Is Devon House Next?

Whenever I have a chance, I drive past Vale Royal to see if there has been any progress with the long-promised and much-needed renovations, after the catastrophic collapse of the portico earlier this year. It is painfully obvious that nothing has been done. Some hoarding, consisting of board and fabric, was put in place to cover up the blight, but even that now looks quite blighted. Are the relevant authorities waiting for another part of the building to collapse before anything will be done? Was the uproar about the neglect just another nine-day wonder?

All of this would be bad enough if it were not part of a broader pattern of neglect of Jamaica’s culture and heritage sector. The historic Emancipation Square in Spanish Town, which already has two ruined buildings (the old King’s House and the old Court House), looks increasingly neglected, with the shabby, patched-up zinc roof covering the Municipal Council building seemingly waiting for a hurricane to remove it while the “tempietto” of the Rodney Memorial, until not so long ago one of the few intact structures on the square, also needs urgent attention. I could go on with many other examples of clear neglect of Jamaica’s built heritage across the island.

Some have argued that neglecting colonial-era structures is acceptable and even desirable, as they are reminders of an oppressive and exploitative colonial past. That is a simplistic view, in my opinion, that neglects to consider that these buildings are an important testament to Jamaica’s complex history and were furthermore constructed using Black labour and technical expertise. The small histories matter as much as the big histories when it comes to such buildings and those less acknowledged histories speak about resilience, ingenuity and survival, as much as these structures also represent colonial power. Understanding and acknowledging what these buildings represent, historically, is the better way to go and if they are productively repurposed for modern public use, they can only add to a well-grounded collective sense of self. No matter how you feel about the legacies of Edward Seaga, this is one matter he undeniably got right.

Devon House has quite different symbolic implications, as it is a mansion built by Jamaica’s first black millionaire and represents how colonial legacies were symbolically challenged by the new middle classes. Nobody can reasonably question its relevance to Jamaica’s heritage. Photos and video footage that has just come to my attention however suggest that Devon House, too, is in jeopardy and that an urgent intervention is needed to ensure that the building does not go the way of Vale Royal. I understand that the interior also needs urgent attention. A number of art works are on loan from the National Gallery of Jamaica to Devon House and the mansion holds valuable antiques. Steps must be taken to ensure that these are not in jeopardy either.

Maintaining a building such as Devon House is challenging, there is no doubt about that, and constant vigilance and judicious maintenance are needed. Termites and wood rot are a constant threat (although those who have been responsible for more modern buildings in Kingston will know that termites are not only a threat to historic structures). It is however much easier, and cheaper, to maintain the building regularly than to wait for a major catastrophe to happen. Urgent action is needed!

The photographs I saw today, and my own experiences on the site, raise many other questions however, and one is whether Devon House is still regarded as a valuable and indeed indispensable heritage site by the powers that be, or whether its roles as an entertainment and gastronomy site have now taken the upper hand. The controversial and historically insensitive renovation of the back courtyard, last year, suggest that the latter is indeed the case, with the heritage aspects becoming less of a priority, if at all.

We also have to wonder who manages Jamaica’s heritage sites. Is the Jamaica National Heritage Trust appropriate funded and staffed for the job, or has it just become a paper tiger? Does its leadership have the technical and scholarly skillsets to do the job, and is there are clearly articulated vision and plan for Jamaica’s heritage to be managed productively? Are the technocrats empowered to do what needs to be done? And where is the Ministry of Culture in all of this? Surely, the management of an important heritage site such as Devon House cannot be the sole responsibility of the Ministry of Tourism or the Office of the Prime Minister (in case of Vale Royal).

From what I have seen, and personally experienced, there has been a massive “de-professionalization” of Jamaica’s culture and heritage sector in recent years. With very few exceptions, the country’s cultural institutions are now headed with persons with generic management qualifications, or qualifications which are only tangentially related to the institution they are heading, but with the right party card and social affiliations and a willingness to work under the present circumstances. Technical expertise, where it still exists, is relegated to the second and third tier of the organization. There has also been an erosion of technical expertise regarding historical conservation, as is illustrated by some of the questionable regarding interventions into heritage buildings such as the Ward theatre (what is the status of that long-awaited restoration, by the way?).

It is my strong view that the leadership of cultural institutions needs to be specialized and consist of persons who have well-established technical expertise and a well-informed and-articulated vision relevant to their field of responsibility. In the past, institutions such as the Institute of Jamaica and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust were headed by eminent specialists in the field, who had an autonomous professional voice and who were able to speak up when that was necessary. I am thinking about Neville Dawes, Beverley Hall-Alleyne and Hugh Nash, among others. We have to ask why such leadership is no longer deemed important today. Perhaps it is not understood why such things matter. That there is no such caliber of leadership inevitably has consequences for how the sector is managed and I believe that we are seeing the consequences of this leadership crisis, for that is what it amounts to.