This essay on roots reggae, plantation futures, and songs of resistance is the sixteenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey
Since the introduction of the term “Anthropocene” in the 1980s, many scholars have emphasized that it disregards those communities impacted most negatively by changing global environments and climates. It also fails to consider another colossal shift that escalated the consequences of human actions on the planet, occurring centuries before 1950—one that echoes today. The imposition of the plantation structuring to land first occurred on islands off the North-West African Coast, like Madeira, in the 1400s, before being replicated across the Americas.
The plantation system constitutes the beginning of an era in which people significantly changed their environs. This colonial restructuring of land also facilitated various European states to enact genocide on Indigenous populations and dispossess and enslave millions of African people.
The “Plantationocene” is used to describe this era. Donna Haraway writes that “the devastating transformation of the diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor” became the blueprint for how those with the most power have treated natural resources, the environment, humans, and other living beings.
Following emancipation from plantation slavery, plantation logic remains, echoing and evolving across spaces, seeping into other societal structures, and underpinning today’s global industries like agriculture, mining, and tourism. Katherine McKittrick describes these structures as “plantation futures.” Plantation futures may appear different from the plantations of transatlantic enslavement, but they continue to reproduce uneven racial geographies, wherein racialized people are exploited for their labor, dispossessed, and criminalized, while the spaces they inhabit are extracted from, polluted, and underfunded for the economic development of North Atlantic nations.
Roots reggae artists have sought to make plantation futures audible through their music since the development of the musical style in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Like other reggae listeners, these histories have become a part of my consciousness through the tracks I have listened to since childhood. In early adulthood, I began DJing on the radio and actively sought out roots reggae records to play for myself and for listeners. As someone who received minimal formal history education, learning about the impact of British colonialism on people and land, over heavy, entrancing basslines, felt powerful. This experience ultimately led me to a Ph.D. through which I have explored Caribbean agricultural histories documented in archives and transmitted through music.
Word of the Farmer
The oppressive conditions of plantation slavery is an almost ubiquitous theme in roots reggae. To name a few songs, plantation slavery features in “Slavery Days” by Burning Spear (1975), “Slave Driver” by Bob Marley and the Wailers (1973), and “True History” by Rod Taylor (1979). Importantly, reggae artists’ focus on oppression often extends to the contemporaneous working conditions of Jamaican people, including—and pertinent to this essay—agricultural workers.
Gregory Isaacs’ 1978 track “Word of the Farmer” is a first-person account of an exploited agricultural worker who is taking a stand against the landowner. He addresses the owner in the following lines: “While you were a-playing, I was the one who sweat and toil,” lamenting that “When there was no water to water the crop / I cried and I cried and I used my teardrops.”
In the song, Isaacs is paid little for his intensive labor; he gives everything to cultivate land while the owner gets richer. He refers to the overseer and landowner as “backra” and “massa,” terms originally assigned to plantation owners and overseers during the era of enslavement in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. These expressions continued to be used post-emancipation in reference to white people, particularly those in positions of power.
By using this language, Isaacs reminds listeners of the legacy of plantation slavery on the agricultural sector of 1970s Jamaica that foreclosed good working conditions for Black agriculturalists.
This song was produced and played at a time in Jamaica when reforms were being introduced under Michael Manley’s People’s National Party to counteract the land monopolization and over‑reliance on imported produce that continued to haunt post‑colonial Jamaica. Manley’s Project Land Lease, which began in 1973, attempted to divide large plots to lease them to more farmers and provide loans and grants for land improvements and equipment.
The program was neither successful nor long-lasting. By the end of the decade, a system remained in which small-scale farmers, who tend to focus on cultivation for domestic use, were still marginalized to less desirable plots; large-scale monocrop agriculture, centered on export markets and North American bauxite mining companies, dominated the most productive parcels of land.
Isaacs was born in the 1950s and grew up in Fletchers Land, downtown Kingston. He would have been witness to, and a part of, the mass migration from rural Jamaica to places like Kingston in search of work that took place in the mid-twentieth century. Though many people found employment in Jamaica’s urban centers, others struggled with chronic unemployment. Importantly, countless Kingstonians sought work in the music industry as reggae began to dominate the airwaves at home and abroad.
Roots reggae artists have sought to make plantation futures audible through their music since the development of the musical style in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Manley’s failed attempts at land reform likely had a mobilizing impact on Isaacs, proving the persistence of the plantation structuring of Jamaica. With music as his medium, he was well positioned to circulate these ideas.
Despite being well-known for his silky vocals on love songs like “Night Nurse” (1982) and “Cool Down the Pace” (1982), his catalogue reveals a link between songs about plantation slavery (e.g. “Slave Market” (1979)), twentieth century policing (e.g. “Rumours” (1988)) and decolonial futures (e.g. “Black Liberation Struggle”(1979)). Together, these songs demonstrate how he perceives plantation logic as mapping onto the present moment.
The Farmer’s Story
The late Max Romeo’s “The Farmer’s Story” (2017) is another song that highlights inequality, this time between working-class land workers and middle-class businesspeople in twenty-first century Jamaica. Romeo’s narrative is in the third person: He compares the life of a “poor farmer,” who “lives in a hut,” “eats chicken back,” and “rides a donkey back” to the life of the higgler (the person who buys the produce from the farmer and sells it at the market). In the song, the higgler “lives in a mansion,” “eats steak and snapper,” and “rides in a Prado.”
Romeo provides a practical solution to this unequal relationship. In the music video, he encourages the farmer to sign an “exclusive supply contract” with a Jamaican supermarket, a contract that would formalize the relationship between farmer and produce seller by specifying a quantity of produce and its minimum value. Whilst these contracts did not guarantee a flattening of the centuries‑old power imbalance between farmers and buyers, they nonetheless supported domestic markets and increased the number of small‑scale farmers in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean during the 2010s, when this song was released.
After signing the contract, the music video shows the farmer moving into a larger home with more acreage, and he looks to be in better health. The song indicates how dedicated Romeo was to alleviating Jamaican farmworkers’ conditions. Since the 1970s he used his musical talent to broadcast messages in support of the working class communities, mobilizing listeners in the fight against anti-blackness and platforming or calling out political leaders.
Isaacs, Romeo, and other reggae artists who sing about themes of exploitation are calling attention to the impact of plantation futures on the land workers who are at the frontline of its manifestation in the agricultural sector. As scholars emphasize, reggae artists have traditionally spoken to—and spoken for—the Black working-class majority in Jamaica because they are raised in these communities and remain committed to expressing their experiences and desires despite their global success.
This means that many reggae artists, particularly in the 1970s, would have had a connection to land work in one way or another. As a teenager, Romeo himself worked on a sugar plantation in Clarendon, Jamaica.
Songs like “The Farmer’s Story” and “Word of the Farmer” have become part of my regular rotation when I play on the radio or in a dancehall; I see this as a critical method of engagement for my research where the sonic is as, if not more, important than the written word.
Provision Grounds Consciousness
The celebration of small-scale farming can also be heard in roots reggae songs.
In his 1983 track “Mr. Farmer Man,” Echo Minott declares, “I’m a farmer man.” The song begins with him singing about farming typical export crops like sugarcane and coffee in “the hills of St. Mary,” in the parish north of his native Kingston, St. Andrew’s. He sings about how happy it makes him to cultivate a wide range of crops to feed and sustain himself, mentioning plants like plantain, coconut, green banana, cassava and marijuana.
Some of these crops, known as ground provisions, have been cultivated by African-Caribbean people on small plots for centuries.
Provision grounds were small plots of land on estates, either outside of the lodgings or in marginal areas, that British landowners allotted to enslaved people to cultivate produce for their own subsistence, allowing landowners to evade paying for the necessary food provision. These small plots improved soil health and increased biodiversity, food system resilience, and food sovereignty for the African-Caribbean communities in Britain’s colonies amidst monocrop agriculture.
In 2014 Earl Sixteen released “Natty Farming,” a track that also sings the praises of the biodiversity that small-scale farming engenders. In the song he describes a Rastafarian farmer growing crops like yam, banana, pumpkin, marijuana, cho cho and okra, singing, “all kinds of things we should be planting.” Earl Sixteen also extols the benefits of traditional, organic farming in helping to eliminate the food insecurity many experience in Jamaica today.[1]
Plantation futures activate decolonial work in those they seek to dehumanize. Artists like Echo Minott and Earl Sixteen do not only seek to discredit the extractive, exhaustive system of agriculture that the Spanish and British brought to Jamaica beginning in the sixteenth century. They also encourage listeners—particularly those in the Caribbean with African heritage and who are often reggae artists’ target audience—to place value on African-Caribbean agricultural heritage, like small-plot farming and a relationship with growing that foregrounds the care of land and people.
This is a decolonial undertaking in its work to delink from colonial attitudes towards land and restore traditional West and Central African farming practices like those that were reconstituted on Caribbean provision grounds.
For some, the dancehall may not be the ideal place to confront both narratives of land and human exploitation and alternative agricultural practices; for others it is empowering to be reminded of such significant histories while dancing in community with fellow reggae listeners.
When I select reggae songs to broadcast, I work to provide narratives of colonialism and decolonial action through cultivating other forms of growing.
Back to the Roots
Importantly, the tradition of documenting the extractivism of the plantation structuring of land and promoting a more reciprocal relationship with land has existed in Jamaica long before the first reggae vinyl was pressed. Sylvia Wynter writes extensively about the “rerooting” or “rerouting” of West and Central African consciousness relating to land on the provision grounds of enslaved people in the Caribbean. She states that “the ideology of the provision ground, and the culture based on it, rehumanized the object/property created by the plantation ideology,” and emphasized the value of cultivating land for producing food and supporting social, cultural, and spiritual nourishment.
The musicologist Olive Lewin found that provision ground ideology flourished in the folk expressions of Jamaican working-class people—often descendants of enslaved people—into the twentieth century.
The musical practices that Lewin refers to embed land-related knowledge and sentiment. To quote her in full:
The slave owner had no qualms about having even the most magnificent cotton tree felled without a word of thanks or explanation to the spirit of that tree though his ancient forebears would have thought differently. Before carrying out such an order, the African immigrant, and later his Jamaican descendant, would sing and make peace with the life, the spirit, in that tree about to be destroyed…A song used in that context by Jamaican sawyers up to the 1940s was: ‘A noh me a bahss say’ (‘Don’t blame me, it’s the boss’s order’).
Her quote underscores the importance of musical expression for disseminating evidence of non-extractivist ways of relating to land; unlike those in positions of power in politics, mainstream media, and education, music has for centuries provided people locked out of traditional processes for knowledge propagation a way to tell an alternative story about agriculture. Echo Minott’s “Mr. Farmer Man” and Earl Sixteen’s “Natty Farming” express pride in landwork and celebrate all that the land provides, underscoring a reciprocal way of relating to their environments.
While reggae music has its roots more in African-Caribbean spiritual expressions than the work songs of the plantation, it is evident that the style has documented the working conditions of growers by addressing both the pervasiveness of plantation futures and the beauty of small-scale farming traditions.
As I have considered in my Ph.D. research, artists call out uneven racialized geographies and call in food security, cleaner air, a more reciprocal relationship with our environments, and better labor conditions for those that work on land. For some, the dancehall may not be the ideal place to confront both narratives of land and human exploitation and alternative agricultural practices; for others it is empowering to be reminded of such significant histories while dancing in community with fellow reggae listeners.
Even circulating these songs on the radio creates an “imagined community” of listeners absorbing the same agricultural histories. By moving together to these reggae baselines, collective understanding of both the Plantationocene and its antithesis becomes realized.
In an age of worsening climate crises and increasing climate denial, musical expressions such as these must be cared for and cultivated.
Featured image: The Jamaican singer Burning Spear performs in the Netherlands. Photo by Peter Verwimp, 2023.
Dr. Carmen Andall-Woodroofe is a researcher and workshop facilitator based in London, UK. She graduated with a Ph.D. from Royal Holloway in 2025 with a thesis entitled “Rooted in Reggae: the ways in which roots reggae mediates African-Caribbean diasporic listeners’; practices and attitudes towards the environment.” Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sustainability and Environment at the British Library, researching provision grounds as sites of resistance against plantation logics with the library’s collections. Contact.
[1] In 2020, the World Food Programme found that 40% of people in former British colonies in the Caribbean experience food insecurity.
You must be logged in to post a comment.