Slavery lies at the heart of Jamaican history. (The equivalent in the US would be if the Bloods and Crips of South Central LA had been armed and protected by the Democrats and Republicans, respectively, through 30 years of gang warfare.) Bob Marley wasn't joking around when he described Concrete Jungle as a place where good life was nowhere to be found. The politicized violence rooted in the garrisons has ripped Jamaica apart, making Kingston one of the world's most dangerous cities as Junglists and Tivolites carry on their long-running vendetta. In 1972, the rival PNP won national elections to take over control of the government the party then built its own hulking concrete garrison a few miles away from Tivoli at a place officially called Arnett Gardens-but known to all the sufferers in West Kingston as "Concrete Jungle." For much of the next 30 years, PNP-affiliated gangsters from Jungle waged so-called "tribal war" against JLP-sponsored gunmen from Tivoli and another JLP garrison called Rema. Followers of the leftist People's National Party risked their lives simply by entering the project Tivoli became a JLP garrison. The right-wing JLP rewarded its fiercest supporters with subsidized housing and patronage jobs in Tivoli over time, the project became home to armed gangs of thuggish JLP enforcers. Tivoli was a modern concrete project built on the ground of a cleared shantytown called the Dungle (that's short for "dung hill") in the late 1960s by the ruling Jamaican Labour Party. The community is one of the most notorious of the government-built housing schemes Jamaicans have aptly come to call "garrisons." West Kingston's first garrison was Tivoli Gardens, a brutalist housing bloc named rather fancifully after a Danish pleasure garden.
Deep ThoughtĬoncrete Jungle has played a central role in the violent history of modern Jamaica. "Concrete Jungle" is not merely a metaphor for a harsh urban environment it is the actual name of a troubled housing project located within the sprawling slums of West Kingston, Jamaica-Bob Marley's hometown. So Marley's description of Concrete Jungle as a place where darkness covered light, where life and love were nowhere to be found, tapped into a powerful religious metaphor with deep roots in both Christian and Rasta thinking. Rasta elders tend to cite Biblical chapter and verse extensively, usually by memory, in the course of their reasonings. But Rastafari itself derived, in part, from the revivalist protestant Christianity that was a powerful force in traditional Jamaican culture Rastas accept the Bible as sacred text, even while they typically reject the Christian church as an institution. And the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.") Bob Marley was, of course, not a Christian but rather a Rastafarian. In him was life and the life was the light of men. (The famous intro to the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made. In the Christian tradition, light has often been used as a metaphor for God, faith, and life itself. The song's intense darkness/light symbolism draws heavily from the Biblical imagery found in passages such as "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5).