As a British-Jamaican woman, I’m disappointed by the trailer for the new film Jafaican. It perpetuates some of the worst stereotypes about my people and reduces our identities to punchlines. It isn’t just unfunny – it’s harmful. And it serves as a reminder of how often our culture is performed by others, while real Jamaican voices are sidelined. A group of Caribbean creatives penned an open letter calling it a ‘modern minstrel show’.
The trailer features singer/TV personality Peter Andre – a white man – donning an Afro-textured, dreadlocked wig, along with a ‘fake’ Jamaican accent dubbed by a West African person. Andre plays Gazza, a ‘small-time crook’ who must ‘master Jamaican culture’ in 21 days and steal £3m from a Jamaican gangster. Equating Jamaicanness with criminality? Groundbreaking.
Jafaican’s trailer and premise play up caricatures of what it means to be Jamaican, feeding into a rank trend that’s festered within the West’s underbelly for centuries. So yes, I kissed my teeth and rolled my eyes while watching it.
Jamaican people are often reduced to criminal, violent or hypersexualised tropes in British media, film and popular culture. These caricatures are reinforced in the media with UK tabloids, for example, screaming headlines like ‘Yardie terror’ and decrying the presence of ‘Jamaican gangsters’ on British soil.
Time and again, we’ve seen Jamaican culture appropriated through UK slang, fashion or accents without genuine understanding of, or respect for, Jamaicans. These caricatures are used to commodify Jamaican culture while actual Jamaican people do not reap the benefits. This is why Jafaican raises alarms – it seems to perpetuate the erasure of authentic Jamaican voices and experiences in favour of ‘palatable’ proxies.
Jamaican culture is appropriated without genuine respect for Jamaicans
The voiceover artist in Jafaican isn’t Jamaican, yet is praised for mimicking patois in keeping with the storyline, while Jamaican patois accents are stigmatised in the UK in certain spaces when spoken by native speakers. Meanwhile peers mimic the same for ‘cool points’.
We exist in a society where even popular influencers, who aren’t of Jamaican heritage, lampoon our culture, cosplaying as boisterous Jamaicans, uttering expletives in our vernacular – ‘claat’ this, ‘pum pum’ that – fuelling a narrative that positions Jamaicans as one-dimensional and feral beings with no ‘broughtupsy’ (a patois term meaning ‘not raised properly’).
This mockery is often packaged as ‘harmless comedy’. But comedy is rarely just laughter for the sake of it. It reflects society, current affairs and political climates, reinforcing beliefs whether right or wrong.
In 2020, BBC Three’s Famalam sparked outrage for stereotypical and hypersexual portrayals by a non-Jamaican team, just like Jafaican.
Jafaican is written and directed by Fredi Nwaka, a British-Nigerian man from Brixton who is an experienced filmmaker. I can confirm, he is well-regarded in the ends and he’s done a lot of important work. During an interview on BBC 1Xtra, Nwaka defended the film by sharing that his son is half-Jamaican and he often visits Jamaica, before reminding listeners that the country’s motto is ‘out of many, one people’.
Though the motto purports to be a proud declaration of multiculturalism, it is widely understood as a colonial philosophy, implemented in 1962 so that the Black-majority citizens in newly independent Jamaica wouldn’t question why white people retained power and resist the Eurocentric status quo.
It’s out of order for a non-Jamaican to invoke that motto to defend a mockery of our culture, especially when they lack the cultural capital and lived experience to do so responsibly.
When I approached Nwaka and his team, they described the film as a ‘celebration of Jamaican culture’, adding that they are ‘grateful for the attention and passion it's received’.
‘At its heart, Jafaican is a feel-good comedy, created by Fredi Nwaka, that explores culture, identity and family through a playful and heartfelt lens,’ a statement read. The statement also mentions co-stars actor Wil Johnson, comedy legend Oliver Samuels and reggae artist Sizzla – beloved creatives of Jamaican heritage – in what, to me, is a fruitless attempt at rehabilitation.
A few days ago, in response to complaints, the Gold Coast Film Festival (GCFF), where the film will premiere on 9 May, defended the film citing Andre’s 1995 hit Mysterious Girl ft Bubbler Ranx as having ‘strong reggae influences’, referencing Nwaka and Andre’s experience of living in a diverse society. The GCFF also says the film was ‘executed by a predominantly Jamaican creative team’ and ‘shot predominantly in Jamaica’.
While the production team and their supporters continue to dismiss or ignore criticism, it’s telling that Andre himself deleted an initial tweet sharing the trailer. His silence says more than any press release could.
Brand Jamaica doesn't need more bad PR. Despite Jamaica’s immense contribution to British life over centuries, Jamaica and her descendants have grappled with uniquely pervasive discrimination in Britain. There’s the Windrush scandal and Home Office failings, where predominantly Black-British Caribbean citizens, mostly Jamaicans, were wrongly detained, denied healthcare or deported.
There are systemic disparities in education, where Black-Caribbean children are disproportionately labelled ‘disruptive’ and kicked out of school. Decades ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, many of their patois-speaking grandparents were labelled ‘educationally subnorma’” by the British state and wrongly funnelled into schools for disabled children.
Jamaican people are also disproportionately criminalised, especially boys and men, regularly profiled in gang narratives, and associated with violence in the media, fuelling wider criminal justice disparities. The false narrative about Jamaicans’ supposed propensity for lawlessness is why Britain imposes sanctions on Jamaican citizens, forcing visitors to jump through hoops to apply for UK visas with applications often denied, disrupting families.
The portrayal of Jamaica through a gangster narrative feels especially loaded, given the intergenerational trauma and displacement that Caribbean communities have uniquely experienced. Ours is a history of many things including colonial migration, trafficking, policing and estrangement that even our beautiful cousins from the African Continent cannot relate to in the same way.
The long shadow of colonialism, compounded by systemic inequalities has left many in our communities grappling with cycles of marginalisation. To see those lived realities reduced to the backdrop of a ‘comedy’ heist, complete with all the familiar implications, is careless at best.
Jamaican people in the UK face a double burden: our culture is celebrated and poached while we are persecuted, excluded from authorship and underrepresented in key industries such as creative spaces. It’s time the UK stopped celebrating the rhythm of Jamaican culture while silencing the people who create it. We deserve better.
I say this not just as a journalist and commentator, but as a filmmaker myself. My award-winning documentary, Barrel Children: The Families Windrush Left Behind, explores the real-life impact of Caribbean migration and identities. It’s a very different kind of story that's rooted in lived experience and history.
Like many culturally specific projects offering nuanced narratives from within Caribbean communities, it has quietly faced challenges around visibility and institutional backing. It underscores the barriers that often exist for authentic Caribbean storytelling, even when the subject matter is critical and timely.
If you think Jafaican is just ‘comedy’: ask yourself who’s laughing and at whose expense?