The Song of the Banana Man

On this day in 1494 Christopher Columbus and his crew became the first Europeans to reach Jamaica, thus setting in motion events that led to the island enduring centuries of European colonialism and untold cruelty.

The Song of the Banana Man  written in to 1950s by Evan Jones was published as part of the celebrations of Jamaica's Independence in 1962. It has since become one of the most loved and well-known poems across the whole of the Caribbean.

The bananas are sitting in a wooden bowl that we bought in 1970 in a market in Kingston, Jamiaca, while we were en route to Fiji. In the same market we poor innocents bought what we thought were the biggest and best bananas that we had ever seen. Sadly they turned out to be cooking plantains with the consistency of rocks!