This past week, while US President Obama conducted a state visit to Jamaica, so too passed the 150th anniversary of the final battle of his nation’s Civil War. As the topics of Jamaica’s modern challenges and the two countries’ intertwined histories of slavery converge, the OXO Tower’s current exhibition, Jamaica: Hidden Histories, seems all too pertinent.
With the photography of Sir H. H. Johnston, the exhibition presents the conditions of rural Jamaican life with such a wonderful rawness as to have seemingly lost nothing in that risky transition between the scene and the lens.
Even after the 1833 abolition of slavery, the island’s black population remained in a state of abject poverty with an almost-complete reliance on their former masters for work. Only with the sterling work of cooperating labour movements, trade unions, and exemplary public figures such as Norman Manley would the exploitation of international corporations be curbed to instead bring some actual benefits for the island’s citizens. With the political stagnation of the post-independence 1970s and the consistent economic decline since then, however, such benefits have largely been futile.
For a time, the idea of a sovereign West Indies Federation – one which unified the islands of the Caribbean in a way the colonial powers always feared and sought to prevent – seemed an appealing one, but the craving for national independence around 1962 overwhelmed the dream of a new commonwealth.
This independence brought with it a reassertion of Jamaican values and practices, from art and language to music and dress. These were championed abroad as well as at home, from the Bronx to Battersea, and the Jamaican influence in these metropolises is detailed at the exhibition in its full vibrancy and passion.
Through global fame in reggae and cricket, Jamaica was able to present itself in the way it should have been able to decades previously when Caribbean migrants aboard the SS Empire Windrush were brought in to help rebuild post-War Britain. Bob Marley was extremely popular, and the West Indies cricket team in 1963 beating their former colonial masters at their own game, from Old Trafford to The Oval, dismantled any residual claims to the legitimacy of white superiority.
Yet with Marley’s death long ago, the glory days of Caribbean cricket fading now to a memory, and the current critical condition of Jamaica’s economy, it would appear that there would be more cause to look back to better times than forward. Rather than dwell in the past, however, Hidden Histories presents it to us not merely as a collection of artefacts but as a repository of rich materials from which an equally strong future can be built.
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Hidden Histories runs until the 17th of May at Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank, London, SE1 9PH. Open from 11:00am – 6:00pm. Admission is free.
