It all depended on your point of view and upbringing. Mortimer Planner, for example, considered sufficiently elevated in the Rastafarian brethren to meet His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, had first moved to the area in 1939. A very simple reason, he said, had drawn him there - the energy emanating from this part of Kingston: "Trenchtown is a spiritual PowerPoint." .
Yet others in the area were not at all happy about the presence of these men with their curious belief that Haile Selassie was God. Why would a young woman called Rita Anderson, a worshipful member of the Church of God, go out of her way to avoid them? .
Her parents had told her the truth: that Rastafarians lived in the drainage gullies and carried parts of people they had murdered in their bags. No doubt it was such thinking that resulted in the sporadic round-ups of Rastas by the police, who would shove them into their trucks and cut off their locks. .
As yet, young Nesta Robert Marley knew almost nothing about the Rastas' religion. He was simply getting through his schooldays, perhaps in a more perfunctory manner than his mother realized. Later he would come to realize that his secondary education had been almost non-existent. With no permanent male role model to act as a guide, the transition from childhood to adolescence was even more awkward for Nesta than for most teenagers. .
New Optimism in the 1950s.
in the late 1950s there was a growing undercurrent of opportunism in Jamaica: people were redefining themselves, working out who they were with a new confidence. The guilty, repressive hold of the British colonialists was becoming increasingly uncertain; already there were whispers of independence being granted to the island. A new era was beginning. .
The cauldron of Trenchtown epitomized one of the great cultural truths about Jamaica - and other impoverished Third World countries: how those who have nothing, and therefore nothing to lose, are not afraid to express their talents.