Jamaica Phone Directory

Jamaica is an island in the Caribbean Sea, measuring only 11,000 square kilometers but yet very famous and important to the cultural heritage of the world. It is a land of singing and dancing and many of the most famous singers were born here. The most well known of them is the legend of the reggae music, Bob Marley.




Jamaica was originally inhabited by some local Indian tribes, the Arawak and the Taino, and later was claimed for Spain by Christopher Columbus around the year 1500. this is why the Jamaica phone directory is a strange mixture between Spanish and Indian names. The country’s name comes from the word xamayca, which means the country of the wood and water, name given by the Indian population.



After the Spanish conquest the capital of the island was declared the Spanish Town, today’s parish of St. Catherine. But the Spanish reign did not last long because at the middle of the 16^th century the British took over the island, adding English names to the Jamaica phone directory. By now the island had a population of about 5,000 people formed from whites, Indians, and the black slaves that the Spanish left behind.

The British ruled Jamaica for about 200 years and encouraged slavery because they started exporting sugar, so the population of Jamaica increased, and the afro American’s percentage rose noticeably (the whites represented only 5 percent of the total population). The blacks had very rough times in that period, because slaves were not well treated , they were wiped if they refused or could not work any more because of the exhaustion, the women were sold and raped by the whites, were not given any free days to rest. By the middle of the 18^th century, the total population of Jamaica was about 370,000 people, out of which 300,000 people were slaves.

After the abolition of slavery, the British imported workers from China and India to replace the black workers, and the Asian remained here. This colorful population produced a lot of valuable artists, that marked the history of music and of literature. Jamaica is synonymous with music and gets its origins from the black slaves that used to work here and whose only joy at the end of a long exhausting day was singing and dancing. This is when the drugs consumption begun, too, and the number of drug addicts has increased a lot, and became one of the first things that cross somebody’s mind when talking about Jamaica. The drug consumption is very popular among the people that have a low income, and is inherited from the slavery period. Unfortunately it has reached a very high level, and the government makes great efforts to keep it under control.