In August, it will be 50 years since Jamaica gained Independence from Britain. Today, the Jamaica Observer’s Entertainment section reflects on the influence Jamaican pop culture has had on that country in REGGAE BRITANNIA, a weekly feature leading up to the Golden Jubilee.

THE 1970s in Britain were challenging for immigrants and first-generation Britons. There was widespread racism and minorities believed the policies of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher late that decade, made things tougher for non-whites.

This hostile climate inspired black youth to form reggae bands like Capitol Letters, Aswad and Steel Pulse. It also gave birth to another militant medium the British press tagged dub poetry.

The most noted of the early dub poetry exponents was Linton Kwesi Johnson, a Clarendon-born firebrand who moved to England in his early teens. The racism blacks and other ethnic groups faced in the 1960s was still prevalent a decade later when Johnson came of age.

While many black youth tuned in to the anti-establishment message of reggae heavyweights like Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, it was Johnson, a British citizen, who hit home the hardest.

His first collection of poems, Voices of The Living and The Dead, was released in the early 1970s and caused a stir among blacks. But it was 1975’s Dread Beat & Blood that put the goateed Johnson on the front-burner.

Set to music two years later, Dread Beat & Blood was released as an album by Island Records. It contained hard-hitting pieces such as Man Free, which called for the freedom of Darcau Howe, a Trinidad-born civil rights activist who was imprisoned at the time.

Johnson’s fresh brand of commentary was not only a sensation in Britain, it also reached the ears of black conscious youth in Jamaica like John Sinclair, now known as Yasus Afari.

“You can’t study contemporary black British history without reverting to Linton Kwesi Johnson. His work appealed to everybody; blacks, whites, academia and even the police,” Yasus told the Jamaica Observer.

Yasus notes that there is some controversy surrounding the origins of dub poetry. He said spoken word artistes like Orlando Wong (later known as Oku Onura) also emerged in Jamaica during the 1970s.

He concedes, however, that Johnson’s fiery rhetoric gained mileage through violent incidents in Britain like the Brixton riots which got international coverage.

“Linton Kwesi Johnson was a ever-present pulse holding up a mirror to society that blacks and whites had to listen. To black people in England he was more than poetry,” Yasus said.

Johnson’s success opened the doors for other black British dub poets like Benjamin Zephaniah, born in Birmingham to a Barbadian father and Jamaican mother from Treasure Beach in St Elizabeth.

Dread Beat & Blood is accepted as one of music’s powerful statements and maybe Johnson’s most potent work.

Dub poetry exploded in Jamaica in the 1980s. In 1983, Mutabaruka released his acclaimed Check It! album which set the pace for similar Jamaican artistes like Jean Breeze and Yasus Afari.