Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 211

partly African descent. She is a fine sculptress in wood and eagerly encourages the beginnings of a Ja-
maican artistic renaissance which, although it is a long way behind the Haitian phenomenon, is beginning
to produce interesting work.
Mr. Bustamante, then, the former riot leader and enfant terrible of the island, is forced, by the politics
of his cousin, to divert his overwhelming energies from their former turbulent channels into the sluices
of Empire and of partisanship of law and order. He champions the cause of moderation and the middle
course with a positively incendiary violence. Thanks to the kindness of Miss Esther Chapman, [2] we
spent several hours, on two occasions, with this most disarming of egocentrics. It was a delight to see
the sense of drama, that antique faculty so pitifully lacking in the dramatic events of our century, sur-
viving so robustly here. For in Mr. Bustamante's unstaunchable flow of bravura, humour, invective and
peroration, men and events grouped and regrouped themselves about his own protagonistic centre in an
endless sequence of astonishing subsidiary combinations. A splendid dramatis personae of Spanish gen-
erals, Cuban ministers, Arab leaders, British governors, lords, Secretaries of State, menacing opponents,
howling mobs and shy beauties walked on and off the fluctuating scene, a stage which he alone never
abandoned, and which extended from the camp of the Spaniards opposing Abd-el-Krim in the Riff wars,
embracing police headquarters and street fights in Cuba, New York skyscrapers, and Kingston thorough-
fares tumultuous with rioters, to the very curtains of the alcove. I listened in fascination to that slow nasal
delivery in the Irish-Welsh intonations of Jamaica from the other side of the whisky glasses. The expres-
sions of those long aristocratic features underlined each change of scene and mood. His face has the form
and colouring of an Iroquois chief, and, in repose, the same expression of supercilious aloofness, anom-
alously backed by a Liszt-like shock of white hair; anomalously poised, too, on a high white collar and
white butterfly bow. Leaning forward to repeat exactly what he said to the Secretary of State, he would
thrust his cuffs slowly back from sinewy forearms, and his long hands would perform gradual motions
of strangulation. In the House of Representatives it was a stirring sight to see this tall and magnificent
histrion lope to his place and settle there, searching the roof with his wild eyes as he allowed his torso to
fall back in his seat of office with the languor of a tired statesman or of a theatrical knight. Nobody who
has seen such a performance can complain that the sense of gesture has entirely drained away from the
parliamentary life of the Empire.
Jamaica is bewilderingly prolific in unusual groups of human beings. Amalgamated Jews, Pocomania,
Garveyism, the extinct Bedwinites, Balmists, Obeahmen, the Maroons, the Rastafari—the list could be
still further extended. Some of them, to be sure, possess exact equivalents elsewhere, but nowhere do
they exist in such profusion.
None of them is more peculiar than Rastafarism (or the Rastafari), a thoroughly eccentric movement
named after the Emperor of Abyssinia. The word is pronounced, by its adepts, Råståfåri, the final i sound
being long, as in the first person singular and the stress falling on the second syllable.
The Rastafari live in a patch of waste land by the railway in the western slums of Kingston known as
the Dunghill—pronounced Dungle, to rhyme with jungle—a collection of huts built of the same flimsy
materials as the hovels of San Juan de Puerto Rico. Some of the slightly more luxurious dwellings are
composed of the rusting bodies of old motor-cars from which the wheels have been removed. The whole
is embedded two feet deep in the ground. The glassless window space is filled in with paper; holes cut
in the hood do service as chimneys. The other houses are constructed throughout of cardboard and pa-
per. From flagpoles above these hovels flutter the red, yellow and green tricolour flags of Abyssinia;