adminLeslie Gordon Goffe Correspondent
JAMAICANS have talked about going back, one day, to Africa since the days of Marcus Garvey. But it is Africans, from East, West, and from South Africa, who have come, instead, to Jamaica. There are Ethiopians here, like Yodit Getachew-Hylton, an aeronautical engineer from Addis Ababa, married to a Jamaican government minister.
There are South Africans, like the writer Peter Abrahams, who has lived in the hills above the Jamaican capital Kingston for 58 years.
There are Ghanaians, like Kodjoe “Benjie” Asamoah, owner of a gourmet catering business.
But most of all, there are Nigerians — almost 5 000 of them calling Jamaica home.
Nigerians have found work here as computer scientists, engineers, and physicians. Several Nigerians own pharmacies, like Benson’s in Old Harbour, in St Catherine parish, outside Kingston. A Nigerian is also the owner of Kingston’s Heart Institute of the Caribbean, which describes itself as the leading cardiac care centre in the West Indies. To ensure they have a voice in Jamaica, Nigerians have set up several organisations here. There is the Nigerian Committee of Friends Jamaica, which arranges parties, dinners and get-togethers at members’ homes. There’s the Nigerian Pastors in Jamaica organisation, which takes care of the community’s religious and spiritual needs and which recently led a prayer rally in Kingston to draw attention to the plight of the more than 200 girls abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
“Being a Nigerian is a task and being a Nigerian in Jamaica is a project,” says the president of the Association of Nigerians, Dr Ibrahim Ajagunna.
The largest and best-known of Jamaica’s Nigerian expatriate organisations, though, is the Association of Nigerians. It has hundreds of members and meets on the first evening of each month at the Nigerian High Commission in Kingston, which is around the corner from Bob Marley’s old studio at 56, Hope Road, where the reggae superstar recorded songs like “Africa Unite” and “Zimbabwe”.
“Being a Nigerian is a task and being a Nigerian in Jamaica is a project,” says the president of the Association of Nigerians, Dr Ibrahim Ajagunna.
What Ajagunna means by this is that both Nigeria and Jamaica are complex countries with complicated people, where nothing is simple or easy.
“When I told people in Nigeria I was going to Jamaica,” Ajagunna continues with a laugh, “they asked, ‘Why are you leaving one third world country to move to another third world country?’”
He had no answer for this other than to say it would have been too easy to migrate, like so many others, to the UK, Canada, or the US.
Ajagunna has lived in Jamaica for more than 20 years and is now a citizen of the Caribbean island nation. Jamaica, he explains, needs him and other highly educated Africans. North America and Europe do not.
“If I was in the UK or the US, I could not make any real contribution,” says Ajagunna who, as a lecturer at the Caribbean Maritime Institute in Kingston, trains young Jamaicans to work in the shipping and nautical industry. “Here in Jamaica, I can make a contribution to human development.” Jamaicans, he insists, are “gravitating more to Africa now and Africans are gravitating to Jamaica.”
There is some truth in this. Yet for many Africans on the island it is only a staging post for migration to the US.
The Olasupo family, who live in rural Jamaica, in the pretty north-eastern coastal town of Annotto Bay, in St Mary parish, appear to be just passing through. Abiola Olasupo is a surgical nurse at the local hospital. “I just decided to come because I like reggae and wanted to know Bob Marley’s country,” she says.
Abiola’s husband, Olatunji, earns his living as a builder and a construction worker as well as a small-scale importer of African foodstuffs such as powdered yams and palm wine. “For now, Jamaica is home for me,” he says, with an eye on a future further north, in America. Abiola concurs, “I like Jamaica, for now.”
The Association of Nigerians says around two dozen of its members leave Jamaica for North America each year. But these, the Association says, are soon replaced by new arrivals from Nigeria.
Travelling back and forth between Jamaica and Nigeria is easier these days than it has ever been, especially since 2011, when direct air flights between the West African and Caribbean countries, with a brief stopover in the US, were begun.
Today, a round-trip ticket from Kingston to Lagos, on Delta Airways, costs around $1,500. In the past, a traveller had to fly to the US or Europe to get a flight to Lagos. This pushed up the price and made the flight time interminable.
Peter Oyodele, the Nigerian ambassador in Jamaica when the deal to begin direct air services between Jamaica and Nigeria was agreed in 2011, said he was thrilled Jamaicans who, he said, “call Africa the motherland”, would be able to get to Africa “at a cheaper cost and in a shorter and more comfortable journey time.”
Jamaica and Nigeria are closer than ever before. But life in Jamaica for Nigerians is not without its challenges and controversies. When a Jamaican TV news programme broadcast a report claiming a Nigerian doctor had abducted babies he had delivered at a Kingston hospital in 2009, sending them to Lagos as part of a child trafficking ring, the Association of Nigerians protested. When the report was later found to have been false, the TV programme issued an apology to the Nigerian government and to the Nigerian community in Jamaica.
To combat negative portrayals, the Association of Nigerians displays on its website acts of generosity by Nigerians towards Jamaicans and their adopted country in the Caribbean. There are items on the site, for example, pointing to the donation of books to schools in poor neighbourhoods. Other entries show Nigerians donating foodstuffs and household items to a children’s home in Kingston. Doctors and nurses from the Association also provide free medical care for the poor.
“We are doing our part to make Jamaica a better place than it is today,” says Ogasie Odiase, a past president of the Association of Nigerians, who works as a network engineer in Jamaica for the J. Wray and Nephew rum company. “Jamaica is,” he says fondly, “our home”.
And though Jamaica is now home sweet home for some, many Africans here still like to meet up from time to time to eat, drink and talk about what is going on back in Lagos or Accra. A favourite spot for this is Kingston’s Café Africa, which has been described as Jamaica’s first authentic African restaurant. The Nollywood star Omotola Jalade Ekeinde paid a visit to the cafe while on a recent trip to Jamaica. Nigerian chef Prince Ohia cooks up everything from Mozambican piri piri wings to Congolese dongo-dongo, salt fish and okra.
“When I came to Jamaica I moved within the entertainment industry,” says chef Ohia, dressed in a distinctive “I Love African Food” t-shirt. He came to Jamaica from Nigeria to attend college but quickly abandoned his studies to become a cook for the Grammy award-winning dancehall music DJ Buju Banton, who became infamous for the anti-gay song “Boom bye bye”.
When Banton was jailed in the US for 10 years in 2009 on drugs and weapons charges, Prince Ohia began cooking at Café Africa. His life in Jamaica, Ohia says, “has been about food and culture and the people”.
Interestingly, Café Africa is owned and operated by members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a body that Marcus Garvey established and, in the 1920s, helped make the largest black organisation at the time, with over a million members worldwide. The modern UNIA, revamped and restored after years of being dormant, is eager to bring Africa and Jamaica together.
Café Africa proprietor, Jamaican Steven Golding, who is also president of UNIA in Jamaica and the son of former Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding, believes the café has become a crucial hub for African expatriates in Kingston.
“Well, I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t know there were so many continental Africans in Jamaica until I opened this restaurant,” says Golding, who is preparing for celebrations in July marking the founding 100 years ago of UNIA. Garvey, Golding says, would be thrilled to see so many Africans in Jamaica. — NewAfrican
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