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Jamaica’s sacred heartbeat

Jamaica’s revivalists keep their ancient living faith alive – blending healing, ancestry, and spirit in a tradition that is now gaining long-awaited recognition.

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, Heart and Soul 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.
Set against the rhythms of worship at Watt Town, the programme asks what it means to inherit a faith, to preserve a tradition, and to find identity in practices once dismissed as superstition. It is a story of survival and recognition, where the journey to UNESCO status becomes part of the wider conversation about Jamaica’s African heritage, spiritual sovereignty, and the enduring power of community.

Presenter: Nick Dawe
Producer: Matt O'Donoghue
Series Producer: Rajeev Gupta
Editor: Chloe Walker
Production Coordinator: Mica Nepomuceno

Release date:

27 minutes

On radio

Fri 29 May 2026 03:32GMT

Broadcasts

  • Fri 29 May 2026 03:32GMT
  • Fri 29 May 2026 12:32GMT
  • Fri 29 May 2026 17:32GMT
  • Fri 29 May 2026 21:32GMT
  • Fri 29 May 2026 22:32GMT
  • Sun 31 May 2026 15:32GMT
  • Sun 31 May 2026 18:32GMT

Podcast