Kingston, 7 March 2025 – “I am filled with pride as someone of African ancestry,” said the Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, the Honourable Olivia Grange, as she presented the UNESCO certificate to Revivalist leaders attesting to Jamaica’s latest inscription to the global List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

UNESCO inscribed the Revival ‘Pilgrimage To Watt Town’ to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list in December during the meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The 'Pilgrimage to Watt Town’ is an annual spiritual commemoration and celebration by Jamaican Revivalists which started just before the Great Revival of 1860.

The Minister presented the certificate of inscription following this year’s pilgrimage on Thursday in Watt Town, St Ann.

“UNESCO does not inscribe religion but [it] will inscribe elements that celebrate aspects of the religion; and we thought it was important [to nominate Pilgrimage to Watt Town] because this is a practice that started with our ancestors and it has continued,” said Minister Grange.

The African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica/Jamaica Memory Bank says Revivalism is a folk religion that emerged in Jamaica in the early 1860s in response to British colonialism and religious oppression. It says, Revivalism in Jamaica features the “blatant retention of African spirituality conflated with Christianity and other forms of Chinese and East Indian spiritual traditions.”

Minister Grange said the UNESCO inscription was an important recognition of the importance of Revivalism in Jamaican culture.

“More than anything else, [the inscription] has made persons who practise Revivalism… very proud because they feel that they have been recognised,” said Minister Grange who led the nomination process to UNESCO.

The Minister added: “I’m very proud that I have been able to inspire, by our action, a community that over the years was stigmatised and now they can hold their heads high because they’re now recognised by the world.”

Commenting on the importance of the inscription, Bishop Donovan Morgan, the General Overseer for the Revival Mission Church said: “It lets me feel like I’m going somewhere. The Revival Church is being lifted up and we are grateful to God and the Minister Olivia Babsy Grange who worked alongside this organisation; and we are rejoicing because today we can say that we are recognised.”

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