Next to the airport, looming along the borders of our village, were hotels with high walls made of pink marble and coral stone, flanked on top by broke-glass bottles, their sharp edges catching the light in cruel warning: To live in paradise is to be reminded how little you can afford it.

Babylon was the government that had outlawed them, the police that had pummelled and killed them. Babylon was the church that had damned them to hellfire. It was the state’s boot at the throat, the politician’s pistol in the gut. The Crown’s whip at the back. Babylon was the sinister and violent forces born of western ideology, colonialism, and

From those psalms of Jewish exile came the Rastafari’s name for the systemically racist state and imperial forces that had hounded, hunted, and downpressed them: Babylon.