There is however one historical elephant in the room, or maybe an inherent contradiction: Reggae is Afro-Jamaican music, that arose among those who descend from Africans who were brought once forcibly to the island Jamaica, had to work as slaves, and remained in poverty on that island. There is thus a problematic identification with the nation of residence.
The same applies of course to all other Black music genres in the African Diaspora, from the US, to Cuba, Trinidad, Colombia, Brazil, and other former colonies, later becoming known for internationalized music. About 70% of what we call “Salsa” is in fact based on Afro-Cuban musical structures – with clear Congo retentions -, to which in New York were added influences, often also from the African Diaspora (Dominican Merengue or Afro Puerto Rican Bomba). Calypso (Trinidad), Blues (US), Samba (Brazil): also all created by descendants of Africans, in a place where they were brought by force.
This is an existential problem, shared throughout the African Diaspora, yet in different ways. Even if, say, countries like Trinidad, Brazil, or Cuba, seem celebrated proudly in lyrics as one’s home, the tragic undertone remains somehow there. Unease remains.
TRAUMA
That tragic undertone is the trauma. In essence, “trauma” can be defined as “losing control” of the situation, and in a sense “inaptitude”. One’s people did not choose to make Jamaica their home, but were pressured to do so, with a lot of abuse. Music helps to remind of the African roots, so that the tree growing can bear good fruits, even in alien soil, to quote Marcus Garvey (more or less).
The human rights abuses, violence, and deaths that came with trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery, added to the existential problem. After deracination, came dehumanization, and marginalization. Music genres developed among poor Black people answered that, contrasted that with roots, humanity, and self-expression.
REPATRIATION
This existential problem is shared throughout the African Diaspora, but in the case of Jamaica, that trauma of deracination or displacement, has been answered more manifestly with the Garvey movement – Back to Africa -, and the related Rastafari movement, since the 1930s.
Jamaica was and is for most Garveyites and Rastafarians not the ideal place for African-Jamaicans, who should according to them repatriate to Africa. They belong there. The sensed urgency of this repatriation might however differ per person.
While Marcus Garvey attempted in earnest to set up a steamship line to bring people back to Africa – the Black Star Liner – in the US after 1917, it was sabotaged and eventually ill-fated. More sabotage than mere “bad management”, as some claimed it to be.
Within the Rastafari movement, repatriation remained a goal, that seemed somewhat “stalled”. Poorer early (Rastafari-adhering) Reggae artists could simply not travel, whereas later Reggae artists making some money, maintained a lot of loyalties within their island of birth, Jamaica, or migration destinations (US, Canada, Britain). Only a few Reggae artists actually made repatriation efforts to Africa as such, some moving (partly) to African countries: Rita Marley being a known example in Ghana, while other Reggae artists bought land and property in parts of Africa (e.g. Sizzla).
This “back to Africa” focus of the Garvey movement and Rastafari is the most outspoken contrast to the initial trauma of forced displacement: (re)taking control of one’s lot again, as solution to the trauma. In theory to start with, as hopeful vision and, perhaps, consolation..
Elsewhere in the African Diaspora - outside of Jamaica - the same existential trauma is more implicitly referred to.
In Jamaica itself – after all a racially “majority Black” country - , some recent voices call for “Africanizing Jamaica”, instead of the unrealistic – or at least seemingly impractical – repatriation of Africans back to Africa. This cultural Africanization was however already happening all along, and at most will entail some policy changes in the higher circles of society, often more symbolic than anything else. The majority view among Rastafari adherents in Jamaica seem to still be repatriation, returning to the African homeland.
REGGAE LYRICS
Of course, Reggae music has been strongly influenced by the Rastafari movement, especially Roots Reggae (old and new), evident in lyrics, with a maintained Back To Africa focus, real or symbolic.
It seemed to me interesting, therefore, to study how (especially) Rastafari-adhering Reggae artists discuss their island of birth, Jamaica. Is there some sensed connection or sense of belonging with Jamaica?, or is the message that one is essentially just “stuck” there, still trying to make the best of it, while thinking of ancestral Africa?
With the recent hurricane called Melissa in 2025, causing destruction in parts of Jamaica, the sense of community and connection with the island as location was again put to the fore (and test), as rebuilding was required.
Rebuilding a Jamaica where you never chose to be in the first place, but had been made into home, also by your own direct ancestors.
The history of slavery is recalled a lot in Reggae lyrics, wherein Jamaica figures as “plantation island” where Africans taken from Africa lived in slavery, and later “ghetto island” where Africans lived in poverty. Of course this is all from the poor people’s perspective, excluded from high society.. or even middle-class society: the sufferers and ghetto dwellers, creating Reggae.
Other lyrics - dealing with current events, or later epochs – showed a broader connection with Jamaica, but mostly also one that is also “tainted”, as inequality between haves and have-nots persists. In many Reggae lyrics, from the 1970s to now, gun violence and crime, are added problems for identification with the island, for ghetto residents, also with a “class” aspect.
This became clear already when Jamaica became independent: especially some well-connected politicians, or Afro-Jamaicans with higher positions, exhibited an opportunistic sense of Jamaican identity and connection, aligned then to one’s position of relative power within the political system. The “Uncle Tom”-effect, you can say, or “Boasy Slave” in Jamaican parlance.
This is also critiqued in Reggae lyrics, such as the patriotic, national slogan, Jamaica had a while: Out Of Many One, in e.g. Mutabaruka’s lyrics. This slogan was copied from the US, but ill-fitted the Jamaican situation, where over 80% of Jamaica is mainly of African descent, so the other of the “many” get a privileged status, it seems. Indeed, minorities like the Chinese, Lebanese, Europeans, and to a lesser degree East Indians, are up to the present economically disproportionately powerful and wealthy within Jamaica.
Reggae lyrics by Rastas, therefore, when dealing with Jamaica include this critique and – one can say – alienation, and dreaming of Africa and Zion. This tragedy at the very least renders great musical art: as James Brown once said “soul” is the word “can’t”.. and Reggae Got Soul, as songs by Toots & the Maytals and later Fantan Mojah are titled.
CULTURE
“Celebrating Jamaicanness” – the other extreme - is found less in Roots Reggae lyrics, but is not absent, even vowing “never to leave it” songs by Eric Donaldson, Admiral Bailey, a.o.). Yet, even among Rastas, as a “cultural” rather than a “political” nation, Jamaica is appreciated: music, food, daily customs, family and friends, specific drinks, parties, specific towns/areas, natural landscapes, but also Jamaica as birthplace of cultural movements with global impact (Garvey, Rastafari, Reggae, a.o.) putting small Jamaica on the map, offering some sense of pride.
Even Sizzla is quite positive about developments – or at least freedoms – within Jamaica on his song In Jamaica.
The quite recent “club hit” The Voices Of Sweet Jamaica at the celebration of 50 years independence of Jamaica from British rule, in 2012, also celebrated food, natural beauty, and culture.
Chronixx has a nice, nuanced vision on Jamaica in Smile Jamaica, as some other Reggae artistes too (like Tarrus Riley, Etana, Jah Cure, a.o.), including mostly the historical existential unease.
Most of the more “conscious” Reggae lyrics (old and new) tend to emphasize the social problems within Jamaica, at most praising cultural resilience. Jamaica equates an involuntary lot or burden to overcome. It appears as such in lyrics of songs by Morgan Heritage, and earlier Culture, Peter Tosh, Hugh Mundell, Junior Delgado, Twinkle Brothers, Bob Andy, or even Bob Marley, the most internationally well-known Jamaican. This accentuates the problematic, conflictive relation, calling for wanting to go “home” (Africa)..
LATIN AMERICA
It also shows, on the positive side, the relative lack of censorship and free speech in Jamaica, and lacking social pressures, compared to other places in the Americas, where Africans ended up, and have less channels to express grievances, than in Jamaica. These grievances and inequalities are certainly there in places like Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil, where – as also documentaries by Henry Louis Gosset jr. (Blacks in Latin America) showed - , Blacks/African descendants remained on the lower rungs of society, among the poorest.
In dictatorships like Cuba, this even caused some censorship problems and persecution problems of Afro-Cuban artists with direct criticism in the lyrics on the regime or inequality. Some artists in Latin America, like Cuban rappers, resorted therefore to more covert lyrics and “code words”, to express grievances, when questioning that myth of “racial, mixed democracy”. This also applies in Brazil, being the country outside of Africa with most people of African descent, but presenting the world a “mixed, equal” image, to hide actual race-based poverty and discrimination (also in e.g. police killings disproportionately of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro).
GOOD AND BAD
Natural beauty in parts of Jamaica – certainly present – is also mentioned in both Reggae lyrics and earlier by Marcus Garvey in his writings on his growing up in rural St Ann. When I visited, I personally also liked the lush, tropical landscapes of parishes of Jamaica, like St Ann (where Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley were born) – more hilly -, and St Thomas – more mountainous – in Eastern Jamaica. I saw beautiful landscapes there.
Crucially, local living or “culture” is celebrated in such Reggae lyrics positive about Jamaica, more than nationalism. Nationalism, like patriotism – as the –“ism” ending suggests – serves often “politics and (economic) power” goals from élites, and thus top-down. It might influence those lower in the hierarchy, but remains partly artificial.
Culture is by contrast from the bottom-up, as folk culture is what you get when common people are left alone, to their own devices.
You don’t celebrate adversity, but how you “overcame” it, simply said.
Tellingly, the artist Ijahman Levi called Jamaica his “culture country”, where Marcus Garvey was from.
Burning Spear has a song “Land Of My Birth” (“I love you..”), and on his latest album a song called Jamaica (praising its culture), whereas Island In The Sun (rhyming with “fun”), appears in lyrics by group Israel Vibration, and others, quasi-positively, while also some places in Jamaica are described with some mild affection, such as Kingston, Montego Bay (a song by Queen Ifrica), Spanish Town (by Chronixx), or Negril, an affection mostly shaped because of friends or family there.
The mostly Rootical/Rasta group the Itals also have a nice, jolly song about Jamaican style of living and dances.
ALIENATION
The many good Reggae songs, also about this theme of alienation or connection with regard to the nation Jamaica, furthermore go interestingly against the Nazi-doctrine of “Entartete kunst” ..
When the Nazi’s took power in Germany in the 1930s, and turned it into a fascist and racist (Germanic supremacy) dictatorship, it entailed censorship of certain art forms, not fitting the national-socialist party line of Germanic superiority, and being too foreign, non-German, racially impure (made by Jews), or “entartet”, which is the German word for “degenerated”. This art thus deemed was condemned openly then banned, by that regime.
What Reggae – and other music and art in the African Diaspora - proves is in fact the contrary: art being valuable as precisely an expression of alienation and being deracinated, therefore all the more soulful and powerful.
More so than just confirming conservative cultural norms in closed communities, with lack of creativity and innovation, remaining safely on the well-trodden paths, to please the authorities. This occurs when people have not been displaced by outside forces, and remained in the same land as their ancestors, practically since years BC, only with some admixtures. Stagnation sets in those cases inevitably in. More travelling and persecuted groups like Jews or Gypsies had to be more creative with their art, yet those were precisely seen as “undesirables” in Nazi Germany.
To a degree, also more historically “mixed” Mediterranean nations (also culturally) like Spain (with a Moorish past), France, or Italy have this less than dominantly, more mono-ethnic Germanic or Slavic countries elsewhere in Europe, giving some more space for creative artistic periods in Southern Europe. Yet, also Vienna in Austria at the time of Mozart, was more multicultural than the rest of Austria, while also Amsterdam and Antwerp (and London) had long an international, “tolerant” image, enabling innovations, though at first mostly economically motivated, it increased variety and openness.
Jamaica was a British colony, and inherited more the Germanic/Northern European sense of “racial purity” and racial connection to a specific land, that the Spanish colonizers had less.
From the start, as even racist, ruthless colonizing conquerors following Columbus to the Americas, like Pizarro and Cortés, soon accepted racial mixture between Spaniards and present Amerindians, even allowing on occasion the mixed offspring some of the inherited power and material inheritance.
In British colonies, and the US, racial purity, segregation, and strict inequality was however more the norm, whereas societies like Cuba, Brazil, and others boasted earlier a “mixed” identity.
This more “mixed identity” in Latin America, proved on the other hand often however hypocritical in light of actual racial inequalities, - as already mentioned -, that persisted in places like Cuba and Brazil, where people of African descent, especially when darker-skinned, remain among the poorest of all groups, and descendants of Europeans among the most powerful and wealthiest. Up to this day: even the in name progressive and anti-racist Communist Party of Cuba, is mostly disproportionately “lilly-white”, or at least Spanish-looking, in its higher echelons.
Similarly, in Brazil, only very light Mulatto might obtain some political power, further the domain of also “lilly white” (European-descended) people, with only in sports and music (Pele, for instance) some status for Afro-Brazilians, similar to the situation in the US, for that matter.
NATIONALISM
US comedian Roy Wood jr. had an entertaining bit about the “conflicted relations” of African Americans with the US, inhibiting them from writing truly “patriotic” songs about the joy of being from the US, - as some White US artists did -, but instead created the lamenting Blues.
This more or less applies to Jamaica as well, and to elsewhere in the African Diaspora, especially in light of persisting racial inequalities, also in e.g. Colombia. The national projects simply went from colonial to postcolonial projects, any popular input in achieving or fighting for independence soon sidelined. Nationalism became an élite thing in the Americas, much more than in Europe.
Many borders in Europe developed historically in a rather haphazard manner (or through royal interests), hardly ever conscious political projects, though a shared ethnic base and history procured a sensed affiliation, even with political leaders. Italian unification – led by Garibaldi – seemed a project, but covered uncomfortably many regional identities within current Italy, and to a lesser degree also German unification.
Still, a sense of being where one historically belongs is present among most European nationals (and in Asia and Africa), resulting in stability and self-assurance, as well as arrogance.
My personal prediction in Late 2020: that the whole Covid virus ordeal or “scam” (according to opposers of it) impacting societies and limiting usual freedoms globally, but especially in Western countries, starting around March 2020.. this would (I predicted) increase nationalistic tendencies, rather than global rebellion. It is not my genius, but rather my knowledge of history that made me predict this well.
While political leaders in Italy, France, Germany, or elsewhere - both on the Left as on the Right – pay lip service to “patriotism”, their alignment with global élites is also evident, mostly for power and economic reasons.
Some right-wing popular movements or political leaders contest this with sometimes even xenophobic nationalism, and simplistic and generalizing “anti-migration” stances. Not positive, but showing that the “national belonging” is sensed and ancestral, with “outsiders” becoming intruders. Outweighing – harshly – global inequality or shared injustices.
This never developed as such in the Americas, only a bit more in more racially mixed societies like Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, or the Dominican Republic, where nation or a vague “Latino” identity becomes a substitute for uncertainty of identity, almost by necessity. This is not without creativity, and even understandable, but the “depth” of the connection with the nation should not be exaggerated.
I have met Cubans and Colombians of mixed race, knowing more or less of a Spanish ancestor, a Chinese one, and African one, and even where from in China, Spain, or Africa. I met a quite dark-skinned Cuban woman once in Cuba – adhering to Yoruba Santería btw –, who asked me if I have ever been to Asturias, as I was half-Spanish. I answered that my mother was more from the Southwest of Spain (close to Córdoba), and Asturias was rather in the North of Spain, having only visited it once. Apparently one of her ancestors came from there. She was mostly of African descent, though, so mixtures differ.
Anyway, the focus remained in the cases of people with mixed ancestry worldly and international, which in itself helps to keep an open mind, and makes identity less “strict”. Yet also more insecure.
FRICTIONS
While the result of a largely tragic history of inequality and exploitation, this “looser” national identity in the Americas is not without its merits. It avoids “redneck”-like small-mindedness and xenophobia, that even hides behind the “subtle” racism now common in Western Europe, or more open variants of xenophobia in parts of Eastern and Southern Europe.
The cultural friction with the also proud Islamic adherents - present among migrants - caused increased tensions and misunderstandings, as both in England as in the Netherlands – for instance – anti-migration parties – called “racist” by some, e.g. the National Front in Britain, or the Dutch Centrum Democraten, soon shifted their focus from people from the colonies of another race (but at least speaking the language and adapted in some ways), to the increased group of Muslim migrants, increasing in number.
This cultural friction is maybe lamentable, but to a degree universal, as such frictions are also found in mixed American and Caribbean societies, e.g. Guyana. There is then only no connection to "sacred" patriotism for the country, where one’s ancestors are after all not even from, but is more a matter of cultural frictions or irritations.
Reggae lyrics therefore also address the dominant influence of Chinese finance in Jamaica (Kabaka Pyramid in the song Well Done, or Vybz Kartel’s Poor People Land), partly in line with tourism promotion, sideling the local population, benefitting thus less from tourism. Kabaka Pyramid states that politicians “sell out the country” Jamaica, for their own gain.
This happens also in parts of Africa, along with neocolonialism trough the banking system (IMF), seemingly rendering repatriation to Africa as an idealistic, yet unrealistic daydream.
In a very recent song (late 2025), Kabaka Pyramid has a quite positive song about Jamaica as “sweet”, even stating as nowhere better, and its culture.
ONE’S GEOGRAPHICAL ROOTS
One - maybe - can “feel at home” in places where one’s (geographical) roots are not, especially when among one’s own people and family. The lack of a deeper connection need not to inhibit happiness.. or does it?
One may be satisfied somewhere else in the world, even a place nothing to do with their family, yet sense on occasion a lack of purpose, or “tranquility” and “security”. For that reason, most people when arriving in places where their roots lie – especially the first time – tend to sense stronger emotions than they thought, which some even describe as a combination of goose-bumps and tears. Migrants know how this feels, when returning to their native countries.
I recall from my youth that when once driving to our Spanish family for holidays - from the Netherlands where we lived -, my Spanish mother was reading or sleepy when driving through France, in the back of the car my Italian father drove, but that my mother started singing merrily when she knew we crossed the Spanish border. I found that funny – knowing how she was - , but my father mumbled something like “too proud and patriotic, always, those Spaniards”.
I had, however, similar feelings when arriving in Spain after some time, in different epochs of my life: recognizing accents, looks, names, knowing my ancestors lived there, gave me a special feeling of “calm”. I missed that growing up in the Netherlands. Afro-Americans – even mixed-raced ones - visiting for the first time Africa, have that even stronger, often with overwhelming yet satisfying emotions. There was after all a real trauma to resolve, based on slavery and forced displacement, lacking even the semi-voluntary aspect of migration.
One can be happy without that actual connection with one’s geographical roots, I imagine, yet to degrees, perhaps missing a dimension to make it perfect. On the other hand, humans have always travelled and migrated, so that is also humanity and fulfillment of another kind. Traveling, but then “back home” – or at least the promise of it , and totally by free will! - seems even more satisfying and consoling, as the Jamaican and Rastafari cases show. It helps heal the historical trauma.
Africa as home remains also in modern Roots Reggae lyrics, therefore. In some parts of Africa, the Islam is also quite dominantly present, or strict Christianity, not necessarily welcoming of a Rastafari people “influx” from the Caribbean. Luckily, some African countries, often heralded as “Zion”, and the main place of return for Rasta’s, like Ethiopia or even Ghana, have showed some tolerance for this migration, and do not know so much religious (Islamic or Christian) extremism, allowing tolerance. Ethiopia's Muslims tend to be relatively "mild" or moderate nowadays, some Ethiopian friends of mine told me.
Still: there are vested interests there, as shown in conflicts in Shashemane land in Ethiopia: a territory emperor Haile Selassie set aside for Africans in the diaspora for settlement, and a group of (Rastafari-adhering) Caribbean migrants indeed settled there. A land conflict with local Oromo people arose there, however, causing some tensions, as there were earlier with Ethiopian Communist and later governments, long (about 40 years!) even withholding Caribbean Rastafari-adherers in Shashamane recognition as national citizens, up to only about 8 years ago.
Still, repatriation as proposed within the Rastafari movement – and still in Reggae lyrics – is in theory not impossible, as the history of mankind shows, sometimes even led by leading “prodigal sons”, wishing to improve their country of origin, as a way to honor ancestors, in some way. It is by itself redemptive of the historical trauma, as I pointed out.
It is therein that I think that the “enduring wisdom” of Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” approach, inherited by Rastafari, lies.
IDENTITY
Elsewhere in the African Diaspora, - notably the US - fake, somewhat forced “identity politics” (rigid yet simplistic black-white distinction) has taken this place, with a less clear, often inherently contradictory direction. In Latin America however, African cultural and racial presence is as indicated more often “drowned” in a carnivalesque mix, which may seem pleasant or realistic, but is inherently infantilizing and patronizing as well, especially in less-democratic contexts. The goals seems all too clear to “depoliticize”, and defuse any rebellion.
On the plus side: the latter openness to local mixture makes all rigid, ancestral “national identity” relative and malleable, thereby allowing an open mind and flexibility, and avoiding parochial mindsets, rigid xenophobia or racial thinking, all too common elsewhere. This openness contributed to rich, and fascinating cultures in places like Brazil, Cuba, and elsewhere, including recognizable African retentions.
On the down side: one is more dependent on higher-placed others in a set location and on shaped conditions of inequality and poverty, for lacking another place of one’s own where one actually belongs, and the protection and consolation this provides. This is undeniably an existential need, that is then ignored and denied.
Interestingly, much Reggae expresses Rastafari views (repatriation, Afrocentricity, spirituality), along with serving as the “true, popular newspaper” of local conditions and problems, rather than the mainstream news in most countries, driven eventually by élite, upper-class interests, hidden or not.
Reggae lyrics seem to encompass both these spectrums (African roots and local conditions), in my opinion, even allowing a healthy “open doubting”, which makes one not only more “intellectual”, but I think also more fully human, “realer” as person. It also makes “art” – which includes music - more profound.
The latter might even have attributed to the international appeal of Reggae, since Bob Marley, who had deep lyrics about this, in simple language. Identifiable language and lyrics of a searching, spiritual individual, later found among many more Reggae artists, from Alton Ellis, to Culture, Burning Spear, Dennis Brown, Ijahman Levi, the Mighty Diamonds, Morgan Heritage, Luciano, Sizzla, Bushman, Buju Banton, and countless others. That spiritual searching can also be called “soul”.
