Jamaica’s sprinters dominated the Glasgow track as Scotland prepared to vote on its future; and across the Caribbean diaspora, the questions of self-determination being asked in Edinburgh were not so different from those being asked in Kingston
Briefing
- Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, July–August 2014; Jamaica wins 13 medals.
- Usain Bolt wins relay gold as Jamaica asserts sprint dominance on British soil.
- Scottish independence referendum on 18 September returns 55% No vote.
- Caribbean community in Scotland engages with independence debate on their own terms.
- CARICOM formally adopts 10-point reparations programme at Heads of Government meeting.
The 20th Commonwealth Games opened in Glasgow on 23 July 2014. Jamaica sent its athletes. The diaspora — in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, in Brixton and in Birmingham, in Toronto and in Trinidad — sent its attention. Jamaica’s sprint tradition is not merely a sporting fact; it is a cultural institution, a source of national pride that operates across all borders and all distances, one of the things that makes the diaspora a diaspora — a community held together across geography by shared identity rather than shared location. When Usain Bolt and the Jamaican relay team ran in Glasgow, the Caribbean communities of every city that has a Caribbean community ran with them.
Jamaica finished the Games with 13 medals, including gold in the men’s relay in which Bolt anchored the team to victory. The performance confirmed, again, the island’s remarkable and disproportionate contribution to global athletics — a country of fewer than three million people producing sprinters who could compete with and defeat athletes from countries with populations hundreds of times larger. For the diaspora, Jamaica’s athletic success at the Commonwealth Games served the function that it always serves: it makes the island visible on a world stage, it creates a moment of collective pride that crosses generations and borders, and it gives diaspora Jamaicans in the Bronx and beyond a reason to explain to neighbours and colleagues where they are from and why they are proud of it.
Scotland Votes: A Question of Self-Determination
Three weeks after the Commonwealth Games closed, Scotland held a referendum on independence. The question — should Scotland be an independent country? — was answered by 55.3 per cent of voters with No, and by 44.7 per cent with Yes. The result preserved the United Kingdom, but the closeness of the vote and the quality of the political engagement produced during the campaign marked the referendum as a significant moment in British political history.
For the Caribbean diaspora in Scotland — concentrated in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, a smaller but well-established community with roots in the post-war Caribbean migration that had settled across Britain — the independence referendum was not a simple question. Many members of the Caribbean community in Scotland supported independence, drawn by the SNP’s broadly progressive social policies and by a sense that an independent Scotland might offer a more welcoming political environment than the Westminster government of David Cameron. Others were ambivalent: the Union was not uncomplicated for people whose countries had been part of the British Empire, and whose relationship with Britain had been defined by the paradoxes of belonging to a country that had simultaneously welcomed and exploited them.
The Reparations Programme Formalised
At the CARICOM Heads of Government meeting in July 2013, Caribbean governments had formally adopted a ten-point reparations programme developed by the CARICOM Reparations Commission. By the second half of 2014, that programme was being operationalised: the commission was gathering evidence, producing legal opinions, and building the diplomatic infrastructure required to advance the reparations claim in international forums. The programme’s ten points — including a full formal apology from the former colonial powers, repatriation programmes, indigenous peoples development programmes, cultural institution support, public health infrastructure, illiteracy eradication, African knowledge development, psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and debt cancellation — constituted a comprehensive framework for addressing the developmental consequences of slavery and colonialism.
The diaspora’s role in advancing the reparations agenda was not merely symbolic. Community organisations in the Bronx and in Brixton, in Toronto and in Birmingham, were hosting educational events, lobbying local politicians, and building alliances with African diaspora organisations, with academic institutions and with civil society organisations across the world. The CARICOM Reparations Commission provided the formal political and legal framework; the diaspora provided the grassroots advocacy that kept the conversation alive in countries whose governments had yet to engage with the claims seriously.
Return Migration: The Choices Being Made
The second half of 2014 also saw a continuing discussion within Caribbean communities in Britain and North America about return migration — the decision made by increasing numbers of diaspora Jamaicans to relocate to Jamaica, either permanently or for extended periods. The motivations were varied: retirement after a working life in Britain; a desire to raise children in Jamaica; an entrepreneurial instinct to invest skills and capital accumulated abroad in Jamaica’s developing economy; and, for some, a response to the increasingly hostile climate in Britain that the hostile environment had created.
Jamaica Homes, which covered the property and investment dimensions of this migration, documented the variety of the decision: from the semi-retired couple building a house on family land in St Elizabeth, to the young professional opening a business in New Kingston, to the pensioner returning to a community they had left sixty years before and finding it both familiar and strange. The relationship between the Jamaican diaspora and the island was not one-directional. People moved. Capital moved. Decisions were made, in the Bronx and in Kingston and in a thousand places between, about where life should be lived and what it was for.
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