Jamaica at 50: Independence, Olympic Glory and Diaspora Pride

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 January 2013 | Period covered: July–December 2012

Key Developments at a Glance

• Jamaica marks its 50th independence anniversary on 6 August 2012, with celebrations across the island and diaspora.
• Usain Bolt wins 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay gold at the London Olympics — Jamaica’s greatest Olympic moment.
• London 2012 becomes a showcase for Jamaica’s extraordinary athletic talent; track and field dominance stuns the world.
• Jamaican diaspora communities across Britain celebrate independence and Olympic success in equal measure.
• Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller leads Jamaica’s independence year; reparations on the national agenda.
• Hostile environment immigration policies continue to develop; community groups press for protections.

There are years that a community carries with it long after they have passed — years that become landmarks in a collective story, moments that are told and retold at family tables, in community halls, in the memories of a generation. For the Jamaican diaspora in the United Kingdom, 2012 is almost certainly such a year. A year in which their island, fifty years after cutting the formal ties of colonial rule, announced itself to the world with an athletic power that left crowds in the Olympic Stadium at Stratford East London lost for words, and in which the diaspora communities of Brixton, Handsworth, Moss Side and beyond shared — in the country they have called home for decades — a pride in Jamaica so intense it became almost physically present.

London 2012: Jamaica’s Olympics

The London Olympic Games ran from 27 July to 12 August 2012. Jamaica’s performance at those Games — hosted in the city where so many Jamaicans have made their home, in the country to which the Windrush generation came to build new lives — was nothing short of extraordinary. In the sprint events that have become Jamaica’s signal contribution to global athletics, the island’s athletes dominated with a completeness that left competitors and commentators alike struggling for comparisons.

Usain Bolt, the greatest sprinter in the history of the sport, won gold in the 100 metres on 5 August with a time of 9.63 seconds — an Olympic record and the second fastest time in human history. He won the 200 metres two days later with a time of 19.32 seconds. And on 11 August, he anchored the Jamaican 4×100 metres relay team to gold in a world record time of 36.84 seconds. Three Olympic golds in three events, in London, in front of the world. The 80,000 spectators in the Olympic Stadium — including thousands of British Jamaicans who had obtained tickets for exactly these moments — erupted with a joy that transcended national loyalty and became something universal: the witnessing of a human being at the absolute limit of what the body can do.

But Bolt was not alone. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who had won the 100m gold in Beijing in 2008, anchored the Jamaican women’s team to a sweep of the 100m medals: first, second, and third. Veronica Campbell-Brown won the 200m. The depth of Jamaican sprinting talent — the product of a culture that takes the sport seriously at every level, from school sports days to regional championships to the Carifta Games — was on full display. The Union Flag flew in the Olympic Stadium alongside the Jamaican flag at victory ceremonies, but in the stands, and across Britain, it was the black, green and gold that commanded the loudest cheers from the Caribbean community.

Independence at 50: A Milestone for the Diaspora

On 6 August 2012 — the anniversary of the day in 1962 when the Union Flag was lowered in Kingston and the black, green and gold of independent Jamaica was raised in its place — Jamaica marked its fiftieth birthday as a sovereign nation. The celebrations on the island were extensive: a national independence grand gala at the National Stadium in Kingston, events across all parishes, and a national mood of celebration and pride that was shared, in real time via television and social media, with Jamaicans in Britain, the United States, Canada and across the world.

For the Jamaican diaspora in the United Kingdom, the 50th anniversary carried a particularly resonant meaning. Many of those who came to Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s did so as British subjects of a colony — before Jamaica was an independent nation. They arrived in a country that was, in a formal constitutional sense, their own: as subjects of the same Crown. The country they left became an independent state while they were already building new lives in Britain. The fifty-year anniversary is therefore not only a celebration of Jamaican nationhood but a moment of reflection for a diaspora whose history straddles the colonial and post-colonial periods in a way that no other generation can replicate.

In London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and Nottingham, Jamaican community organisations mounted independence celebrations that mixed the serious and the joyful. Exhibitions on Jamaica’s history and cultural achievements, concerts featuring reggae and dancehall and mento, community dinners, and civic events in town halls and community centres brought together generations of the diaspora to mark the half-century in a spirit that honoured what Jamaica has achieved — and remembered what the journey to independence, and the journey to Britain, cost.

Portia Simpson Miller: Independence Year Leadership

Jamaica entered its 50th anniversary year under the leadership of Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, who led the People’s National Party to victory in the general election of 29 January 2012. Simpson Miller — returning to the office she held from 2006 to 2007 — is Jamaica’s first female Prime Minister and the leader who has most explicitly championed the reparations cause at the highest level of the Jamaican state. In her independence day address, she spoke of Jamaica’s achievements over fifty years of independence and of the work that remains: building a more just, more equitable, more prosperous nation from the foundations of a colonial history that extracted rather than invested.

The Simpson Miller government has been engaging with the CARICOM process that is moving towards the formal establishment of a regional Reparations Commission. Jamaica’s reparations advocacy, rooted in the specific history of Jamaican plantation slavery and its consequences, is being developed alongside the broader Caribbean claim. For the diaspora, the prospect of a formally constituted Caribbean reparations commission advancing the claim against Britain — from within a country whose cultural and economic life the Caribbean community has helped to shape — is a development whose significance is not lost.

The Broader Picture: Immigration and Community

The joy of London 2012 and the Jamaica independence celebrations has not entirely displaced the community’s awareness of the political context in which it lives. Home Secretary Theresa May’s hostile environment policy, announced in 2012 and progressively being given operational form, has registered with community organisations who are already seeing its early effects on long-settled Caribbean-born residents. The intersection of a government’s determination to create a hostile environment for migration and the presence in Britain of a generation of Caribbean-born residents whose right to be here is entirely established but not always formally documented is a slow-burning crisis that has not yet attracted national attention.

Deportation flights to Jamaica continue. Legal campaigns against individual cases are pursued with dedication by Detention Action and other organisations. The bilateral relationship between Britain and Jamaica carries within it, alongside the celebrations of 2012, a series of unresolved tensions that will not be resolved by athletics medals or anniversary galas. But as this extraordinary year ends — a year in which Jamaica showed the world what fifty years of independence, and the talent of its people, can produce — the diaspora community takes strength from the pride it has felt, and prepares to continue the longer fights that lie ahead.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; AP; International Association of Athletics Federations; Jamaica Olympic Association; UK Parliament Hansard; Jamaica High Commission London; Runnymede Trust; Home Office (UK).

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