The Griot | Stories Roots Legacy

The full story of The Skatalites — the Jamaican instrumental supergroup that invented ska. From the Alpha Boys' School alumni who formed its core, to Don Drummond's brilliance and tragic end, to Jackie Mittoo's musical legacy across two continents.

In February of 1763, an enslaved Akan man named Cuffy led the largest slave revolt in Dutch colonial history — and then formally proposed splitting the colony of Berbice with the Dutch governor in writing. The letter he signed as 'Governor of the Black People of Berbice' still exists in the Dutch National Archives. This episode tells the story of the Berbice Rebellion: eight months of a provisional Black government, the internal fracture that ended it, and the question of what it means that this happened thirty years before Haiti and twelve years before the American Revolution. Today that territory is Guyana — home to one of the world's largest new oil discoveries. Cuffy is on the currency. The republic he never got to build chose him as its national hero. History of the Caribbean — stories the textbooks left out. New episodes every week.

Easter Sunday, 1816. Barbados. Thousands of enslaved people rose up and burned the cane fields — and the woman who told them why they had to do it has been erased from the story for 210 years. Nanny Grigg was enslaved at Simmons Plantation in Saint Philip. She could read. She followed the British Parliamentary debates about the Registry Bill. She gathered people and explained what the newspapers said — that freedom had been granted in England and the planters were hiding it. Her words, preserved in the colonial trial records that followed the rebellion, show she built the political consciousness that made Bussa's military operation possible. This episode reads those records against the archive that created them, and asks why Caribbean history has kept her in the footnotes for two centuries. The History of the Caribbean | New episodes weekly on all major platforms.

The definitive story of Frederick Nathaniel Hibbert — the man who named reggae, sang like Otis Redding, and spent 50 years in the shadow of an icon he helped create.

In October 1878, three women known as the Fire Queens led 300 workers in burning 53 sugar estates across St. Croix in the Danish West Indies. The uprising — called the Fireburn — was the most dramatic labor rebellion in Caribbean history. Queen Mary Thomas, Axelina Salomon, and Mathilda Salomon were convicted and imprisoned in Denmark for life. Mary Thomas died in a Danish cell in 1895. She never returned home. But here's what the colonial court record doesn't show you: before the fires, Mary Thomas wrote a letter to the Danish Governor General. A letter demanding renegotiated labor contracts and a fair hearing. That letter is referenced in her trial documents — but has never been found in any archive. This episode explores the Fireburn, the Labour Act that re-enslaved emancipated workers, the missing letter, and what Denmark's formal acknowledgment in 2018 did — and did not — mean. History of the Caribbean — New episodes every week.

He wasn't a gunman. He was an architect. In 1973, seventeen-year-old Vivian Blake boarded a plane to New York as part of a Jamaican cricket team tour — and never came back. What he built instead was the most sophisticated Caribbean drug distribution network in American history: a cellular cocaine operation spanning 20+ US cities, reaching as far as Alaska, responsible for an alleged 1,400 drug-related killings across the United States. This is the untold story of how the Shower Posse became the blueprint for the modern international drug cartel — and how, when the FBI finally closed the net in 1988, Vivian Blake walked calmly onto a cruise ship and sailed home while his entire American operation collapsed behind him. We go deep on the cricket team infiltration, the crack cocaine industrialization model that confused federal law enforcement for years, the cruise ship escape, the four-year extradition battle, and the one question nobody ever answered: was there a ledger? And if there was — where did it go?

He built the most important recording studio in Jamaican music history. He recorded The Wailers, The Skatalites, Burning Spear, Dennis Brown, and hundreds of others at 13 Brentford Road — and he owned everything they made. Clement "Coxsone" Dodd is the single most influential figure in the architecture of ska, rocksteady, and roots reggae, and the most controversial. Artists who passed through Studio One received almost no royalties for music that sold internationally for decades. This episode covers the full story: the sound system wars of 1950s Kingston, the founding of Studio One, the Skatalites house band, the Wailers' arrival and departure, Lee Perry's bitter exit, and the catalog that still circulates today. History of the Caribbean — available on all podcast platforms.

In September 1998, the streets of downtown Kingston were on fire. Tires burned. Guns fired into the air. Four people died. And the entire Jamaican security apparatus — police, politicians, military brass — could not stop it.

One man could.

Donald "Zeeks" Phipps walked to the balcony of the Kingston Central Police Station, raised his hand, and the riot stopped.

This is the story of how a man from Matthews Lane — one of Kingston's most politically weaponized garrison communities — built absolute authority over downtown Jamaica for nearly two decades. How he inherited an empire from his brother, Early Bird Phipps, after a killing that transferred the Spanglers Posse's power overnight. How the political machinery of the PNP depended on his territory to deliver votes, and how the line between elected government and garrison don was always thinner than anyone admitted publicly.

It is also the story of how that power fractured from the inside — when his most trusted lieutenant defected to Tivoli Gardens, when two bodies were found burned in a lot near Matthews Lane, and when Operation Kingfish finally put him in a courtroom that no riot could unlock.

Zeeks fought his conviction all the way to the UK Privy Council. He lost every appeal.

But the real cost of the Zeeks story is not the thirty-year sentence. It is the Matthews Lane he left behind — a community so completely organized around one man's authority that when he was removed, it had never learned to exist without him.

This is JAMAICAN GANGSTER. No mythology. No glamor. Just the full, verified, uncut story of the men who ruled Jamaica's underworld — and the systems that built them.

Duke Reid — The Trojan — walked into every recording session at Treasure Isle with two pistols on his hips and a shotgun across his back. The session musicians showed up on time. They played correctly. And they made some of the most important Jamaican music ever recorded. This is the full story of the man who built Treasure Isle Records and defined the rocksteady era — before Bob Marley, before Lee Perry, before the world knew Jamaica had a music industry worth knowing about. New episode on History of the Caribbean: The Gunman Who Ruled Jamaica. What do you know about Duke Reid? Drop it below #DukeReid #TreasureIsle #Rocksteady #JamaicanMusic #HistoryOfTheCaribbean