New York African Studies Association

! N E W S L E T T E R

! NYASA Newsletter No. 64! Winter/Spring 2013! ISSN 0148-7264

Professor Locksley Edmondson Named Distinguished Africanist

Locksley Edmondson of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University will be re-ceiving the Distinguished Africanist Award at the 38th Annual Conference of the New York African Studies Association being held at Binghamton University, April 5-6, 2013. Last year’s recipient was Muno Ndulo, Professor of Law at Cornell University and Director of Cornell University’s Institute of African Development. Among other recipients have been such luminaries in the field of African Studies as Chinua Achebe and Ali Mazrui.

Professor Edmondson was born and raised in Ja-maica and completed his higher education in England (B.S., Birmingham) and Canada (Ph.D, Queens). He has been at Cornell for over 20 years, including appointment as Director of Afri-cana Studies (1991-96). He previously taught at universities in Canada, East Africa, and the Car-

ibbean. At the University of the West Indies he was Dean of Social Sciences for four years. In the United States, besides Cornell University, he taught at the University of Denver and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

A political scientist, Professor Edmondson has been a consultant to several international or-ganizations (including UNESCO and the United Nations University). Additionally, he has served as president or executive board member of a number of professional organizations specializ-ing in Caribbean, African, and African American concerns.

He has traveled and lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean. He has attended numerous interna-tional professional conferences, including par-ticipation by invitation in six UNESCO Experts’ Meetings, chairing two meetings and serving on a third as vice-chair.

Professor Edmondson has published widely on a broad range of topics, involving such issues as Africa and the African Diaspora, Caribbean Na-tion Building, Black Roots and Identity, Pan-Africanism, the International Challenges of Race, and the Caribbean and Africa Within the Global Society.

He also has been a moving force in the New York African Studies Association, serving for many years on the NYASA Executive and as president during 1997-1998.

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Down the Way to Jamaica: The Island in the Sun 27 Years Later10 November - 2 December 2012

Article and pictures by Roger Gocking, Professor Emeritus, Mercy College

Caribbean Airlines was not sure which plane we were to fly on from New York to Kingston, Ja-maica. We boarded a plane then disembarked into the jet port and then were told to get back on. It took a while to go through this “fire drill” as the aircraft was brim full with Jamaicans going home with lots of baggage. It meant that by the time we got to Jamaica darkness had descended. The anticipated bird’s eye view of the magnifi-cent Kingston harbor, surrounded by the Blue Mountains, was only a sprinkle of twinkling lights and dark shadows. My friend, Peter, who was picking me up, had paid the price for this confu-sion and had been waiting two hours for my arri-val. It was just another example of why he was convinced that flying with this “unreliable” West Indian airline (the national airline of Trinidad that also operates Air Jamaica) was not for him. Instead, he prefers to stick with U.S. carriers. He had just returned from a conference in Europe and was going back for another in two weeks and then would be off to Barbados for yet another. Frantz Fanon of Les damnés de la terre fame once made the comment that the Third World bour-geoisie were a gold mine for international air-lines. Peter certainly is doing his bit, though most of his travel is on business attending public health conferences all over the world. He is one of Jamaica’s leading experts on the AIDS epi-demic in the island.

In contrast, local transport in Kingston works far better than when I was last on the island 27 years ago. Now private enterprise in the form of “route taxis” provides serious competition for the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) with their omnibuses. These route taxis are regular cars that carry four passengers on a set route and cost only slightly more than the JUTC buses ($100 versus $80 Jamaican dollars - a little over a U.S. dollar) and come far more often. A trip to South Parade in downtown Kingston from where I was staying in the suburbs took a fraction of the time it would have taken in the past.

Across the road from where I got off was the

Kingston Parish Church, the Church of Saint Thomas, one of the oldest churches in Jamaica. It was constructed in the late 17th century soon after the English captured the island from the Spaniards in 1655. Fortuitously, the building was open, which I was to discover was not usually the case for Jamaican churches when no service is taking place. Unfortunately, the threat of theft and vandalism in unattended churches is all too possible. I was curious to see if Afrocentric relig-ious art had come of age as it has in many places with predominantly black populations. As one would expect for an Anglican High Church, over three-hundred years old, there is no lack of beau-tiful stained glass windows depicting scenes from the Bible with typically Caucasian personae. However, I was not disappointed, as in the Lady Chapel there was both a very Jamaican-looking life-sized Madonna and Child by the Jamaican sculptor, Osmond Watson (1934-2005), and a triptych of the Pieta done by Susan Alexander, a New Yorker who has made Jamaica her home.

Afrocentric artwork in the Lady Chapel of the Church of Saint Thomas the Apostle byOsmond Watson and Susan Alexander

As it turned out the Church of Saint Thomas was hardly unique. The Catholic Holy Trinity Cathe-dral is not far away from Saint Thomas and simi-larly in downtown Kingston and undoubtedly is the most impressive of all Jamaican churches.

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There is now an extensive restoration project un-derway very much helped by support from the King and Queen of Spain. Initially the church contained some of the most outstanding art work of any church in the Caribbean, but in 1970 much of this was in terrible shape and the then Roman Catholic Bishop decided the best solution was to paint over the interior in a bland institu-tional grey. The feeling was that the art work was “too ornate and pretentious” to be in keep-ing with edicts coming out of Vatican II that there should be a “direct relationship between the Catholic layperson and God.”

There also was concern with criticism from the Black Power movement that the church was pro-Caucasian as indicated by its art. In 1968 there had been serious Black Power riots in Kingston that had been triggered by the government re-fusing to allow the return to the island of the popular Guyanese black activist lecturer, Walter Rodney. The issue of black power remains a po-tentially incendiary issue in Jamaica and belat-edly to offset the criticism that the Catholic Church is too white the present Holy Trinity rec-tor has commissioned the church’s property manager, who is an amateur artist, to add some murals of black saints. The latter has no idea of who these saints are but from looking at a par-tially completed mural it seems that one will be the Peruvian sixteenth and seventeenth century “mulatto” Saint Martin de Porress. Saint Thomas and Holy Trinity Cathedral are in downtown Kingston, which like many other large capitals has suffered over the years from middle and upper middle class flight to the suburbs. The premier Catholic Church in Kingston is now Saints Peter and Paul located in the northern suburb of Liguanea with appropriately many upmarket shopping centers. I was curious to see if Afrocentricity had also made some inroads in this much wealthier, lighter-complexioned con-gregation with potentially ambiguous feelings about black power. In spite of the more upscale neighborhood the church was also kept locked, but it was easy enough to find someone with a key, and then I was left to wander at my leisure through the im-maculately maintained building. Apart from

statues and paintings, the most typical Afrocen-tric art in Catholic churches has become the four-teen Stations of the Cross that adorn the walls of the nave. Typically these depictions of the via dolorosa have been mass-produced examples of what has been described as “Art Saint Sulpice” (named after the area around the Church of Saint Sulpice on Paris’ Left Bank that since the 1840s has become a worldwide center for liturgical art). This is what adorned the walls of Saints Peter and Paul when I was growing up in Jamaica; but much to my surprise had now been replaced with very Jamaican-looking portraits of Christ and other persons involved in the Crucifixion. They had been done in concrete and though the fea-tures were clearly negroid the white/grey color of the material ironically mutes this aspect of the art work. I eventually was able to interview the woman responsible for this work, who is a well-known Jamaican artist, Joan Josephs, and a mem-

Faces of Jesus and Mary in one of the Stationsof the Cross in the Church of Saint Peter and

Paul by Joan Josephs

ber of the congregation. She is a product of the Jamaica School of Art which was established by Jamaica’s best-known sculptor, Edna Manley, who was married to Norman Manley, Jamaica’s second prime minister. She told me she had con-sciously done the work to look Jamaican to say “who we are.”

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She is currently at work on an outdoor project in the church’s grounds and well represents the willingness of Jamaican artists to produce relig-ious art. Christopher Gonzalez, who acquired some notoriety/celebrity with his statue of Bob Marley, which was to stand in front of the Na-tional Stadium, has also produced highly contro-versial religious work. One of his least controver-sial is an emaciated looking black Christ in the University of the West Indies’ non-denomina-tional chapel at the University’s main Mona Campus. Marley’s family and the Rasta faithful were hardly impressed with Gonzalez’s portrayal of Marley which looks a bit like tree’s roots com-ing up out of the ground, and it was pelted with stones and fruit when it was first unveiled at the National Stadium in Kingston. It was then exiled to the National Gallery and more recently has found a home in the Island Village Resort in Ocho Rios where, perhaps, tourists may be better able to appreciate its expressionistic qualities. The statue of Christ in the University Chapel has done only somewhat better, as it is tucked away among the drums, now de rigueur for the ecu-menical services of today, in the back of the chapel where it could easily be mistaken for a clothes rack.

However, in general, Jamaicans take art seriously as evidenced by the impressive new Jamaica Na-tional Gallery that is located in what was the old Kingston waterfront. After visiting Saint Thomas I made my way there through what used to be Kingston’s main shopping center, Kings Street, which has clearly seen better days. Shopping centers in the suburbs have obviously upstaged what used to be the commercial hub of the city. The gallery itself is located in an area of water-front green space and high-rise office buildings that, like many of such attempts at urban re-newal, seem to be rather underused. The gallery itself gets it fair share of visitors, and I had to rub shoulders with large but closely chaperoned groups of primary school youngsters. The per-manent collection is like a slice of Jamaican his-tory as it begins with a selection of art objects by the Taino people who inhabited Jamaica when Columbus arrived in 1494, and has an extensive section on Jamaica as a slave plantation society. However, most of the collection is devoted to the painting and sculpture of the recent past. It is a

superlative collection of the later as basically all of Jamaica’s important artists are represented.

A Negro Aroused, Replica of a Statue byEdna Manley, Kingston Water Front

My next destination was the University of the West Indies where my father was once the chief librarian, and I very much wanted to see what sorts of changes had taken place to the campus since I was last there in 1985. The Mona campus is located in a truly magnificent setting about six miles northeast of downtown Kingston with the Blue Mountains of the Port Royal Range as back-drop. They soar to slightly over 5,000 feet at the highest point. The 653 acre campus is located in a valley between the two much lower Dallas and Long Mountains. Much of the area was formally two sugar estates, and the remains of an old aq-ueduct that brought water from the Hope River

Old water aqueduct on the UWI Mona Campus

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in the north to the Mona sugar mill is the most obvious indication of this earlier past.

In the 1950s, when my family moved to Jamaica, the University had about a thousand students. The current enrollment is now over 11,000 and though the area occupied by the campus has not expanded, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of buildings. Undoubtedly, the most impressive is the new Basic Medical Sciences Complex. It is a massive six-story structure that dwarfs all other buildings on campus like a bat-tleship among destroyers. Silver-white in color with bridge-like cantilevered portions, it boasts state-of-the art “green” technologies. A green-house on the roof forms the basis of a huge co-generation electricity plant which will power the facility as well as a number of buildings nearby. Rain water will be “harvested” to flush toilets, and specially designed louvers will protect the building from flying debris in the event of hurri-cane conditions.

Basic Medical Sciences Complex, UWI Mona Campus

The price tag for this Goliath was $3.5 billion Ja-maican dollars, about $37 million USD. It was designed by a Jamaican architect, but like so much else in the developing world China is very much involved in this project, with Zhongda China Construction the main contractor. The Chinese also have constructed a smaller medical center in Montego Bay which is the main tourist destination in the island. They are also hard at work constructing ports, major highways, doing shoreline reclamation and building housing pro-

jects. Unlike earlier campus facilities, the Medi-cal Complex is designed to be a money earner for the University by attracting fee-paying non-West Indian students from the “U.K., the U.S., Canada, and as far away as Africa.” Similar plans are also afoot for the newly opened Mona School of Busi-ness and Management, close by, and the New Faculty of Law complex. Their significantly dif-ferent modes operandi from that of earlier more traditional arts and sciences faculties is well sym-bolized in their far more avant-garde architec-ture. Symbolically, they are clustered together on the opposite side of the campus. My friend Peter’s more cynical take on the actual role of the new Medical Complex is that Jamaica will now be able “to export even more well-trained doctors to the U.S. and Canada at a fraction of what it costs to train them in North America.”

The emergence of revenue-generating faculties represents an important new development for the University of the West Indies, but it is over-shadowed by the far more ubiquitous concern with security. The campus that used to be wide open and accessible to the public has now em-braced security with a vengeance. There are gates at all entrances to the campus maned by guards 24/7. Even entry into buildings requires passage through rigorous security checks. For example, it was a challenge for me to gain en-trance to the main library where my father had been librarian, and required an appeal to a refer-ence librarian who vaguely remembered him. Similarly, the faculty residence area where we lived is now also surrounded by a mesh-wire fence topped by barbed wire and has guarded gates. Altogether, seven guards are on duty 24/7 for this area. It took considerable sweet-talking to get them to allow me to enter to look around and take some pictures of where my family had lived. I had a discussion with one of the security guards at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Per-forming Arts (he refused to let me take a look inside the building!) who had worked for the University since 1959. When he was hired there had been 15 security personnel. Now that num-ber was over 200.

The two newest halls of residence for the dra-matically expanded student body well reflect this trend. Both are named after former vice chancel-

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lors, (the equivalent of the president of a U.S. university) and are located in what used to be exclusively an area of playing fields and sporting complexes. They could both be mistaken for cor-rectional facilities, as they are surrounded by chain link fences topped with rolls of razor wire. I did not even try to gain entrance to see what the accommodation was like and compare it to student housing when I spent a year living in one of the older halls of residence. Across the road

Rex Nettleford Hall of Residence, UWI Mona Campus

was the even more recently constructed UWI/Usain Bolt Regupol Track that was a gift of the German firm, BSW Regupol, and the Puma Shoe Company which sponsors Bolt. This “Bright Ber-lin Blue” track is similar to that in Berlin where Bolt set his 100 and 200 meter world records in 2009. It is also surrounded by a chain link fence with barbed wire on top. Once again it took sweet-talking to get the security guard to allow me inside to look around but to “take no pic-tures.” Behind the Port Royal Mountains that form the backdrop for the Liguanea Plains on which King-ston and the University of the West Indies stand is the even more impressive Grand Ridge of the Blue Mountains. It was in this mountain range where I cut my teeth as a mountaineer, and no visit to Jamaica can be complete for me without a foray into what has been described as a tropical Garden of Eden. The highest peak in the range is Blue Mountain peak at 7,402 feet above sea level with one other 7,000 footer beside it and several

others well over 6,000 feet. The Taino people, who inhabited Jamaica before Columbus arrived in 1494, referred to their island home as the “land of wood and water.” The Blue Mountains, with over 200 inches of rainfall per annum in the high altitudes of the range, best of all reflect this reality. However, this does not make them unat-tractive for human habitation and there has been a long history of settlement in the foothills of these mountains. People seeking to escape the malaria and yellow fever lowland areas of Ja-maica have moved into the healthier mountain coolness of the Blue Mountains. Today they are world-renowned for their Blue Mountain Coffee, but they also have played an important role in the development of the banana industry in Ja-maica beginning in the late nineteenth century.

The Grand Ridge of the Blue Mountains withcloud cover down to 5,000 feet

The long history of settlement has meant that they have been crisscrossed with trails that ex-tend from the foothills to even some of the high-est points. My plan was to hike from the north-ern edge of the University campus up to Guava Ridge in the Port Royal Mountains and then down to the valley of the Green River and from there up to Blue Mountain Peak, the highest point in the Grand Ridge of the Blue Mountains. This was a hike I had done in sections many times in the past, but finding where the trail began soon proved to be impossible. There has been so much building around the Hope River where the trail used to begin and new roads constructed into the mountains that no one knew what I was

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talking about. I felt a bit like a Rip Van Winkle who had returned after a twenty-year sleep. I eventually gave up and instead took a route taxi in the form of a minibus jam-packed with mostly children and teenagers on their way to school in the town of Mavis Bank, near the Green River. By taking this twisting, turning, and often precipi-tous road I circumvented the Port Royal Moun-tains and ended up in the Valley of the Green River.

Crossing the river turned out to be something of a challenge as the rains from the recent Hurri-cane Sandy had brought it up. In the past I felt there would have been more in the way of a real bridge rather than the few logs tied together that called for quite a balancing act to cross. Even more surprising was what had happened to what once had been a well-maintained bridle path. It quickly degenerated into what Jamaicans call a “fine trail.” At times it was fine enough to make me wonder whether I was still on it, but after about four miles it did lead to the Village of Penlyne Castle. In the past this had been little more than a collection of flimsy huts along a deeply eroded path, but now there were several substantial “storied” houses built of concrete. Electricity had also arrived and pulsating Reggae music throbbed from sound systems in numerous shops. It was quickly obvious that the real way to Penlyne Castle was not the “fine trail” I had taken. There now was a driving road that came from another direction. I realized that the transformation of bridle paths into motorable roads was probably one of the most important infrastructure changes that had taken place in the Blue Mountains during my 27 year absence. Bridle paths that had not under-gone this transformation had been allowed to “bush over” which, with over 200 inches of rain a year, does not take very long. One of the few ex-ceptions is the trail to the Peak which continues for a mile or so on from Penlyne Castle as motor-able road to lodges where Peak climbers can stay overnight, and then for about five miles winds its way up the mountain as a hiking trail through dense, wet, mountain rain forest. This is the true Garden of Eden location with over 500 species of flowering plants - many of which are native to Jamaica. In 1992 the Jamaican government des-

ignated the area above 5,000 feet as the Blue Mountain National Park. There are now trail signs with arcane naturalistic information about Aepiphytic plants (those that grow on trees but do not derive nourishment from them - like or-chids) and “Elfin Woodlands” along with admo-nitions “to take nothing but photos and leave nothing but footprints.” Now there is a camp-ground and a day use area at the half way point at Portland Gap. There is even a ranger station, but no ranger was in evidence when I passed by at 5 a.m. in the morning or even when I returned around 9 a.m. It was inevitably wet, cold, and foggy when I have passed through Portland Gap and I can well understand why no one wants to be stationed there on a permanent basis.

In general the park has seen better days in its short existence. Even the trail, which used to be impeccably maintained, is in danger of being “bushed over” in places. The recent ravages of Hurricane Sandy must also have contributed to the considerable erosion evident in sections of the trail. The summit offers a spectacular view of the eastern end of Jamaica and on a really clear day one can even see the outline of Cuba, 130 miles away. Unfortunately, this is not often the case, and though the weather had been promis-ing when I was hiking in from Mavis Bank, by the time I began the final five miles to the peak at 4 a.m. the following morning a typical misty rain

Remnants of the concrete hut on top ofBlue Peak Mountain

had developed which only got worse as I as-cended. The Peak was shrouded in swirling fog

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and I quickly began to cool. People claim to have seen ice on the summit but this would be very unusual as the temperature is more typically in the low forties. Sadly, the small concrete house on the summit, which was always the target of vandalism, is little more than four graffiti-covered walls with a few roofing beams and cor-rugated iron sheets flapping in the wind. Nor has the short trail that led from the main peak to the subsidiary East Peak been maintained, and I quickly gave up trying to force a passage through the thick, wet, scratchy bush.

As I came down from the Peak the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and I could appreciate the ex-tent of the building that has occurred in the low-er elevations of the Blue Mountains - even in ex-tremely precipitous locations. Kingston is the

epicenter of this phenomenon, with an explosion of building in the foothills around the city. I sub-sequently rented a car and drove around much of the island, and it was evident that this building boom is hardly unique to the capital or in the mountains surrounding it. All over Jamaica, houses, some of “McMansion” dimensions, are being constructed. One suspects that much of this is being financed with money earned abroad. Jamaica, in spite of security concerns, is still an extremely attractive place for retiring and areas like the Blue Mountains offer great natural beauty, an exhilarating climate, and escape from the violence associated with large urban areas. In this regard nothing has changed as far as the Blue Mountains are concerned. I have always felt safe hiking in them, even alone, and there is no reason to believe that things have changed.

Around Africaby Tom Nyquist, Nyquist Foundation

Africa’s Unsung Asian Partner - When it comes to Africa’s emerging partners, China has stolen the headlines. But lesser-known Asian players also are involved in the African growth story. Among them is South Korea, which is becoming a full-fledged partner. It’s direct investment stock in Africa increased from $24.3 million in 2000 to $287 million in 2010. OECD data indicates that South Korea’s bilateral trade with the continent reached $25 billion in 2011, from just under $6 billion in 2000 - one of the fast growth performances among Africa’s external partners. Leading the way is Samsung Electronics, which is looking to boost its regional business to $10 billion by 2015.

JP Morgan to Manage Nigeria Sovereign Wealth Fund - Leading U.S. financial services firm, JP Mor-gan, has been appointed custodian of Nigeria’s $1 Billion Sovereign Wealth Fund, according to the Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. The fund will be administered through three structures: the Stabilization Fund, the Infrastructure Fund, and the Future Generation Fund.

Nairobi Becoming Center for African Art - Nairobi has been taking on an increasingly cosmopolitan and even Pan African character, particularly in the realm of the visual arts. There are several factors con-tributing to this trend. One is that art centers like Kuona Trust, Banana Hill, and Red Hill Art Galleries are bringing in visiting artists from around the region for exhibitions. Another is the recent launch of the Circle Art Agency, a new art consultancy firm that aims to link Kenyan artists to the global art market as well as grow an indigenous one. _____________________________________________________________________________________________

Co-editors: Roger Gocking and Thomas Nyquist. The NYASA Newsletter is published by the New York African Studies Association, SUNY New Paltz 12561-2493. Contents of the newsletter may be reproduced with attribution. Membership in NYASA is $25 and back issues of the Newsletter are available for $10 each.

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