Quashee and Anancy

Abstract

It was not only the intermediate classes and strata of Jamaican society which were bringing forth new organisations and leaders in the late 1930s. The lowest classes, the articulators of the subordinate moments of the most fundamental contradictions, were also stirring, had indeed begun to move even before the others. For purposes of analysis it has been necessary to separate various developments and treat them in two chapters; it must be remembered that in fact the Jamaican totality produced a tangled web of organisations, ideas and leadership in these years, leading to a variety of actions because it mediated the interests of a range of unevenly developed classes and strata. Nevertheless, it was increasingly the case that it was the Jamaican working class, and to some extent the poor peasants, who were concentrating their consciousness and action and forcing other classes to react to them. At length it was the workers and peasants who took the centre of the stage. From the end of April until almost the middle of June 1938 the starvelings of Jamaica rose in revolt. In many parts of the island they went on strike, marched in demonstrations, looted shops, cut telephone wires, blocked roads, broke down bridges, destroyed crops, besieged local landlords in their houses and even attacked armed police patrols with only sticks and stones. Not all of these things happened everywhere; some parts were much more disturbed than others.