Vladimir Polenov – Jamdown Sundown. My whispered chronicles of the Caribbean (страница 6)

In truth, the Maroons receive virtually no support from the state. 90% of men are employed in agriculture, their wives, as a rule, do not work and take care of the household and children. Unemployment (16%) and illiteracy among the population are high in Accompong. Their living conditions are therefore the simplest and quite difficult.

At the head of the Maroons in each of their settlements is a “colonel”, who heads a council of 14 of the most respected citizens, where all issues of life and everyday life of the community are discussed and decided. At the same time, the colonel is, despite the collective nature of local self-government, an absolute authority. They say that the Maroons had colonels who did not hesitate to use obeism – black magic, in order to force individual rebels from their “area of responsibility” to submit to the authority of the community leader.

Obviously in such relatively small and homogeneous communities, everyone knows each other. There is practically no crime there, unlike in most of Jamaica. Certainly sometimes, as the residents told us, minor offenses, mainly thefts, do happen. But the criminal is quickly found, and then, of course, he will no longer live among the Maroons.

Colonel F. Williams (a retired police officer), dressed in a multi-colored, tunic-like “dress” suit, the head of the Maroon community in Accompong (he was re-elected in 2015 for another five-year term), personally led us around the village, showed us a kind of club where the council meets and community meetings are held, the local primary school, where funny-looking children with big round eyes diligently listened to the teachers’ explanations, casting a curious glance at the “newcomers from the big world,” and we, despite our curiosity, still tried not to disrupt the educational process too much.

Historians, describing the life and daily routine of this special caste of former slaves and their descendants, noted that the Maroons, who practiced polygamy in the old days, supposedly did not care much about their children. But such an attitude, if it existed, apparently remained in the distant past. We were able to see this for ourselves during the few hours we spent in Accompong.

F. Williams and other members of the council, who invited us to dinner at their club (the meal consisted of a variety of delicious dishes, which women brought from their homes within a radius of several hundred meters and placed before us like a magic tablecloth), talked a lot about the role of education in ensuring the future of the community and its well-being. The Colonel asked that we should possibly take influence on the authorities in Kingston to allocate one of the scholarships annually granted as our country’s support for studying at Russian universities, for a young man or woman from Accompong. Even there, far from the Jamaican capital, according to F. Williams, it is well known what great practical benefit professionals who received higher education in our country in the specialties most in demand in their homeland, have brought to Jamaica over the decades.

It is important, that all our interlocutors on the island, starting with the government leaders, regardless of which of the two main parties, it was formed, noted that Jamaicans who studied in the Soviet Union or, in modern times, in Russia, all returned to the island and worked there, often occupying high positions in various spheres of economics, health care and science, in the civil service, in political and public structures.

As we were told, there were times when Jamaicans who studied in the USSR and then returned to work in the acquired profession were ordered by the authorities on the island to report to the police station every week, as if they were going to criminals who had served prison terms. In the Western world, to which Jamaica conditionally considers itself, at that time, as it is well known, they feared the ideological influence of the Soviet Union on the local minds, the “infiltration” of alien ideas into bourgeois society that “corrupted” it.

Therefore, to this day, there is a great demand on the island for education in Russia. Over the decades, a kind of dynasty of “Russian Jamaicans” has even formed, in which father or mother or even both parents studied in our country, and the children followed in their footsteps and also study in Russian universities.

Of course, we couldn’t refuse the hospitable Maroons, who gathered us at a common table in the “club”, in their desire to introduce us the traditional food of the freedom-loving mountain dwellers (later we will talk about Jamaican cuisine in general, but now we will mention a couple of typical dishes “as a starter”).

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