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The Documentary Podcast

Jamaica’s sacred heartbeat

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.32.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2026

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

At a hillside gathering in Watt Town, Jamaica, drums, prayer, and song converge in a living tradition that reaches beyond the island and across the generations to Africa. Kirt Henry is part of the community of revivalists who worked to secure Unesco recognition for a practice long misunderstood and marginalised. In this intimate journey into Jamaican spiritualism, scholar and practitioner, Kirt, reflects on faith shaped by memory, resilience, and ancestral connection. Through stories of healing, trance, ritual clothing and the sacred language of the body, Kirt explores a spiritual world where the boundaries between the earthly and the unseen are fluid. Revivalism emerges, not as a relic of the past, but as a way of life, one that carries the weight of colonial trauma while offering belonging, continuity and hope. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from Heart and Soul, exploring personal approaches to spirituality from around the world.

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

0:07.2

Things just swirling around my head.

0:09.6

Am I really the product of this?

0:12.1

Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.

0:17.0

Little did I know what more was to come.

0:19.5

I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift,

0:23.6

we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database.

0:28.8

They did know that I was different.

0:31.7

You had kids together.

0:33.0

Yeah.

0:33.5

Then you met.

0:34.3

Then we met.

0:35.2

The Gift.

0:36.1

Listen on BBC Sounds.

0:43.9

Jamaica has given the world a lot of cultural gifts, be it reggae music, be it Rastafari.

0:54.8

And I say with pride that revivalism is the only religion that came from the people of Jamaica.

1:04.2

And that is something to be proud of.

1:09.9

Jamaican revivalism is a glorious mashup,

1:12.8

a blend of rhythms and beliefs that's part Christianity,

1:16.9

part ancestral spirituality.

1:22.6

Our bodies are used as instruments.

1:28.0

You'll have the deep guttural sound,

...

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