The Voice Of The Jamaican Ghetto: Incarcerated but not Silenced

by Adidja Palmer

Not only has Babylon taken our spirituality from us but they have even taken away our names. The names most of us have today are the names that were given to us by our slave masters. We do not even know our true ancestral last name before we were enslaved and branded like animals. In fact, we do not know which country in Africa we are from as the slave traders kept no record of us individually. The church considered us infidels and our transportation as slaves from Africa to the New World was similar to (if not worse than) the way we transport cattle today. Many of us assume that we are from the West Coast of Africa but we cannot even pinpoint the country because Europeans took the continent and carved it into pieces the way thieves share the spoils from a heist. To this day, there is no direct flight from Jamaica to Africa but you can pick choose and refuse to go to the land of the former colonial master on a daily basis, but only if you are ‘allowed’ through Immigration. Where is the love for the Black Child when our people have to travel through the land of our former slave masters, just to get an affordable ticket to our homeland? Can’t all the countries in the Caribbean get together and have one direct flight to West Africa? Unbelievable!