The Independence Day of Jamaica celebrates when the Island nation officially became a sovereign state.
The Colony of Jamaica gained its independence from the United Kingdom on 6 August 1962, following more than 300 years under British control.
The tremendous victory of this likkle but tallawah nation (“small but mighty” in Jamaican Patois) was one triumph in the long history of Black sovereignty and nationalism that led to the disintegration of the British empire in the Caribbean.
Jamaica had been a Spanish colony until 1655 when Britain launched an expedition across the Spanish Caribbean during the Anglo-Spanish War.
Although English general Oliver Cromwell’s invasion of Jamaica in May 1655 ended in failure and his plan for the Western Design (name of the expedition) overwhelmingly failed, Jamaica was formally ceded to Britain in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid.
Jamaica remained a British colony almost another three hundred years through the Maroon Wars (1728-1739 and 1795-1796), Tacky’s Rebellion (a defining revolt in the British Caribbean in 1760), and Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery as an institution in 1834.
Centuries of civil unrest and activism in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean intensified in the 1900s.
Notably, Jamaican-born Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey appealed for improved living standards for Black Jamaicans and later gained international acclaim when he and his first wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey.
Together the Garvey’s founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League in Kingston in 1914.
Though Garvey wasn’t elected to public office in Jamaica, the UNIA was responsible for many Black Jamaicans’ anticolonial and nationalist sentiments during the early twentieth century.
The Jamaica Independence Act was formerly presented on May 22, 1962, was later approved by Royal assent on July 19, and came into effect on August 6.
Jamaica is the first Anglophone speaking nation in the Caribbean to have gained independence.
