The Inside Story

Venture inland to find the real Jamaica: meet the ‘children of Nanny’, descended from runaway slaves; sip the sumptuous coffee of the famous Blue Mountains; or ride with a rasta through the karst hills of Cockpit Country.

- Stephanie Cavagnaro

Colonel Wallace Sterling has slipped into a soliloquy, eulogising Nanny — a warrior woman who knew every fold of these mountains, and how to remain camouflaged within them. She was a shape-shifter; a soldier whose weapon was the land. She’d slide behind a curtain of falls, withdraw into caves and disappear within the creeping, chokingly dense forests that nosedive down the John Crow Mountains and crash into the rushing Rio Grande. “That’s why we say we are Grande Nanny yoyo — we are all children of Grande Nanny.”

Vanishing into his house, the colonel leaves me outside, where the sun bakes a sweet sedation into the landscape. A kitten is lazily tracing infinity symbols between my legs when the colonel emerges with a Ghanaian kuficap, beat-up Nike trainers and a machete. It’s time to find Nanny. I follow him along an asphalt road that fades into a forested footpath, where the swelling greenery is so rampant epiphytes even sprout from overhead electrical wires.

“As a colonel, you’re the person that’s in charge,” he says with a one-tooth smile. For 21 years, the colonel has been the leader of semi-autonomous Moore Town — a community descended from the fearsome Windward Maroons, a group of West Africans who escaped slavery in the 17th century and fled to Jamaica’s mountainous interior. “Look around,” he urges. “All of this is surrounded by mountains, right? You can get ready protection for the community.”