From Slum to Ghetto: Social Deprivation

There were signs of the formation of a massive zone of social deprivation in Kingston—notably in West Kingston, dating from the West India Royal Commission Report (1945) and the Denham Town redevelopment project of the late 1930s (Central Housing Advisory Board, 1936; Stolberg 1990), via the Report on the Rastafari movement in the early 1960s (Smith, Augier, and Nettleford, 1960) and an early paper by Clarke (1966), to the research of Clarke (1975a, b) and Eyre (1986a, b) in the 1970s and 1980s. Kingston’s late-colonial slums were redesignated the ghetto after 1970 (Eyre 1986a, b). More precisely, the ghetto had its origins in the recognized slum areas of West Kingston of 1935 (Clarke, 1975a: fig. 25), in the areas in poor condition in 1947 (Fig. 1.9), the areas of poor housing in 1960 (Fig. 1.10), and the overcrowded areas of 1960 (Clarke 1975a: fig. 48). Clearly, the slum/ghetto is associated with deprivation, and with high population density in relation to low social class and poor quality (usually rented) accommodation. What is peculiar about the present-day Kingston ghetto is that it is a predominantly black area (more than 92 per cent), in a city where the black population is 88 per cent of the total (Ch. 4). So, while the ghetto conforms to Ward’s definition (1982) in that it is racially homogeneous (almost all the remainder of its population is mulatto), it is defined as much by the deprivation of its occupants—and their high-density dwelling—as by its exclusive racial characteristics. Moreover, it has not expanded by flight from white residential heartlands on its periphery, as in the case of Morrill’s (1965) US ghetto model. Indeed the middle-class mulatto districts on its northern periphery in Kingston have retained their class status (while becoming noticeably darker) over the last thirty years, and the ghetto has spread into areas that were either vacant (in the west) or have become decayed (in the east) (Knight and Davies 1978). Whereas in 1970, the slum/ ghetto was largely West Kingston, it now extends to East Kingston as well, and the major spatial distinction is between uptown (which is largely upper or middle class) and downtown (which is lower class and houses the core of the ghetto). The precise point of division is often given as the clock at Half Way Tree, hence the terms living above or below the clock (Robotham 2003b).

Plural StratiWcation: Colour-Class and Culture

Urbanization in Kingston since independence, as the previous chapter demonstrated, has placed a very heavy burden on the already disadvantaged lower class. This burden is expressed in their dependence on the informal sector of employment, high rates of unemployment, rental of high-density accommodation (or outright squatting), shared access to toilet facilities, and lack of piped-water connections in the tenements—all these problematic characteristics piling up in the downtown areas—quintessentially in West Kingston. There is clearly a stratification of living conditions ranging from affluence in the uptown suburbs via a modicum of comfort in the middle zone around Half Way Tree and Cross Roads to outright deprivation in the downtown neighbourhoods. It was argued in the previous chapter that this stratification of living conditions is underpinned by class-differentiated neighbourhoods; as this chapter will show, these circumstances mesh with—and reinforce—colour-class stratification and cultural pluralism, or what I have called plural stratification (to distinguish it from class stratification alone). After the Second World War, it became the conventional wisdom among Caribbean social scientists (of local birth) to depict Jamaica—and the Windward and Leeward Islands—as colour-class stratifications. This had the advantage of linking these Caribbean stratifications to occupational/class systems in the US and Europe, while pointing to a colonial history of colour differentiation, which shadowed class and reinforced it. So, the upper class was white or pass-as-white, the middle class brown and black, and the lower class black with some brown (Henriques 1953: 42). A number of racially or ethnically distinct groups originally fell outside this colour-class stratification, but had, over time, been accommodated within it: Jews were absorbed into the upper class, as were the Syrian professionals; Chinese, the remaining Syrians, and a few East Indians were middle class; the majority of East Indians were lower class. Two further aspects of colour-class need underlining. There was a tendency for its advocates to regard class as unproblematic and consensual, as in the American tradition of social analysis (Parsons 1952). In short, the whole colour-class system was dependent upon the almost complete acceptance by each group of the superiority of the white, and the inferiority of the black (Henriques 1953).

Kingston: A Creole Colonial City (1692–1962)

In colonial towns—settlements founded or developed by Western, imperial powers—two or more ‘cities’ usually exist: ‘the indigenous, ‘‘tradition-orientated’’ settlement, frequently manifesting the characteristics of the ‘‘pre-industrial city’’, and on the other hand, the ‘‘new’’ or ‘‘western’’ city, established as a result of the colonial process’ (King 1976: 5–6). But Caribbean cities gainsay this duality. Caribbean societies have virtually no pre- European inhabitants, and the non-Western elements in their cultures are no more indigenous than the traits of their white elites. Caribbean cities are quintessentially colonial, products of early mercantilism. Their creole (local or American) cultural characteristics were fashioned in the Caribbean by white sugar planters, merchants, and administrators who enslaved the blacks they imported from Africa, and with them bred a hybrid group—the free coloured people (Braithwaite 1971). Caribbean colonial cities are characterized by a morphological unity imposed by Europeans, yet their social and spatial structures have been compartmentalized by these creole social divisions (Clarke 1975a; Goodenough 1976; Welch 2003) Caribbean societies have been moulded by colonialism, the sugar plantation and slavery. These historical factors have also been underpinned by insularity, which facilitated occupation, exploitation, and labour control— and implicated port cities in such seaborne activities as sugar export and slave-labour recruitment. Accordingly, four themes provide the organizational framework for this chapter on Kingston, the principal city of Jamaica, during the colonial period: the economy, population, colour-class-culture stratification, and the spatial aspects of the city’s organization. The themes relate to different scales: the urban economy expresses the global aspects of commercial transactions; population and race-class stratification refer to the juxtaposition of different populations and cultures within colonial society; these socio-economic structures give rise to distinctive spatial configurations within the urban community. By 1800 Kingston was the major city and port of the largest British colony in the Caribbean, and its multiracial population was rigidly stratified into legal estates. Since the early nineteenth century, Jamaica has experienced a sequence of clearly identified historical events—slave emancipation in 1834, equalization of the sugar duties after 1845, a workers’ riot in 1938, and a slow process of constitutional decolonization after 1944, leading up to independence in 1962. This chapter is therefore organized around three major periods in Caribbean history—slavery (1692–1838), emancipation and the postemancipation period (1838–1944), and constitutional decolonization (1944– 62).

Colour-Class and Race Segregation: The Spatial Dimension

It has already been shown that colour-class increasingly dissolved into class in the post-independence period in Kingston as the whites and the racial minorities left Jamaica, and the socially mobile blacks moved into middle-class and elite positions (Ch. 3). However, socio-economic neighbourhoods were still strongly set apart in 1991, and these distinctions were rooted in late-colonial residential patterns established on the Liguanea Plain (Chs. 1 and 2). This chapter is essentially a continuation of the previous one (Ch. 3), and builds on its findings. It concentrates on the spatial dimension of social processes by examining colour-class and race segregation—and desegregation—in the late-colonial and post-independence periods. Colour and race distributions are examined cartographically, and are supplemented by the index of dissimilarity, which measures the evenness/ unevenness of distribution of two categories or groups measured one against the other. The index of dissimilarity is also calculated for occupations, using them as a proxy for class, so that they may be compared to indices for race and colour. Finally, indices known as P* are calculated for colour, race, and occupational categories to measure a group’s comparative isolation, taking its size and the size of the group with which it is being compared into account. The spatial expression of the class structure of Kingston in 1960 and 1991 (to which the argument returns) provides the underpinning for the distribution of colour/racial categories at independence and since sovereignty (Figs. 1.8 and 2.6). The class mosaic was largely reflected in colour distributions in late-colonial times, and the location of the racial minorities was indicative of their degree of penetration of the creole colour-class hierarchy, and the level of their entrée. Likewise, changes in colour/racial distributions since independence may be used to examine the mobility into the elite and middle classes (and class areas) by the black and mixed populations, and to trace the social fortunes of the minorities, in the context of their demographic decline. The chapter begins with a discussion of changing colour and race distributions over the period 1943 to 1991, before examining the statistics for segregation. The white minority group in Kingston in 1943 was confined to the eastern, central, and northern suburbs and to some historic localities in the town centre, associated with business. The areas they occupied recorded at least median socio-economic status scores, and most of the heaviest concentrations were associated with areas of high rank.

Urbanization in Kingston since Independence

The enactment of Jamaica’s independence in Kingston on 6 August 1962 did not sweep away the colonial structures that had been put in place for the previous three centuries. Constitutional change had been taking place since 1944, but unemployment and dependence on the informal sector of the economy, coupled to poor housing and slum formation, could not be put right in short order. This chapter focuses on employment/unemployment and housing issues in Kingston in the first decades after independence, and makes a direct comparison with conditions in the last years of colonialism. A major new policy introduced after sovereignty was structural adjustment, which began to be implemented in a systematic way in the 1980s, and has had a substantial—and negative—impact on the lower class. Academic opinion suggests that the Latin American and Caribbean city has been doubly undermined during the last half century: first, by massive population increase following 1950, as the balance of the population has shifted from predominantly rural to overwhelmingly urban; and, secondly, by structural adjustment, which, since the late 1970s, has undone or undermined many of the solutions to urbanization previously achieved by grassroots endeavour in the face of labour-intensive capitalism—for example, the provision of shelter through self-help housing of the squatter kind. In short, whatever benefits late twentieth-century globalization has brought to Latin American and the Caribbean, there have been massive losers among the urban poor (Clarke and Howard 1999). This chapter modifies many, but not all, of these generalizations in the case of Kingston. While its formerly protected economy has been turned inside out by structural adjustment, Jamaica’s economy, even prior to independence, was small, open, and therefore potentially vulnerable; and Kingston was already a classic example of an overcrowded metropolis with a weak industrial base. The introduction of structural adjustment in Jamaica has increased unemployment or withdrawal from the labourforce, and impacted on the housing situation among the lower class, without—in the case of Jamaica—increasing economic growth. However, in Kingston, once the immediate impact of structural adjustment was over, a static or slowly declining urban economy has gone hand in hand with a gradual reduction (so the data show) of the highest levels of unemployment and a substantial improvement in housing provision and quality, despite the fact that more than half the labourforce is in the informal sector.

Decolonization and the Politics of National Culture

The focus in this chapter shifts from the ghetto, politics, and violence in downtown Kingston (Ch. 5 and 6) to concentrate on the development of the plastic and performing arts during the last four decades of Jamaica’s decolonization and the first four decades after independence. Inevitably, it also concentrates on the experience and achievements of two generations of Jamaicans, who, with the help of a handful of Britishers during the 1920s and 1930s, laid the foundations for the flourishing of creole culture (the culture of the brown and black population) as national culture after 1962. However many of the themes that have previously been investigated— colonialism, race, pluralism, class, the ghetto, and politics resurface in this chapter and are bound into the argument. The chapter opens with a brief account of the late-colonial need to forge a national identity in Jamaica instead of relying on the imitative provincialism of white colonial culture. It then looks at the cultural complexity of Kingston, drawing brief attention to distinctions in family, religion, education, and especially language between the three principal social strata, in the lower two of which the modern arts movement has been embedded. The focus is subsequently placed on the plastic arts—sculpture, wood carving, pottery, and painting; poetry, and the novel; pantomime, dance, and plays. The final section concentrates on popular music and the creative role of the Rastafari movement in the development and diffusion of reggae, one of the quintessential expressions of Jamaican national culture. Here low-status black culture has been not only a national unifying focus for all (or almost all) sections of society, but also a vehicle for projecting a Jamaican black identity on to the international stage. However, reggae has been partially eclipsed by dance-hall (and slackness), and this has introduced renewed tensions between uptown and downtown. A major feature of Jamaican national culture (as it emerged around independence) is that it is creole, or local to Jamaica. However, it is also a plural culture, in that virtually all branches of the arts are divided into tutored and untutored versions: Cooper (1993) uses the terms ‘book’ and ‘long head’, reflecting the involvement of the middle and lower strata, respectively.

Conclusion

This conclusion reconsiders the various themes depicted by spatial and longitudinal analysis, and reflects on the use of spatial and aspatial census data to construct the social geography of Kingston since sovereignty. In particular, the conclusion returns to the imposition of structural adjustment by the IMF-World Bank; the formal/informal split in employment; the persistent housing deficit; the demise of colour/race segregation and the enduring significance of class and pluralism in the social stratification; and the ghetto as a locale of deprivation and violence, as well as of creole creativity. Kingston is no longer the colour–class segregated entity that it was at independence, but it is broken, in a post-modern sense, into variegated micro-worlds of achievement and defeat, danger and safety, often spatially proximate or even juxtaposed. But Kingston is not unique. It is comparable in its employment and housing problems to adjacent Latin American cities that have experienced structural adjustment over the last twenty to twenty-five years, and to an even wider range of post-colonial cities that are undergoing rapid political or economic transformation, including globalization. Two obvious comparators are São Paulo in Brazil, which has suffered income polarization, and the massive growth of its informal settlements since the democratization of the military regime in the 1980s, and the cities of South Africa, where apartheid provided the basis for segregation on a massive scale until the early 1990s. Furthermore, São Paulo, Johannesburg, and Kingston have violent crime records among the worst in the developing world, largely because social polarization is rooted in class/race difference and deprivation. The conclusion turns first to the value of long-run census analysis, before it reviews the book’s major findings, considers Kingston’s place in a wider world, and assesses Kingston’s decolonization. This book has focused on issues of social development and spatial change covering the late-colonial and post-sovereignty periods in Kingston, and has drawn heavily on the census information covering the period 1943 to 1991. The 1943 census was carried out to provide statistical information essential for population registration prior to the first general election based on adult suffrage in 1944, and is regarded as the first modern census.

Politics, Violence, and Drugs

A survey of the frequency and seriousness of violence in Jamaica, focusing on the urban areas, has recently been carried out by Moser and Holland (1997). ‘While signiWcant distinctions occurred between communities, as well as between diVerent focus groups within communities, overall the groups ranked gang and gun violence as the most serious forms of violence, followed by rape and drug violence. Other interpersonal violence was the least serious, although it was the most prevalent type of violence in the communities (Moser and Holland 1997: 22). These conclusions, according to which people rank infrequent outbreaks of gun, gang, rape, and drug violence ahead of all other more common forms of urban violence in terms of their signiWcance is explained by the murder data. Between 1999 and 2001, there were more than 2,760 murders in Jamaica, and homicide rates in the vicinity of 40 murders per 100,000 inhabitants have placed Jamaica near the top of the list of countries with the highest incidence in the world. Yet in recent years the police have attributed only just over 10 per cent of murders to drug and gangland-related activity, the most prevalent categories of murder being related to robbery (25 per cent), domestic violence (32 per cent), and reprisal killings (33 per cent) (Headley 2002). Why has violence associated with guns, gangs, and drugs become so feared? Why has Jamaican politics, often held up as a shining example of post-colonial two-party democracy, been implicated in the development of gangs and guns? How did drugs enter the urban scene in Kingston, and how did Kingston, a Caribbean backwater in terms of global capitalism, become the nexus for international drug cartels? This chapter examines the link between post-colonial political patronage and violence in the context of the Kingston ghetto, home to the city’s most marginal population. It traces the development of key ghetto constituencies into garrison communities in the 1960s and 1970s; and explores the link between politics, gangs, and the development of the trade in ganja (marijuana).