Commentary: Dreadlocks In Jamaican Schools

Text: Mel Cooke

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This arti­cle was first pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber 2024 (RIDDIM 04/2024).

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Dread­locks is to Jamaican Pop­u­lar Music per­form­ers and musi­cians, espe­cial­ly reg­gae, what spout­ing off is to USA ath­letes, in par­tic­u­lar sprint­er Noah Lyles at the moment. So not every­one in the group has this char­ac­ter­is­tic, but there are suf­fi­cient who do to make those who do not stand out, and those who do show the behav­ior or phys­i­cal attribute to cre­ate a con­vinc­ing stereo­type.

Of course, the num­ber of stand­out per­form­ers, from the Wail­ers and the Mar­leys to Mor­gan Her­itage, Buju Ban­ton, Burn­ing Spear, Big Youth, Tar­rus Riley, Siz­zla, Caple­ton, Steel Pulse’s David Hinds, Muta­baru­ka, Pro­to­je, Jah9, Sprag­ga Benz and so many more that a com­plete list is impos­si­ble to put togeth­er, sup­ports the notion. Added to that are the logos for the Rebel Salute, Reg­gae Sum­fest and (now dor­mant) Reg­gae Sun­splash Jamaican music fes­ti­vals, which all fea­ture draw­ings of dread­locked men and it is pos­si­bly still a sur­prise to per­sons vis­it­ing Jamaica for the first time that not every­one is sport­ing dreads.

Con­nect­ing the locks anal­o­gy with one on Jamaican Pop­u­lar Music in gen­er­al by an unim­peach­able author­i­ty, in the 2002 BBC doc­u­men­tary ”Reg­gae: The Sto­ry of Jamaican Music”, Jim­my Cliff describes it as Jamaica’s oil. So the log­i­cal thread would be that the locks which are so cen­tral to the image of reg­gae would be as val­ued in Jamaica as a com­po­nent in pro­duc­ing oil is in a coun­try for­tu­nate enough to have the valu­able sub­stance (well, unless the USA wants it so bad­ly that it is will­ing to start a war or desta­bi­lize the coun­try to lib­er­ate some sud­den­ly oppressed peo­ple in the coun­try to get at the reserves). 

The log­ic does not hold. In 2024, 72 years after Jamaica gained polit­i­cal inde­pen­dence from Britain, it has tak­en a Court of Appeal rul­ing to have a deci­sion by a pri­ma­ry lev­el school to have a girl wo was denied entry because of her dread­locks over­turned. In July 2024 the Court of Appeal ruled that the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of the girl had been breached when Kens­ing­ton Pri­ma­ry School, St. Cather­ine, barred her from entry unless her hair was cut. As these legal things go out took a while – the school took action against the poten­tial stu­dent in 2018 (when the girl was five years old) and the Supreme Court upheld the deci­sion in 2020.

In jus­ti­fy­ing its posi­tion, the school said that dread­locks were unhy­gien­ic, that it was prone to lice and what Jamaicans call ”jun­jo” – a real­ly nasty look­ing and smelling mold (not to be con­fused with the late Vol­cano sound sys­tem own­er and record pro­duc­er Hen­ry ”Jun­jo” Lawes, who was mur­dered in Eng­land in 1999). This was in 2018; in 1977 George Nooks (as dee­jay Prince Mohamed) record­ed ”Forty Leg”, which demand­ed ”stop spread pro­pa­gan­da pon di dread/cause di dread no have no forty leg inna him head”. This was in response to a notion being bandied about that Rasta­farians had ”forty legs” (as cen­tipedes are known in Jamaica) in their hair.

”Forty leg”, ”jun­jo”, lice, same sup­po­si­tion of extreme unclean­li­ness or, as Jamaicans put it, nas­ti­ness.

While Rasta­fari and dead­locks have become syn­ony­mous with reg­gae, those look­ing in from out­side Jamaica would have to under­stand that the edu­ca­tion sys­tem and Rasta­fari oper­ate on com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent lev­els in a heav­i­ly strat­i­fied soci­ety, with Chris­tian­i­ty dom­i­nat­ing the for­mer. So Bush­man could urge ”grow yu nat­ty mek it come dung” as much as he wants; Mor­gan Her­itage can insin­u­ate strate­gic con­ceal­ment with ”Don’t Haf­fi Dread”; Bob Mar­ley and the Wail­ers can encour­age ”grow your dread­locks / don’t be afraid of the wolf pack” as much as they want, there are sec­tions of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem which say no to dread­locks. Ras Kar­bi put it well in ”Dis­crim­i­na­tion”, a song about a Rasta­far­i­an at a job inter­view let­ting out his locks, to the ter­ror of the inter­view­er, as it was made clear that ”long hair freaky peo­ple need not apply / no want no ol nay­ga no Rasta­fari”.

The rejec­tion is not uni­ver­sal, though, with many schools at the basic, pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­els mak­ing con­ces­sions on grounds of the stu­dents’ reli­gion. How­ev­er, there is much dis­crim­i­na­tion, most of which does not go into the legal sys­tem, much less reach the promi­nence of this par­tic­u­lar case.

It is part and par­cel of the rem­nants of the Jamaican state’s oppres­sion of Rasta­fari, from its incep­tion in the 1930s and, per­haps, peak­ing in the Coral Gar­dens Inci­dent (Rasta­fari say Coral Gar­dens Mas­sacre) of Good (Rasta­fari say Bad) Fri­day, 1963, start­ing in Mon­tego Bay and spread­ing across west­ern Jamaica espe­cial­ly. Then there was the bull­doz­ing of Back O Wall, west­ern Kingston, in 1966 to make room for the build­ing of Tivoli Gar­dens, before the rise of reg­gae in the late 1960s into the 1970s, which dove­tailed neat­ly with the demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism posi­tion of the Michael Man­ley led People’s Nation­al Par­ty (PNP) Gov­ern­ment, which came into pow­er in 1972.

Still, oppres­sive poli­cies are held in place in pock­ets of pow­er all across the land, includ­ing the edu­ca­tion sys­tem. This rul­ing is one vic­to­ry, which has tak­en 8 years and lots of mon­ey (although a fig­ure has not been pub­li­cized). Many more have suf­fered and are suf­fer­ing in silence, all for a head of hair – and the con­tra­dic­tion to the Jamaican sta­tus quo which it rep­re­sents.

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