Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and death.

Key to James’s novel is an understanding of the political dynamic that dominated Jamaica in the decades after it gained full independence from the United Kingdom in 1962.

The long-standing rivalry between Jamaica’s two main political parties began in the pre-independence era, when Jamaica was still part of the British Empire. In the mid to late 1930s, as civil disturbances broke out across the British West Indies to protest socioeconomic inequality between British colonists and Caribbean laborers, Jamaican trade unions developed into modern political parties. Key labor figure Norman Manley organized the People’s National Party (PNP) in 1938, while labor leader Alexander Bustamante formed the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) in 1943. The 1944 election ushered the JLP into power, with Bustamante as prime minister. Bustamante served his constituency to the disadvantage of the pro-PNP demographic. He also painted the left-leaning PNP as a communist organization, prompting attacks between sympathizers of each party.

During the 1960s, the political parties started employing organized crime groups to advance their agenda. In one incident, the reigning JLP endorsed the demolition of a Rastafarian slum called Back-O-Wall, replacing it with a garrison for the Phoenix Gang (later, more famously, the Shower Posse) which was sympathetic to the government. 

The violence escalated when the PNP took power in the 1972 election and declared support for Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro. In an effort to diminish the PNP’s influence on the country, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stepped in to supply weapons to JLP-aligned gangs. This brought about widespread public violence, which continued through the JLP’s return to power in the 1980s.

Attempts to quell the violence often leveraged culture as a common ground. In 1976 and in 1978, Jamaican reggae pioneer Bob Marley held two peace concerts intended to unite sympathizers of both parties. Behind the scenes, gang leaders joined forces to deescalate turf violence, working together to bring Marley back to Jamaica for the second concert. During that second concert, Marley personally brought political rivals Michael Manley of the PNP and Edward Seaga of the JLP onstage to join hands. 

James draws heavily from the history of the Shower Posse, as well as the wider context around their operation in the 1970s and 80s, to develop a fictionalized version of the organization in the novel. 

Prominent Shower Posse members included leader Claude Massop. Massop had violent clashes with a rival motorcycle gang, but he went down in history for organizing a peace treaty between gang leaders on both poles of the Jamaican political spectrum. Massop was killed during a police chase in which he was shot over 40 times. Massop’s successor, Lester Lloyd Coke, also known as Jim Brown, stretched the Shower Posse’s power to the United States, facilitating illegal drug trade between the two countries. Coke/Brown was arrested in 1990 and killed in 1992 when a fire mysteriously broke out in his cell. In the 2018 Netflix documentary ReMastered: Who Shot the Sherriff?, Coke and several JLP-aligned gunmen are identified as the hit squad that attempted to assassinate Bob Marley in 1976.

In James’ novel, the characters of Papa-Lo and Josey Wales are clear analogues for the real-life figures of Massop and Coke. Likewise, the political events that background the failed assassination of Bob Marley help to give context to the novel’s depiction of the Singer’s ambush.