In January this year, staff from at Jamaica's Public Broadcasting Corporation made a shocking discovery. One of the country's most important music collections, including
original recordings by Bob Marley and Pete Tosh, had been ransacked. Thousands of vinyl records and CDs had gone. Nearly one year on not a single record has been recovered, but
officials are hoping an appeal to music fans will help replace the
collection built up over the years by the JBC. Created in 1961 at the end of the colonial era, the JBC
followed a model very similar to the BBC: a public service to inform,
educate and entertain. The radio station was there at the birth of Jamaica's music
business when all kinds of music burst forth on the Caribbean island. Its music library had everything from mento to ska, and from rocksteady to reggae.
Irreplaceable cuts?
In 1997, the government sold off parts of the JBC. Under the deal, the library of historic film and video footage, plus the reels of tape and records played on the radio station would be kept as part of the national archive. The collection was stored in the old headquarters of the JBC in part of central Kingston called Half-Way Tree. There it lay, seemingly locked away for safe keeping for more than a decade.
It's a national disgrace... somehow they had access to it and all that history is lost
 Gladstone Wilson
Former JBC programme manager |
Then workers from the JBC's replacement, the Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica, or PBC-J, toured the building to check the archive for themselves. "When we came in we saw piles and piles of sleeves that the 45's came in, literally a couple of thousand on the floor just laying on the ground," said Leighton Thomas, the head of the PBC-J.
It was estimated that some 80% of the collection had been taken, but the true scale of the loss was difficult to calculate as no accurate records were kept. A team is now trying to work out what was taken and what is left. Classic reggae cuts that are probably irreplaceable seem to be missing. "Artists would go out and make just one vinyl record only for radio, a one-off cut," says Mr Thomas. "Some of Bob Marley's original recordings would have been here, material that was never mass produced and sold. So that's what we're searching for, to see if we've still got the Bob Marley before he was Bob Marley."
'Culture of complicity'
Police are still investigating what happened. It was discovered that the room may have been broken into from outside, but there was also evidence that he doors had been tampered with from the inside. What is left of the archive has been moved to a new more secure location. "It's a national disgrace, we've really thrown away or let people take what was not their own, but somehow they had access to it and all that history is lost," says Gladstone Wilson, the former programme manager at JBC. CONTINUE READING...
