Slough to Kingston

Slough’s Caribbean community, concentrated in the Chalvey area west of the town centre, had watched Jamaica’s fortunes with the particular attention of the diaspora across a season of contrasts: the optimism of June’s first diaspora conference and the grief of September’s hurricane arrived in the same year and in the same community, carried by the same phone calls and the same remittance transfers

Briefing

• Jamaica’s first Biennial Diaspora Conference held in Kingston, June 2004.
• Hurricane Ivan strikes Jamaica, 11 September 2004; deaths, flooding, widespread damage.
• Grenada devastated by Ivan; 90% of structures damaged; Caribbean diaspora mobilises aid.
• Athens Olympics: Jamaica’s sprinters perform strongly; diaspora pride at Summer Games.
• UK Home Secretary David Blunkett introduces identity card proposals; community concerned.

In June 2004, the Jamaican government held the first of what would become a biennial series of diaspora conferences in Kingston. The conference brought together representatives of Jamaican communities from Britain, the United States, Canada and across the Caribbean. Its agenda was ambitious: investment in Jamaica’s development, the formalisation of the relationship between the Jamaican state and its overseas communities, the question of diaspora participation in Jamaican political and civic life, and the role that the approximately three million Jamaicans and Jamaican-heritage people living outside the island could play in shaping Jamaica’s future.

For the Slough community, and for diaspora communities across Britain, the conference was a significant moment. It formalised, for the first time, a recognition by the Jamaican government that the diaspora was not simply a source of remittances but a constituency with its own perspectives, its own expertise and its own stake in the direction of Jamaican development. The communities that had been managing their relationship with Jamaica informally — through family networks, through church connections, through community organisations — now had a formal institutional channel through which to engage with the Jamaican state. The first conference did not resolve the questions it raised, but it established a framework for engagement that had not previously existed.

Ivan: The Hurricane That Changed the Season

Three months after the diaspora conference, Hurricane Ivan arrived. It struck Jamaica on 11 September 2004 — a date that carried its own resonances — as a Category 4 storm. The damage was widespread: roads and bridges were destroyed, homes were flooded, crops were lost, and seventeen people died. The storm had already devastated Grenada three days earlier, where it had damaged or destroyed approximately ninety per cent of the island’s structures and killed thirty-nine people. The scale of the destruction in Grenada was, by any measure, catastrophic: an entire country’s built environment, reduced to rubble in hours.

In Slough, in Brixton, in Chapeltown, the Caribbean community activated its emergency networks with the speed that had become, across the decades of hurricane seasons, a refined response. Money was raised in churches and community halls. Information was gathered through phone trees about which families had been affected and what their immediate needs were. The Caribbean community organisations that had other functions in ordinary times became, in the days after Ivan, coordination centres for emergency support. The community’s capacity for this kind of response was not accidental; it had been built through repeated practice across the hurricane seasons of previous years, and it reflected a solidarity that was one of the defining characteristics of diaspora life.

The Athens Olympics and Jamaican Athletic Excellence

Between the diaspora conference and the hurricane, the Athens Olympics had given the Caribbean community a more straightforwardly joyful occasion. Jamaica’s sprinters — Asafa Powell, who was establishing himself as one of the world’s leading 100 metre sprinters; Veronica Campbell, Aleen Bailey and the rest of Jamaica’s sprint relay squad — had performed at a level that sustained the tradition of Jamaican athletic excellence that had been one of the most consistent and visible expressions of Jamaican national identity since the first Jamaican athletes began competing internationally in the post-independence period.

The Jamaican diaspora’s relationship with Jamaican athletics was a form of belonging. In the years before Usain Bolt transformed the sport, the consistent quality of Jamaican sprint performances was an ongoing assertion of the island’s place in the world: a small nation, resource-constrained, with structural challenges that were the legacy of colonial underdevelopment, but producing, in the particular domain of human speed, a tradition that had no obvious explanation except the training culture, the competitive environment and something in the spirit of the people who ran.

Identity Cards and the Community’s Wariness

In 2004, Home Secretary David Blunkett was developing proposals for a national identity card scheme. The proposals were controversial across the political spectrum, raising questions about civil liberties, privacy and the relationship between citizens and the state. For the Caribbean community, the identity card debate had a particular resonance. The community had a specific history with documentation requirements: the Nationality Act 1981 had created a documentation problem that would manifest, decades later, in the Windrush scandal. The requirement to produce documentation of status — to prove the right to be in Britain — had been used against the community in ways that the community had not forgotten.

The Liberty campaign against identity cards argued that the scheme would create a new infrastructure of surveillance and documentation that would be used disproportionately against minority communities. The Caribbean community organisations that engaged with the debate raised the same concern from their own specific experience. The identity card debate would continue into the following years before the scheme was eventually abandoned. In 2004, it was a reminder that the relationship between the Caribbean community and the British state was never entirely settled, and that the documentation of belonging — who had the right to be here, on what terms and with what evidence — was always, for the community, a question with personal stakes.