Negril Weekend

Groundins

By: Charles H.E. Campbell

When Norman Manley laid down the highway in Negril, it was an unpopular decision. Back then, it was a seven-mile stretch of the most beautiful beach anywhere in the Caribbean, in the middle of a low-lying swampy wilderness.

His vision was to develop community tourism centred around this prime asset. Soon after, the Anglican Church built their camp and as a youngster, I enjoyed many wonderful moments camping and hiking in Negril and associating with the most hospitable of local populations.

Somewhere between Woodstock 40 years ago and Reggae Sunsplash, hippies in large numbers discovered the scenic beaches and beautiful people of Negril. For a time thereafter, they virtually colonised the village, walking around with barely any clothes, tanning and bathing naked on the beach. Many inter-married with the local population and stayed permanently.

R
eggae and Rock were their music of choice and Negril developed an international reputation for generating seven nights of music and promoting an alternative lifestyle. The evidence of this early interaction is still there to show, with the many racially mixed families who reside and operate small businesses there. After a while however, this scene was relegated to the West End, now called Bob Marley Avenue.

The first couple hotel properties that were established on the beachfront honoured the cardinal rule of having no more than two storeys. However, as time went on and the country became even more reliant on the tourism product, massive structures were established right along the seven-mile strip, so that presently, a view of the beach is totally obliterated from the road. A new type of tourist was now targeted and a new product called 'all-inclusive' began to cut out completely the benefits that the wider community traditionally garnered from supplying services to the vacationers.

Clive Pringle, aka Cubba of MX3 Entertainment Complex, states the implication succinctly when he says, "if you want to have sustainable tourism, the local population will have to feel like they are a part of it. If you cut them out, then they are going to prey upon and harass the tourists because there is no structured way through which they can benefit. Being natives, they naturally see Negril as their community and reject being shunted aside by outsiders". This is a social discord that will have to be addressed in the short term before the situation becomes explosive and injures the very tourism product, which the town of Negril is famous for worldwide. Social integration and peace in Negril is so essential to a sustainable tourism product and economy. We ignore the power of the poor to the industry's peril.

It has been nine years since a small group of promoters established a series of parties cumulatively called the Negril weekend and the events have grown in number and size, attracting mostly Jamaicans and Jamaica expatriate teenagers and young adults to Negril between Emancipation and Independence. This creates an economic boon yearly for the hoteliers, restaurants, shopping centres and nightclubs. In the process, they have developed a prototype which could be replicated in all the major tourism destinations in Jamaica. As a matter of fact, Portland has now established a similar programme. My advice to these promoters is to strengthen and advance the rapport recently established between themselves and elements of the local commercial/entertainment sector, so that they can better define common objectives and a mutually beneficial relationship, putting the present schism behind us once and for all.

While attending the ATI and Dream Weekend parties last week, I began to feel slightly like a cultural anthropologist. It seems a major transition has occurred in the type of music being played at most parties and sessions. Except for fleeting moments, when the most hardcore classics and current hits are sampled perfunctorily, hip-hop music - admittedly sometimes mixed with the heavy Dancehall baseline - is now the major fare at these live events. Added to this, even the dancehall tunes and lingo are barely distinguishable from hip-hop. If only for historical purposes, it behoves our music theorists and researchers to define in print for posterity, what is the structure of the Dancehall music, versus hip hop, before the Jamaican genre given to the world becomes so diffused by its intermingling with its internationally predominant cousin that it is consumed and totally defies definition.

Another fact borne out by these parties was that racial segregation, to some extent, still persists even among today's youth. This was most starkly demonstrated by the contrasting and simultaneously held Daydreams, with its coalitions of 'browns' and Pretty In Pink, with its varying shades of bewigged blacks.

Email: che.campbell@gmail.com

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