IN MANY years gone by, there was a practice by some person’s enemy to call a funeral home to send a hearse to pick up that person’s body because that person was dead. It was the ultimate insult; you are nothing, you are dead. Sometimes, there was...
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15 to Sunday, November 17, the Asafu Yard in the Maroon village of Charles Town in Portland teemed with mourners, well-wishers, bereaved family members, relatives, friends and associates of Colonel Marcia ‘Kim’ Douglas, who passed...
ON JULY 1, 1870, the Jamaican Government opened a home specifically for elderly women, but eventually it opened its doors to destitute and crippled old men, and children. It came to be called the Eventide Home for the Aged. One hundred and ten...
“Colonel was not just a natural leader; she was a force of nature. Her passion for advancing sports, education, social development, and cultural heritage resonated deeply within our community and beyond. She championed these causes tirelessly,...
AT FOLLY Point, near Portland’s capital town of Port Antonio, there are ruins of a 60-room mansion, commonly referred to as ‘Folly Mansion’, and located on a small peninsular. There are several stories about how the place came to be called Folly....
IN APRIL 1919 Garvey announced plans to launch a steamship business, known as the Black Star Line Shipping (BSL) Company, as a way to transport cargoes of African produce to the United States. He held a mass meeting inside Carnegie Hall, New York...
IN UNFLATTERING circum-stances, Malcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St Ann’s Bay, St Ann, on August 17, 1887. Somewhere along the journey, Malcus was changed to Marcus. Garvey became a printer’s apprentice before moving in 1906 to Kingston, where he...
AFTER YEARS of frustration, the British colonisers signed treaties of peace and friendship with the Maroons, in 1738 with the Leeward Maroons of western Jamaica, and the Windward Maroons of eastern Jamaica in 1739. The treaty in the west was signed...
TONI-ANN SINGH in her capacity as Miss World Jamaica might have brought some attention to the district of Bath (where she lived for a while), located in the eastern parish of St Thomas; but it was Jacob, the run-away enslaved African who...
AT THE time of the Morant Bay Uprising in 1865, Edward John Eyre, the British colonial governor, was in charge of the administration of the colony, in which there were dissenting voices, much discontent among the laity and in the Assembly over the...
ON WEDNESDAY, April 20, 1966, people started to gather at the Palisadoes Airport, near Port Royal. They were anticipating the arrival of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, the following day. They were mainly Rastafarians...
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1957, hundreds of members of the Holy Name Society of St Anne’s Roman Catholic Church boarded a train at the Kingston Railway Station for an all-day excursion to Montego Bay in the company of their leader, the Reverend Father...
WHEN GENERAL Robert Venables and Admiral William Penn failed to capture Hispaniola from the Spaniards for the British Crown, they decided to take Jamaica instead as a consolation prize to appease Oliver Cromwell, the then de facto ruler of Great...
SOME PEOPLE’S bad reputation is so rich that it propels them to fame. Jack Mansong was one of such people. Years after he died, he was still the ‘talk of the town’, a folk hero whose story has become the inspiration for many creative endeavours. It...
IT IS a story from our slavery past that many Jamaicans have never heard about, yet a plaque was mounted at Black River, St Elizabeth, on Friday, December 28, 2007 by the Institute of Jamaica, in collaboration with the Jamaica National Bicentenary...
YESTERDAY WAS Heroes’ Day, a day set aside to honour and remember our men and women who carry the status of ‘National Hero/Heroine’. And for years, Derrick ‘Black X’ Robinson has been advocating for Tacky (originally Takyi) to officially join our...
THE MAROON community in Jamaica, and more so the Charles Town Maroon village in Portland, was hurled into deep mourning on the morning of Wednesday, October 16 when Colonel Marcia Douglas died suddenly. She was 48 years old. Colonel Douglas, who...
THE HUNT for the four fugitives wanted for the murder of two infantrymen of the Royal Hampshire Regiment took a gruesome turn on Saturday, June 25, 1960, when the body of three Rastafarians were found buried in one grave, near where the Rastafarian...
WHEN JAMAICAN police personnel and members of the Royal Hampshire Regiment (RHR) went to raid a Rasta Camp at Red Hills in St Andrew on Tuesday, June 21, 1960, they did not go on a whim. The operation took place after a weekend of planning because...
AN ALL-NIGHT vigil and search for the five men suspected of shooting four privates of the Royal Hampshire Regiment who went with local police personnel to raid a Rasta camp in Red Hills, St Andrew on Tuesday, June 22, 1960 was futile. The...
FROM THE very beginning, there was opposition to the rise of the Jamaican folk religion now known as Rastafarianism and its founder, Leonard Howard, who established a camp near Sligoville in St Catherine. The camp was called The Pinnacle because it...
The Jamaican Association for Debating and Empowerment (JADE) Limited, elevating debate culture across Jamaica, will be hosting its second annual National Debaters’ Week (NDW) from Sunday, October 13 to Saturday, October 19, under the theme, ‘Hear...
ON WEDNESDAY, October 2, we tell the story of Obeahman Plato and the tsunami, hurricane and earthquake that destroyed Westmoreland in 1780, a year when hurricanes raged. These natural phenomena are not rare, for the island is prone to them, as a...
IN THE late 1970s, Jamaica was gripped by the evil hands of political violence, leading up to the general election of October 30, 1980. Michael Manley of the People’s National Party (PNP) was prime minister, and Edward Seaga was the leader of the...
LAST YEAR, UK-born Jamaican writer, Kwame M.A. McPherson, won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the first Jamaican to have won this the biggest global fiction-writing competition. But, flashback to 2006. Then, he was starring in his own real-life...
