Notting Hill to Kingston

The summer of 2012 would bring two anniversaries that pulled in different directions: sixty years of the Queen’s reign and fifty years of Jamaican independence. For the community that had lived both histories simultaneously, the question was not which to celebrate, but how to hold both without losing the thread of either

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Briefing

• Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee weekend celebrations held 2–5 June 2012.
• Jamaica prepares for 50th independence anniversary on 6 August 2012.
• Notting Hill Carnival plans for 2012 take on additional celebratory significance.
• Diaspora organisations plan dual programming for Jubilee and Jamaica 50.
• Return migration discussions intensify; economic conditions in Britain prompting reconsideration.

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In the early months of 2012, Britain was preparing for two large celebrations. The first was the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, who had acceded to the throne on 6 February 1952 and would, in June 2012, mark sixty years as monarch with a long weekend of national events: a pageant on the Thames, a concert at Buckingham Palace, a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s Cathedral, and a procession through the streets of central London that would draw crowds comparable to those at her coronation sixty years earlier. The second — not a British celebration exactly, but one that the British Jamaican community was invested in — was the fiftieth anniversary of Jamaican independence, which would fall on 6 August 2012.

These two commemorations arrived together in the calendar of the Jamaican community in Britain like stones dropped simultaneously into still water. The ripples from each moved outwards and, in the middle, collided. The Jamaican community in Notting Hill — and in Brixton, and in Handsworth, and across the diaspora — had a relationship with both the British monarchy and with Jamaican independence that was layered, personal and not easily reduced to either celebration or critique.

The Jubilee and the Community

The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was, for many in the Caribbean community, an occasion of genuine warmth. The Queen herself was well-regarded in the Caribbean. She had visited Jamaica multiple times. As Head of the Commonwealth, she had a particular significance for countries whose connection to Britain was mediated through that post-imperial institution rather than through the more fraught channels of colonial history and immigration politics. Many in the older generation of the Jamaican community had a genuine respect for the Queen that was distinct from, and not necessarily in contradiction with, a strong sense of Jamaican national identity.

But the Diamond Jubilee also landed in a specific political context. The debate about the monarchy’s future in the Caribbean — the question of whether Jamaica and other Caribbean nations should become republics — was live and active in 2012. The Jamaican diaspora in Britain, particularly its younger members, had views on this question that were not straightforwardly deferential to the institution being celebrated. The republic debate was not simply about the monarchy: it was about the incomplete nature of decolonisation, about the ongoing relationships between Caribbean nations and their former colonial powers, about the question of what independence meant fifty years after it had been achieved.

Notting Hill and the History of Carnival

Notting Hill Carnival, held each August Bank Holiday weekend, was itself a product of a particular history. It had begun in 1966 as a community festival organised by the Caribbean community in west London, partly in response to the tensions and violence of the preceding decade — the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 were still within living memory when the first Carnival was organised. By 2012, Carnival had become one of the largest street festivals in Europe, attracting visitors from across Britain and the world. It had also retained its character as a Caribbean community event, a cultural assertion in the streets of a neighbourhood that had once been the site of racial violence and that had since been transformed by property prices into one of the most expensive areas in London.

The 2012 Carnival, which fell a fortnight before Jamaica’s fiftieth independence anniversary, took on additional significance as a result. The Jamaican community’s participation in Carnival — always substantial, always central — was inflected in 2012 with the awareness of what was being commemorated. The costumes, the sound systems, the food stalls: all of it carried, in 2012, the particular weight of a community that was marking, in its way, the half-century of Jamaican nationhood.

Jamaica 50 and the Diaspora’s Investment

Jamaica’s fiftieth independence anniversary was marked with events across the diaspora as well as on the island. In Britain, a series of concerts, exhibitions, academic events and community celebrations had been planned for the weeks around 6 August. The Jamaican diaspora organisations that coordinated these events were, in many cases, organisations that had been working in the community for decades: the Jamaica High Commission’s cultural programme, community associations in Brixton and Notting Hill and Handsworth, churches that had been serving Caribbean-heritage congregations since the 1950s.

Jamaica 50 also brought to the surface a set of questions that the anniversary invited but could not resolve. Fifty years of independence had produced a Jamaica that was, in many ways, a nation still finding its form. The economic challenges were real: the relationship with the IMF, the debt, the inequality, the infrastructure that needed investment. The social challenges were real: the violence in certain communities, the inequality of opportunity, the brain drain of skilled Jamaicans to Britain and North America and the rest of the world. And yet Jamaica in 2012 was also a nation that had produced Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, that had given the world reggae and dancehall, that had a diaspora of remarkable energy and achievement spread across every country where people had looked for opportunity and found some.

Return Migration: A Growing Conversation

In the first half of 2012, a conversation that had been conducted quietly in community spaces for years was becoming more audible. The British economy was in difficulty: the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis had produced years of austerity, public sector retrenchment and a labour market that was tighter than the one that had attracted Caribbean workers in the 1950s and 1960s. For some in the Jamaican community, this was prompting a reconsideration of the question of where home was.

Return migration had always been a feature of diaspora life. Some had always gone back: to retire, to be near family, to build something in the place where they had started. But in 2012, the conversation included a generation that had been born in Britain or had come very young, for whom Jamaica was not a place of origin but a place of connection — a place they knew through family, through music, through the landscape of a grandparent’s stories. The question of return migration was, for this generation, more complex: it was not a question of going home but of going somewhere that felt like it could become home, for reasons that included economic necessity and the pull of an island they had always known was part of who they were.

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