Title: Wild Flavours: An Insider Account of Jamaica’s Journey Through the Crisis of the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Christopher Tufton

Published by: Leaders Press, 2024

Reviewed by: Sharon Leach

It has been said that time moves in one direction whilst memory moves in another. Which is why Jamaica’s Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton’s recently released second book, Wild Flavours, chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic on the island, is one of the timeliest and most important memoirs to be released in a while.

Deftly combining scholarship with literary intrigue, the book brings into sharp relief the enormity of the leadership challenges faced by Tufton, who presided over the Jamaican health portfolio during this period of crisis that the entire world faced together, even while offering detailed accounts of the sequence of events as they played out across the island.

The book, which is dedicated to Jamaica’s frontline public health workers, begins the only place such a book could begin — with Passenger Zero, also referred to as Patient One, the person who introduced COVID to the island’s shores when she arrived on a British Airways flight from London on March 4, 2020. From then on, it goes full throttle, like a James Patterson novel, until the crisis is finally in the rear-view mirror, some three years later, when it was declared by the World Health Organization as no longer being a global emergency.

What is truly remarkable about the minister’s scrupulous recounting of the events that had kept so many people, for such a long time, in a fog of depression and despair — myself included — is, though recent history, is the light shone on many of the little things that have since been forgotten. During this period, the worst public health crisis in a century, it seemed easy then to think that there would be no detail small enough to escape memory. And yet, for example, how could I have no recollection that, from as far back as January, the health minister “had made a presentation to the Cabinet explaining that the disease would reach Jamaica and that resources were needed to prepare for it”, as Tufton notes.

COVID-19 did not simply turn up, an uninvited guest, at the time of Tufton’s subsequent press conference broadcast on local TV stations in March, as failing memory is somehow prone to imagine it.

The book highlights what the frightened public was in no position at the time to fully appreciate: the toll also taken on the leadership of the country throughout the crisis, which soon became clear would be around for the long haul. These were uncharted waters, and the Government had to carefully walk the line between political and economic expediency and, in the end, what was in the best interest of the Jamaican people.

“Based on the MOHW technical team’s advice, I suggested that we impose a travel ban against anyone coming from China,” Tufton notes, of that Cabinet presentation in January. “The recommendation for the ban was no small matter, and it was politically fraught… The Jamaica-China relationship is very important to Jamaica, particularly as China was, at the time, Jamaica’s largest bilateral donor and lender.”

In the end, however, “we took the advice of the ministry’s technical team”.

But the heartbeat of this book is Tufton’s refreshing candour and his commitment to transparency, which includes his willingness to admit not just the triumphs of his Administration’s handling of an unprecedented public health crisis, but also the missteps.

In particular: his.

He points to other health ministers across the world forced to resign over the mishandling of COVID, before candidly addressing his own.

“Relatively speaking then, I survived that long only to blunder right at the very end. I was roundly — and rightfully — criticised. I was lucky: when another Cabinet member was videoed breaking COVID-19 restrictions by celebrating his advisor’s birthday with several other people in a hotel bar, he was forced to resign as minister. I had better timing and didn’t have to pay such a high price,” he writes. “The prime minister imposed fines on me and the other offenders. I wrote a cheque for J$100,000 to the Mustard Seed Foundation, one of Jamaica’s most important charities.”

This first-hand account by one of Jamaica’s most beloved politicians, about how the country weathered, and, importantly, triumphed over, the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, is an important read for lovers of this blessed island and a tribute to the indomitable spirit of her people.