Jamaica will preserve British colonial sites as slavery monuments to boost the island’s ‘dark tourism’ industry.
Local activists have led Caribbean demands for reparations for centuries of slavery, but figures in the government believe the country’s economy could benefit from the empire’s remaining physical legacy.
Jamaican ministers want to preserve the crumbling architecture of Georgian plantation houses and the slave infrastructure left over from British rule and use them as sites for ‘dark tourism’.
This style of travel is characterized by visiting places associated with death and suffering. As part of Jamaica’s strategy, the suffering under 300 years of British rule will be explained in places that have been saved.
The plans come amid an intensifying campaign to secure reparations for the Caribbean, largely led by Jamaican academics. But Edmund Bartlett, the Tourism Minister, has his own view on how the legacy of the slave trade could make money.
Mr Barlett said: “We are interested in what is called ‘dark tourism’, it is something we are building.
“We work closely with the Ministry of Culture and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust in the conservation and restoration of historic sites and monuments.
“The built heritage is very important because it tells a story in stone and with sticks and mortar. Jamaica, which is a confluence of so many cultures and peoples and so on, has a story that you need to connect with, because a little piece of you (the British) is really here, a piece of your history, your past.
Mr Bartlett is an author and tourism industry theorist who earlier this month hosted a Global Tourism Resilience conference in Montego Bay, attended by formerly colonized Caribbean countries, which could follow his lead.
While Mr Bartlett is keen to preserve monuments to slavery, others in Jamaica have called for their demolition.
His Labor colleague Alando Terrelonge, the Minister of State for Trade, last year called on Caribbean countries to “demolish those old monuments” and “also remove certain colonial names from our buildings and our streets” so that we don’t ” telling the stories of the oppressors”.
The demands came amid a wave of historical revisions in Britain following the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol in 2020, which also saw the removal of monuments to slave traders including Robert Miligan and John Cass. The process became so controversial that then culture secretary Oliver Dowden devised a strategy of ‘preserve and explain’, insisting that controversial monuments be preserved and their stories told.
Mr Bartlett foresees that Jamaica’s ‘dark tourism’ sites will be popular with descendants of both the slaves and the slave traders, as well as those curious about Britain’s slave economy.
There has been a dark tourism boom in recent years, with UNESCO designating sites including an Argentine torture center and memorials to the Rwandan genocide as protected world heritage sites.
Jamaica may offer many potential locations. Britain took over Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, and after a boom in piracy, sugar plantations operated by enslaved Africans became crucial to the island’s economy until their abolition in 1834. Colonial rule continued until independence in 1962.
Across the island, rare examples of mainly Georgian colonial architecture were left behind by the wealthy plantocracy, including mansions, mansions, courthouses and hospitals, but many of these have fallen into disrepair.
However, conservation projects for colonial sites are now in the pipeline. This includes the residence of John Tharp (1744-1804), once Jamaica’s largest slave and landowner. It will be converted into a history museum explaining its sugar trading in the former slave port of Falmouth.
Tharp’s House could get funding through a £12 million fund managed by the Commonwealth Heritage Forum, a private charity based in London, which may also fund work on the old colonial-era railway station in Kingston.
A new museum is planned in the former colonial capital of Port Royal, which will eventually preserve a 200-year-old naval hospital.
The Morant Bay Courthouse, which was at the center of the execution of Jamaican national hero Paul Bogle, who led a rebellion in 1865 that was brutally put down by the governor at the time, will also be renovated to turn it into a museum.
Preserving the architectural treasures of the enslaving administration has not been a priority. A reparations campaign is at the heart of the political focus on colonialism, led by Prof. Verene Shepherd, who has demanded that European powers pay £26.5 trillion in reparations to the Caribbean, and who serves as vice-chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission .
The Commission guides restorative justice policy for the fifteen CARICOM (Caribbean Community) member states. The Telegraph revealed last year that countries were planning to formally request reparations from institutions linked to slavery, including the Church of England and the royal family.
In 2022, the Prince and Princess of Wales completed a difficult trip to the Caribbean, during which they faced anti-royal protests in Belize, and were told by Andrew Holness, the Jamaican Prime Minister, that the island nation would try to “move on ‘. and become a republic.
