Marooned in Jamaica
The Colonel doesn’t have a telephone. In fact there are no phones in Moore Town, because there are no phone lines high up in the lush forests that cover the northern slopes of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica, writes Mike Gerrard.
There are no mobiles either, because there are no signals. So arranging to meet the Colonel was a little bit hit and miss. At the first attempt, after we drove for an hour to travel the ten miles up the slowly winding and pot-holed road high into the steamy hills, the Colonel wasn’t at home. We left a message that we would be back in two days time, and hoped for the best.
Two days later I returned with my local contact, Charn Brown, a young farmer who also leads walking tours with a company called Valley Hikes. Based in Port Antonio, they take the more adventurous tourists on hiking trips into the John Crow Mountains and the Rio Grande Valley, to go bird-watching or to visit hidden waterfalls a world away from the more touristy side of Jamaica. I’d been told about them at the hotel where I was staying, the Hotel Mocking Bird Hill.
Charn seemed to see my request to meet the Colonel as a challenge, and he was rising to it. I’d long wanted to learn more about the Maroons, the descendants of runaway slaves who live in two autonomous regions, one in the west and one in the east of the island. Visitors are very welcome, the only problem being getting to and from these remote settlements. But Jamaica is the land of ‘no problem’, and Charn bumped us back up the mountain to Moore Town. Jamaica’s major roads had been described to me scornfully by one taxi driver as ‘a national disgrace’, so it’s easy to imagine what they’re like where even the telephone poles don’t go.
Moore Town is a sprawling village, a mix of wooden and concrete homes. On the wall outside one building is written: ‘No smoking inside this shop.’ It’s a pleasant rural village, not prosperous-looking but far from poverty-stricken, a village where people make a living by growing yams, bananas, mangos, grapefruit, cacao, and whatever else will grow in the warm and wet earth. It is a village like any other in the hills of Jamaica, except for the people who live in it.
As we arrived for the second time outside the house of Colonel Wallace Sterling, four huge Rastas were leaving. It is hard not to be intimidated by these fearsome-looking men with their dreadlocks, till they break into charming smiles and say hello. They’re followed by the Colonel himself, younger than I’d expected from the title. He’s in his early forties, perhaps, with close-cropped hair and wearing a t-shirt and shorts. It is a courtesy to call in on the Colonel when arriving in Moore Town, to be given permission to visit the village.
Wallace Sterling became the Colonel in 1995. ‘To become the Colonel… it wasn’t necessarily my desire but I was asked. I used to work on a cruise ship, and taking this position meant coming back to be here on almost a 24-hour basis. It’s not a paying job. Once I took up the challenge, there are moments you enjoy and moments when you think you could do a lot better.’
In The Parish Of Trelawney, Jamaica
The position of Colonel goes back to the days when the Maroons finally made a peace settlement with Jamaica’s British rulers. When the Spanish had left Jamaica in 1660, they freed their slaves and provided them with weapons, not to be generous but knowing the slaves would cause problems for future rulers. This they did, their numbers increased by runaways from the later slaves who had been brought to Jamaica in their tens of thousands by the British.
The Maroons lived in remote parts of the island’s mountainous interior, a wild wilderness that many of today’s visitors, going there only for the beaches, are unaware still exists. The very name of the Maroons comes from a British corruption of the Spanish word cimarones, or savages. These tribes fought the British fiercely, carrying out raids and often escaping thanks to their knowledge of the mountainous terrain. A peace treaty was eventually signed in 1739, providing the Maroons with the land which they still live on.
The treaty with the British,’ the Colonel explains, ‘said that as a people we were an autonomous region within Jamaica and that still applies today. But over the years laws change to keep in tune with society. A 200-year-old constitution is not necessarily best for today. If someone commits a crime then we have the right to try people in our own court, but in practice we seldom do this. You have to be practical. We have no facilities, no prison, so what we always do in practice is to hand the trial over to the local magistrate. Perhaps domestic disputes we would deal with within the community but if there was a major crime, like for instance a murder, we would allow the police to deal with it.
‘A number of people still speak the old Cromante language. When our fore-parents were fighting in the mountains they would have used this language which was a mixture of the various African languages that they spoke. Because the Ashanti were dominant, most of their language was in there. But when you settle down there is a matter of survival, of commerce, of education. English is the language of education. In the churches they see the old language as the language of devil-worship. Anything that wasn’t Christian was regarded as heathen, whether it was right or wrong. But the essence of communication is understanding, no matter what the language you use.’
The Colonel shows a commendable understanding of the need to live in the modern world, while remaining true to traditions. He is about to go to Kingston to argue the case for a Maroon MP, separate from the MP that represents the whole of the local region. How many Maroons remain today?
‘Well, we have never done a census,’ he says, ‘but we could sit down on the porch and count the people if we wanted to do that. I would say it is in the region of 2,000. Two thousand and change, let us say. And approximately the same amount who live outside the community.’
In order to keep more of the Maroons within the community, the Colonel knows there has to be employment: ‘If there is employment then people would stay. That is why in the ’40s and ’50s people migrated to the UK and USA. Agriculture is the main source of employment. Not too long ago, bananas were selling well, also yams, cacao, potatoes. But all that has changed. The farmer who has 2-3 acres of land on the hillside doesn’t have good access roads for vehicles. He is still reliant on manual labour to get his produce to the roads, to get it to the market. His costs are going to be higher. He cannot compete with, say, the US farmers.
‘We are also looking into producing craft items. It comes back to needing seed money to start these things going. We’re offered the money but always the terms are so hard that it becomes impossible. You wonder if they really want to help you or not. The conditions are so stringent, it really is asking a lot of little communities.’
The Colonel wants to promote eco-tourism too, through companies like Valley Hikes, and to open a museum displaying Maroon culture. But there is a long way to go yet, as he knows.
‘We are now in the 21st century,’ he says, ‘and the school has a computer but it cannot be connected to the internet because we don’t have a telephone line. And no mobile phones.’
Whether that is a good thing or not is a matter of perspective.
