As an eight-year-old boy at Mount Zion Primary School above Rose Hall Estates I first heard the name Three-Finger Jack, an outlaw who staged his resistance against the system of slavery in eastern Jamaica.

Jack conjured up images, by virtue of his ascription of ‘Three-Finger’, that he was not only an outlaw but a dangerous thief. But as the rebellious man in the bushes of St Thomas and fighting against oppressionresonated with me as Jack’s story, there was a similar story about my people — the Bus Biola Race — of Barrett Hall Estates in St James. It was a story told to me at six years old as I harassed my dear maternal grandmother to explain why we were referred to as the “Bus Boila Race”.

She explained to me how our people, during the Sam Sharpe Rebellion blew up the boiler at Barrett Hall Sugar Estate above Greenwood Great House, and in an exodus before Emancipation, finally settled in the virtually inaccessible back lands of the LilIiput property and called their new community… Barrett Town. Very recently I was on a tour being conducted of the Greenwood Great House (formerly the Barrett Hall Great House) by owner Bob Bretton when he pointed to the remains of a boiler placed on a stand outside a window, and informed me that it was what was left after an explosion due to a slave rebellion at Barrett Hall Sugar Factory which was situated above the great house. Tears came to my eyes. Despite the scarcity of information, my curiosity about Three-Finger Jack never subsided neither did my interest in the story of all peoples ever wane. And so, academic pursuit aside and long after those specific requirements were met, my journeys continued to the sources (and since this question is continually asked of me) where riveting and authentic information could be harvested: Manuscript Department and Reading Room of the British Museum; the Public Record Office, London; Royal Commonwealth Society; Library of the West India Committee, London; Institute of Jamaica, Jamaica Archives, Plantation Records, Church Records including laid stones (inside churches particularly Anglicans) and grave stones; University of Southampton Library digitalisation Unit, sources in the USA particularly those universities in the New England States including the University of North Carolina. Legend from communities carried over through the intergenerational continuum, (eg bus boila race). Research in traditional religion… obeah, myalism, pocomania…songs, dance gestures, and other cultural expressions including the origin of “Bongo Man” in the” Convince Cult” which predated the word “Rastafari” by centuries.

I have taught at Cornwall College, Jamaica Maritime Institute, Northern Caribbean University, visiting (setting up course outline for the History of the Caribbean Trade Union Movement, for the History and Social Science Department; Jamaica Tourist Board Visitor Information section and the University of the West Indies School of Continuing Studies for several years. Twenty-five years ago I was sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, London, when a lady walked up to me and handed me a document saying: ‘This is what you have been looking for, and walked away’. It was a report of several slave rebellions, revolts and resistance including that of Three-Finger Jack in the parish of St Thomas and in Jamaica. After realising what had just happened I rushed to find the lady who handed me that document but she was nowhere to be found. I remembered her greeting me in Swahili and clearly had features of the Yoruba peoples from whom I am descended.

Here is the true story, which has been thoroughly checked from more than one sources, of Three-Finger Jack whose real name was Jack Mansong: Captain Henry Harrock was on a slave hunting expedition off the West Coast of Africa when he was saved from drowning by an African named Makro and his wife, Amri. Captain Harrock repaid them by treacherously shipping them off to Jamaica to be sold as slaves. On the voyage Makro, having realised that he and his wife were tricked, became so rebellious that he had to be whipped repeatedly. His spirit remained unbroken and he finally died on the ship after receiving about 500 lashes.

Amri, who was pregnant with Makro’s child, survived the voyage and upon arriving at Morant Bay in Jamaica was sold to a Mr Mornton. Three months later the baby was born — a boy who was to become the celebrated Jack Mansong. She brought up her son on tales of the old days of freedom in her home in Africa, of the treachery of captain Henry Harrock and of the unconquerable spirit of Makro. These stories had a powerful effect upon the mind and character of the boy. He grew up hating slavery and all it stood for, and this hate was given definite direction by the fact that Captain Henry Harrock was still alive. Jack grew into a huge man, with powerful, well-proportioned body. It is said he stood nearly seven feet tall. He could endure the hardest labour and easily do the work of two men. His eyes were expressive and a look of reproach from Jack Mansong could strike terror.

One day, Jack found out that captain Harrock was staying at the estate of which he belonged. The tale of the slaver’s treachery came back with vivid force and Jack’s mind was full of thoughts of revenge. He started to plan a rebellion but was betrayed and sentenced to death. The night before he was to be executed he burst forth from his place of confinement and killed the two soldiers who were on guard outside. He took their guns and ammunition and went to say goodbye to his grieving mother Amri. When he left Amri he went to the great house where Henry Harrock lay asleep. He knocked him out, flung him over his shoulders and headed for the hills. By the time his escape was discovered, Jack had disappeared. He established his headquarters in a cave near Mount Lebanus in St Thomas in the east and laid low until the search for him cooled. He chained captain Harrock’s hand and foot to a wall of the cave and made him work.

As an outlaw with practically every man against him Jack began to feel the need for spiritual protection. In the region of Mount Lebanus was a great obeahman named Bashra who lived in a hut among bushes and trees. Jack received protection in the form of bags of cat’s foot, a dried toad, a pig’s tail, and other similar objects which were to protect him from harm. There was a Moore Town Maroon (bounty hunters of other runaway slaves since the 1739 peace treaty) named Quashee, a skilful tracker and a man as brave as Jack himself. The two men faced each other with drawn cutlasses and a wild fight began during which one of Quashee blows caught Jack on his right hand and cut off two of his fingers. The mutilated hand became Jack’s trademark and it provided the name by which Jamaicans know him best: Three-Finger Jack.

Between 1780 and January 13, 1781 the House of Assembly voted a reward of one thousand pounds as compensation to capture or kill Three-Finger Jack.

Quashee, the Maroon from Moore Town assembled a tracking party including the Scott’s Hall Maroons from St Mary to hunt and killed Three-Finger Jack. After several attempts in which Quashee himself was seriously hurt, Jack was beheaded and his killers walked from Mount Lebanus to Spanish Town to collect the ransom money. It was the Scott’s Hall Maroons who also killed Tacky, pulled out his entrails, heart and lung which they roasted and had a ceremonial feast before walking with his head to Spanish Town for the reward money. And again it was the Eastern Maroons who captured Paul Bogle after the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865.

Three-Finger Jack had his parallel in western Jamaica in the person of “Plato” in the Mooreland Mountains who was captured by the western Maroons. The Maroons from Moore Town, Charles Town, Crawford Town and Accompong Town crushed their fellow Maroons in the second Maroon War in upper St James in 1795 having received bribe money from the Colonial Plantocratic Government in a lump sum and further incentive of 50 pounds for every rebel captured or alternatively ever pair of matching ears presented as proof of death of a rebel. (More on the gut wrenching Second Maroon War in upper St James with its Halifax, Nova Scotia and Freetown, Sierre Leonie,West Africa connections, very soon.)

The Maroons massacred the Sam Sharpe rebels in the 1831/32 slave rebellion under the same attractive rewards and terms. There are several places, former plantations, across Jamaica bearing the name of Bounty Hall. This had absolutely nothing to do with the fertility of the soil and its productivity on these properties rather they were strategic locations where Maroons exchange captured slaved for their bounty or reward! For 99 years from 1739, the time of the first peace treaty with the Maroons, to 1838 the abolition of slavery for the rest of the negro population in Jamaica, freedom was delayed because of the Maroon’s support of the planters to keep the system in place. And the tool was the unleashing of unspeakable violence against the rest of the Black population enforced by the Maroons.

In all this story of struggle, the underlying dynamics were injustice, oppression, repression and a response by the victims for liberation. In a word — freedom — politically and economically. This is the crux of the aspirations of the masses in the Jamaican journey for the last 508 years starting with the coming of the Europeans and the capture of our ancestors from Africa within the context of a rigged economic system of capitalism evolving through its various phases, and with the same perpetual winners and losers.

But when we have a bunch of insolvent losers who cannot pay the winners then winners become losers! Even as the society degenerate by its decent into more social chaos, turmoil and high incidence of crime and violence. There are those who are asking , in the face of our high crime and murder rate when did Jamaica come to this? The parallel question, given any serious knowledge of the countrys history, ought to be when was Jamaican anything but this?

I believe if we diagnose wrongly by continually confusing cause-and-effects relationships in the context of our continuing social interactions, we will prescribe wrongly resulting in a greater degree of fright and flight ending in deferred dreams. And no amount of self-deception or mesmerism can alter this reality. Neither will lots of nice sounding speeches accompanied by high media visibility, without robust economic growth, can and will change our situation.