Jamaican Plantation Sovereignty and the Suppression of Rastafari: Coral Gardens in 1963

This paper will examine how the newly independent Jamaican state used the Coral Gardens Massacre of 1963 to establish national origin myths by deploying the centuries-old colonial tradition of suppressing religiously inspired enslaved revolts. In response to a small Rastafari group’s resistance to police violence, state officials organized Jamaica’s first joint police-military operation, also enlisting civilians in a coordinated attack on Rasta communities near Montego Bay. Deploying the Jamaican colonial tradition of carefully managing Africana religious communities, Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante ordered that all north Jamaican Rastas be rounded up, tortured, beaten, or killed in the name of public order and stability. 

I argue that, in the first year of independence, the new Jamaican state used the violent management of Africana religion at Coral Gardens as its foundational exercise in sovereignty. By violently suppressing Afrocentric Rastafari, the state maintained the longstanding plantation practice of managing Black religion, demonstrating a narrative continuity between colonial and postcolonial modes of sovereign violence. If the literal plantation could no longer order political life, its mythic logics of white domination and Black suppression would. In articulating the resilience and contestation of visions of sovereignty innovated on the plantation, I will analytically center the role of Africana religious practitioners as authors of their own competing sovereignties. I also show that these Africana religious visions of Black freedom and autonomy authorize Afrocentric subjectivities against which paranoid colonial and postcolonial officials must constantly sustain their own mythic technologies of suppressive state power. In doing so, I expand prevailing scholarly discussions of religion and colonial sovereignty beyond discourses of imperially-enforced Christian theo-politics, instead highlighting the plantation itself as a site for the production of enduring forms of religion and religious visions of sovereignty, humanity, and freedom.

I will succinctly show that Black revolts harried the planter class from the inception of the Jamaican colonial polity. Colonial officials fought for their literal and mythic lives across centuries. Therefore, preserving their mythic sovereignty as paradigmatic overlords, Jamaican planters innovated visions of sovereignty that hinged on the British suppression of enslaved revolt. Building largely upon Sylvia Wynter’s theories of myths’ role in the institution of political and cultural realities as well as Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, myths of plantation sovereignty at Coral Gardens come into view as part of a cyclical performance in suppression and colonial violence.

Briefly tracing the religious facets of enslaved and post-enslaved revolts in Jamaica reveals that narratives of Jamaican state suppression of Africana religions formed the foundational myths that undergirded Jamaica’s colonial and postcolonial sovereignty. As Deborah Thomas has argued, sovereignty is “performed and thus embodied”, and as a performance, “requires an audience for whom the performance must be legible” (Thomas 2019, 13). By suppressing Africana religions, Jamaican sovereigns performed their mythic supremacy for themselves, colonial peers, and the enslaved upon which they impressed prescribed plantation identities. However, following emancipation and the later independence of the Jamaican state, the audience and performers shifted. Upon attaining nationhood, evidencing sovereignty now meant becoming legible to peer capitalist, liberal democracies of the West, namely the regionally hegemonic U.S. However, despite this postcolonial shift, the deeper colonial myths of plantation sovereignty remained. To become a legible modern nation-state was to continue the colonial subjugation of Africana religions–to continue the colonial war without end (Mbembe 2003).

Beginning with the 17th century Maroons and their use of obeah, followed by nascent Pan-African, Ethiopianist Christian revolutionaries, a religious history of Black Jamaican revolts contextualizes the advent of Jamaican Rastafari within such an ongoing colonial war. The mythic stand-in for the enslaved revolt, violence on the Rastafari in the Coral Gardens Massacre of 1963 actualized the legitimacy of the new Jamaican state and highlights a climactic moment of nation-building, wherein plantation colonial myths were narratively fastened to new democratic, independent visions of sovereignty. 

If Jamaican sovereignty depended on the logics of the plantation, then its endurance past emancipation owes to key narrative fictions. I will here propose a definition of such narratives as sovereignty’s working myths. The concept of working myths highlights sovereignty’s theo-political contrivance–that is, the constant need for sovereign entities to narrate their legitimacy using religious and mythic motifs. Myths may or may not reflect material state capacities; however, they always mean to influence real loyalties, terrors, or affinities and are often constructed within longer, deeper, and broader mythic registers, enchanted and infused with affective potency. Far from stable and total, such narrative justifications unsettle traditional scholarly perceptions of sovereignty as hegemonic regimes that factually monopolize power unchecked–the existence of such sovereignty is dubious given that the power to tell a different myth always looms from the margin, threatening the sovereign’s “aura of factuality” (Geertz 1973).

Technologies of violence deployed in colonial domination everywhere were innovated on the plantation, and thus characterize modernity’s visions of freedom, sovereignty, and contestations thereof everywhere (Thomas 2019; Wynter 2003; Williams 1944). Denied the mythically authorized identity of fully human, enslaved and post-enslaved Jamaicans iteratively insisted on their status as humans–innovating their own mythic technologies of becoming legitimate cultural, and political actors. In doing so, they continuously undermined the mythic narratives of colonial sovereignty which demanded Black suppression and Black subjects’ indisputable status as property (Thomas 2019, 13). In this context, Africana religious practitioners, like the Rastafari, have constantly devised competing modes of political, cultural, and religious subjectivity to reflect alternative visions of flourishing, freedom, and survival in service of their own concepts of humanity. Rastafari’s expressly Afro-centric visions of God, aesthetics, history, and political and religious freedom exemplify a competing sovereign tradition, which threatened the mythic regime of the plantation. How and why such a threat was recognized and punished by the new Jamaican state will reveal key insights into the resilience of colonial practices of religious management in the postcolonial Americas and the relationship between such religious suppression and prevailing notions of state sovereignty.