- The 1907 Kingston earthquake destroyed thousands of homes overnight
- Post-earthquake rebuilding produced Jamaica’s first urban planning rules
- Labour migration to Panama and Cuba reshaped rural communities
- Marcus Garvey’s movement changed how Jamaicans understood land and race
- Kingston’s yards and tenements housed the poorest in dangerous overcrowding
- The 1938 labour uprising forced Britain to confront Jamaica’s housing crisis
Kingston, Earthquake, Empire and the Urban Poor
In the first four decades of the twentieth century, Jamaica’s capital was shaken to rubble and rebuilt; its workers crossed the world to build other nations’ canals and harvest other nations’ cane; and the housing conditions of its poorest residents deteriorated into a crisis that no amount of colonial complacency could conceal. By 1938, the streets of Kingston and the cane fields of Westmoreland had produced something Britain had not anticipated: an organised, angry and finally politicised Jamaican working class that would not be sent home with a wage and a warning.
The Earth Moves: Kingston Before and After the 1907 Earthquake
At 3.30 in the afternoon of 14 January 1907, an earthquake of estimated magnitude 6.5 struck Jamaica. The epicentre was offshore, southwest of Kingston, but the city felt the full force. Within ninety seconds, much of the Jamaican capital lay in ruins. The fires that broke out in the collapsed commercial district burned for three days. When the smoke cleared, between 800 and 1,000 people were dead, tens of thousands were homeless, and the physical fabric of Jamaica’s largest city had been effectively destroyed.
Kingston in 1907 was a city built largely of wood. The commercial district — King Street and its surrounding streets, the wharves along the waterfront, the grand merchant houses that had risen with the banana trade of the previous three decades — was a mixture of timber-framed commercial buildings, cast-iron verandas and warehouses of variable structural quality. The residential areas fanning out from the commercial core were more varied. The wealthier residents of the corporate area lived in substantial timber houses in the residential districts of the north — New Kingston, Half Way Tree, the cooler foothills below the Blue Mountains — in houses with wide verandas, jalousied windows and generous yards. The poorest residents lived in the dense urban yards of the inner city — multiple families sharing a compound around a central cistern and common cookfire, in one-room board structures built so close together that a fire in one was a fire in all.
It was the inner-city yards and the dense working-class quarters nearest the commercial district that suffered most heavily in the earthquake and the fires that followed. The wooden structures collapsed quickly. The fires, which broke out simultaneously in several locations as cooking fires and lamps were overturned in the collapse, found in the dense urban yards an ideal fuel: timber, thatch, matting, cloth. The fire brigade was overwhelmed. The water mains had ruptured in the earthquake. British naval vessels in Kingston Harbour provided some assistance but could not contain the blaze.
The earthquake exposed, in a single afternoon, what the colonial administrative reports had been noting with polite concern for decades: that Kingston’s housing stock was dangerously overcrowded, poorly constructed and utterly inadequate to the needs of a growing urban population. The city that had to be rebuilt from January 1907 onward would, at least in the commercial district and in the districts where the administration had direct oversight, be rebuilt to different standards. What it would not do — and here, once again, the colonial system’s structural limitations asserted themselves — was address the underlying conditions of poverty and overcrowding that had made the urban yards so devastatingly vulnerable in the first place.
Rebuilding a Capital: Urban Planning, Race and the New Kingston
The post-earthquake rebuilding of Kingston was the first instance in Jamaican history in which the colonial administration engaged systematically with the question of urban planning. A reconstruction committee was established, building regulations were tightened, and the rebuilding of the commercial district proceeded on a plan that widened certain key streets, established minimum setback requirements for new buildings, and mandated the use of concrete or reinforced construction for commercial premises above a certain size. The Kingston Corporation — the city’s municipal administration — oversaw the process with the support of the colonial government and with financial assistance from the British Treasury, which extended a loan to facilitate rebuilding on better-quality terms than the city’s own revenues could support.
The rebuilt Kingston of the 1910s and 1920s was, in its commercial and middle-class residential zones, a more substantial city than the one it replaced. Concrete replaced timber in the commercial buildings of King Street and Harbour Street. The residential districts of Half Way Tree and New Kingston developed as middle-class suburbs — planned grids of residential streets lined with substantial single-storey concrete or timber houses set in generous gardens, served by the tramway that ran up to Half Way Tree from the commercial centre and connected the suburbs to the city’s economic core. These were comfortable neighbourhoods for Jamaica’s small professional and commercial middle class — the lawyers, doctors, civil servants, coloured merchants and the more prosperous members of the business community who could afford the rents and rates of the northern suburbs.
The geography of race and class in post-earthquake Kingston was, however, not substantially disrupted by the rebuilding. The upper-middle class — predominantly white and light-skinned — occupied the large houses in the foothills and the better residential streets of New Kingston. The Black professional and clerical middle class occupied the more modest middle zones. And the Black working poor — the vast majority of Kingston’s population, who laboured as port workers, market traders, domestic servants, laundry workers, construction labourers and the dozens of other trades that kept the city functioning — occupied the inner-city yards, the west Kingston tenements, and the areas of the corporate area that the planners of the post-earthquake rebuilding had not reached.
These areas were not improved by the rebuilding process. They were expanded. As the population of Kingston grew — from an estimated 57,000 in 1911 to more than 110,000 by 1943 — the pressure on the inner-city housing stock intensified. The yard system, in which multiple families shared a single compound and a single water source, became more crowded. Tenement buildings that had been built for one family became home to three or four. Rooms were subdivided. Lean-to structures were added to yards that were already at capacity. The sanitary conditions in these areas — already poor before 1907 — deteriorated further as population density increased without any corresponding investment in water supply, sewage disposal or waste collection.
The Yard and the Tenement: Housing Jamaica’s Urban Poor
The “yard” was the defining residential unit of working-class Kingston in the early twentieth century, and it deserves to be understood in its full complexity rather than reduced to a synonym for slum. The Kingston yard was a spatial arrangement: a central open space — the yard itself — surrounded on two, three or four sides by the rooms and small dwellings of multiple tenant families. The yard typically contained a communal standpipe or cistern, a communal latrine or earth closet, a central space for cooking and washing, and a social life conducted largely in the open air.
The yard was also a community. The multiple families who shared a yard were not merely co-residents. They were often extended kin, or people from the same rural parish who had come to Kingston seeking work and had found each other through the networks of their home communities. They shared childcare, shared food in lean periods, shared information about work and about the various threats — eviction, police attention, illness — that were the constant background noise of the inner-city poor. The yard community could be a place of extraordinary mutual support. It could also be a place of intense friction, as the privations of overcrowded shared space placed constant pressure on social relations that had no room to breathe.
The rents for yard rooms were extracted by landlords who ranged from the city’s established property-owning class to small-scale investors who had bought or inherited one or two rooms in an inner-city yard and relied on the rental income for their own precarious subsistence. The relationship between tenant and landlord in the Kingston yard was a miniature version of the larger colonial relationship: the landlord held the title deed; the tenant held nothing but a week-by-week arrangement that could be terminated with whatever notice the landlord chose to give. The tenant who fell behind with rent — perhaps because the casual dock-work had dried up, or because a child was sick and the market trading had been interrupted — was liable to summary eviction into the street.
The tenement buildings that supplemented the yards in the inner-city areas were typically two- or three-storey wooden structures of the mid-nineteenth century, built as single-family dwellings and long since subdivided into as many separate rental units as the owner’s contractor could fit within the shell. By the 1920s, the worst of these buildings were structurally compromised, vermin-infested, without functioning sanitation, and housing densities that colonial medical officers described in their reports with a kind of exhausted precision: four adults and three children in a room measuring twelve feet by nine; six adults in two rooms with a single window; eight people sharing a yard latrine that was emptied by contract scavengers once per week.
The medical consequences were predictable. Tuberculosis was endemic in the inner-city areas. Infant mortality rates in the Kingston corporate area were among the highest in the Caribbean. Typhoid, dysentery and hookworm were common. The Jamaica Medical Service, established and expanded in the Crown Colony era, ran clinics and hospitals but operated from a resource base that was wholly inadequate to the disease burden of the urban poor. The colonial medical reports of the 1920s and 1930s documented these conditions with meticulous accuracy. The political response to those reports was, for most of the period, close to nothing.
Going Foreign: Migration, Remittances and the Shape of Communities
While Kingston’s housing conditions deteriorated, rural Jamaica was being reshaped by a different force: emigration. From the late nineteenth century onward, and with particular intensity in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Jamaican men — and a smaller number of women — left the island in large numbers to seek work in the construction sites, cane fields and banana plantations of Central America, Cuba, the United States and the Panama Canal Zone.
The Panama Canal, whose construction employed tens of thousands of West Indian workers between 1905 and its opening in 1914, was the single largest draw. The canal construction companies — first the French, then the American — actively recruited in Jamaica, and the wages on offer, even under conditions of harsh physical labour in a disease-ridden jungle, were considerably higher than anything available on the island. Jamaican workers in Panama sent money home. Remittances from the canal workers allowed rural families to repair houses, purchase additional land, send children to secondary school and accumulate the small capital reserves that might provide a buffer against a bad agricultural year.
The physical evidence of migration money could be read in the housing of the rural parishes from which the migrants came. In the communities around St Ann’s Bay, in the interior of St Mary, in the villages of Portland and Trelawny, houses that had been wattle-and-daub began to acquire concrete block foundations and metal roofing. A family whose son had spent three years on the canal returned not just with cash but sometimes with building materials — zinc sheeting, nails, a bag of cement — purchased in Panama and shipped home. These were visible markers of improved economic standing, and they were understood as such in communities where the material standard of housing was a form of public biography.
Migration to Cuba, which intensified in the 1910s and 1920s as the Cuban sugar industry expanded dramatically, drew a different group: the seasonal cane-cutters and agricultural workers who moved back and forth between Jamaica and the Cuban estates on a pattern that replicated, in some respects, the seasonal labour movements of the post-emancipation Jamaican economy. The conditions in Cuba were often brutal — the cane cutting was gruelling, the accommodation minimal, the employers not notably more sympathetic to their Jamaican workforce than the Jamaican planters had been — but the wages were still better than what was available at home. And the Cuban migration, like the Panamanian, generated remittances that flowed back to Jamaica’s rural communities and contributed, modestly but measurably, to the improvement of housing conditions in the parishes most heavily affected.
The migration waves also changed the composition of rural communities. The men who went foreign and did not return — who settled in Panama City, in Havana, in New York, in Colon — left behind women-headed households that managed the family land and raised the children on a combination of provision-ground agriculture, market trading and whatever remittances continued to arrive. The female-headed household, which had deep roots in Jamaica’s post-slavery social structure, was reinforced by the emigration of male breadwinners in ways that would have long-lasting effects on the structure of Jamaican family life and on the patterns of property ownership and inheritance within rural communities.
Marcus Garvey, Race and the Claim to Space
No account of Jamaica in the first decades of the twentieth century can avoid Marcus Mosiah Garvey, who was born in St Ann’s Bay in 1887 and who would, in his brief period of mass political activity between 1914 and the late 1920s, become the most influential Black political thinker and organiser of his era in the entire Atlantic world.
Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica in 1914, and by the time he relocated its primary operations to New York in 1916, the organisation had chapters across the Caribbean, the United States, Central America and West Africa. At its peak in the early 1920s, the UNIA claimed millions of members and published a newspaper — the Negro World — that circulated in dozens of countries. Garvey’s political programme, summarised in the slogan “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad,” was a comprehensive challenge to the colonial order that had defined the lives of people of African descent since the sixteenth century.
What Garvey’s politics meant for the question of land and housing in Jamaica was not simple or direct. Garvey did not propose a land redistribution programme in the Jamaica of 1914; his gaze was Continental and diasporic rather than narrowly legislative. But his central argument — that Black people were entitled to dignity, self-determination and ownership of the spaces they inhabited — had implications that resonated deeply with communities whose relationship to land had been shaped by slavery, emancipation and a post-emancipation system that had consistently sought to limit Black access to productive property.
In Jamaica, Garvey’s movement drew its support most heavily from the urban working class and the rural poor who had migrated to the towns. The UNIA chapters in Kingston — the organisation had its Jamaican headquarters in a building on Orange Street in the inner city — provided a social institution that served some of the same functions as the Baptist chapels had served for the free village communities of the previous century: a space of communal gathering, mutual support, information exchange and the articulation of a collective identity that refused the diminishment that the colonial system offered as a daily experience.
Garvey was deported from the United States in 1927 following a conviction on charges of mail fraud connected to his Black Star Line shipping venture, and he returned to Jamaica where he continued his political activity until his death in London in 1940. His influence on the generation of Jamaican political leaders who would guide the island to independence — a generation that included Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante, both of whom came of political age in the Garvey era — was formative in ways that neither always acknowledged publicly but which shaped their understanding of what an independent Jamaica might aspire to be.
Depression, Banana Disease and the Collapse of Rural Security
The banana economy that had provided the north-east parishes with a degree of commercial security since the 1870s began to unravel in the late 1920s and early 1930s, under pressure from two directions simultaneously. The Great Depression, which followed the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, collapsed commodity prices across the board. American consumers reduced their expenditure on imported tropical fruit. The prices paid to Jamaican growers by the United Fruit Company — which had consolidated its control over the Jamaica banana trade through the merger of 1899 that absorbed the old Boston Fruit Company — fell sharply.
Simultaneously, Panama disease — a soil-borne fungal infection caused by Fusarium oxysporum, against which the Gros Michel banana variety that Jamaican smallholders had cultivated for sixty years had no resistance — was spreading through the plantations. Infected plots produced fewer and smaller bunches, then ceased to produce at all. The disease could not be treated and could not be reversed once it had taken hold in a soil. Fields that had produced profitable banana crops for a generation became, within a few seasons, worthless for banana cultivation. The only remedy was to replant with a different variety on clean land — an option that required capital and alternative land, neither of which most smallholders possessed.
The combined effect of the Depression and Panama disease on the banana parishes was devastating. Smallholder incomes collapsed. Families that had been using banana income to service mortgages on recently purchased lots found themselves unable to keep up with payments. Some lost the land they had accumulated through years of careful saving and commercial cultivation. The corrugated iron roofs that had been the visible marker of banana prosperity in the Portland and St Mary hills began to rust without the maintenance funds to replace them. The improvements in rural housing standards that the banana income had supported were halted, and in some communities reversed.
The rural poor who could not survive on their deteriorating provision grounds and had no banana income to supplement them moved. They moved to Kingston and to the other corporate area towns — Montego Bay, Spanish Town — in search of work that was itself increasingly scarce. The Depression had contracted the dock work, the construction trade and the service industries of the capital. The migrants arrived in a city already under severe housing pressure and found themselves competing for space in the inner-city yards with the existing urban poor. The population of the Kingston corporate area grew through the 1930s as rural Jamaica pushed its surplus population toward the capital, and the housing crisis that had been building since the post-earthquake rebuilding became acute.
1938: When the Workers Spoke
The crisis that had been building in Jamaica’s housing, labour and rural economy through the Depression years broke open in May and June of 1938 in a series of strikes and disturbances that began in the Westmoreland cane fields and spread to the Kingston docks, the banana estates of the north coast and the transport workers of the capital. The trigger was wages — specifically, the disparity between the poverty-level wages paid to Jamaican sugar workers and the profits being extracted by the American-owned and British-owned sugar companies that had bought into the island’s remaining sugar production.
Alexander Bustamante, a Jamaican-born money broker and journalist who had returned to the island in 1932 after years in Cuba, Panama, New York and elsewhere, emerged in the 1938 crisis as the most charismatic labour organiser the island had produced. Bustamante was not an ideologue; he was a tribune — a man whose gifts were personal, visceral and theatrical, who understood the anger of the Kingston yards and the Westmoreland cane fields in a way that the educated middle-class leadership of the nascent political movement did not. He spoke at meetings with a directness that the colonial authorities found alarming, was arrested in May 1938, and emerged from custody as the most famous man in Jamaica.
Norman Washington Manley, his cousin — a Rhodes Scholar, a brilliant barrister and one of the most intellectually formidable Jamaicans of his generation — appeared for Bustamante at his hearing and used the political crisis of 1938 to found the People’s National Party in September of that year. Manley’s vision was more programmatic than Bustamante’s: a Jamaica that would eventually achieve self-government, a Jamaica in which land reform, public housing, universal education and a welfare state would transform the conditions of the working poor whose lives the 1938 disturbances had made impossible for the colonial administration to ignore.
The British government’s response to the 1938 disturbances was the appointment of a Royal Commission under Lord Moyne — the West India Royal Commission — whose investigations would eventually produce a report of remarkable candour about the conditions of the Caribbean poor. The Moyne Commission’s report, which documented the housing conditions, malnutrition, unemployment and medical deprivation of the Caribbean working class in detail that the colonial administration had never before committed to official paper, would shape the post-war development policies of the entire British Caribbean. But the report, completed in 1939, was suppressed for the duration of the Second World War on the grounds that its contents might be used as anti-British propaganda. The people whose conditions it described would not read its findings for years.
What the events of 1938 made clear, beyond the immediate drama of the strikes and the arrests, was that Jamaica’s housing conditions — the overcrowded yards of west Kingston, the eroding rural smallholdings of the banana parishes, the workers’ barracks of the surviving sugar estates — were not simply a social problem. They were a political one. The men and women who had lived their lives in these conditions, who had watched their houses crumble without the income to repair them and their lots diminish as debt and disease claimed the banana income they had relied on, were no longer willing to accept the colonial administration’s assurance that improvement was coming and patience was required.
The Jamaican working class had, in the late 1930s, acquired the two things that the colonial system had spent a century attempting to deny them: political organisation and a public voice. The movements of 1938 — Bustamante’s labour federation, Manley’s nationalist party, the growing trade union movement that would crystallise in the following years — would define the politics of the next two decades. And at the centre of all of them, stated or implied, was the question that had been at the heart of Jamaican history since 1838: who had the right to decent housing, to land, to the physical security that the colonial system had always arranged for its own benefit and distributed, if at all, by grudging concession rather than by right.
The decade between 1938 and Jamaica’s eventual self-government would see the first systematic public housing programmes in the island’s history, the first serious land settlement schemes, and the beginning of a constitutional journey that would end with independence on 6 August 1962. The Jamaica that arrived at independence would be a different country from the Jamaica of 1900. But the housing crisis of the yards, the precarious tenure of the rural smallholder, and the unanswered land question that ran through the whole of Jamaican history like a seam through limestone — these would not be resolved by independence alone. They were the inheritance that independence would receive, and the work that the new nation would have to find the resources, the will and the imagination to address.
Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com
Visit our YouTube Community ↗