{"id":35,"date":"2026-11-06T05:29:57","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T05:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/?p=35"},"modified":"2026-11-06T05:29:57","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T05:29:57","slug":"the-lion-and-da-unicorn-philsugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"The Lion and Da Unicorn | PhilSugar"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Andrew Stevens.
\nIan Thomson,
\nThe Dead Yard
\n, Faber and Faber, 2010
\nAs I write this, Christopher \u2018Dudus\u2019 Coke sits awaiting trial in the US, extradited at its request on account of his alleged drugs and arms smuggling activities as leader of the Shower Posse. The Tivoli Gardens-based gang owe their origins to the violent fault-line between Jamaica\u2019s binary rival post-independence rulers, the centre-right Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) and the nominally left top sugar baby site Philippines<\/a> People\u2019s National Party (PNP). Of course, the US interest in Jamaican domestic politics is concerned with its own territorial sovereignty, much to the ruling JLP\u2019s consternation, after all Dudus\u2019 largesse holds as much sway in the \u2018Little Jamaica\u2019 of Brooklyn, New York (where he will face trial) as it does in Kingston. Ian Thomson\u2019s
\nThe Dead Yard
\ndoesn\u2019t mention Dudus or his posse, it doesn\u2019t have to. Dudus is but sugar dating membership cost<\/a> one name attached to the hydra-like gang structure which has persisted since independence, albeit one who plunged the capital into virtual civil war last month. The 24 hour news cycle supplies the rest.
\nThomson traces the \u2018paradise island\u2019s trajectory find sugar babies Makati<\/a> from the pre-independence Harlem-based
\nNegro World
\nof the vain Marcus Garvey (since lionised as he was never able to achieve his putative \u2018Negro Napoleon\u2019 dictator role in the vein of the actual dictators he worshipped) through to the contemporary grim reality of the island\u2019s Hedonism resorts for affluent and amoral tourists. As he helpfully points out at several junctures, the British Empire was as much a sexual enterprise as a commercial one. Thomson takes up his account with the dissolution of the fragile and unwieldy West Indies Federation on 5 August 1962 when the island achieved its independence from the British Empire, joining the soon to be nascent Commonwealth. The midnight moment of the Union Jack taken down for the last time in real sugar daddies Philippines<\/a> Kingston was celebrated solely by one migrant labour nurse in Wanstead, East London, he reckons. He documents the extent to which for all intents and purposes, despite the Fabian playwright George Bernard Shaw\u2019s exhortation on a visit to the island in 1911 of \u201cJamaica for the Jamaicans\u201d, its national culture has long been inextricably linked to the ways and means of its former mother country, the indelible Anglican twee adornments from its 14 formal \u2018parish\u2019 areas, through to the baronial estates acting as a nod to its plantation era, replete with iced tea on the (increasingly decrepit) terrace and the perpetuation of domestic servitude. Thomson\u2019s criss-cross across the island maps out these fraught zones, each \u201cJLP-loyal garrison constituency\u201d.
\nAs he notes, the island\u2019s befuddled colonial administrators were at pains to bequeath the newly-independent state Britain\u2019s two-party Westminster system, hard-wiring for decades to come the antagonisms which have characterised the island\u2019s descent into disorder:
\nTivoli Gardens, formerly the Back-o-Wall slum, had been built in 1966 by the Jamaican Labour Party government or JLP. The inhabitants had been loyal to the opposing political party, the People\u2019s National Party or PNP, and the government wanted rid of them. On the morning of 12 July 1966, armed police dispersed the residents with tear gas, batons and rifle-shot, the bulldozers rolled in behind sugar dating fake profiles<\/a> the police, flattening the shanty. The newly-installed JLP strong men were afterwards supplied with firearms (\u2018vote-getters\u2019) in exchange for their continued political allegiance. With the construction of Tivoli Gardens, the lines were drawn for generations to come: JLP or PNP?
\nHe meets successive Jamaicans of all races who believe the island was somehow \u201cbetter off\u201d under the \u201cBritish system\u201d, an unspoken nod to both colonialism and slavery, if necessary (anything being preferable to the legacy of disorder since 1962). This takes in, as you would expect, its continuing role as a member of the Commonwealth under the British Queen (who had been on the throne for a decade before its independence) and its likely attainment of republic status within the near future. As Thomson attests, the last such attempt towards republicanism happened during the 1970s at the height of LSE-educated PNP premier Michael Manley\u2019s pro-Cuba (its larger neighbour) administration, intoxicated on cod Black Power slogans. The era which followed is taken up with constant JLP\/PNP bickering between the island\u2019s light-skinned elites, the post-Greneda adventurism of the US and its highly-leveraged credit arrangements with the disaster-hit island (acting like a council estate loan shark) and its former mother country declaring \u2018enough!\u2019 in 2003 with Tony Blair\u2019s Home Office imposing hitherto unknown draconian immigration controls on a former colony as a result of Yardie violence on the capital\u2019s streets and drug mule incursions past HM Customs. Dancehall homophobia gets a forensic overview as to its origins (a colonial free sugar dating sites Philippines<\/a> 1861 Act or Church-based, you decide), though as Thomson notes 96% of the population remain in favour of the criminalisation of homosexuality, leading to constant hand-wringing among the competing \u2018liberation\u2019 agendas of the mother country\u2019s culturally relativist anti-imperialist left. Thomson argues that both the feminised domain of quite often father-free Jamaican society and the tendency for Dancehall artists to protest
\na little too much
\nabout the perceived presence of homosexual imagery may lay behind it. He also notes that it is the overbearing quiescent liberalism of most active sugar daddy site Philippines<\/a> the pale, male and stale Judicial Committee of the Privy Council sitting in London\u2019s Westminster which is left to act as final arbiter of its human rights.
\nAnd yet,
\nThe Dead Yard
\nbecomes almost as much a tale of London as Kingston (there is also a grey concrete gun-shot pockmarked Tivoli Gardens in Woolwich, South East London). Each chapter is arranged with a song title in mind, sometimes re-rendered i.e. \u2018(Black Man) in Hammersmith Palais\u2019. This takes in the role of the National Council for Civil Liberties, almost a government in exile in the UK for every welfarist socialist intellectual of the era, along with the Institute for Race Relations and the lesser-known Metropolitan Coloured People\u2019s Housing Association.
\nThomson is as at ease in the kitchen of the former Royal Air Force pilot in Peckham or chewing the cud with \u00e9migr\u00e9 journalists in cafes private sugar arrangement<\/a> as he is meeting Turnham Green-based lyrical poets. The account very much takes in Peckham Rye (as per the opening credits for Channel 4\u2019s own West Indian barbershop comedy
\nDesmonds
\n) through to Tottenham (or \u201cTottenham, N17\u2033 as one proud matriarch puts it to him) as its constant zone, the presence of estate thug crews such as the Cold Hearted Crew and Beg For Mercy providing the tabloid fear. He meets Gladwin \u2018Gladdy Wax\u2019 Wright, proprietor of Stoke Newington reggae store and community meeting point, adjacent to the gun-toting Somerford Grove Estate. Gladdy Wax speaks of his own emigration from Jamaica, up the M6 to Birmingham and the \u2018blues parties\u2019 (ironically now a staple of northern working class culture) necessitated by the West Indian community\u2019s exclusion from the menacing smoke-filled members-only social clubs of the day, each find sugar daddies Philippines<\/a> clutching their can of Harp on the house sofa (\u201cRed Stripe came later\u201d, Thomson says). Not long after \u201cTrench Town swagger\u201d came to England amid the Mod Reggae movement, with those Jamaican youth prepared to don \u201ccrombies and two-tone Trevira suits\u201d allowed to join skinhead gangs. Ska was very much seen as the musical embodiment of the new Commonwealth, Jamaica\u2019s Skatalites (whose breakthrough \u2018Guns of Navarone\u2019 was b-sided with \u2018Marcus Garvey\u2019) and Dragonaires powering the white teenage dancefloor. \u2018My Boy Lollipop\u2019 by Millie Small with its \u201cpert under-age suggestiveness\u201d was the pop edge of this. Meanwhile, one Jamaican rejoiced as he found the \u201cLion of Judah\u201d among the black metal statues of Trafalgar Square (symbolically the celebration of the British defeat of Garvey\u2019s venerated Napoleon). He also finds Jamaican immigrants who following the \u2018disturbances\u2019 of Notting Hill in the late 1950s, applauded the passage of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act as a means to take a breather and allow the existing population to settle in (an early example of pulling the ladder up, as seen more recently by bemused BNP activists in Barking, where black Britons have reportedly asked for their literature).
\nAs Dudus reclines in his American jail cell and ponders what the DEA have Makati sugar baby<\/a> in store for his leisure, he could do worse than to examine Ian Thomson\u2019s forensic account of what put him there.
\nABOUT THE AUTHOR
\nAndrew Stevens
\nis Cities Editor of
\n3:AM
\nand lives in London.<\/p>\n

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By Andrew Stevens. Ian Thomson, The Dead Yard , Faber and Faber, 2010 As I write this, Christopher \u2018Dudus\u2019 Coke sits awaiting trial in the US, extradited at its request on account of his alleged drugs and arms smuggling activities as leader of the Shower Posse. The Tivoli Gardens-based gang owe their origins to the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"solace_meta_sidebar":"","solace_meta_container":"","solace_meta_enable_content_width":"","solace_meta_content_width":0,"solace_meta_title_alignment":"","solace_meta_author_avatar":"","solace_post_elements_order":"","solace_meta_disable_header":"","solace_meta_disable_footer":"","solace_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/38"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}