Oberlin College anthropologist George Eaton Simpson spent much of 1953 and 1954 engaged in the study of Rastafari communities in Jamaica. Simpson's period of research directly overlapped with the peak of Mau Mau, the war undertaken by dreadlocked guerrilla fighters against British colonialists and their allies in Kenya. Simpson described how Rastafari were aware of the suffering they and Kenyans were experiencing at the hands of British colonialism, a suffering that would surely fade with relocation to their “homeland,” Ethiopia. That transition would be brought in part by Mau Mau, they suggested: “Mau Mau is a war between black men and white men, and the black men are angels of deliverance sent by [the Emperor of Ethiopia] Haile Selassie to drive white men out of Africa.” Once Africa was again “black,” the ultimate solution could be attained, one in which oppressed blacks from across the world, and particularly Jamaica, could return to their ancestral lands. They juxtaposed Jesus, for whom they had been told to “wait,” against Haile Selassie, “Our God and Our King,” who held the promise of immediate liberty.Footnote ² In evoking Mau Mau, poor Rastafari of Kingston's urban slums were claiming pan-African solidarity with Kenyan guerrillas nearly 8,000 miles to the east.

In the past decade, the transnational links that connected North America, Europe, and Africa with the Caribbean during the first half of the twentieth century have been the subject of significant scholarly attention. In an important book, Jason Parker has studied the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean.Footnote ³ More recently, Eric Duke has analyzed the links between the notion of a West Indian federation and the wider black diaspora, and Birte Timm has addressed the Harlem-based Jamaica Progressive League and the role it played in Jamaica's political scene from the 1930s to 1950s.Footnote ⁴ The focus of these works is high politics, and that approach has been reflected in scholarship on the lives, activities, and ideas of major Pan-Africanist figures such as Henry Sylvester Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey.Footnote ⁵ Other recent historical analyses have attended to the ways black activists across the globe sought out those facing similar challenges to procure moral or material assistance, as did Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association with Éamon de Valera's Sinn Féin.Footnote ⁶

But there is a middle- and upper-class ring to many of these associations. Trinidadian intellectual George Padmore's network of letter-writers, or the meetings at Ras Makonnen or Amy Garvey's restaurants in London, or the international defense teams engaged in defending Jomo Kenyatta or the Treason Trial detainees in South Africa—all featured actors of a certain privilege or status.Footnote ⁷ We usually know a great deal about these sorts of figures: we can recount their personal histories, describe their characters and personalities, and outline their activities. We can trace the connections between the Anglican clergyman Michael Scott and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—with their involvement in South-West Africa—or Ghanaian Pan-Africanists and anti-nuclear pacifists Bayard Rustin and Bill Sutherland.Footnote ⁸ Even Keisha Blain's crucial narrative about black female international activism in the first half of the twentieth century concerns women whose names we know.Footnote ⁹ But the activists and pan-Africanists who never met the qualifications for appearing in our archives remain elusive. Their writings, where they exist, rarely achieved what Achille Mbembe calls the required “status” for archival reception, their words and actions deemed too insignificant and difficult to decipher to merit attention.Footnote ¹⁰

It has taken painstaking work to begin to remedy these omissions. Those who have taken on the challenge include Lara Putnam, who has focused on the “experiences and ideas of not-very-powerful people in not-very-prominent places” across the Caribbean region. She uncovers how a range of these actors, including musicians, migrant workers, and churchgoers, sought to fight against a “white supremacist” global system during the first third of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹ In a similar vein, Robert Vinson takes on the “gospel of Garveyism” in the 1920s and 1930s across the Atlantic, in South Africa.Footnote ¹² Later scholarship from the era of Black Power, too, is useful: Monique Bedasse's Jah Kingdom ties the international dimensions of the Rastafari repatriation movement to Tanzania, revealing the engagement of little-known actors in defining and living pan-Africanism.Footnote ¹³ Quito Swan, too, outlines a little-known Melanesian episode in which peoples of West Papua identified as part of a black African diaspora.Footnote ¹⁴ This article draws inspiration from these scholars, and focuses on what Putnam describes as “black internationalism” between the eras of Garvey and Black Power. By the 1950s, the children of Jamaica's Garveyites had come of age, raised on stories of the “black messiah,” and with their own radical ideas. Like the Rastafari, many were inspired by events in Kenya, which spurred visions of their own diasporic connections and dreams. Theirs were alternative visions to the Pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah and his ilk.

At the core of this essay sits Mau Mau, one of the most significant anti-colonial wars in British Africa. Though it has occupied the attentions of many scholars, they have tended to treat it in isolation, perhaps an accidental product of its rich but narrow historiography.Footnote ¹⁵ Terence Ranger's observation that, “The question of the international repercussions of Mau Mau has been oddly neglected even while analyses of Mau Mau itself have become more and more sophisticated,” is as pertinent today as it was two decades ago.Footnote ¹⁶ Inserting Mau Mau into the context of Jamaica during the 1950s permits us to understand the long reach of the movement and how it activated social consciousness in other parts of the colonized world. Mau Mau divided Jamaicans in a way that Garveyism and the anti-apartheid struggle never did. It pulled at the country's social fabric, intersecting with lower-class black radical protest, Africanism, and the Rastafari, laying bare the divisions that the decolonizing nation faced.

Shifting perspective from George Padmore's study to the shanties of western Kingston forces us to probe more deeply the term “Pan-Africanism.” Long associated with Padmore and Nkrumah in the 1950s, it has been plagued by accusations of elitism since the days of Du Bois and the “Talented Tenth.” Some today go so far as to charge that orthodox Pan-Africanism has signally failed to address the condition of the masses across the entire twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, difficulty in defining the term's use (made more complicated by those who manifested its values before it entered common parlance) has led scholars including Putnam to prefer “black internationalism.”Footnote ¹⁸ In its plainest sense, however, pan-Africanism represents an affiliation between, and mutual support of, Africans at “home” and in the diaspora. Poor Jamaicans in the 1950s would have appreciated the simplicity of such a concept and all it represented, but not the elitism with which it was frequently associated. During that decade, indeed, they would reject the Pan-Africanism of Padmore and South African commentator and novelist Peter Abrahams. This article therefore takes its lead from George Shepperson who referred to “pan-Africanism … with a small ‘p’” to distinguish followers of men like Garvey with the “Du Bois line.”Footnote ¹⁹ Mau Mau represented a pan-Africanism that stood at odds with that of Nkrumah, and most closely aligned with, and was the forerunner of, Walter Rodney, Stokely Carmichael, and Black Power in the Caribbean. It was a more radical, violent, and black-focused vision.

The bulk of pan-Africanist scholarship, including that cited above, focuses on direct, physical connection between intellectuals, their activism, and protest movements. A far less explored though equally vital aspect is the connections between those who had no direct contact with one another. Activists in Jamaica, after all, did not meet with, write to, or hold discussions with Kenya's Mau Mau; it was impossible given the impracticalities of long-distance travel for the Jamaican poor, not to mention Kenya's State of Emergency in the 1950s. Robbie Shilliam is one of the few to have addressed these less tangible links in a recent book that considers how activism in the African diaspora has resonated in the South Pacific. (In both locations, after all, people were responding to a similar colonial state.) Following Shilliam, this paper questions why, and in what ways, Jamaicans separated by thousands of miles from Kenya came to build the histories, create the stories, and forge the mental ties to bind themselves to others they perceived as being engaged in a similar project.Footnote ²⁰

*****

Until recently, most observers were content to view the late 1940s and 1950s as a period dominated by the Cold War and conflict between east and west. But as Matthew Connelly has convincingly shown, these issues were “overlaid” by “visions of North-South conflict.” For United States President Dwight Eisenhower and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Alan Dulles, a more “disturbing prospect [was] … an expanding and escalating conflict with ‘the great mass of mankind which [wa]s non-white and non-European.’”Footnote ²¹ If the links between Mau Mau and Jamaica were horizontal—placing two “peripheries” in conversation with one another—then Eisenhower and Dulles were concerned with vertical linkages: the west facing off against non-aligned nations where men and women with black and brown skin lived.

In this context, the Colonial Office sent a secret circular to its Caribbean territories in mid-1953. The war in Kenya was barely nine months old: the governor had declared a state of emergency on 20 October 1952, marking the commencement of guerrilla fighting in the colony's center. The Colonial Office sought to discover whether news about Mau Mau was having any effect in the islands of the British Caribbean, and what sort of propaganda might be useful in combatting potential sympathies. The responses were worrying: at the Colonial Office, Charles Bonington wrote to his colleague who headed the Information Department informing him about a telegram he had received from Jamaica and British Honduras (Belize): “The less we say about Mau Mau the better. At present we should certainly be unwise to give it any more publicity.”Footnote ²² In British Guiana (Guyana), came the reply, Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party was, “assiduous in depicting the Mau Mau as national heroes resisting Imperialist oppression.”Footnote ²³ R. H. Young, the information officer there, described, “widespread support for Mau Mau throughout the Caribbean, based on purely racial grounds.”Footnote ²⁴ The potential for Mau Mau to inspire anger and rebellion in the Caribbean was clearly cause for unease in both London and the islands.

But Young's simplistic explanation—an affinity based on “purely racial grounds”—was a significant misreading of the complexities of colonial societies in the Caribbean, and especially in Jamaica. There, Alexander Bustamante—the colony's chief minister, who typically appeared on the front page of his party's press organ resplendent in white tie—would have felt no more affinity with Mau Mau than the governor of Kenya himself. Bustamante had a well-known penchant for dismissing radical black groups out of hand, something it is possible to trace in his correspondence as early as the 1930s.Footnote ²⁵ Like Bustamante, many of Jamaica's middle and upper classes viewed the Kenyan conflict as an expression of atavistic savagery. Interviews with those who attended school during the 1950s reveal consistent tropes about Africa that provided the context for comprehending Mau Mau. All emphasized the continent's foreignness: Africa was discussed as the location of “cruelty,” safari animals, and “jungle,” and in many cases was entirely absent from schools’ educational curricula.Footnote ²⁶

In the Caribbean, information bulletins and news items written in London and Nairobi were dispatched to the colonies for reprinting or syndication in the local press. They served to emphasize these tropes by focusing on the violence and savagery of Mau Mau fighters. This approach was especially pronounced following the notorious massacre at Lari on 26 March 1953. A Mau Mau attack on the village of Lari left 120 bodies “dead or grievously injured”—including many women and children—before security forces took vengeance with reprisals later that night.Footnote ²⁷ Jamaica's mainstream press depicted the event in sensationalist style. The Star told how Mau Mau had eviscerated pregnant women in front of their wailing children.Footnote ²⁸ Lari was the Gleaner's lead story: it produced syndicated material from the Associated Press on its front page describing how the “dread secret society” had “massacre[d] a village.” Thomas Wright's editorial described Mau Mau as a “barbaric sect … [which was] fiendishly bloodthirsty and grimly inhuman.”Footnote ²⁹ Because few independent journalists were permitted to operate in Kenya, most Caribbean news items were drawn from the Associated Press, Reuters, and government information officers in Britain. The latter also edited and repackaged missives emanating from the 331 employees of Kenya's swollen information services.Footnote ³⁰

Public figures representing the colony's middle class gave voice to the threat of Mau Mau in Jamaica. Vere Johns, the Star's long-time conservative columnist, was aware of potential similarities between the Jamaican and Kenyan situations, describing how land hunger was comparable in both locations. The groundswell of support for Mau Mau in Jamaica concerned him. Johns knew how ordinary Jamaicans were inspired by Mau Mau's radical actions: “There are elements in Jamaica who preach violence as a means of achieving self-government for this country,” he noted, and “They fasten on the Kenya incidents with relish and directly convey the impression that Jamaica needs some local Mau Mau society to correct its wrongs.”Footnote ³¹ The editors at the colony's most radical mainstream newspaper, Public Opinion, used their daily column to warn that “swift retribution” would descend on any Jamaicans who believed that a “miniature form of Mau Mau” could provide a solution to the nation's ailments.Footnote ³² Stuart Hall's posthumously published autobiography permits us to understand this reaction. Familiar Stranger reveals the fascination with, but fear of, black consciousness, to which Hall's family reacted with a “bewildered horror,” fearing the potential of the poor and disenfranchised rising up and upsetting the established social hierarchy.Footnote ³³

The reactions of middle- and upper-class Jamaicans to the Kenyan conflict were thus quickly polarized from the lower classes. The former vociferously backed the educated Kikuyu Jomo Kenyatta, erroneously convicted for “managing Mau Mau” by mid-1953, a movement for which in reality he had few sympathies. They also lamented the “Kenya situation” more broadly, but they stopped short of throwing support behind Mau Mau itself. Kenyatta, who would lead Kenya to independence as prime minister and later became its president, was logically attractive to Jamaica's middle class: he was a comparatively conservative politician who favored constitutional change, achieved via political meetings, marches, and petitions. The leader of the Kenya African Union (the colony's foremost African political party), Kenyatta's course of study at the London School of Economics represented high standing to members of Jamaica's status-conscious middle class. Moreover, he represented a traditional and appealing vision of Pan-Africanism, the result of his active participation in the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. Kenyatta was thus perceived as a “respectable” connection to a shared history of black oppression that might be mobilized in the interests of national independence.

From the early 1950s, therefore, interested members of Jamaica's middle classes took up Kenyatta's cause. The People's Freedom Movement, a left-leaning political party in Jamaica under the leadership of trade unionist and Marxist Richard Hart, consistently kept Kenyatta in its newsletter throughout the mid-1950s, holding street meetings and drawing attention to conditions in the colony's prisons and detention camps.Footnote ³⁴ George Padmore echoed similar tropes in his regular columns in Public Opinion. Padmore had criticized Kenyatta during the 1930s for his unreliability and moderate approach to politics, but as an anti-colonial leader, his status could not be questioned. But perhaps none encapsulated this mixture more than Dudley Thompson, the Jamaican lawyer and friend of Kenyatta who participated in the latter's legal defense in 1953.Footnote ³⁵ Thompson described Kenyatta in the Jamaican press as a typical “nationalist” leader, and his wife spoke publicly about the “peaceful, timid” Kikuyu, “rotting behind the barbed wire of concentration camps.”Footnote ³⁶ Through their efforts and those of others, Jamaicans contributed to a fund to aid Kenyatta's defense. But it was one thing to raise awareness about Kenya's war or Kenyatta's detention, and another to support Mau Mau. Thompson's views on the movement were largely shaped by Kenyatta, who had told Thompson that Mau Mau was a “disease” that had “spoiled” Kenya and “must be buried.”Footnote ³⁷ Thompson reflected these opinions in 1955 when he “denounced Mau Mau as a savage society” in Jamaica.Footnote ³⁸ (Thompson's impact was significant because he was one of the leading pan-Africanist voices in Jamaica during the 1950s, lecturing continuously about Africa and the possibilities for Jamaicans to emigrate there.) These themes were mirrored on a global scale at the Bandung Conference in 1955. Delegates from twenty-nine nations drew attention to conflicts across the colonized world. But while Algeria, South Africa, and Morocco commanded repeated comment, Kenya barely warranted mention, and none uttered the term “Mau Mau.”Footnote ³⁹ Fighting apartheid was an issue upon which all could agree; Mau Mau was messy and opaque.Footnote ⁴⁰

The penalties for middle- and upper-class Jamaicans who offered support for Mau Mau were severe. One man living in the leafy suburb of Mona, near the university, remembered that if you spoke about Mau Mau, or even “raise[d] the subject,” people would “automatically say Rasta[fari],” a label of social exclusion in the 1950s.Footnote ⁴¹ The risks were especially high for public figures. In his Public Opinion editorial of 11 April 1953, the Canadian-born Jamaican Fred Wilmot addressed Mau Mau. For several months, Wilmot had published articles about Kenya that featured a range of contrasting views, even including one by the doyenne of Kenya's settlers, Elspeth Huxley. Clearly well informed on Mau Mau, by April Wilmot had reached the conclusion that Mau Mau was a genuine “revolution” against Kenya's “constituted authority.” “I find myself in strong sympathy with the revolution,” he opined, and suggested that the United Nations should take up the case. Wilmot was a popular voice in Jamaica whose opinion carried weight, especially because he also hosted a program on current affairs on Radio Jamaica. Five days later, while waiting to go on air, Wilmot was summarily dismissed, with station manager Bill McLurg declining to explain why, but noting that he had suggested that Wilmot not publish his article of 11 April.Footnote ⁴²

For the men and women of Jamaica's middle class, Africa held an odd position. Publicly, one might state one's affiliation with the continent, and in particular express sympathy and brotherhood with its inhabitants. But the reality was that few of these Jamaicans viewed themselves as having much in common with African peoples beyond genetics. Hall would describe this separation as reflecting the “two Jamaicas”: the white and brown country, to which he belonged, and the masses of lower-class black Jamaica, utterly separate both physically and mentally. This position stood in stark contrast to that expressed by Jamaica's lower classes, especially in Kingston's slums, where support for Mau Mau bubbled. This sympathy was inspired in the squalor and deprivation in which so many lived, like their counterparts in central Kenya. Though Jamaica's economy expanded annually at a rate of 16 to 17 percent during the first half of the 1950s, the benefits did not trickle down. Unemployment stood at 120,000 in 1957, approximately 18 percent of the workforce.Footnote ⁴³ Michael Manley was, like Padmore, a columnist at Public Opinion, and he would become Jamaica's prime minister in 1972. Manley described the scene in western Kingston in terms that reflected the socialist platform he would later advocate for the nation: “Kingston's masses are angry. They are angry because they are hungry. They are angry because they have been abused for too long…. Kingston rumbles.” An editorial on the same page described Jamaica's predicament as “explosive.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Jomo Kenyatta also became an inspirational figure for the lower classes during the 1950s. While Kenyatta appealed to Jamaica's middle class as a scholar and statesman, the island's marginalized saw him as the unquestioned mastermind of Mau Mau and based their positive appraisal on that belief. In interviews in Kingston, men and women remember Kenyatta as hugely popular, and that “the masses was with [him],” as one man put it.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such was the degree to which Kenyatta inspired this affection that reggae artist Winston Rodney would soon take Kenyatta's nickname—“Burning Spear”—as his stage name in a career that has lasted almost half a century. It was, in part, Kenyatta's highly publicized trial that served to keep him in the public eye and bolster his appeal. In early 1953, Major General Hinde had determined that widespread press coverage of Kenyatta's trial would serve as an important part of British propaganda, in an effort that officials soon realized was more likely to create sympathy and support for Kenyatta than anything else.Footnote ⁴⁶ Jamaicans, indeed, sympathized with Kenyatta for his detention. As one man put it, referencing the common experience of both men, “He was like the [Nelson] Mandela of those times.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Careful analysis of a range of newspapers from the 1950s reveals repeated meetings, sometimes three or four per week, held to draw attention to the situation in Kenya. Some involved formal organizations like the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In December 1952, at a meeting ostensibly to deal with a reorganization of the UNIA's Kingston branch, Amy Jacques Garvey—noted activist and second wife of Marcus Garvey—appeared unexpectedly.Footnote ⁴⁸ Speaking about Kenya at length, she tied Mau Mau to the black struggle across the globe, suggesting that only when black peoples had instilled fear of violent reprisal in their oppressors would indignities like lynching in the United States and the Emergency in Kenya end. She drew “round upon round of applause.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Several months later, in Franklin Town on the island's north coast, Garvey and Councilor Cleveland Walker took on Wilmot's firing from Public Opinion. Aware of the power Mau Mau-related topics conveyed, they suggested Wilmot's expulsion actually represented “colour prejudice” in Jamaica.Footnote ⁵⁰ Many more meetings, however, were more spontaneous. Informal meetings enjoyed the advantage of being able to avoid the cumbersome process of applying for permission from the police, which often took several days and was frequently denied. One Thursday night in January 1953, people arrived in such a manner in Jones Town, a shanty to the east of Trench Town. With apparently little preplanning or organization, two thousand people came together to pass a resolution against the “barbaric and terroristic practices” of the British in Kenya, and call for Kenyatta's release.Footnote ⁵¹ Across Kingston, men and women met to discuss Mau Mau, and raise funds in support of the movement.

Mau Mau reverberated far beyond the confines of western Kingston, long the colony's hotbed for radicalism. In Johnson Town, near Lucea on the island's west coast, Mau Mau was raised in a series of People's National Party (PNP) meetings. It was often tied to South African Prime Minister D. F. Malan's apartheid regime, considered the most egregious system of discrimination against peoples of color. Reports of the Jamaica Constabulary suggest there was persistent argument and anger between ranking members of the PNP and those who attended. In one meeting in April 1953, Mr. O. B. Rose—once a farm worker in the United States—was told by the chairman that he had to stop speaking about Mau Mau, something that precipitated a “heated argument.”Footnote ⁵² On several occasions, Rose expressed rage at the indignities inflicted on “coloured people” across the globe at British hands, and read aloud articles from Public Opinion and the Star about Mau Mau and Wilmot's firing, described as an “Act of Malanism.”Footnote ⁵³ Speeches like Rose's inspired others to stand up and declare Rose a relative moderate, and ask why the PNP had failed to address these international situations, which they viewed as a variant of similar actions taken in Jamaica by the government, then involved in a major campaign of slum clearances.Footnote ⁵⁴ Sedley Williams of Annotto Bay, on Jamaica's north coast, used the press as a mouthpiece to express his anger. He wrote to the editor of Public Opinion to describe the Mau Mau war as “unfortunate Negros … being hunted.” Calling for anyone with “the slightest Negro blood” to be enraged, he continued: “Regardless of how dreadful communism might be it cannot be as disgraceful to mankind as what the Englishmen are doing [to] my colour … the Negroes down Kenya are our brothers not brute beasts.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In June, a Mr. Barker followed a well-trodden path in rejecting the PNP's political program and asking why topics like “Mau Mau, Kenya and Dr. Malan” remained outside the focus of discussion.Footnote ⁵⁶ Councilor Walker described that unemployment sat at the crux of people's anger and that Jamaica would soon hear of a local Mau Mau uprising unless the government—which he described as being “afraid” of Mau Mau though it was geographically distant—took measures to rectify the situation.Footnote ⁵⁷

This public reaction requires confronting the question as to how, and in what form, Jamaica's marginalized peoples gained their information about Mau Mau. Certainly, Mau Mau was never far from the front pages of the mainstream press after October 1952. Coverage in both Public Opinion and the Star was sensationalist, typically describing violent oath taking ceremonies, slashing deaths, and the mutilation of animals.Footnote ⁵⁸ Some Jamaicans, as noted, considered these acts of violence entirely appropriate. But others dismissed this reporting and preferred to listen to a wide variety of actors in Jamaica who offered more attractive interpretations. Padmore, for instance, had spent late 1952 and early 1953 writing his “Africa Report” in Public Opinion. (This was, importantly, even before several scandals appeared concerning the conduct of British troops in Kenya.) In these pieces, Padmore avoided directly supporting Mau Mau, but depicted its appearance as the product of “fascism” and “white supremacy.” He suggested that reports of violence were exaggerated, and sometimes ended his report with “Africans unite!”Footnote ⁵⁹ It is difficult to know precisely the degree to which Padmore was directly responsible for a wider framing of Mau Mau in Pan-Africanist terms, for certainly Mau Mau's aims were never pan-Africanist, and many would argue not even nationalist in focus.Footnote ⁶⁰

Padmore's framing of African issues in Pan-Africanist terms was bolstered by a myriad of visitors who came to Jamaica to speak on African topics. Some familiar organizations were consistently active: the Ethiopian World Federation and UNIA, in particular, organized events on African topics almost every month. Ken Hill's newly formed National Labour Party took Garvey's UNIA's colors as its own and “Back to Africa” was a consistent policy platform.Footnote ⁶¹ Fred Evans's short-lived United Negro Party was devoted to little more than fostering Garvey's policies “whatever the consequences.”Footnote ⁶² The names of many others, though, appear nowhere but in the middle pages of the odd newspaper issue. A Toro prince named Akiki Niabongo visited Jamaica in 1950 and was the inspiration for a campaign for the teaching of African languages in Jamaica two years later. A United Nations African scholar, Nicholas Avoti, stayed for two months in 1952 teaching a welfare course.Footnote ⁶³ In 1953, a D. K. Asante came to Jamaica from the Gold Coast for several months during which he gave talks and learned about Jamaican community and healthcare systems as a way to assist “Africa.”Footnote ⁶⁴ These regular exchanges involving African visitors temporarily resident in Jamaica inspired debate and brought forth perspectives missing from the newspapers.

*****

In the second half of 1954 and in 1955, the parish of St. Andrew, with Kingston at its heart, experienced a wave of violence from one of the most prominent criminal gangs in pre-independence Jamaica: Mau Mau. The press from the period reports weekly incidents implicating the gang, which included violence, intimidation, and armed robberies, involving both men and women. That a Jamaican gang borrowed its name from Kenya should come as little surprise: such international appropriations were common (Kenyan Mau Mau fighters took names such as Hirohito, China, and Communist, for instance). By adopting the name “Mau Mau,” gang members were taking advantage of Mau Mau's fearsome reputation, aware of the terror it inspired in the middle and upper classes.Footnote ⁶⁵ As a former member of the gang explained, the name, “signal[ed] to white Jamaicans, the British colonial population and all white people living in Jamaica, that the intention of these gangsters was to kill them in the same way that the Mau Mau were killing whites in Kenya.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Predictably, the Jamaican press pulled language from Kenya to describe the gang, typically reporting how it “terrorized” Kingston residents. Some of the more hysterical reporting stated that member initiations included shedding human blood with a knife.Footnote ⁶⁷

The sorts of symbols that permitted Jamaica's middle and upper classes to demonstrate their status—education, good employment, and so forth—were largely unavailable to the poor. But, as Clinton Hutton demonstrates in an important article, gang membership provided opportunities for the youth whose futures were otherwise “devoid of optimism.” His interviews with former Mau Mau in Jamaica reveal how joining a gang was a response to the daily prejudices of the colonial system. Respect was earned from the “audaciously bold reckless courage, defiance and impish adventurousness” gangsters demonstrated, which produced a “degree of admiration for badmanism among the populace.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Being a member of Mau Mau or another gang was a way to garner success beyond the confines of the “brown man” standards of the island.

It appears that Mau Mau's physical struggle in Kenya evoked the Jamaican experience of resisting slavery and its colonial progeny. The all-encompassing experience of slavery, in one of its most brutal manifestations, sat at the core of Jamaican society. Stuart Hall, aged eighteen in 1950, remembered the institution and its successor, colonialism, as “dominating, [and] recurring” in the Jamaican worldview.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the 1920s and 1930s, supporters of Marcus Garvey had brought the experience of slavery and its colonial legacy into mainstream debate, fusing that history with contemporary activism in a way that predated the other Caribbean islands. Resistance to the slave system and its colonial remnants was a crucial part of the poor black Jamaican psyche, an orientation that remained just as pertinent decades later when Bob Marley raised it in “Redemption Song.”Footnote ⁷⁰ By the 1950s, the children of Garveyites had reached early adulthood, raised on tales of those who had fought against the British system. They told stories about Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, hanged on successive days in October 1865 for their roles in the Morant Bay uprising.Footnote ⁷¹ British administrators frequently commented on the importance of taking into account the experience of slavery while serving on the island.Footnote ⁷² Moreover, few drew a distinction between historic slavery and the colonial system that followed. For the novelist Victor Stafford Reid, the British response to the Kenya emergency was easily comprehensible to him, since it was simply a repetition of that at Morant Bay in 1865.Footnote ⁷³ It reflected a long history of battling against the slave system and its plantation society remnants.Footnote ⁷⁴

Interviews with men and women who lived in poorer parts of Kingston during the 1950s reveal how Mau Mau's underdog struggle was inspirational. The Kenya emergency, after all, with its system of “detention and rehabilitation” camps, lasted until January 1960, making it an ever-present topic of discussion throughout the decade. One man interviewed in Greenwich Town, a low-income neighborhood adjoining Trench Town, described Mau Mau in terms of the obstacles stacked against them. Without guns, just “sharpened machetes” (the common tool of both Jamaican and Kenyan farmers), Mau Mau was living proof of the fight one had to undertake to survive: “Every man supposed to fight for his rights in life,” he explained. As a shopkeeper—and missing an eye from a street fight in his youth—this was inspirational: “That's the life I love,” he said.Footnote ⁷⁵ Another man stated that he “would have loved to join the movement,” but that the challenge in doing so was a logistical one: “[You] have to go to London to go to Africa,” he pointed out, and Britain would have blocked such a move.Footnote ⁷⁶

Mau Mau's appeal also had to do with land. In addition to focusing on Mau Mau's violent aspects, the Jamaican press had depicted the movement as aiming to drive the British from Kenya and reclaim the land for its people. Mau Mau formally referred to itself, after all, as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (though this descriptor rarely appeared in the Jamaican press). For the Jamaican poor, the issue of land hunger resonated deeply. Its roots were, once more, in the nineteenth century: in the years following emancipation, the government had raised the sale price of land and implemented restrictions that prevented most black Jamaicans from owning any.Footnote ⁷⁷ The lack of land was felt keenly among Rastafari. During the 1930s, one of the movement's primary formulators, Leonard Howell, had built a commune for over one thousand landless Jamaicans high in the hills of St. Catherine, named Pinnacle. It was a semi-autonomous commune run under Howell's laws that symbolized a new vision of living (or “livity”) for squatters from Kingston's slums. Howell had chosen the site for its proximity to Sligoville, the first Jamaican liberated village after the end of slavery. Pinnacle represented self-sufficiency and independence for hundreds of Kingston's poor who streamed up into the hills. The yearning for land among poor Jamaicans was tied to Ethiopia and Africa: since the 1930s, Rastafari had spoken loudly about their desire to re-cross the Atlantic Ocean, and rumors about repatriation circulated like a “blazing fire.”Footnote ⁷⁸

As a result, Jamaica's poor were deeply concerned with the practicalities of travel to Africa. It reflected how they perceived of “Africa,” and their connection to it, in a different way than did the upper and middle classes. But how did they think of the continent?Footnote ⁷⁹ Did they speak unproblematically about it, essentializing Africa into one “country?”Footnote ⁸⁰ This is a topic that has divided scholars, too: arguments over the notion of “Africa” within pan-Africanism and African and African American culture have swirled through these fields since the 1980s.Footnote ⁸¹ For poor Jamaicans, Africa operated on two levels. First, as argued above, it was inspirational and represented a vision of living and behavior that contrasted the poor conditions in which they were forced to exist. In this sense “Africa” operated as a touchstone in a similar vein as it did for interested middle- and upper-class Jamaicans, though in a slightly different way. Yet it also represented an additional, physical space where a new life could be crafted. Wealthy Jamaicans tended to view such itinerant aims as at best a pipedream, and at worst suggestive of mental illness.Footnote ⁸²

This was emphatically demonstrated in the “Back to Africa” movement during the 1950s. “Back to Africa” is usually discussed in the context of the Rastafari, whose desire to “return” to Ethiopia is well documented. But decades earlier Garvey had described blacks as similar to the “children of Israel,” yearning for the “promised land” of Africa from which they had been exiled.Footnote ⁸³ He had spoken publicly in support of the Ethiopian side during the Italian invasion in 1935 (though he was critical of Haile Selassie).Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, in 1959, when Rastafari poured down to Kingston's waterfront to await passage to Africa, inspired by the Reverend Claudius Henry, they were joined by thousands who were not members of the faith.Footnote ⁸⁵ For many, it was not the first time they had sold their meager possessions and arrived at the docks ready to leave.Footnote ⁸⁶ The notion that a ship would arrive and transport you to a place where opportunities existed for housing, jobs, and a better life hardly stretched the bounds of reality for working class Jamaicans, though many have viewed it as odd. Garvey, like thousands of others, had himself lived and worked in Costa Rica, Panama, and Harlem in New York City, and founded the iconic Black Star Line, a vehicle for the transport of blacks. During the early 1950s, squatters in Trench Town had sung, “We want a place to live! Or send us back to Africa!” as bulldozers of the Central Housing Authority destroyed their homes.Footnote ⁸⁷

The potential for migration was largely dependent on the attitude of the governments potentially sending, and receiving, these citizens. Many of those wishing to migrate had a more concrete plan than simply traveling to “Africa.” In the 1940s and 1950s, they focused on Liberia, which was often a hotter topic of conversation than Ethiopia. During the 1940s and 1950s, Jamaica's government had on several occasions investigated the possibilities of formal migration to Liberia and other regions of Africa.Footnote ⁸⁸ And as early as 1950, Jamaica's acting colonial secretary had written to Liberia's honorary consul in Kingston describing “numerous requests” from the public for assistance in traveling there.Footnote ⁸⁹

This received added impetus from Liberian President William V. S. Tubman's visit to Jamaica in 1954. Crowds flocked to greet the visitor in an outpouring of excitement. Travel agents took out advertisements in the daily press offering passage to Liberia (“Liberia Calls You”), though of course the cost of passage was far beyond the means of the lower classes.Footnote ⁹⁰ One poet celebrated the visit in verse: “President V. S. Tubman! We'd like to go home, now!”Footnote ⁹¹ In a guest column for Public Opinion, Harlem-based journalist W. A. Domingo noted, “It used to be fashionable for Jamaicans of colour to boast of their European connections, however slight, while deprecating or completely ignoring their ties with … Africa.” Accusing Bustamante of being the primary exponent of such an approach, Domingo noted that the chief minister had begun to realize that playing up African connections was a way to gain traction with the colony's youth.Footnote ⁹² Hundreds of Jamaicans began the process of saving money and procuring documentation to make the journey, despite long odds. Their tenacity was rewarded: by 1969, an official at the British Embassy in Monrovia could describe the “substantial community of Jamaicans” resident in the country, noting that they had been able to achieve economic success and prestige as a result of their strong education.Footnote ⁹³

*****

These events and debates catalyzed a public contest over Africa and pan-Africanism between the lower and middle/upper classes in Jamaica. At least on the surface, it appeared that more people now held positive perceptions of Africa than in the past. The mid-1950s, after all, had seen the rapid development of a number of pan-Africanist groups featuring members who belonged to different social classes, ranging from the Brotherhood Solidarity of United Ethiopians, to the Ethiopian Coptic Faith, to the Kings of Kings Mission. Many of these groups were affiliated with the Ethiopian World Federation (revitalized in Jamaica in 1955 by Mamie Richardson's visit to the island).Footnote ⁹⁴ As the 1950s progressed, there was no more significant episode than Ghana's impending independence. Jamaica's mainstream press had covered the colony's constitutional developments during the mid-1950s, building to a fever pitch in the months preceding 6 March 1957. Kwame Nkrumah, who would become that nation's first president, was feted by all. Politically and publicly, both Norman Manley (who succeeded Bustamante as chief minister) and Bustamante himself did all they could to align themselves with this wave. Manley, in particular, had ground to make up: a “brown man,” he had represented a dressmaker who had sued Marcus Garvey for libel in 1930.Footnote ⁹⁵ During the 1940s, he (and Morris Cargill) had again taken on Garvey by representing an African American man who was suing the UNIA for unpaid salary.Footnote ⁹⁶ Manley attended Ghana's independence day celebrations, and in speeches delivered there lauded Garvey's contribution to Jamaican society. Returning to a hero's welcome in Kingston, Manley was carried shoulder-high by his supporters along lower King Street near the docks. He tied his PNP's struggle to that of Ghana: lamenting their slow progress in Jamaica, Manley attacked the constitution of 1944 which gave limited self-government, and the Jamaica Labour Party which won elections that year: “When I think of what befell our cause in 1944 when it got into the hands of the wrong people who care nothing of these things; when I think that we could have been there [fully independent] now!”Footnote ⁹⁷ The PNP set about raising funds for the 156 South African activists (including Nelson Mandela) detained in the “Treason Trial” that lasted from 1956 until 1961.Footnote ⁹⁸

But beneath the surface, it was clear that for Jamaica's politicians the connection was little more than a handy touchstone. On the eve of Ghana's independence, the editors of Public Opinion used their column to laud the inspirational example of Ghana's success. They noted the historic links between Ghana and the West Indies, but little more. They cautioned, too, about the “outmoded and destructive tribalism” that Ghanaians had to avoid, and continued to suggest that a colonial-style agenda of development would be the most practical way forward.Footnote ⁹⁹ More pressing was the experience of West Indians working in Britain who faced discrimination in jobs and housing.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Perhaps nowhere was this trope clearer than when Bustamante labeled Ghana “not as civilized as Jamaica” on the floor of parliament, which forced Manley to apologize to the “world at large” for Bustamante's “bad manners” and “ignorance.” “When did he go there [Africa] to learn about African civilization and Africans?” asked Manley rhetorically, taking the opportunity to play to his constituents, relabeling “Ghana” as “Africa.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

The period was a pivotal one, coming at a moment of reorientation for Pan-Africanism. The global outlook Garvey had represented—a united community of millions of blacks—was a powerful unifying force. But the requirements of forming decolonized states had forced even staunch Pan-Africanists like Nkrumah to focus concretely on nation-al politics. The approach was even more rigidly formalized in the 1960s as African nations resisted secessionist efforts and various federations appeared and vanished. The causes were several: on one level it was geographical, as black internationalists in the United States found themselves limited by McCarthyist legislation that cut off their abilities to travel and connect their struggle to that of decolonizing nations. In some instances, the temptations of a neat pathway offered by orthodox nationalism proved too great. But there was a change in the personas too: grassroots intellectuals, their names often untraceable, were beginning to challenge the Padmores and Du Boises, for few had missed the “great irony,” as Simon Gikandi puts it, that “the men and women who met to plot the future of Pan-Africanism were also the most westernized of colonial subjects.”Footnote ¹⁰² These activists were fighting for their place at the forefront of the battle for rights encapsulated in the civil rights movement, and later Black Power.

In Jamaica, the traditional vision of Pan-Africanist thought was represented in the media by Padmore and Peter Abrahams. Padmore was a constant presence in Jamaica: his African Opinion was widely read, and he wrote in the pages of Public Opinion intermittently throughout the 1950s. Padmore was both occupied by and fascinated with Africa's impending decolonization. In 1956, he published the important Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. He devoted chapters thirteen and fourteen to explicating the causes and events of Mau Mau, but maintained that among colonial systems, the British provided “the greatest possibility for dependent peoples to attain self-determination along constitutional lines.”Footnote ¹⁰³ “Mau-Mau!” he wrote on a Christmas card to St. Clair Drake in 1955, showing his “approval” of the movement, noted the African American scholar, while consistently lauding Mohandas Gandhi's non-violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ St. Clair Drake drew Padmore's attention to an odd distinction in Pan-Africanism or Communism? “I looked at his book,” remembered Drake, “and the first whole part of it was about Marcus Garvey. ‘Look, you're talking about blackness throughout the whole first part,’” he told Padmore, but “now you're saying that an African is anybody who believes in ‘one man one vote.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These sorts of contradictions became ever clearer in the 1960s, as African nations became loathe to criticize repressive regimes on the continent, in effect rejecting the classic pan-African “principle” that black people were responsible for liberating those in oppressive circumstances.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Then there was Peter Abrahams. The South African novelist and commentator relocated to Jamaica in the summer of 1955, beginning a residence in the country that would end tragically in 2017. By 1960, Abrahams's radio commentaries did more than any other source to keep Jamaica's population up to date with happenings on the African continent. Typically appearing six evenings per week at dinnertime, he was a constant fixture, first with Real Jamaica Radio, and then the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation.

Abrahams's programs expressed an orthodox Pan-Africanist stance. Like the majority of educated African nationalists from South Africa to Southern Rhodesia, his vision was one of multi-racial democracy in which color was irrelevant. Abrahams championed mainstream, middle-class causes: drawing attention to the detention of South African activists in the Treason Trial and getting publicly involved in the celebrations around Ghana's independence. But Abrahams had always eschewed notions of violent revolution, such as Mau Mau represented. He had published the novel A Wreath for Udomo in 1956, in which the protagonist, Michael Udomo, leads a relatively peaceful revolution against colonial authority. Udomo was loosely modeled on an Nkrumah or Kenyatta, a foreign-educated intellectual who returns to his native “PanAfrica” to bring revolution. But Udomo soon realizes that his country requires white capital and technocratic expertise to succeed, and to defeat the limiting force of tribalism. In any case, Abrahams was limited by conservatism in Jamaica's media: the daily Gleaner, for instance, as a matter of editorial policy, did not refer to a person's skin color until the late 1950s. We “treat[ed] it as though it did not exist,” remembered Abrahams.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Grassroots pan-Africanists rejected Abrahams's public pronouncements. Their somewhat scattered efforts coalesced around the figure of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba's death on 17 January 1961 had inspired radical protest in Jamaica in a way that a constitutional nationalist like his mentor Kwame Nkrumah, who had pushed Ghana immediately into the British Commonwealth at independence, never could. Lumumba was widely admired in Jamaica and frequently appeared in the press (including in several articles authored by a youthful Basil Davidson).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Journalists had reported in detail on the All African People's Conference in Accra in 1958, where Lumumba's radical rhetoric about the “exploitation and injustice” of “racist” Belgians took center stage.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Lumumba's immediate popularity in Jamaica distinguished him from Nkrumah, whose espousal of non-violence had opened him up to challenge at the Accra meeting from the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale and its chief theorist, Frantz Fanon.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Anger at Lumumba's assassination inspired a march downtown on 1 March 1961. The central figure was St. William Grant, a Garveyite and former labor leader famous for delivering lectures on social and political issues in Kingston's Victoria Park. A staunch Africanist in the UNIA, Grant led marchers from the park down King Street in central Kingston. Together with a number of Rastafari (estimates on their numbers vary wildly), marchers expressed their anger about Lumumba's killing. They flew flags with slogans like “Colour Bar Must Go!”; “Keep Africa Black: Death to the Enemies of Black Supremacy”; and “Long Live the Negro Race.” Grant had adorned himself in a form of African dress, and the marchers shook their fists at Barclays Bank as they passed. At the march's culmination, Amy Jacques Garvey spoke. When it was Grant's turn, in a striking echo of Kenya, he referred to those who listened to his speech as “Freedom Fighters,” as Mau Mau often described themselves, and the marchers sang “Onward Christian Soldiers,” as had Mau Mau fighters and many others resisting slavery and colonialism.Footnote ¹¹¹ Grant took on Abrahams, attacking him for his conservative approach and dismissing the novelist's authority to speak on African topics. Enraged by Abrahams's recent commentary on Lumumba, he called the South African a “traitor” and “declared that if he had given that broadcast in an independent African country, he would have been given 24 hours to clear out.”Footnote ¹¹² Grant's reaction was all the more striking given that Abrahams was by far the most progressive voice regularly appearing on the radio.Footnote ¹¹³

*****

Any discussion of Mau Mau, Africa, or pan-Africanism in Jamaica during the 1950s must include the Rastafari. That there was a strong connection between Mau Mau and Jamaica's persecuted Rastafari is clear. The decade was one in which members of the burgeoning faith faced discrimination and violence on a daily basis, and Mau Mau provided succor and inspiration. Historian Horace Campbell notes the sympathies Rastafari in the commune of Pinnacle felt for the movement. Identifying with Mau Mau gave them “a sense of dignity and black pride … [and] self-respect,” he notes.Footnote ¹¹⁴ One of the most powerful links between the two groups appeared via the Youth Black Faith (YBF).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Formed in 1949, the YBF represented a radical alternative to existing Rastafari groups. It rejected the “waywardness” of elders as well as their willingness to obey a proportion of colonial laws, and it “formally institutionalized” the smoking of ganja.Footnote ¹¹⁶ YBF members were inspired by press depictions of Mau Mau as radical, social outcasts, an orientation with which they aligned. On the morning of 9 April 1953, the day after Jomo Kenyatta was sentenced, the YBF marched from Trench Town in western Kingston, along Spanish Town Road, into the city center. They alluded to the history of slavery imposed upon African peoples by whites, offered their support for Kenyatta, and spoke of the fall of “Babylon.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ It was a pilgrimage they repeated the following year at the same time.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Gatherings that linked Mau Mau and Rastafari became commonplace. During the mid-1950s, the anthropologist Simpson recorded Rastafari describing Mau Mau as “angels” created by Haile Selassie, and the conflict as a plain war between black and white.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Aware of British bombings of the forests of central Kenya, Rastas explained, “The white men throw bombs on the Mau Mau, but they can't hurt them because Haile Selassie controls the bomb.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Charles Dunkley was a central figure. He held a number of meetings in eastern Kingston during the middle of 1953. Standing on a soapbox on street corners, he told crowds that the “citizens of western Kingston were fully organised and that the people of eastern Kingston should also organise themselves ‘so we can chase the white man out of this country.’” Described by the press as “preaching the Mau Mau doctrine,” Dunkley was arrested and fined.Footnote ¹²¹ This press approach, labeling radical protest as “Mau Mau,” was also reflected in its terminology. Rastafari became “bearded terrorists,” an appellation that British propagandists most commonly used for Kenyan Mau Mau.Footnote ¹²² Middle-class Jamaicans viewed Rastafari much like Kenyan settlers viewed their opponents. Rastas were “menacing,” as Hall puts it: “They came to be perceived as the most terrifying visible proof of the nameless, poor black threat that pressed in on middle-class Jamaica,” their nightly drumming audible to middle-class children safely tucked up in bed.Footnote ¹²³

Rastas had their own networks of information on which they relied for formulating their understanding of Mau Mau. They viewed the news sources of “Babylon” as largely irrelevant. In areas like Back O'Wall or the Dungle, Rastafari and many other interested Jamaicans came to gain and share knowledge. In his pioneering work, sociologist Barry Chevannes has described the importance of texts and reading among Rastafari groups, something he dates back to the 1930s when Howell wrote The People's Voice, a newsletter focused on Africa. By the 1950s, publications focused on African topics were common in Jamaica: Rastafari ordered the Ethiopian Observer, the black-run U.S. newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, and Sylvia Pankhurst's New Times and Ethiopia News published in London.Footnote ¹²⁴ Officials confessed their confusion as to how Rastafari came to possess such “large numbers” of pamphlets about the African continent.Footnote ¹²⁵ Rasta leaders were highly informed on international issues and shared their knowledge to all who would listen. When future Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican, visited Mortimer Planno, one of the major Rastafari leaders, Patterson was surprised to learn that, “There is … much discussion on current political events throughout the world,” and he declared the Rastafari “unusually well informed.” He commented, tellingly, on the only furniture Planno owned: “Apart from a small cot to sleep on, the only other piece of furniture … was a large and expensive radio set.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Planno himself—a true “black internationalist”—received a constant stream of visitors from the United States, the Caribbean, and Britain, and he had links to Ethiopian World Federation members in New York and London as well as with several Rastafari who had migrated to Britain from Jamaica during the decade.Footnote ¹²⁷

Like the origins of Mau Mau—an appellation that members of the movement themselves never used, and of unclear etymology—the Rastafari movement had deep, tangled roots. It is certain, however, that it was inspired in significant part by, and in, the broader African diaspora, an orientation it maintained in contrast to nation-state politics. The earliest formulators of Rastafari thought lived and worked with others of African descent in Panama, Harlem, and other locations during the 1920s and 1930s, with Howell himself impressed by Garvey's own message of pan-African solidarity.Footnote ¹²⁸ For both Rastafari and Mau Mau, it was essential to build an alternative, “African” history to the Western or national versions. Howell had written The Promised Key in 1935 in an effort to fuse politics, belief, and history to create legitimacy and appeal for the Rastafari movement. He described biblical figures Adam, Eve, and Abraham together with “Anglo-Saxon” as “all white people if you please.” They stood in contrast to King Alpha and Queen Omega, “Black Arch Sovereign[s] of most Holy Times,” who were black. Arguing that Alpha and Omega predated Adam and Eve, Howell described how Haile Selassie was their direct descendant. In this way, Howell provided a long, proud history for the world's black population.Footnote ¹²⁹

Scholarship on Mau Mau perhaps permits us to push further our thinking about Rastafari, and more broadly about the nature of lower-class struggle in Jamaica. It also helps us to better understand how ideas and ideals spread through the poorer shanties of Kingston and beyond. In a seminal work on Kenya, Daniel Branch addressed the category of “loyalist,” the term used to describe those who sided with the colonial administration during Mau Mau. Revealing the complexity and ambiguity of the term, Branch demonstrates how people might slide between the ostensibly separate categories of “Mau Mau” and “loyalist” based on their personal needs at any given time.Footnote ¹³⁰ Reading the daily and weekly press from Jamaica during the 1950s suggests that it would be fruitful to take such an approach in thinking about Rastafari and their links to lower-class struggle. Scholars have tended to view Rastafari as a class apart, separate both in religion and comportment from the bulk of Jamaica's population. Interviews generally bear out this perception, yet a careful reading of the sources suggests that the lines here, too, may have been more blurred.

It is popularly believed that wearing dreadlocks was the visible marker that served to both identify Rastafari and represent their separation from the rest of Jamaican society. The importance of dreadlocks cannot be underestimated, and it is therefore essential to reflect on their role during the 1950s. Campbell suggests that Rastafari began wearing dreadlocks as a result of inspiration from Mau Mau, but in fact, the practice more likely appeared with the YBF.Footnote ¹³¹ Its chief formulator, Bongo Watto, told Chevannes that the systematic wearing of dreadlocks originated in 1949, several years before Mau Mau began.Footnote ¹³² It was the YBF, inspired by Mau Mau's radicalism, that by the 1960s transformed the wearing of dreadlocks into a politicized practice that was synonymous with Rastafari. In the all-important 1950s, however, press reports on Rastafari rarely even mention dreadlocks. Instead, Rastafari are described as “beards.” Simpson—a careful observer who worked with a range of Rastafari groups during the 1950s—makes no mention at all of hair in his classic 1955 article.Footnote ¹³³ Five years later, when M. G. Smith, Roy Augier, and Rex Nettleford of the University of the West Indies made the first detailed study of the movement, they divided Rastafari brethren into three groups: “locksmen” who wore plaited dreadlocks they did not cut; “beardmen” who wore beards, did not plait their hair, and cut both at times; and the “Baldhead” for whom only some article of clothing might mark the adherent to the public as a Rasta.Footnote ¹³⁴ Noted Rastafari expert and scholar John Homiak cautions that we should be “wary of published accounts that inflate the Dreadlocks presence entering the 1960s.”Footnote ¹³⁵

This great diversity of appearance, combined with consistent oral testimony about “imitation” Rastas, or “rascals,” including those who pretended to be Rastafari to commit crimes, suggests another perspective in thinking about Jamaica in the 1950s. A bottom-up swelling of protest, combined with a faith in its relative infancy and practiced in dramatically different ways across the island, reflected the vibrant, flexible, and complex interactions of lower-class protest and pan-Africanism.Footnote ¹³⁶ Observers at the time reported such notions. In the Star, Alexander Wauka suggested that there was no such thing as a Rastafari organization. Instead, he argued, there were, “growing numbers of employed tradesmen, artisans and small-business-men—both men and women—who are proud to own their National culture in its pure unadulterated form.” For Wauka, this grassroots movement blended an “Ethiopian ideal” with Jamaica's own culture, creating a heady blend that rejected either rigid nationalism or a wholly external driving force.Footnote ¹³⁷

Though scholars tend to view Rastafari as detested by the public and socially isolated in the late 1950s, archival evidence demonstrates that their cause was supported by other Jamaicans, many of whom suffered in similar ways. Thus at Kingston's Coronation Market in May 1959, market men and women—none of whom were Rastafari—threw stones at a policeman who attacked a Rastaman.Footnote ¹³⁸ In the shanties of western Kingston, ordinary Jamaicans began wearing beards as signs of discontent about their poverty, viewing them as symbols of a revolutionary personality partially copied from Rastafari.Footnote ¹³⁹ The beard itself became a focus of public discourse: in press columns, people debated whether beards represented a wearer's violent inclinations (and were hence “weapons”), were socially appropriate for middle-class men, or “clean.” Some employers, like the fire department, forbade their employees from wearing them.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As already described, a new wave of people determined to return to Africa appeared, claiming that the head of the Africa Reform Church and Rastafari leader Reverend Claudius Henry had guaranteed their passage. They threatened to “burn down Kingston” if prevented from traveling.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Their assumptions seemed reasonable: Henry had just returned from a trip to Ethiopia on 2 October 1959 with promises of land for them.Footnote ¹⁴² People's views of Rastafari were beginning a transition: once excluded oddities and cult members, they were becoming leaders in a grassroots pan-Africanist movement. This was tragically demonstrated at the execution of Henry's son Reynold in 1961 for his role in the deaths of two British soldiers near Sligoville. A crowd of five hundred people, including crying women, gathered outside the prison in which he was hanged. Having voiced his belief that he would achieve “everlasting life,” Henry cried, “I die for Marcus Garvey” as the rope snapped taut.Footnote ¹⁴³

Claudius Henry was particularly active in connecting the Rastafari struggle to global pan-Africanism. He frequently tied the experience of black Africans and African Americans to the Jamaican situation. One night, he might deliver a speech standing in front of large pictures of Dooley Martin and Bert Moore, showing their lynching in Columbus, Mississippi in 1935.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ On another, he might tell a crowd: “I want Mr. [Norman] Manley and his white wife go down Alabama and see if they won't lynch him.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Exodus to Africa was the only tonic. As with Lumumba's assassination, the Sharpeville Massacre of 21 March 1960 in South Africa was a focal point. George Alphonse Williams, leader of one Rastafari group called the United Rases Organ, had said that “black men could no longer sit with their arms folded and allow white men to make fools of them. They needed freedom now and only by a revolution could they succeed. They also needed arms,” he stated, before assuring the crowd that Henry could procure them through his contacts with Fidel Castro. Another suggested that they should seek out other avenues for procuring arms, too, “if necessary by attacking men on the streets and raiding their homes at night.” Intelligence officials stated that Rastafari were “incensed,” and had “armed themselves with machetes and [were] declaring that the time [had] come to gain their ‘freedom’ by violence if necessary.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

*****

As Mau Mau neared its end, Victor Stafford Reid published his celebrated The Leopard, the only Caribbean novel to address the Kenyan conflict.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Lauding Mau Mau's violence, Reid explained how he composed the novel out of his “sheer anger” at Western depictions of the movement. For Reid, who was often considered to represent the voice of the common person in Jamaica, Mau Mau catalyzed a pan-Africanism that predated Black Power of the 1960s. The Emergency had led him to view Africa as “underneath this skin … [and] inside my pores.” Even creating the novel's physical environment linked the two spheres: living in Gordon Town in the Blue Mountains above Kingston, Reid took long walks in the local rainforest to inspire his descriptions of the novel's scenery. He read African folklore, and “became Africa,” as he put it.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In his unsuccessful application to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1955, Reid laid out his plans to spend nine months in Kenya during the Emergency to enable him to produce an authentic account. “The story of Kenya and the Mau Mau has been told by many western-born white men,” he wrote to the fund, “But it has never been told through the lips and eyes of a black man born in the west… [who] can think with the African.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In underlining the word “think,” Reid represented the affinity he perceived between Africa and the Caribbean.

Mau Mau's importance in representing and catalyzing a distinct version of grassroots pan-Africanism was also reflected in the activism of Walter Rodney. The Guyanese intellectual took up his position as lecturer in History at the University of the West Indies' Mona campus in 1968, where he built links between the campus and Kingston's lower classes, pulling in urban youth, Rastafari, and other diverse activist groups. Rodney's associates remember him lecturing them about Mau Mau as the Black Power movement gained strength toward the end of the decade. “They were forceful,” Rodney would say of Mau Mau, suggesting that this quality and Mau Mau's “revolutionary spirit” illuminated a pathway for Jamaica to follow.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ These talks and lectures reflected the historian's deep sympathies with, and interest in, Mau Mau. Rodney had conducted firsthand research on Mau Mau's impact in northern Tanzania while teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam, where he had come to view the movement as representing the revolutionary potential of the underclass.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In all this, Rodney was tapping into Mau Mau's relevance and gravitas for Jamaica's black struggle.

In addition to demonstrating the movement's trans-Atlantic impact, situating Mau Mau in Jamaica in the 1950s further develops our understanding of black radicalism and Rastafari on the island. Using Mau Mau as a lens, we are able to capture an alternative stream of pan-Africanist thought deriving from a vibrant mix of lower-class intellectuals and activists. This analysis suggests at least two important ways to alter our thinking on twentieth-century pan-Africanist thought. First, orthodox Pan-Africanism involved multi-directional flows of information and interaction: from the United States to Ghana, or Trinidad to London and on to Kenya, and so forth. But lower-class Jamaicans never had the ability to travel internationally or access written or physical networks in this way. Moreover, the British limitation of communication in Kenya meant that Mau Mau fighters and intellectuals were unable to appeal to supporters in the Caribbean. Thus, the links were quite different: these were unidirectional trans-Atlantic connections of affiliation, interest, support, and common cause, but without direct interaction. Never mediated through London or Paris, they were connections between peripheries.

Second, this analysis pushes us to think more carefully about the ways we periodize Pan-Africanism and the end of empire. In his recent comment in a 2013 forum in the American Historical Review, entitled “Transnational Lives in the Twentieth Century,” Matthew Guterl noted that one of the failures of the recent turn toward transnational history has been that we have remained limited by our current historical periodizations, in this case those based on the teleology of the nation-state and independence in the Caribbean.Footnote ¹⁵² In this framework, Pan-Africanism's significance is subsumed within the creation of new nations in Africa and the Caribbean. But when we turn our attention to Jamaica's lower classes and Rastafari, it is clear that we must adjust our focus. For many of the marginalized, the nation-state was largely a mirage: present, certainly, but unreachable, with a future independence holding out little promise. They looked beyond their island, seeking a community of like-minded men and women in more distant climes. Their experiences should therefore cause us to question the appropriateness of the terms “decolonization” and “transnationalism,” with their implicit focus on the nation-al.Footnote ¹⁵³ The activism of Jamaica's lower classes in the 1950s is better thought of as a vibrant upswell in pan-Africanist thought which would establish the ground for Black Power in the mid-1960s.