Jamaica turns colonial buildings into slavery monuments for tourism

JAMAICA will preserve British colonial sites as slavery monuments to boost “dark tourism” on the island.

Local activists have led Caribbean demands for reparatory payments for centuries of slavery but figures in government believe that the country’s economy can benefit from the remaining physical legacy of the empire. Jamaican ministers want to preserve the crumbling architecture of Georgian plantation houses and slave infrastructure left over from British rule to use as sites for “dark tourism”.

This style of travel is characterised by visiting places associated with death and suffering. As part of Jamaica’s strategy, the suffering under Britain’s 300-year rule will be explained at sites that have been saved.

The plans come amid a campaign to secure reparations for the Caribbean, largely led by Jamaican academics. Edmund Bartlett, the minister for tourism, has his own vision how the legacy could generate cash.

Mr Barlett said: “We are interested in what is called ‘dark tourism’, it is something that we are building.

“We are working closely with the Ministry of Culture and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, in conservation work and restoration for historic sites and monuments.

“The built heritage is very, very important, because it tells a story in stone and sticks and mortar. Jamaica, being 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 theorist who hosted a Global Tourism Resilience conference in Montego Bay this month, attended by formerly colonised Caribbean nations that could follow his lead.

While Mr Bartlett is keen to preserve monuments to slavery, others have demanded their demolition. His Labour Party colleague Alando Terrelonge, minister of state for trade, called for Caribbean nations to “tear down those monuments of old” last year and remove “certain colonial names ... from our buildings and our streets” so we are not “telling the stories of the oppressors”.

The demands came amid a wave of historical revision happening in Britain following the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol in 2020, with monuments to slave traders including Robert Miligan and John Cass also removed. The process became so contentious that Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary at the time, devised a strategy of “retain and explain” that insisted controversial monuments be preserved and their stories told. Mr Bartlett envisions that Jamaica’s “dark tourism” sites will be popular with descendants of both the enslaved and the slavers, as well as those curious about Britain’s slave economy. There has been a boom in dark tourism in recent years, with Unesco designating places including an Argentine torture centre and memorials to the Rwandan genocide as protected world heritage sites.

Jamaica may offer many potential sites. Britain took Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, and after a boom in piracy sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans became the central to the island’s economy until abolition in 1834. Colonial rule continued until independence in 1962. Across the island, rare examples of particularly Georgian colonial architecture were left behind by the wealthy plantocracy, including mansions, town houses, courthouses and hospitals, but many have been allowed to decay.

Conservation projects for colonial sites are in the pipeline, including the residence of John Tharp, who was once the largest slave and landowner in Jamaica. It will be turned into a period museum explaining his sugar business in the one-time slave port of Falmouth.

Tharp’s House may get funding via a £12million 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 see the conservation of a 200-year-old Naval Hospital. The Morant Bay courthouse central to the execution of Jamaican national hero Paul Bogle, who led a rebellion in 1865 brutally quashed by the governor at the time, is also set for renovation to turn it into a museum.

Preserving architectural treasures of the administration has not been a priority. A reparations campaign has been at the heart of the political focus on colonialism, led by Prof Verene Shepherd, who has demanded European powers pay £26.5trillion to the Caribbean, and who acts as vice chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission that steers policy on reparative justice for the 15 Caricom (Caribbean Community) states.

Countries plan to formally request reparations from institutions linked to slavery, including the Church of England and the Royal family.

‘We are interested in what is called “dark tourism”, it is something that we are building’

‘The built heritage is important, because it tells a story in stone and sticks and mortar’