___________ is the country's capital and largest city.

Christopher Columbus first arrived in Jamaica in May of 1494. He later brought other Spanish settlers who colonized the land and forced the __________, American-Indian people who had already occupied the land, into unpaid and forced labor.

The Spanish were the first to bring sugarcane and slavery to the island. They ruled the land for a century and a half until they were defeated by the English in __________. Slavery and sugar cultivation became Jamaica’s main trade, making the English planters incredibly wealthy.

When the English arrived, the Spaniards fled to the neighboring islands. Their enslaved people escaped into the mountains and formed their own independent groups, called ___________. The _________ were in time joined by other enslaved people who escaped from the English. For a long time, they fought against the English who sought to re-enslave them. So successful were the ________, fighting from their fortresses, that the English were forced to sign peace treaties granting them self-government and ceding to them the mountain lands that they inhabited.

Slavery in Jamaica was abolished in _________.

Beginning in the 1840s, the British began using Chinese and Indian indentured labour to work on plantations. The island achieved independence from the United Kingdom on 6 August _________.

The Jamaican Patois is also referred to as Jamaican Creole or Patwa. Although English is the official language of the country, Jamaican Patois is the most widely spoken. Jamaican Patois is a form of English Creole developed on the island during the slave trade.

In the 1960s, around the time Jamaicans were negotiating their independence from England, the local language was _____________ by the upper classes as the language of the poor and uneducated folk. On the other end of the spectrum, reggae musicians used the language to express their identity, and songs filled with descriptions of poverty and political strife were mainstream at the time. Poets and theater performers also embraced patois as their primary mode of communication.

Translate the following sentence from Jamaican Patois to English: Fram yestideh mi a wuk, mi tiad enuh

What does “Mi a go a ‘bashment’” mean?

What does “a wah dat?” mean?