Led by Iya Akilah and Kemba Jaramogi, the women of Fondes Amandes blend tradition and science to restore forests, fight fires, and revive communal practices – challenging climate colonialism with grassroots power.
"I give thanks for this moment.
I give thanks to the Egun – that would be the ancestors.
I give thanks to all those who contributed in different ways for the transformation of the space.
I give thanks to Mother Earth, Mama Onile.
I give thanks to all the deities who dwell within the forest.
I give thanks to Tacuma Jaramogi, the late founder of this project, and all those who toiled, and who had faith in seeing a barren hillside convert from the barrenness to what it is today.
I start by giving thanks to those known and unknown, seen and unseen forces that continue to govern me, and guide me to do this work.
Ase, Ase, Ase."
This is how Iya Akilah Jaramogi begins our interview. Her Orisha heritage looms large in how she approaches her work as the matriarch of the Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project (FACRP), fighting fires and rehabilitating forests in the northern hills of Trinidad. Jaramogi hails from the south of the island, descended from the Merikin community – a group of around 700 African American soldiers who settled in the forests of South Trinidad in the early 1800s, bringing with them a rich culture that has helped inform how Jaramogi approaches the agro-forestry movement she has nurtured at Fondes Amandes. I spoke to her, her daughter Kemba Jaramogi, and plant physiologist Dr. Aiden Farrell about the work being done within that community and how it has changed the face of the hillside.
“The project started way back in 1982, when I met Tacuma,” said Jaramogi. The two bonded over their relationship to the land, the forest, the river. Although they were from different parts of the island, this love for the natural world around them forged a deep connection. “So, Tacuma and I started a life in the forest”. But in the 1980s, the hills of St. Ann’s were not the lush, green landscapes they are today. “It was not easy,” said Jaramogi. From their home on the other side of the hill, they would come across to Fondes Amandes, plant trees in the rainy season, and stay away in the dry season, when the fires would come through. “It was the norm... seeing the hillsides burn.”
Maintaining a full native forest, or restoring it, that's the important thing.
I spoke to Dr. Aiden Farrell, senior lecturer in Plant Physiology at the University of the West Indies, about what made that hillside so susceptible to wildfire. “The reason Fondes Amandes and the areas around St. Ann’s and beyond have the trouble with forest fires is [that] the forest of the area is not an intact forest,” said Farrell. “That's what they're trying to bring back.” Without the protection of a variety of native plant life trapping moisture and insulating the ground from heat and light, the landscape can be eaten up by hungry fires in minutes. “Maintaining a full native forest, or restoring it, that's the important thing.” In a seasonally dry climate like the Caribbean's, a bare hillside has no natural defences against a spreading wildfire.
Dismantling A Legacy of Climate Colonialism
In other parts of the Northern range, more well-established forest has been a major protection against the spread of fire. But in the bustling north-western end of the island, greenery has, in many places, given way to dry scrubland on the outskirts of the concrete jungle of the capital city. It is the legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean, where long-tended green spaces were razed to create the towns and plantations that would feed the resource extraction to the metropole. Recently, I was reading Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe's “Dark Laboratory”, where she discusses the colonial origins of the climate crisis, writing: “The European quest for Eden has pushed the planet to environmental ruin.” She argued that conservationist debates often ignore the relationship between climate change and the contributing factors of race, labor, and colonialism. She looked to non-Western knowledge systems for an alternative for how we must begin to reimagine our relationship to the planet. In Jaramogi's traditions – Merikin, Orisha, Rastafari, Indigenous – I see the embodiment of this practice.
The framework of their practice is a co-mingling of these traditional methods alongside modern techniques and technologies. Akilah Jaramogi's husband, Tacuma, worked at Trinidad and Tobago's Forestry Division, where he learned techniques like cutting fire breaks to prevent the spread of blazes. He would then bring that information back to the community to be shared. But after his death in 1994, everything changed. With five young children, a forest, and a community looking to her for leadership, Akilah Jaramogi knew she had to do something. This was the first gayap, in March 1995.
From Traditional Techniques to a Formalized Approach
“We wanted to celebrate Tacuma, to pay homage,” she said. In her home in the south, gayap was a part of everyday life. The word comes from the Indigenous Karinya word “kayapa”, referring to an activity where members of a community come together to complete a project. I spoke to Jaramogi's daughter Kemba, who is now a central part of FACRP's functioning, and has taken the concept of gayap to a new level. At the start, it was a yearly ritual of remembrance, where members of the community would help support the work of reforesting the area and protecting from fires.
Gayap refers to an activity where members of a community come together to complete a project.
“The gayap is not just for bush and forest fires,” said Kemba. “The gayap can be used for anything, and is keeping those traditions alive that helped our foreparents survive. Back in the day, people had a gayap to build a house – now you must have a lot of money and contractors to do so. People in a hillside community might have a gayap day to tote materials up the hill for building. If a road caved in you might have a gayap to put the road back together. So, there are so many different ways that you can use a gayap, because gayap is all about bringing people together to work for a positive cause.”
In 2019, the younger Jaramogi began working alongside the University of the West Indies' Institute for Gender and Development Studies to put together the “Gayap Toolkit”. This formalized approach took the traditional techniques, passed down from her mother for community work, and made it accessible for other groups looking to put together similar projects. “This is one of our key, essential models that we use every year to help us prepare for our upcoming fire season,” says Kemba. But although it has been in use by FACRP since the 1980s, this is the first time their system has been documented.
The Future of Fondes Amandes' Forests
The Fondes Amandes that Kemba has grown up in looks very different now to when her family first started trying to rehabilitate the landscape. Species who had long disappeared are now returning to the forest. The entire community's relationship to the land has changed. But for the mother and daughter pair, it has been an uphill battle to ensure that their work gained the respect it deserved. For years, letters to the organization would always be addressed to “Mr. Jaramogi”, Kemba remembers. “You walk into a space and you have to do a lot to convince people about what you're talking about,” she said. “Typically, it's a male-dominated space... You have to work twice as hard to prove you know what you're talking about.”
Having women in a position of leadership has shaped the nature of the organization and its values.
But having women in a position of leadership is not simply a circumstantial element of FACRP's success. It has shaped the nature of the organization and its values. Rachel Mulroy, in her 2021 article “From Glass Ceiling to Green Canopy: An Intersectional Model of Feminist Sustainability in Fondes Amandes, Trinidad”, described it as “a feminist model of agro-forestry.” She discussed how their mission was not only focused on reforestation from a climate change perspective, but also the role of preserving traditionally gendered knowledge on “the usefulness of cooking herbs and medicinal plants” as well. In her discussions with Kemba, she asked her to list, off the top of her head, some of FACRP's goals. “Good health and wellbeing, we're growing organic hardwoods, fruits and herbs... education, gender equality as well, because we focus on capability to do the work over gender.”
As their work continues, the Jaramogis and the team at FACRP still have their yearly gayap, and are still working to protect and replenish the forests of St. Ann’s. They are in the field, cutting fire breaks, trekking through the hills and forests, and facing the blazes that still emerge from time to time. But from the start, part of their mission has been to share this knowledge and empower others, sharing the traditional techniques, learning new ones, and giving communities a wealth of resources to make changes in their own spaces.
