WHEN Jamaicans ask for “a Nanny”, they are expecting to receive a $500 note. But it is also confirmation of their widespread acceptance of the image on the currency as a true representation of the feared Maroon warrior. After all, drawings of all the other national heroes dutifully capture what they looked like.

Not so with Nanny of the Maroons. It was in 1976 that Nanny, the figure we now know as defined on the $500 note, came into being.

When Nanny was named a National Hero in 1975, there were no records of how she actually looked, beyond documentary claims that she was “a small wiry woman with piercing eyes”.

Claude Gayle, then a young scholar of the Jamaica School of Art, responded to a request from principal Jerry Craig for students to conceptualise a representation of Nanny.

“I think it was about 1975 or 1976. We were at the North Street campus of the Jamaica School of Art. It was presented to us by Jerry Craig as a competition for a representational depiction of Nanny of the Maroons,” said Gayle, now residing in the United States.

“We were to draw on our own knowledge of history to influence our work, and that was all the instructions given,” he added.

Olive Bowen, also a student of the art school, sat as the model for Gayle, and her features were diligently captured as that of Queen Nanny.

“I used a fellow student as my main model for the pen-and-ink drawing I submitted. I was informed subsequently that my drawing was selected, and I was paid a small honorarium. I was not told what the drawing was to be used for,” Gayle explained. The young art student received a token $30 for his efforts.

And that winning drawing came to be accepted as Nanny, Queen of the Maroons. A copy of the original, with the scribbling ‘winner’ in one corner, still remains in Gayle’s possession.

Then in 1994, with increasing devaluation, came the $500-note with Nanny’s head-wrapped image.

“We got the portrait from the National Library,” a representative of the Bank of Jamaica told the Sunday Observer.

While Gayle’s representation of Nanny varies slightly from that on the currency, it is his drawing, commissioned by the then Agency for Public Information (API), now the Jamaica Information Service (JIS), that was the inspiration.

“A few years later as a JBC employee, I went to the API to work on a project and saw pencil renditions of the national heroes (including Nanny) being done by an artist there for another assignment. The drawing on the Jamaican note appeared to me to be a reproduction of those pencil drawings,” Gayle said.

And so, after 30 years, Bowen’s likeness has become accepted as that of Nanny, and she has never said a word to anyone. “I never told anyone, not even my children,” she said.

Bowen (now McLean) has been head of the visual arts department at St Elizabeth Technical High School for 18 years. Her striking looks even got her drafted into a Halo Shampoo commercial just about the same time as her Nanny sketch. “I remember I was in class when Kofi Kayiga (the tutor) told me a commercial was being filmed outside.

He held my hand and took me to them saying that I should be in the ad. Up until 1978 that ad was still running on television,” she reminisced. Her association with Nanny will, however, last much longer, thanks to the $500 note.

What will also linger, at least in the minds of some, are the controversies which the heroine has triggered. Some sceptics refer to the absence of a female on the list of national heroes as being the only reason Nanny was chosen.

Then there are the reputed superhuman exploits that have led many others to question her accomplishments, and her very existence, at times. Feats like catching bullets with the buttocks and boiling water without fire have led to the dismissal of Nanny as a folk-tale hero not worthy of the status of national hero. Antagonists even propose that ‘Nanny’ was one of a number of women bearing the same matriarchal title.

However, according to historical documentation, she was real, and some of her freedom-fighting achievements are well recorded. “About 1,000 acres of land in the Blue Mountains was given by the British government in her name as a truce,” social historian Hartley Neita reminded.

And archived at the National Library are dated writings on the exploits of the Maroons, including Nanny. Laws of Jamaica Volume One 1681-1759, for example, makes reference to Nanny and Nannytown. The British and their accounts of the fights reflect the surprise and fear that the Maroon guerilla warfare led by Nanny caused among them.

“Her defiance, as opposed to her brother Cudjoe, was that she never became an enforcer for the British,” said Professor Rex Nettleford, who was cultural advisor to the Michael Manley government at the time Nanny received national hero status. Cudjoe’s Maroons had signed a treaty with the British to return runaway slaves, an act Nanny strongly opposed.

It is not common knowledge that a model was used to portray the national hero, but even if Nanny’s representation is not true to life, added Nettleford, “there is no problem with that, her achievements are what counts”.

“There is no greater deception than that of the man who, it is said, walked the Sea of Galilee about 2,000 years ago,” said Nettleford. The accepted portrait of Jesus the Christ was also produced using models many years after his death; one model is reputed to be a relative of the renowned artist, Michelangelo.

The minister of education, youth and culture, Maxine Henry-Wilson agreed with Nettleford.

“I don’t think anybody meant it to be a deception. What is important is what she represents, rather than the picture,” she said.

The education minister added that she saw no need, when teaching young children about Nanny, to tell them that the image on the pages of their school books was just that – an image. It was not necessary for children to “get into that divide, because what you are doing is teaching them principles”, Henry-Wilson said.