See Part 1 Here
See Part 2 Here
Carolyn Cooper is Professor Emerita of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. In the 1980’s, she was an active member of the Women’s Studies Working Group at Mona. In the 1990’s, she wrote a bilingual English/Jamaican column for the Jamaica Observer. From 2009-2024, she wrote a column for the Jamaica Sunday Gleaner. Today’s column, in three parts, was delivered in June as a plenary lecture at the 50th annual conference of the Caribbean Studies Association in Kingston, Jamaica.
In June 2022, Dr Devon Taylor, founder and president of the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (JABBEM), contacted me about the work of the organisation. It was the loss of access to the Mammee Bay Beach which he frequented as a child which precipitated the formation of the activist group. Mammee Bay Resorts allegedly owned the land above the beach and sold it to River Land Holdings and Sepheus Holdings in 2018/2019. The dates of the transactions are not precisely known. Because of the COVID lockdown which restricted free movement, regular users of the beach were not aware of the sale of the property and the subsequent lock out. I readily agreed to lend my support to the cause as a volunteer advisor. I am indebted to Dr Taylor for the JABBEM information that follows.
Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (JABBEM)
is an equal rights and environmental justice movement
that seeks to undo discriminatory beach access and use of the sea
policies and practices against the Jamaican people.
JABBEM seeks to make all beaches in Jamaica accessible
to Jamaicans with general rights of access in perpetuity
as well as advocating for the rights of nature status
for the beach and river ecosystems.
It is the tourist industry in Jamaica that benefits from beach access legislation that discriminates against the majority of citizens. JABBEM highlights the inequitable distribution of tourism profit in 2024, as confirmed by data from the Statistical Institute of Jamaica. Of the US$ 4.3 million total profit, the community share is a mere 10%, the Government cut is 20% and the don gorgons of the tourist industry rake in 70%. It would be good to know the exact breakdown of foreign versus local tourism profits. I anticipate that the lion’s share goes to foreigners whose hotel room capacity and occupancy rates far exceed those of most local hoteliers.
Beach access in Jamaica is governed by the antiquated 1956 Beach Control Act. Section 3 (4) states that:
“No person shall be deemed to have any rights in or over the foreshore of this Island or the floor of the sea save such as are derived from or acquired or preserved under or by virtue of this Act.” As confirmed in data from the National Environment and Planning Agency, a mere 2.8 miles of the 494 miles of Jamaica’s shoreline is accessible to the public. Less than 1%! It sounds even worse in metric measurement. 2.8 miles is 4.5 kilometres; 494 miles is 796 kilometres.
Despite this dread inequity of access, the 1882 Prescription Act provided a measure of relief:
“When any beach has been used by the public for fishing, or for purposes incident to fishing, or for bathing or recreation, and any road, track or pathway passing over any land adjoining or adjacent to such beach has been used by the public or any class of the public as a means of access to such beach, without interruption for the full period of twenty years, the public shall, subject to the provision hereinafter contained, have the absolute and indefeasible right to use such beach, land, road, track or pathway, as aforesaid, unless it shall appear that the same was enjoyed by some consent or agreement expressly made or given for that purpose by deed or writing.”
“In circumstances in which access is disputed, the Prescription Act allowed the matter to be taken up in the courts. Where the public or any class of the public have used any beach, land, road, track or pathway in the manner specified in subsection (i) of section 4 for the period mentioned in the same subsection and such user is disputed, any person concerned in the dispute may lodge a plaint in the Resident Magistrate’s Court for the parish in which such beach, land, road, track or pathway is situated….”
The film Beach Inna Bondage: The Fight For Jamaica’s Coastline brilliantly documents the battle for beach access under the protection of the Prescription Act. The documentary is a collaborative project: JABBEM, roots reggae singer Keznamdi and filmmakers Emiel Martens and Elise Vermeer. Martens is a Dutch film scholar-practitioner who has, over the past 20 years, focused most of his research on the interwoven history of film, tourism, and empire in Jamaica. He is an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and for the academic year 2025-2026 served as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Caribbean School of Media and Communication (CARIMAC), The University of the West Indies, Mona. Martens is the Founding Director of Caribbean Creativity, a non-profit organization that, since 2008, has been dedicated to the programming and promotion of Caribbean and Caribbean-themed cinema in the Netherlands and beyond. Elsie Vermeer is a Dutch documentary filmmaker and journalist with a background in visual anthropology. She currently works as a content creator for the Dutch public broadcaster HUMAN, while also developing independent film projects. Keznamdi won the 2026 Reggae Grammy for his 2025 album Blxxd & Fyah. One of the hits of the album is “Colonial Bondage” which documents the ways in which Jamaicans are still enslaved:
Dem sell out we land
Beautiful beaches
All for the tourist
Business is business
This is my country
It’s broken in pieces
And this is my country
Ran by elite elitas
Exploiting the weakest
While violence increases
My country is bleeding
Oh, crab in a barrel
And everybody get a likkle bit greedy
There are five prescription rights cases now in the courts: Mammee Bay, Bob Marley Beach, Little Dunns River, Blue Lagoon and Providence Flanker.
The Jamaican government’s proposed Beach Access and Management Policy which has been tabled in Parliament seeks to update the 1957 Beach Control Act. But it does not give citizens any right to beach access. Instead, the Government would assert the right to sell beaches; to privatise the sea for over-water development; and to create artificial beaches to which the public would have no access. This is completely unacceptable. Devon Taylor summarizes the issue in this way: “After a careful and studied review, JABBEM concludes that the policy reinforces rather than breaks away from the historical systems of colonial and capitalist dispossession that have denied Jamaican people of sovereign access to their own coastline.”
My column on what Devon Taylor rightly calls “capitalist dispossession” was published in October 2022 with this headline, “Black Jamaicans Not Entitled to Leisure.” There, I noted this comment posted by Carlton Reynolds on The Gleaner’s website in response to my August 2022 column “Racial politics in Jamaica:” “[Y]ou are a very irresponsible woman obsessed with the past and using it to create hatred and division.” No wonder history is not a compulsory subject in Jamaican schools! It seems as if some of us are afraid of the lessons of the past. We refuse to acknowledge the fact that so many of our current social problems are the direct legacy of our brutal history. Our society was founded on the sustained abuse of enslaved Africans. Their sole value was their labour, both skilled and manual, that was forcibly used to create wealth for white plantation owners.
But even those exploitative British capitalists knew that leisure was essential for the survival of the system of slavery. Sunday was a day of rest from the twelve-hour shifts that labourers were forced to endure for most of the week. Some of the day was used for work on provision grounds – land allotted for food production. Yes, it was still work. But they were working for themselves. On Sundays, there was also time for leisure activities. Singing and dancing were the primary forms of recreation. And even though drumming was outlawed, Africans creatively used their own bodies as musical instruments. They rhythmically clapped their hands and stomped their feet, reclaiming their humanity in the pure pleasure of artistic expression. This is the history of Sunday as a day of leisure in Jamaica.
RESERVED FOR TOURISTS
These days, church in its variety of forms is the place where many working-class Jamaicans make a joyful noise unto the Lord on Sunday. For some, their day of rejoicing is Saturday. Religion is therapy, relieving the stresses of the workweek. Or, even worse, unemployment! Men and woman who routinely engage in menial labour dress up in their finery for church. They step out in style. They know that their job is not their identity. Sunday is also the primary day of secular pleasure in Jamaica. Going to the beach for a sea bath is a long-established recreational activity. But it is becoming more and more difficult for the majority of Jamaicans to gain access to beaches. We are excluded from the best beaches on the island. These are reserved for tourists and upper-class Jamaicans.
Politicians of both the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party have failed to ensure that all Jamaicans can enjoy the natural resources of our country. We are the laughing stock of the rest of the Caribbean. On a visit to the Turks and Caicos Islands, I asked a taxi driver about beach access. When he realised I was from Jamaica, he laughed and said he had heard about our troubles.
I return to where I started with piracy that is foregrounded in Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song:
Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit
But my hand was made strong
By the hand of the Almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
The robbery is not only the capture of enslaved Africans. It is the deliberate attempt to erase the identity, the very humanity of Africans in the Diaspora. I here acknowledge the Cuban Jamaican political philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter who argues in her ovular/seminal 2003 essay, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” that the colonialist imperative to overrepresent whiteness as the quintessential definition of humanness must be comprehensively undermined.
In the following lines, Marley makes a surprising appeal, given the title of the song:
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
‘Cause all I ever have
Redemption song
Redemption song
The title of Marley’s song is derived from the name of a popular hymnal published in London by Pickering & Inglis Ltd in 1937. In personal correspondence, the historical sociologist and creative writer Erna Brodber notes that, Redemption Songs is one of those fundamentalist Christian propaganda texts brought to Jamaica in the early 20th century by American missionaries.” She persuasively argues that, “Bob claimed Songs of Freedom instead of the Redemption songs which is all he ever had before sighting emancipatory Rastafari livity. You seek redemption when you have sinned. What sin have black people committed that requires redemption? It is mental slavery that makes us passively accept the image of ourselves as needing redemption. What we need is to do is to define ourselves for ourselves and collectively help each other to sing songs of freedom.” The redemption in the title of Marley’s song appears to be decidedly ironic.
Marley alludes to Marcus Garvey’s prophetic words: “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is our only ruler; sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind.” Emancipation from mental slavery demands that we free Jamaican beaches from colonial bondage. We can no longer allow the capitalist pirates in the tourist industry, in collusion with corrupt politicians, to continue to rob the Jamaican people of our birthright. All beaches in Jamaica should be accessible to all Jamaicans without exception. We must forward triumphantly in this generation, singing songs of freedom.
Discussion