The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  In Jamaica, burning with the enthusiasms of innumerable revivalist sects, it caused no surprise that one section of the community should have withdrawn into a private world of farcical fantasy, and until the mid-1950s the Ras Tafarians were regarded as harmless vagrant lunatics made more than usually repellent by their indifference to dirt. But the movement was growing; it was attracting, particularly from America, people who were more embittered than resigned; relations with the police deteriorated. And it was only when the movement claimed its first deaths in 1960 that its strength was realized. The attitude of the middle class was one of horror and shame. There were protests when a study team from the University College of the West Indies reported on the movement with sympathetic understanding: this, it was felt, was giving respectability to rabble. While I was in Jamaica one of the convicted Ras Tafarians was due to be hanged. The local evening paper, with its zestful accounts of last hours and last words, generated the atmosphere of the public hanging, almost, it seemed, as a warning to others. So that at last what was farce had turned into grotesque tragedy.

  Nationalism in Surinam, a movement of intellectuals, rejects the culture of Europe. Ras Tafarianism in Jamaica is nothing more than a proletarian extension of this attitude, which it carries to its crazy and logical limit. It resembles African nationalism, which asserts the importance of the ‘African personality’, and is the opposite of middle-class West Indian Negro nationalism, which is concerned only to deny the existence of a specially Negro personality. It is regarded by the largely brown Jamaican middle class as a black lower-class contagion, a sort of backyard Mau-Mau. Your gardener begins to behave strangely; his talk becomes cryptic; he speaks of the promised land of Ethiopia or Saudi Arabia (still a slave country) or even Israel; he starts to grow a beard. The Rastas have got him: you ridicule him or you sack him: henceforth he is unemployable.

  The movement awaits organization and exploitation, by communists (Cuba is just to the north) or by politically ambitious racists. It may, however, frustrate or destroy those who attempt to manipulate it; for Ras Tafarianism is like a mass neurosis and can respond positively only to unreason which is on its own level of unreason. This is its greater danger. On the advice of the University College study team the Jamaican Government decided to send a mission to certain African countries to study the possibilities of Jamaican immigration. This was like treating the symptoms of a neurosis: before the mission could leave, one of its Ras Tafarian members went to prison on a marijuana charge. Repatriation, even if it comes, will not magically remove the Ras Tafarian’s life-long sense of rejection and will not alter the social and economic conditions in Jamaica in which the movement flourishes.

  Jamaica is eighty per cent black; and what cannot be denied is that just as in England the fascists frenziedly proclaim the racial attitudes of the majority, who are scandalized only by the exhibitionism, so in Jamaica the Ras Tafarians express the basic racial attitudes of the majority of the black population. Race – in the sense of black against brown, yellow and white, in that order – is the most important issue in Jamaica today. The hypocrisy which permitted the middle-class brown Jamaican to speak of racial harmony while carefully maintaining the shade distinctions that preserved his privilege is at last provoking anger and creating a thoroughly black racism which could conceivably turn the island into another Haiti.

  The business enterprise of the Chinese and Syrian communities has aroused envy and hostility. And the rich white tourists, enjoying the private white sand beaches of hotels where the charges for one day exceed the average earnings of a Jamaican for a month, are a standing provocation; so that the Tourist Board is now equally concerned with attracting tourists and reconciling the natives to their presence. As someone connected with the ‘industry’ said to me: ‘Chappie pays a lot of money to fly out here. He goes into his hotel, slips into his little bermuda shorts and hot shirt, hangs his little camera round his neck, sticks a cigar in his mouth, steps out into this damned expensive Jamaican winter sunshine. And bonk! What does he see? A poster begging the natives to be nice to him.’

  The Sunday Gleaner of 2 April 1961 carried a whole-page article on the race problem by a student at the University College. In its frank, brutal self-analysis it recalled the mood of the Negroes of British Guiana.

  THE QUESTION OF BLACK AND WHITE:

  WHO HATES WHO – AND WHY

  In a letter to the Sunday Gleaner from an unknown author

  Sometime ago the Hon. R. L. M. Kirkwood made a broadcast in which he condemned the rise of the incidence of hatred of blacks for whites in the island …

  Another worthy gentleman, Mr Barham, has written two letters to ‘The Gleaner’ in which he warned that the people who controlled money in this island were whites, Chinese, Syrians and Jews. He threatened that unless Negroes ceased to abuse and vilify these people they would leave the island and, so to speak, leave the Negroes to stew in their own juice – unemployment and economic stagnation.

  … If the black Jamaican hates other races in the sense that Mr Barnham means then they express their hate differently from other people.

  I feel quite sure that if the Creator offered the black Jamaicans the opportunity to be recreated as white men, eight out of every ten black persons in Jamaica would want to become white … The Negro as a rule shows preference for people of other races … We, the Negroes, love people with fair skins, straight noses, straight hair and blue eyes … You would think education would make a difference but it does not. Right here at University a black girl becomes a beauty queen only if the girls of other types stay out …

  There are comparatively few Negro parents who object when their children take partners of another race. If there is an objection, it is usually grounded in fear that the son-in-law or daughter-in-law of another race will alienate the affection of the son or daughter from the parents …

  The black people of Jamaica has served and slaved for people of other races for many a decade. Our newest masters are the Chinese who are doing a good job of treating Negroes the way white people do. In spite of all they have suffered the black man still likes to serve and honour the white man in preference to his own brethren …

  Chinese shops are going up all around us every day all over Jamaica and good shops they are too. But the Chinese shopkeeper with the quickness of his race has learned to snob [sic] the Negro customer when there are white or fair people around …

  It can’t be by accident that in a country in which 75 per cent of the people are Negroes in almost every bank in Kingston the staff is composed entirely of people of every other race except the Negro race. (The coloured girls in the banks would be offended if you called them Negroes.)

  It is an insult to the Negro race …

  Today the black man, unless he has education, is still a ‘black boy’. In the civil service respectable men with families are called ‘Caleb’, and ‘Williams’ just like that because they happen to be on the subordinate staff. If anybody thinks the black man is satisfied with the status quo, he is mistaken. He wants a change in this social structure geared to help a few and hinder the many; he wants respect and recognition for his status. He may be deciding that if he is not respected he won’t respect anyone. Above all he wants money and economic stability as a race. The saying ‘The black man has no money’ which is true now must not be true in the next thirty years. If a change cannot be effected by social evolution then it will become necessary to use the methods the white man has used so successfully in so many countries. Either way we are going to get what we want.

  As for Mr Barham and the sacred, ‘divinely’ appointed lords and masters of our race, if they cannot tolerate the growing-pains that the black section of society is showing, we wish them god-speed, they may go in peace. Their threats and menaces will not deter us.

  Finally let me say to all black people in this island that envy and abuse of the other races is not the answer to our problems. To solve our problem this is what we must do.

  (i) Respe
ct ourselves.

  (ii) Support our own people first – others after. All other races do this.

  (iii) Our men must show a greater sense of responsibility and physical courage.

  (iv) We must develop our capacity for independent action and do not depend on government for everything.

  (v) We must learn the value of ‘group-consciousness’ and be ready to sacrifice our personal and sectional interests for the good of the race.

  (vi) We have got to wipe out illiteracy and cut illegitimacy among our people.

  (vii) Promiscuity of our men and the looseness of our women is sapping the vitality of our race. Our young men need to marry earlier and bring up children in well-ordered homes: as it is our young men spend most of their time philandering, drinking and carousing generally.

  (viii) Get into business – scrimp and save and expand.

  Not a word, you notice, about the white and black piano keys making harmony together: so far has the nationalism of the twenties and thirties grown more embittered, so close has the intellectual moved to Ras Tafarianism.

  I went to the country to talk to one of the communists ‘in the field’. He received me in a box-like one-room office which stood on stilts and contained two tables, one chair, one typewriter and nothing else. He stood up and began delivering an oration with so many gestures and in such a loud voice that I begged him to sit down and speak more softly. He announced with a slightly crooked smile that he was a man with ‘international connexions’. It had been a long drive, and I was too hot to be frightened or impressed. He said again that he had international connexions. I invited him to have a drink in the Chinese rumshop, where we would at least have more room. He made a speech about the evils of drink. I said if he didn’t come I would go alone. He shut up his little office and we drove to the rumshop. He never gave a straight reply to any question and said with a smile that he had learned ‘caution’. He spoke in pure metaphor. Were the communists gaining strength in his area? ‘The river must flow,’ he said. To another question he replied, ‘We need petrol for the lamp of revolution.’ At one stage he made a long speech about the oppression of the people and the inevitability of revolution. Were they getting help from Cuba? ‘I have learned caution. I am a man with international connexions. Do you think you can bell the cat?’ I felt they were getting no help from Cuba. I asked him how he started. Here he became more conversational and West Indian and told me of his wartime beginnings as an agitator among Jamaican airmen in the R.A.F. ‘I used to be a sort of lawyer for the boys. Whenever they was in hany real trouble I used to tell them, “Boy, your only hope is to start bawling colour prejudice.” ’ The memory amused him. Then, speaking as of a triumph which was yet an injustice, he said, ‘They push me up to a place in Scotland. Not one black man in the place.’ At this stage I saw that the move to the rumshop was an error. The two foolish Jamaicans I had brought with me from Kingston for their local knowledge were drunk. They began to speak against communism in ear-splitting shouts, and my communist, absolutely sober, responded gamely with all his distorted Jamaican Welsh rhetoric. I left them and went to the bar and took some Phensic. The shouting went on. Drink, rhetoric, loud repetitive argument: many of the Jamaican gatherings I went to ended like this.

  So always in Jamaica one lived in two unrelated worlds, the world of the middle class – the businessman’s Jamaican-grand, pseudo-American talk, the women’s chatter about the wages of servants and the treachery of servants – and the vaster, frightening world beyond it. You went to Caymanas for the Jamaica Turf Club meeting. You had to take another trip to the Caymanas of the sugar estates: the unemployed labourers in bright jerseys idling below a tree, their faces sullen with resignation, complaining without passion about the destruction of their vegetable gardens by the estate: ‘Young, young pumpkins,’ they said, and made it sound like murder, though there was clearly another side to the story; the sign on the factory gate: ‘Anyone found eating canes in the yard will be dismissed’; the beautiful black peasant woman with seven children by her ‘present’ and ‘twelve in all, including abortions’: ‘They have no thought for us, down in the dust and the hashes.’

  Beyond the world of refrigerators and motor-cars on hire-purchase (‘Everybody’s car-conscious,’ an English girl told me), the hi-fi record players and the talk of Lawrence Durrell, one found the attitudes, little changed from those which infuriated Trollope a hundred years ago, of people who objected to regular work and were content to live from hand to mouth. Like the man in the rumshop outside Mandeville who had given up his job with the bauxite company because it simply went on and on, and he preferred intermittent employment. ‘When I left the bauxite people,’ he said, ‘I rested myself well for a month, taking my two waters (rum and water) every day.’ Each world made the other unreal; and the radio services overlaid both with an atmosphere of fantasy. The breathless, opulent gaiety of the commercial jingles of Radio Jamaica; the quality service of the Jamaica Broadcasting Company, its talks, features, well-mannered discussions and news-analyses: they both belonged to a settled, confident society. I could not associate them with the people or the land about me, and they seemed no more than irrelevant words and music in the overheated air.

  * * *

  I had been travelling around for nearly seven months. I was getting tired. In Jamaica my diary entries grew shorter and shorter and then stopped altogether. There was nothing new to record. Every day I saw the same things – unemployment, ugliness, overpopulation, race – and every day I heard the same circular arguments. The young intellectuals, whose gifts had been developed to enrich a developing, stable society, talked and talked and became frenzied in their frustration. They were looking for an enemy, and there was none. The pressures in Jamaica were not simply the pressures of race or those of poverty. They were the accumulated pressures of the slave society, the colonial society, the under-developed, over-populated agricultural country; and they were beyond the control of any one ‘leader’. The situation required not a leader but a society which understood itself and had purpose and direction. It was only generating selfishness, cynicism and a self-destructive rage.

  FINALE AT FRENCHMAN’S COVE

  One evening Dr Lewis, the Principal of the University College, said to me, ‘I have an indirect invitation for you. From Grainger Weston. He owns a place on the North Coast called Frenchman’s Cove and wants to offer hospitality to someone connected with the arts.’

  I had heard about Frenchman’s Cove almost as soon as I had got to Jamaica. In a land of expensive hotels – thirteen guineas a day for a cramped double room in Kingston and up to twenty pounds and more on the North Coast – Frenchman’s Cove was said to be the most expensive. No one was sure just how expensive. Some said two thousand American dollars for a couple for a fortnight; some said two thousand five hundred. Lunch cost five guineas, dinner nine. And even so, one Jamaican told me with almost proprietorial pride, you were turned away if it was found that you weren’t in the New York social register.

  It seemed, though, that once you had been accepted and had paid, your every request was granted. You could order exactly what you wanted to eat (‘caviare for breakfast’); you could drink as much as you wanted (‘champagne every hour’); you could take boat trips and air trips around the island; motor-cars were at your disposal, horses, rafts; you could telephone any part of the world. You could even leave Frenchman’s Cove, if you didn’t like it, and stay at a hotel of your choice: Frenchman’s paid.

  For many days after Dr Lewis had spoken to me I heard nothing. A post office strike, one eruption of the prevailing unrest, was followed by a strike of government subordinate workers. I was resignedly preparing to investigate the problems of tourism in Jamaica when the strikes ended and Mr Weston’s invitation came.

  We took the mountain road to the North Coast and then drove east. This part of the coast is not greatly developed; hotels do not screen the sea. The sand is in places greyish, acceptable by the standards of England and even Trinidad,
but disregarded locally. (There are unfounded complaints that hotels have bought up all the white sand beaches, leaving only black sand for Jamaicans: a neat symbol of the racial resentment tourism is exciting.) The road is narrow and winding, not like the tourist road that runs west from Ocho Rios to Montego Bay, which is wide and smooth and reasonably straight and carries hotel signs, real estate signs and signs reminding motorists to drive on the left. We drove past broken-down villages, the unremarkable rural slums of the tropics: decay in lushness: pink-distempered shacks of broken boards and rusting corrugated iron, more ambitious concrete buildings, ugly and stained, dingy cafés stocked with aerated water, cakes and patent medicines, and made bright with enamelled advertisements for soft drinks. We came into Port Antonio, a banana port which is seldom busy and had ceased to grow. Then bush and black sand began once more. It was hard to think of this as a setting for luxury, a hideout for millionaires.

  Presently we found ourselves driving beside a long stone wall. Separate letters attached to the wall spelled out FRENCHMAN’S cove. We turned into the wide drive. The vegetation here was abruptly ordered and open. Beyond the asphalted area gravelled paths led up gentle inclines and disappeared. The grounds were quiet. There were two sports cars, one red, one cream, below the concrete canopy of the lodge, a low stone-and-glass building with clean straight lines. More cars were parked neatly in the sun. I looked with interest and apprehension for millionaires and members of the New York social register. I saw no one. The stillness was unsettling, but the driver behaved as though he drove up to Frenchman’s Cove every day. He drove right under the canopy, came to a stop beside the glass entrance to the lodge, jumped out and opened doors and boot with a decisiveness and noise for which I was grateful.