Francesca Tavares | Jamaica’s troubles: The history we carry without speaking (1970s)

When the Irish speak of “the Troubles”, they say the words with a particular weight – a compression of grief, passed between generations like a wound that never fully closed. They have their literature, their public reckoning. Even their silences are named.

We Jamaicans have a silence, too. A deeper one – because we have not even named it. When people of a certain age speak of the 1970s, something happens in the room. A knowing pause. An unspoken compact: those who were there know, and those who weren't are not quite owed the full account.

We should say its name.

THE HORRORS

Between 1972 and 1980, Jamaica conducted a political experiment that very nearly consumed the country. One hundred people were murdered in the lead-up to the 1976 election alone. By 1980, official police statistics recorded 844 killed in a single election year – a figure analysts believe understated the true toll given record-keeping limitations at the time. (Jamaica Observer, October 2012).

An average of four Kingstonians were murdered every day in the months before the October vote (AP, reported in The Michigan Daily, July 1980). Among the atrocities of that year: 153 elderly and disabled women killed in a predawn arson attack on the Eventide Home in Kingston on May 20, 1980, attributed by police to politically-motivated men from a nearby constituency. (Jamaica Gleaner archive).

Between 1971 and 1980, 276,200 Jamaicans left the island – 142,000 for the United States alone – and Jamaica lost perhaps as much as 40 per cent of its middle class, overnight (Nations Encyclopedia; Migration Policy Institute). 

"We were very scared," one Jamaican woman who left for New York in 1977 recalled. "A lot of business people were moving. We came with nothing. We went twenty years backwards" (PBS / Exploring Hate, 2025).

Jamaica's GDP fell to roughly 25 per cent below its 1972 level, and the country entered IMF structural adjustment in 1977 – the first victim of the Third World debt crisis – requiring a 30 per cent currency devaluation and deep cuts in public expenditure. Add to that the decimation of Jamaica’s middle class and industry…plummeting poverty and an innovative and cultural winter we are still recovering from. (Boston Review, January 2026).

I mourn the Jamaica that was, and never will be again – the many forced to flee from out of us, leaving the nation forever fractured and unable to be whole.

The garrisons that still define Kingston, St Catherine, Montego Bay, etc. today – still producing dons and bodies and grief – were deliberately constructed in those years as instruments of political power. The architecture of that fear has never been fully dismantled.

But this is also – and this is the part we have most completely forgotten – a story about courage. There were Jamaicans who stood in the middle of that decade and said: “this is what is happening”. In print, under their own names, week after week. I want you to know one of their names.

THE HEROES

John Edgar Colwell Hearne – born Montreal, 1926, educated Jamaica College, Edinburgh, London – served in the RAF in the Second World War and became the first Jamaican author published by Faber and Faber, a contemporary of V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming in that first wave of West Indian literature. 

He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, received the Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica, and directed the Creative Arts Centre at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona for 30 years. Nearly 200 of his handwritten Gleaner columns survive in the UWI archive, described by scholars as invaluable historical records of the period. (Karlene Nelson, PMC/NIH, 2021).

He was, by his own explicit declaration, a Democratic Socialist. A close personal friend of Michael Manley. A man who had worked inside Jamaica House.

Then in May 1976, Hearne went to Orange Street in West Kingston and saw what had happened there and wrote about it.

In his account, 50 armed men had surrounded a tenement block, sealed the escape routes, prevented the police and firemen from entering, and set the buildings alight. Ten people burned to death. Five hundred lost their homes overnight. 

People’s National Party (PNP) supporters had been quietly moved out beforehand; the people who remained were Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) supporters in territory a local Member of Parliament (MP) needed to control. PNP operatives called the strategy “scatta dem” – scatter them. Political cleansing, in patois. 

Hearne went to the communities, saw what was being done to poor Black Jamaicans in the name of the party that claimed to represent them, and wrote about it in The Gleaner.

The response was swift. Demonstrators marched on the Creative Arts Centre at UWI. Graffiti appeared on its walls: “John Hearne is a British CIA”. A placard read: “Hearne must burn”. 

At the PNP's annual party conference in 1977, Hearne took his seat near the platform. A group surrounded him, accused him of writing dirty articles, and beat him bloody. The police fired shots into the air to drive off his attackers. (Jamaica Gleaner, 1977; Jamaica Observer, January 2018).

A Silver Musgrave Medal winner. At that time, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist. A man published by Faber and Faber. Beaten at his own party's conference for telling the truth.

He kept writing.

He was not alone. Wilmot ‘Motty’ Perkins was fired, threatened at his home by political operatives in relay shifts, and sued for libel primarily by politically involved persons – 28 times – not a single case ever tried or settled. (Jamaica Observer, December 2022).

On September 24, 1979, Manley himself marched to The Gleaner's North Street offices with future Prime Minister PJ Patterson and warned the newspaper: "Next time. Next time". The Gleaner's managing director described it plainly as an attempt to influence editorial policy – or close the paper.

As scholars of the Irish Troubles have written: "unspoken horrors plant seeds where new tragedies will grow" (Dissent Magazine, 2020).

Jamaica has its Troubles. We carried them through the 1970s, built them into Kingston's stones, and exported them in 276,000 suitcases. We live with their consequences every day – in the crime statistics, in the garrisons, in a political culture that still cannot fully separate patronage from governance.

John Hearne said what he saw. At a cost most of us will never be asked to pay.

The least we can do is remember him.

- Francesca Tavares is a Jamaican attorney and commentator. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com. ONLINE ONLY COMMENTARY.