Abstract
At the CPU I arrange to talk further with Mr Swaby. He envisages self-help in Kingston as a prelude to rehousing and owner occupation. It is necessary to create an atmosphere of industry and organization. Rehousing of yard dwellers will have to maintain the ethos of the settlements. The overcrowded middle-class areas in Mr Swaby’s 1952 survey of Kingston are now as densely populated as ever.1
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Notes
Alexander Bedward (1859–1930), was the folk hero and messianic cult leader of a movement (Bedwardism) that in the early 1900s centered on the Jamaica Native Baptist Free Church in August Town (now in northeast Kingston) on the banks of the Hope River. In 1920 Bedward announced that he would ascend to Heaven on December 31, 1920 and descend to earth on January 3, 1921. Later in 1921, when neither event had taken place, Bedward was committed by the colonial authorities to the Belvue Asylum where he later died (Olive Senior, Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage [St Andrew. Jamaica: Twin Guinep Publishers, 2003], 54–55).
M. G. (Mike) Smith (1921–93) was, at the time of our meeting, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at UCWI. A protégé of the Manley family while he was still a schoolboy at Jamaica College, he won the Jamaica Island Scholarship in 1939, attended McGill University, Canada, and then joined the Canadian Army, in which he served in Europe during the Second World War. Graduating with a BA from University College, London in 1948, he carried out fieldwork for his doctorate in Social Anthropology in Northern Nigeria, submitting his thesis in 1951. From 1952 to 1960 he was a research fellow and then senior research fellow at the ISER at UCWI, leaving in 1961 for a professorship in Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author of numerous books and articles on social theory—especially on pluralism and the plural society, Africa and the Caribbean, he was subsequently Professor of Anthropology and Head of Department at University College, London (1969–75), and Professor of Anthropology at Yale University (1978–86). From 1972 to 1977 he was special advisor to the prime minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley. See Douglas Hall, A Man Divided: Michael Garfield Smith: Jamaican Poet and Anthropologist, 1921–1993 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1997).
M. G. Smith, A Framework for Caribbean Studies (1955). Kingston, Jamaica: Extra-Mural Department, University College of the West Indies.
M. G. Smith, West Indian Family Structure (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962)—see Chapter 6 on Kingston (163–197).
These locations coincide closely with my map of the distribution of members of the cult of Ras Tafari based on the 1960 census (Colin G. Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and social Change, 1692–1962 [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1975], Fig. 89, 243).
The Yallahs Valley appears as sample area F in David Edwards, An Economic Study of Small Farming in Jamaica (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University College of the West Indies, 1961).
“Partners” is a system of communal working, whereby each participant in the group takes it in turn to till his land with the help of the others; “day-for-day” involves a peasant borrowing the labor of a neighbor and then returning it on a reciprocal basis (M. G. Smith, A Report on Labour Supply in Rural Jamaica [Kingston: Government Printer, 1956]). Clarendon in 1956, as recalled by Richard Hart (Trevor Munroe, Jamaican Politics: A Marxist Perspective in Transition [Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann, 1990], 150–151), and was still participating successfully in Parish Council elections as a PFM candidate in the Vere area of Clarendon in the early 1960s—see, for example, LSIC Report January 1960, para 7, CO 1031/3708, C410239, TNA, PRO. In February 1961 Sinclair became acting-chairman of the PFM, presumably because of the poor health of its Chairman, Ferdinand Smith, LSIC Report February 1961, para 21, CO 1031/3708, C410239, TNA, PRO.
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Clarke, C. (2016). Kingston and Rural Jamaica. In: Race, Class, and the Politics of Decolonization. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137540782_4
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