Quarterly Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Update — Q4 1996

Quarterly Update | Q4 1996 | October–December 1996 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: Q4 1996 in Six Lines

• Clinton defeats Dole November 5; Caribbean diaspora in US celebrates a second term
• Spice Girls dominate British music; a cultural phenomenon unlike anything since Beatlemania
• Dunblane firearms legislation advances; UK moves toward handgun ban after March massacre
• Zaire descends into war; one million refugees flee as Mobutu’s state disintegrates
• Jamaica tourism closes strongest year since the early 1990s; diaspora visits up sharply
• IRA ceasefire still broken; peace process stalls as year ends without resolution

Clinton’s Second Term: Stability in Washington

On November 5, 1996, President Bill Clinton was re-elected with 49.2% of the popular vote against Republican challenger Bob Dole’s 40.7%, carrying 31 states and 379 electoral votes. The result was never seriously in doubt: the economy was strong, the deficit was falling, and Dole had failed to generate the kind of enthusiasm among Republican voters that a successful challenger campaign requires. Clinton became the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win two consecutive presidential terms — a milestone that carried particular significance for a party that had lost five of the six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.

For the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora in the United States, Clinton’s re-election was received with genuine satisfaction. The economic conditions of the mid-1990s had been notably positive for working families in the diaspora: employment was high, wages were rising, and the sustained expansion that the Clinton years had produced meant that more diaspora members had more capacity to save, invest, and send remittances home. The Caribbean community’s relationship with the Democratic Party remains strong, and the prospect of four more years of an administration that had made at least meaningful efforts to engage with Caribbean and African-American concerns was welcomed.

The Spice Girls: A Cultural Moment

The autumn of 1996 has been dominated in British popular culture by the extraordinary commercial success of the Spice Girls, the five-member pop group whose debut single “Wannabe” went to number one in the UK in July and has since gone to number one in more than thirty countries. Their follow-up singles “Say You’ll Be There” and “2 Become 1” have both debuted at number one in Britain, making the Spice Girls the most commercially successful British pop act of the year and generating comparisons, in terms of global reach and cultural saturation, with the Beatles. The concept of “Girl Power” that they have popularised — a brash, assertive, unapologetically commercial feminism — has generated both enthusiasm and critical debate about its depth and authenticity.

For the Caribbean community in the UK, the Spice Girls phenomenon is one of those cultural moments that belongs to everyone while belonging to no one community in particular. Pop music has been a site of interaction between British Caribbean culture and the mainstream throughout the community’s history — the influence of Caribbean music on British pop, from the ska and reggae-inflected sounds of the late 1970s and 1980s through to the contemporary scene, is deep and well-documented. The Spice Girls are not a Caribbean cultural product, but they are a British cultural product, and the Caribbean community’s place in British culture means that its relationship with British cultural phenomena is not one of outside observation but of inside participation.

Dunblane: The Firearms Bill and Its Significance

The Dunblane massacre of March 13, 1996 — in which a gunman killed sixteen children and their teacher at a primary school in Stirling, Scotland — has continued to reshape British politics through the fourth quarter, with the Major government’s Firearms (Amendment) Act banning most handguns above .22 calibre passing through Parliament. The legislation represents a significant tightening of already strict British gun control laws, and its passage reflects both the extraordinary public pressure generated by the Dunblane families’ campaign and the political impossibility of opposing meaningful gun control in the aftermath of the massacre of five-year-olds.

For the Caribbean community in Britain — a community that has direct and painful experience of gun violence in its own neighbourhoods — the Dunblane legislation is welcomed as a step in the right direction, while also raising the question of why it took the murder of white children in a Scottish market town to produce the political will for action that decades of gun violence in urban, predominantly Black communities had not generated. That question is asked without diminishing the grief of Dunblane, which is real and shared; it is asked because the discrepancy it points to is also real and must be named.

Zaire: A Continent in Crisis

The fourth quarter has seen the acceleration of the crisis in Zaire, where a rebellion in the east of the country — led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila and backed by the governments of Rwanda and Uganda — has produced a humanitarian emergency on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Up to one million Rwandan Hutu refugees, who had been living in camps in eastern Zaire since the genocide of 1994, have been displaced by the fighting, creating one of the largest refugee movements in African history. The camps, which had been controlled by the Hutu militias responsible for the genocide, have been broken up — a development that created a complex moral calculation for international observers and aid organisations navigating the relationship between refugee protection and accountability for mass atrocities.

For the Caribbean community, the Zaire crisis is another chapter in the ongoing story of post-colonial African governance and the international community’s uneven response to African crises. The contrast between the speed of Western military and diplomatic engagement in some theatres and the relative passivity in the face of African crises of comparable or greater scale is a contrast that the Caribbean community notices and comments upon.

Jamaica: Year-End Review

Jamaica closes 1996 with its tourism sector recording its strongest year since the early 1990s, with stop-over arrivals showing solid growth and the Montego Bay corridor in particular performing well. The combination of competitive pricing, product improvement at the resort level, and sustained marketing investment by the Jamaica Tourist Board has produced results that give the industry confidence as it plans for 1997. Diaspora visits to the island have been notably higher than in recent years, reflecting both the improving economic conditions in the UK and North America and the increasing proportion of the diaspora reaching the life stage where reconnection with Jamaica becomes a priority.

The property market has continued to attract diaspora interest, with the combination of favourable exchange rates, competitive pricing relative to UK and North American markets, and the growing availability of diaspora-targeted product providing conditions that support transaction activity. The political calm of a year without a general election has also helped: diaspora buyers are sensitive to Jamaican political stability, and a quiet political year is a positive environment for investment decisions that require long time horizons.

Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Quarterly Update — covering October to December 1996. Published by Jamaica Homes News on 2 January 1997.

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