Craig Simpson (The Telegraph) writes about Jamaica’s plan to turn sites of trauma—relics of Britain’s slave industry—into profitable, historical spaces for grief tourism. He says, “The Caribbean island is embracing a trend that takes once shameful locations and reclaims them for the sake of history.” It will be interesting to see how planning for these sites may curate and highlight the resilience and concrete contributions of the people who buttressed British economy through their labor. (A thought-provoking, while controversial, outlook for other sites in the Caribbean, such as the Whim Museum in St. Croix.)
Cruise liners dominate the skyline of the Jamaican town of Falmouth as the holidaying passengers rush off eager for sun and sand, which dominate tourism on the island.
But in the shadow of hulking Royal Caribbean vessels are the wharfs where African slaves once alighted, never to re-embark, along with the crumbling houses and offices where the brutal business of slavery was tallied. Most of Jamaica’s three million annual visitors will pass by these Georgian relics of Britain’s slave economy, and the history that goes with it.
There are now plans to entice “dark tourists” , also known as “grief tourists”, who seek out sites of suffering around the world – and decaying architectural gems may be saved in the process. The industry of “grief tourism” has drawn visitors – and cash – to sites from the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the shell-pocked streets of Sarajevo, and the growing taste for seeing the scene of horrors known from the news or history books has not gone unnoticed in Jamaica.
Edmund Bartlett, the country’s minister of tourism, has authored a book titled Decoding the Future of Tourism Resilience, which includes a chapter on the potential of more morbid destinations.
He has told The Telegraph that he is looking at the potential of Jamaica as a destination for those seeking to see and understand the inequities of slavery. The country’s slave economy produced fortunes in sugar during Britain’s 300-year rule.
The politician with the Right-leaning Labour Party said that he is working closely with the ministry of culture and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust to ensure “conservation work and restoration for historic sights and monuments” linked to the colonial past.
In Falmouth, one project is already underway. The Port Authority, a Jamaican government agency, is paying for the renovation of a dockside house that belonged to John Tharp (1744-1804), the largest slave owner on the island, with around 2,500.
The gutted 230-year-old townhouse is being restored to its original Georgian splendour, with the express purpose of becoming a museum telling the story of Tharp’s business and the influence of slavery on the island, where tourists and locals could be happy to forget it.
This process of conservation has pleased groups like the Friends of the Georgian Society of Jamaica, who have long advocated for the 18th-century architectural gems of Falmouth, and Jamaica in general, to be preserved. And preservation and touristic profit can go hand in hand.
Tharp’s slaves would have been transported from the docks to his vast upland estate of Good Hope inland, where an elegant plantation residence sits above the forest cloud, and where Georgian bridges, sugar works, a water mill and bridge all survive.
The sugar cane of Good Hope has given way to a 2,000-acre citrus and coconut farm bought by Jamaican businessman Tony Hart, and inherited by his son Blaise, who has worked to conserve the historic site and make it profitable.
“There were six people working here when my father bought it, and now there are close to 100,” he says. “Good Hope needed a lot of restoration, that was a journey in itself.”
Now a profitable destination for weddings and psychedelic mushroom retreats, the estate founded in 1744 also includes an almost-unique example of a surviving slave village: crude settlements that have largely vanished without a trace elsewhere on the island.
The “grief tourist” can gaze on the buildings that defined the lives of the enslaved: the squat stone foundations of their tiny dwellings, the burned-out ruins of the hospital where they were treated, the boiling house where they processed sugar cane into crystals, and offices of those directing their labour.
At the “great house” – where Tharp once lived – verandahs, jalousies and sash windows show how homes were designed to keep the plantocracy cool in the tropical heat.
Mr Hart has suggested that the draw of grief tourism for surviving and potentially unpopular plantation houses – many of which were burned down by rebel slaves led by Sam Sharpe in 1831 – could help to preserve these decaying architectural gems.
“There are definitely spots that have potential,” he said. “There are some gorgeous places.” [. . .]
He concedes, however, that it can be difficult to justify funding the preservation of what some in Jamaica see as “monuments to oppression”, and the Jamaican conservation architect Peter Francis claims: “There is a stigma about preserving certain types of heritage. There’s a whole debate about reparations, and there is more interest in preserving things that relate to immediate Jamaican heritage, Bob Marley and so on.”
Peregrine Bryant, a British architect working to support conservation in Jamaica, believes that, like the Colosseum “many buildings of past shame are treasured in the world today” and that they can be a “resource for tourism”.
The tourism potential has been reflected in a number of projects now in the pipeline which will have at their heart the darker history of Jamaica. Once captured from the Spanish in the 1650s, the island became first a den of piracy and then Britain’s biggest sugar producer, requiring the importation of 600,000 African slaves before the trade was abolished in 1807.
Port Royal, the former capital and first point of entry for many slaves until a 1692 earthquake, is set to become the site of a new state-of-the-art museum space costing £3 million which can put the artefacts of colonial rule on display, with funding coming again from the Port Authority.
“People go to Port Royal for rum and fish today,” says Jonathan Greenland, the British director of the National Museum Jamaica. “But it was the centre of British colonial life. Slaves worked the docks there.”
He added: “Slavery is seen in everything here, in relationships, in culture, in health, in the sense of humour. It has had an influence. It’s important people learn about this history, in Jamaica, and in Britain. There is the potential to tell this story here, where slavery was once so central.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/24/how-jamaica-plan-grief-tourism-restore-slave-trade-sites
[Photo above (Sukimac Photography): Tharp House, in Falmouth, was once the home of John Tharp, the island’s largest slave owner.]
Craig Simpson (The Telegraph) writes about Jamaica’s plan to turn sites of trauma—relics of Britain’s slave industry—into profitable, historical spaces for grief tourism. He says, “The Caribbean island is embracing a trend that takes once shameful locations and reclaims them for the sake of history.” It will be interesting to see how planning for these
