A JAMAICAN CHILDHOOD - A NEVER TO BE FORGOTTEN EXPERIENCE

Part of the now badly eroded landscape which Shaka and his family and friends spent their childhood.

As Shaka remembered it, there he was happily stripping the hard skin of the length of juicy sugar cane with his teeth and biting into it, when something dreadful occurred. Without any warning, he found himself being held firmly by his hand by a man who, it would almost immediately transpired, was one of the Rangers or Overseers working on the Estate. 

 Before Shaka could figure out what was happening, the man began taking him away from his brothers and friends, with whom he had gone stealing sugar cane. When the Ranger asked Shaka where his father was, and Shaka told him that he was in England, the man’s unsympathetic and firm response was, ‘.. and lef yuh to steal backra cane’, which was, on reflection, both a question and an affirmation of the insinuation that, yes, ‘him lef yu to do dat.’ 

 When the Ranger began to talk about taking Shaka to Prison, his fears took on heightened levels of desperation, as he envisaged himself being taken from his family and locked up in what he imagined would have been an extremely frightening place. Shaka recalled that he began to poignantly plead and beg the Ranger to let him go, and to promise that he would never do it again. 

Probably feeling that he had made his point, and/or being moved by Shaka’s pitiful pleading and crying, the Ranger let go of him. By now Shaka’s brothers and friend were out of sight, as he made his way up the trail to rejoin them. From the discussion he had with them, it transpired that everybody other than Shaka, for whatever inexplicable reason, had seen and/or been made aware of the approaching Ranger, and had immediately thrown their pieces of sugar cane into the cane field. 

It was only Shaka who had been caught with the evidence of the crime. Shaka cannot recall whether he did get an explanation from his brothers and friends, as to why they did not intervened with the Ranger, or whether they knew that he would eventually let Shaka go.

This terrible incident did not completely stopped Shaka from stealing backra’s sugar cane, but it made him more vigilant on the rare occasions when he did succumb to the temptation. For that night, however, the relief Shaka felt about not being taken to the Police by the Ranger, was immense, and is something he would always remember.

Evidence of how precarious living could be at times, when you are at the mercy of the elements