes a living from export industries: from sugar, bauxite and—sub rosa—marijuana. And from tourism. This hasn’t made it rich (in recent decades the GDP has amounted to just enough to service the national debt); and the country has not been spared poverty or violence. But, unlike Haiti, it has been spared despair.

Rastas, rentiers, retirees, maroons

I was due to meet Wesley in Kingston the following day. Wesley lives in London; his brother, Eyton George, is a dog-handler in the Drug Squad at the airport in Kingston, in charge of the labradors that sniff at the baggage of suspect travellers. It was George’s day off when I arrived, though, so I didn’t have the chance to see him at work—or see how his labradors would get along with the likes of the big youth, with his gold tooth and bling.

Wesley and George hail from Clarendon parish, in the centre of the island. We were due to go up there in a few days, to their home village, Guava Ground, and then to the Cockpit country, a wilderness area in the hilly area of the north-west inhabited by self-identified Maroons, the descendants of slaves who escaped from sugar plantations in the seventeenth century.

It was my first visit to Jamaica. Of the cultural and historical sites on the island those I was most curious to visit were the Maroon communities. My curiosity about them was anthropological. Were Maroons different from other Jamaicans? Were they just an offbeat tourist attraction? Or a link back to Africa? The rhythms of Jamaican music, the patterns of Jamaican kinship, and elements of Rastafarian belief all spring from seeds of West Africa that survived the Atlantic passage and the long travails of slavery. And Maroon societies, more than others on the island, have preserved visible symbols of this African past. So I’d prevailed on Wesley to add one of the Maroon villages to our itinerary.

The plan was to leave the din of Kingston and the coastal plain and tour some of the old sugar estates—sugarcane cultivation being, historically, the main economic outcome of the colonization of the island. We would stop in Guava Ground, where Wesley’s ancestors had moved after the end of slavery, and then go up into the hills—hills like the John Crow Mountains down below, swathed in rain.

But first we were spending a few days in Kingston. Wesley had some family matters to discuss with his brother George before our trip to Guava Ground. Their family was large and mostly poor, living in the interior of the island. In Jamaica prevalent rural poverty and unemployment are exacerbated by the fact that many places, including Clarendon, have been affected by soil erosion and loss of tree cover—as the man on the plane had said. An increasing proportion of Jamaican country-dwellers are retirees or rentiers, living on their savings or on their relatives’ earnings from Britain and America. So life in Jamaica can be expensive for visiting expatriates, whose relatives are liable to assume that their returning kin are wealthy from the pickings of Babylon.

Natty Morgan is still on the run

The weather cleared as the plane came in to land at Palisadoes Airport, on the long sand spit that guards Kingston harbour. Next to me the big youth turned the pages of a two-day-old copy of the Gleaner, Jamaica’s main daily newspaper. The subject of the lead story was an escaped gunman in Spanish Town, near Kingston. natty morgan still on the run was the headline.

“Natty” Morgan—Oneil Nathaniel Morgan—was the island’s most celebrated gangster, the latest in a long line of badmen, as they are called in Jamaica, villains turned folk heroes, half-feared and half-admired. In the paper, alongside the story about Natty Morgan, there was a report on food riots in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. As we taxied to the arrivals bay the big gold youth continued to dispraise Haiti, and praise Jamaica. But our neighbour in the aisle seat had clearly decided that the issue of tree-felling and the environment wasn’t worth pursuing. Or maybe he noticed that the youth’s cabin luggage included a chain saw.

The chain saw caused some commotion as we came through Customs. When the big youth moved past the security check the metal detector began to buzz and flash. Loose rivets rattled. He put the chainsaw aside, but the metal detector did not relent until he took the rings from his fingers and the gold—or perhaps gold-plated—chain from his neck. On the other side of the barrier he replaced them one by one—a death’s head, a Solomon’s seal, a knuckle duster and, finally, the gleaming neck chain, heavy as an alderman’s. So much gold, our neighbour muttered as we waited, that it looked like the big youth must have snagged Captain Kidd’s treasure. The zig-zag patterns on the nape of his neck dimpled as he put the chain back on.

Beyond the barrier, where the air was bright with the passing of the rain, a man on a neon-blue motorcycle was waiting for him.

“Dem catch Natty yet?” said the youth to his friend, pointing to the headline in The Gleaner, as the friend revved up his motorbike.

“They never catch ’im,” came the reply, before they sped away. “’im gaan to Cuba.”

The Harder They Come

On the run in Spanish Town. Gone to Cuba. My image of Jamaica, like that of many others of my generation, had been unduly influenced by a cult movie of the 1970s, The Harder They Come. Filmed in the shantytowns of Kingston and the Blue Mountains to the northwest of the city, and starring Jimmy Cliff (who also wrote and performed much of the soundtrack), it’s the story of a ganja-dealing reggae star on the run from the law, based on the brief career of a real-life gunman named Rhygin. The Harder They Come is to Jamaica as Black Orpheus is to Brazil, a talismanic movie where uncontrived performances give rise to a small masterpiece. But the success of the film risks confirming a national stereotype. No comparable film has come out of Jamaica since The Harder They Come. These days Jamaicans who can afford it are watching soaps and Hollywood action films. The roofs and gardens of the wealthy suburbs of Kingston are dense with satellite dishes, steely cobwebs that point towards Miami, where money and made-for-TV movies come from.

The big youth, with his gold jewellery and his gangster swagger, seemed to be a lineal descendent of Rhygin—the gunman who was the inspiration for The Harder They Come. This was Rhygin as he would be in the 1990s, enhanced by US ghetto-style bling. While the real-life gangster Natty Morgan, whose fate the big youth had enquired after, represented the continuing strand of hyper-violence in this enduring outlaw mythology. It was a tendency that seemed to have persisted undiminished since the 1970s. The headline in the Gleaner—natty morgan still on the run—could have featured in the film itself.

The story, according to the paper, was this: Natty Morgan, twenty-five years old, wanted for at least seven murders, had managed to evade the police for the past five months. Now he had escaped again. In a shoot-out in Riverton City, a shantytown in a swampy area of west Kingston, though surrounded by police, he had somehow managed to avoid capture. But the woman with him had been shot to death. She was Natty Morgan’s baby-mother—the mother of his child—one of a number of them. She and Natty had been walking hand-in-hand down the main street eating fried fish when the shooting began. While she was dead, he was unhurt, according to the paper, apart from a wound to his little finger.

The Gleaner’s chief columnist wrote that people were beginning to attribute superhuman qualities to Natty Morgan. But the real reason Natty remained free, he argued, was that the public did not trust the police enough to reveal his hiding place. Plus the fact that Natty Morgan was known to kill informers. There was a suggestion, too, that some prison officers had connived in his escape from the Gun Court the previous December. Popular condemnation was complicated by this. The columnist quoted residents of Riverton City who argued that Natty Morgan’s crimes were negligible compared to those of the police.

The original Rhygin, in Jimmy Cliff’s interpretation of the role, had been an involuntary desperado, driven to violence by circumstance. That’s to say—in the words of the Wailers track that propelled reggae to a world stage—he shot the sheriff. In Rhygin’s case, though, he shot several deputies too. As well as being a desperado, Rhygin was the epitome of the vitality of Jamaican culture, the lyrical desperation that overflowed and flooded the world with reggae in the 1970s. But Natty Morgan was no reggae star. He was merely a gangster. Reggae and outlawry parted company when the music became a global commodity, a process in which The Harder They Come played its part.

A concert in Kingston

Kingston, Jamaica—like Brixton and Ladbroke Grove, its overseas dominions—is awash with reggae music. It has become part of official culture. Gangsters may be vilified, but popular musicians are venerated, even more than elsewhere in the world. They represent, after all, the country’s main export, after bauxite. The late Bob Marley—the Honourable Robert Nesta Marley, O.M., as official pronouncements have it—is a national hero. A recently-installed statue can be seen in the national gallery, and his visage figures on a newly-issued postage stamp. There’s a museum dedicated to the Wailers in the old Tuff Gong studio, where they recorded their last records—Jamaica’s answer to Graceland. There’s a ganja pipe on display there, as used by His Marleyness, and a framed citation from Sir Florizel Augustus Glasspole, the Governor-General of Jamaica, that declares 6 February Bob Marley Day.

The week I arrived was the tenth anniversary of Marley’s death. A memorial concert was planned in Kingston’s leading theatre. And the city was in a furor of nostalgia. The new statue of Marley was the subject of some controversy. A nine-foot bronze by a sculptor named Christopher Gonzales, it had originally been commissioned by the government for Heroes’ Park in downtown Kingston. But the general opinion was that it looked like a dead tree trunk; so it was relegated to the foyer of the National Gallery. Its defenders said the arboreal quality was deliberate, but popular opinion held that it would have been a better thing if it had borne more resemblance to its subject. The concert was announced as a benefit event for the Marley family, or one branch of the family. How come they needed the money? Because Bob Marley died intestate, leaving eleven children by seven mothers to contend for the legacy. The court case was taking place in the United States, and the concert was, among other things, a fund-raiser for some of the claimants’ legal bills.

On the day itself Wesley flew down from Washington, where he had just been posted by the BBC. He got us tickets for the concert, which was already booked out, and in the evening we set off to the Ward Theatre, a bright turquoise building next to a red-brick Methodist chapel on Victoria Parade, the main square in downtown Kingston. It was a symbolic location, Wesley explained, situated on the border between the two central parliamentary constituencies in Kingston, seats held by the leaders of the two political parties, Edward Seaga of the JLP and Michael Manley of the PNP. In the 1970s supporters of these two parties turned Kingston into a war zone; it was Bob Marley who brought Manley and Seaga together at a concert in 1978 to make a public appeal for peace.

The atmosphere outside the Ward Theatre as the concert began was calm, almost reverent, the push and shove of Kingston life in abeyance for the evening. Higglers—market traders—plied their wares in the dusk. Most of the people gathered in the square could not afford the price of a ticket to the concert, but a video screen displayed the opening act, which featured a sharp-suited jazz saxophonist playing a set of slow variations on “Redemption Song”, one of Bob Marley’s last compositions. The concert that followed featured a reggae steel band, a reggae orchestra with brass and strings, a capella reggae singers and a reggae ballet. Ziggy Marley, Bob’s most famous son, performed with his sisters and his brother—and the original I-Three, the Wailers’ backing group. Bob Marley’s widow Rita, star of the I-Three, cut a regal figure in white satin, with a rhinestone-studded turban. It was a startlingly respectable occasion. There was barely a spliff in the house.

Natty Morgan in Spanish Town

The next day we set out for Clarendon. Wesley’s brother George and his family lived far out of town, near the Hellshire beaches. Instead of going there we picked him up from work, from an office by the Gun Court, an urban fortress of concrete and razor wire that is a monument to the gang warfare of the 1970s. Prisoners waved at us from behind the wire. This was the jail Natty Morgan had escaped from last year, George told us. It was not till later that George revealed his own tale of an encounter with Jamaica’s most wanted man.

The faces of Jamaican national heroes were painted on a wall near the Gun Court. It was a gallery of the island’s history: Paul Bogle, leader of the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, Sam Sharpe, leader of an earlier slave revolt, Nanny, the legendary warrior priestess of the Windward Maroons, and Cudjoe, or Kojo, Chief of the Leeward Maroons, whose mountain stronghold we were due to visit later. Following these ancestral figures came Marcus Garvey, the inspiration of Rastafarianism, then Alexander Bustamante, the first Prime Minister of Jamaica, and his successor, Norman Manley. Finally there was Michael Manley, Norman’s son, the current Prime Minister, who has dominated Jamaican politics for the last two decades.

But Michael Manley’s face in the mural had been blacked out at some point in the violent clashes of the past few years and insults scrawled across it. Once a socialist, Manley’s first term as Prime Minister in the 1970s saw social turmoil, destabilization by the CIA, an exodus of the middle classes and, in the long run, a decline in standards of living for rich and poor alike. In 1989, however, after a gap of nearly a decade, Manley returned to power, a late convert to free market capitalism. Expectations were raised by his return, but recession hit the economy, and popular dissatisfaction was now on the rise again.

A trail of more recent graffiti danced along the wall towards the shacks and tenement yards of Rae Town:

say no to drugs. the gun is not a toy. to hell with war. aids kill.

The slogans came to a climax in a protest against poor public sanitation and the threat it posed to children’s health:

we tired a shit water splash we pickney.

From Rae Town we drove on out of Kingston, past the scattered shacks of Riverton—Natty Morgan’s domain—through Spanish Town and Bog Walk, past Linstead, and on to the Alcan bauxite processing factory at the Ewarton turning. George grew visibly tense as we drew near the turning.

“Today the first time for a long while I come to Guava Ground this way,” he said.

The last time he had driven on this road, he explained, was on a trip with his wife Jean and their two children when their van had been ambushed by half-a-dozen gunmen.

“It were just ahead here, before the turn-off for the Vale,” said George. “Them put a tree across the road an’ hide behind the branches—an’ make us stop the bus.”

“Then,” he said, “one man put a gun to mi head.”

“And then,” he paused, and continued, “Then I saw that it were Natty Morgan himself.”

George gave a laugh.

“I ain’t joking. I know ‘im. I store mi revolver beneath the seat. So I could not get at it. I keep prayin’ my little boy won’t wake up and say somethin’. Fe if they know I is a policeman they kill me for sure.”

“But thanks be to God,” he concluded, “the little boy sleep all the way to Spanish Town.”

Natty Morgan released George and his family outside Spanish Town, leaving them unharmed at the side of the road; the van was recovered a day later, without the revolver. With Natty Morgan’s long record of homicides, George counted himself lucky not to have been added to the roster of his victims.

“If I had the chance right now, I’d a-kill him,” George said.

“You would?” said Wesley. “But Natty didn’t kill you, did he? And he could have done. What about the rule of law? Doesn’t he have the right to a fair trial?”

“For what?” said George. “The man is guilty. I not in favour of injustice, but if a man going kill you, you got to kill him first. Remember Sandokan—that other badman? The police just terrorize his community and they get rid of him. They turn him in… No, they kill him straight.”

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it?” said Wesley, persevering. “If people are killed like that it will just go on and on…”

“One t’ing I have noticed,” said George dismissively, “Is the police don’t usually kill saints.”

From Lluidas Vale to Guava Ground

The car swung through citrus groves into Lluidas Vale, a vast green plain where steep islands of rock and forest leapt from a sea of cane. At the heart of it, in the centre of the flatness, stood the zinc-roofed sugar factory, flanked by silver-painted vats, towers of sweetness shining in the sun. A huge magnet swung over a moving river of cut cane, plucking out stray metal objects—axes and cutlasses—before the cane entered the crusher. The reek of molasses hung in the air.

Jamaica exists because of sugar. And its sweetness pervades the land. Rum, the national drink, is made of it. Jamaican beer is as sweet as lemonade. Molasses and sugar syrup are mixed in with the spices that give Jamaican food its pungency —nutmeg, pimento, chili and cilantro (known as coriander in Jamaica, as in Britain). Sugar is rolled into the dough that makes the bright yellow flaky pastry that enfolds sweetmeats and vegetable patties. In egg nog, the sweetest concoction of all, sugar is added to rum and raw-egg mixture to make an ice-cold, alcoholic custard.

Today in Jamaica tourism has eclipsed the sugar industry in economic terms, but for four hundred years plantation slavery determined the course of the island’s history. George and Wesley’s ancestors had been shipped from Africa to labour in these fields. From their labour came the sugar my ancestors in Britain had stirred into their tea. And now we were here as tourists at the sugar factory. Tourism and sugar. Sugar and tourism. In such islands of the Caribbean they are the alpha and omega of colonialism.

Up in the hills beyond was Guava Ground, George and Wesley’s ancestral village. Freed from slavery—but not freed from want—their forebears had moved to the hills in search of land. They found it on a steep knoll with a view down to citrus groves and a little river valley which ran back to Lluidas Vale. We drove from the vale, up a winding, ill-maintained road. The place was beautiful, with a magnificent view over the Vale. But for people living in Guava Ground there was a long way to go for water. I stood near the cement graves of Wesley and George’s grandparents, under a cashew tree, gazing down at the valley, while the brothers greeted their Uncle Tatar and the cousins who had begun to arrive.

Kinship is a complex thing in Jamaica—as everywhere but perhaps more so. A lure for anthropologists, but a headache for Jamaicans coming back from a sojourn abroad. In Jamaican law, all offspring are legitimate, whether or not they are born in wedlock. Even the church recognises this reality. Mothering Sunday fell during my visit. But the institution of marriage hardly figured in the service. And outside the Anglican cathedral in Kingston signs proclaimed it to be Miss Jamaican Mother’s Day.

“It is not uncommon,” one book on Jamaica advises its readers, “to encounter a third cousin on one’s step-father’s half-brother’s sister’s side.” In Guava Ground many relatives arrived to greet us; neither George nor Wesley knew who half of them were.

“Venise?” I heard George say.

“Yes, Uncle George?” said a plump girl with straightened hair and a sequinned blouse.

“Mi jus’ want to make sure that yuh name,”  said George, his speech more rural now, and sprinkled with patois. “Seriously now, yuh aright, Venise?  Goin’ a school?  Yuh should be sure to learn something, child.”

“Yuh should learn to sew,” said Uncle George. “Then yuh be able to be yuh own woman. An’ when yuh boyfren’ say some bad thing you can say somethin’ to him.”

“Say what?” said Venise.

“Try this,” George suggested. “Like—Yuh know who yuh talkin’ to?”

Venise giggled and looked at her hands. George turned to her father, Uncle Tatar, to ask about another relative.

“Now wha’ ’appen with that cousin Hughie, the dark one, the black one?” he asked.

“They is all black,” said Uncle Tatar, with a chuckle.

Rice, red peas; a family tree

Uncle Tatar cooked rice and red peas for us, and a chicken he strangled in the yard.

“Now don’t laugh at mi cooking,” he said. “And don’t cry fe the sauce be too hot.”

George was looking round the yard. “Your family eat a lot of banana?” he asked.

“Dem eat whatsoever dem get,” said Uncle Tatar.

The house and his garden both had a run-down air, and I wondered where Uncle Tatar’s wife was, or if he had one. There was no roof on the outhouse.

“We still recoverin’ from Gilbert,” he said.

So which of the cousins was Gilbert, I wondered idly.

Everyone laughed at my question. Uncle Tatar was talking about Hurricane Gilbert, the last big hurricane to strike Jamaica, which devastated the island in September 1988.

“They were no birds for months back then,” he murmured, with a wistful note in his voice. “No humming birds at all.”

(Ah, I found myself thinking, the birds had all left for Cuba, along with Natty Morgan. But I thought better of putting forward this idea.)

“An’ we got no shop now in Guava Ground because of Gilbert,” said Uncle Tatar.

“And so,” he added, looking at Wesley, “I be startin’ a shop soon.”

“How are you going to stock it?” asked Wesley.

Uncle Tatar came back quick as a flash.

“Yuh goin’ fe give me loan,” he said.

“Oh, I see,” said Wesley.

Turning to me, he added, sotto voce, “I walked right into that one.”

I had my notebook on the table and was roughing out Wesley’s family tree, trying to follow the increasingly rapid flow of arriving and departing cousins. I’d got as far as the line of kinship that linked his Aunt Merlinne, daughter of his grandfather Uriah, to her sister-in-law’s brother Perceval, also known as John.

So, I enquired, was Perceval here too—or John?

Once more my question was the cause of merriment. Perceval John and Uncle Tatar, it turned out, were alternative names for the same person. And Uncle Tatar was also Aunt Merlinne’s father’s cousin.

“Aren’t you supposed to be an anthropologist?” said Wesley. “How come you missed that?

Aunt Merlinne was one of Wesley’s favourite relatives. We went on to see her in her house a way down the road. She served us tea from a china teapot, and biscuits from an enamelled tin. She told me she had retired to Jamaica after thirty-seven years as a cleaner in South London. Her children were all raised and married away now.

“An’ now I am restin’,” she said. “It’s good to be here at home. Yuh cyaan’ rest in Englan’.”

All she wanted from Britain, she said, was her subscription to the News of The World.

In the family tree that I was drawing in my notebook there was some confusion about George’s parentage. After we bid his Aunt Merlinne goodbye I asked him and Wesley about this.

“The thing is,” said Wesley. “I used to call George my half-brother. Same mother, different father. But when my father came out to Jamaica last Christmas he started referring to him as his son. This was after George got his job in the canine division. He was promoted to corporal. And it seems my father has promoted him in the family too. From now on George is officially his son. So he’s my full brother now.”

“Our father’s story changes all the time.” said Wesley, exchanging a look with George. “He has a lot of outside children. He’s what you might call—” he paused to find the right word, “a dynast.”

“What you mean,” said his brother George, “is ’im want to be the biggest cocksman in the valley.”

The Maroons and the Cockpit country

As we drove down from Guava Ground plantation workers were coming home in trucks, sucking on sticks of cane as they rode. The road was littered with cane trash. It was the end of the season; heavy rain had stalled the harvest for the past week. The national target was a quarter of a million tons, according to a report in the Gleaner. The target had yet to be reached; but no one in Clarendon was worrying too much about that. Afternoon light pencilled through the banana groves, muddy and voluptuous, the light that Albert Huie, a noted Jamaican landscape painter, calls sulphur light.

The kindah tree, Accompong

It was easy to forget, in the gorgeous dusk of Clarendon, that this tropical pastoral was rooted in the violence of slavery. But the Maroon villages, still higher in the hills than Guava Ground, are a living reminder of that history, of the history of the slave revolts which continued in Jamaica until emancipation in the 1830s. The Maroons were escaped slaves: from the earliest days of the Spanish occupation, two centuries before freed slaves began to occupy the lower stretches of the hills, they took refuge in the trackless Cockpit country in the north-west, a series of steep, thickly forested, limestone ridges riddled with caves. The village called Accompong was built on the site of their main stronghold.

The Leeward Maroons, as the Maroons of Accompong are known, fought two wars against the British, the first under their legendary chief Kojo, or Cudjoe. In these wars, it is said, they developed a form of ambush where they disguised themselves as trees. The British redcoats would be lured, Macbeth-like, into a forest glade that suddenly revealed itself as a circle of armed men. Finally the British made a treaty which recognised the authority of the Maroon chiefs, known as Colonels; a treaty that, according to the present holders of this title, is still in force.

In good weather Accompong is a couple of hours from Montego Bay on the north coast. But there’s no telephone there, and rain can turn the steep mountain roads to rivers, cutting the village off from the outside world for days at a time. It was raining heavily as Wesley and I set out for the hills. We just made it, the car up to its hubcaps in red mud. When we arrived we found the Accompong Colonel, Martin Luther Wright, waiting for us in his office, which was doubling as the town clinic. (Accompong, too, was hit by Hurricane Gilbert). Colonel Wright showed us Kojo’s ceremonial horn. He gave us a transcribed copy of the treaty that the Maroons concluded with the British in 1739. And, when the downpour was over, he directed a young kinsman of his to take us to the Kindah tree, a silk-cotton tree where the annual ceremonies to celebrate Kojo Day, the town’s annual festival in January, take place.

The Kindah Tree—or maybe a precursor of the tree that stands in Accompong today—was the site of the treaty between the English and the Maroon leader Kojo, that ended the first Maroon War (there were other wars, but these did not involve the Accompong Maroons). With my anthropologist’s hat on, I asked Colonel Wright to tell us more about the ceremonies on Kojo Day. I was wondering if they involved spirit possession, like those of other African-derived cultural phenomena in the Caribbean, such as the Myal cult, the rituals of which are also reported to have taken place at the roots of cotton trees. Colonel Wright was not forthcoming about this. The ceremonies, he said, were secret, and known only to Maroon elders.

There was certainly nothing visibly pagan about Accompong: the town was full of churches: Adventist, Assembly of God, Episcopalian, United Church of Jamaica. Colonel Wright was a preacher himself—like his namesake, Martin Luther. This may have been why he was reluctant to discuss the pagan aspect of the ceremonies at the Kindah tree. Beyond the houses, the tree, festooned with offerings, overlooked a wooded valley. And beyond the valley, the Cockpits undulated to the horizon, full of wild hogs and hidden ganja plantations.

“Here in Accompong we have the best sinsi on the island.” said our young guide, name-checking sinsemilla, the celebrated strain of cannabis.

“Do you really?” asked Wesley in his best BBC voice. “Don’t you have problems with the police?”

It struck me that it was just as well we had left Wesley’s cousin George with his drug-tracking dogs back at the airport in Kingston.

“No, man,” said our guide. “Dem use chopper fe spray down dem plant, but we hear dem comin’ an hide it. Dem no come by foot. If Natty Morgan hide in the Cockpit, man, they never find him.”

“Mind you,” he added, “Natty Morgan a town boy. ’im starve to death out there.”

The day we visited Accompong was our last day on the island. I’d come to Jamaica in search of survivals, of traces of Africa. But what was striking in the Cockpit country wasn’t so much the preservation of ancient lore and customs as the conservation of nature itself, under the aegis of the sacred Kindah tree. The Maroons, who, for defensive purposes, had once disguised themselves as trees, still had tracts of primary forest surrounding their settlements. It was the last untouched forest in Jamaica, as thick in places as in the pre-Columbian era, when the Arawak Indians were the island’s only inhabitants. The difference between the people of Accompong and those of Guava Ground lay less in their possession of ancient links to Africa, or their history of resistance to government, than in their present-day custodianship of this forest, the last wilderness in a densely inhabited island. According to Colonel Wright they are its guardians. If the Accompong Maroons in their hilly fastness have anything to do with it, there’s a chance that Jamaica will not end up deforested like Haiti—Hurricane Gilbert and land hunger notwithstanding.

The Cockpits seemed a fine place to be, that day, on top of the island, in the sulphur light, rain falling, under the silk cotton tree, with not a satellite dish or antenna in sight. I hadn’t managed to learn much about the secret ceremonies on Kojo Day, but I didn’t mind. I was glad to know the Maroons still had secrets to be kept.

The death of Natty Morgan

A month or two after I returned to England, Natty Morgan’s career as Jamaica’s most wanted man came to an end. Not in the Cockpits, not in Cuba, but back in Kingston, in Riverton City, where his violent career had started. There was no trial. On 19 August 1991 he was shot to death in another police ambush—like his babymother, and like Rhygin and Sandokan before him. In death Natty Morgan’s face was unrecognizable; relatives had to identify him by birthmarks. Many applauded, including Wesley’s brother Eyton George; but the Gleaner’s political columnist demurred once more. “Killing 1,000 Natty Morgans,” he wrote, “will be an exercise in futility… for each one you kill, the social matrix produces another three.” Some months later the Prime Minister, Michael Manley, announced that he was stepping down from the leadership of the country. Cynical observers said he had failed as a capitalist as he had once failed as a socialist.

It’s coming up to the hurricane season in Jamaica now. And there’s continuing political turmoil on the island. There’ll be an election soon. Wesley says there will be some changes, and we should pray for them to be the right ones. Meanwhile in Accompong, it is reported that the Maroon communities celebrated Kojo Day in January at the Kindah Tree, with secret ceremonies followed by public festivities, as they had done each year for the previous two centuries. ★