Flag of Jamaica

How to read it

Jamaica’s flag was designed in early 1962 by a bipartisan committee of the House of Representatives, after a design competition in 1961 failed to produce a winner, and first raised at midnight on 5 August 1962 as the British flag came down, according to the Jamaica Information Service (JIS). The JIS describes a diagonal cross, or saltire, in gold, each of its arms as wide as one sixth of the flag’s length, with green triangles at the top and bottom and black triangles at the hoist and fly; the flag is twice as long as it is high. The National Library of Jamaica gives the green as Emerald T8 17 of the British Admiralty bunting pattern. The JIS also publishes a code for the flag’s use: it is not to touch the ground or floor, no other flag goes above it or to its right except at foreign embassies and consulates, and at half-mast it flies about one flag’s height below the top of the pole, not halfway down.

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Black, from hardships to strength

The meaning of the black changed in 1996. The government’s Ministry Paper No. 28 of 22 May 1962, the Gleaner wrote in 2025, read the flag as “hardship there are, but the land is green and the sun shineth”, the black standing for hardships overcome and to be faced. The National Library of Jamaica says a committee on the national symbols and observances, chaired by Professor Rex Nettleford, dropped that reading in February 1996, because many Jamaicans link themselves with the colour black and were affronted by its association with hardship.

Not every account agrees on the details. The columnist Michael Burke, who had campaigned for the change, wrote in the Jamaica Observer in 2012 that Prime Minister P. J. Patterson announced it late in 1996 and that the committee was headed by Sir Philip Sherlock, and that in 2003 the JIS was still putting out the old meaning. The old reading lasts: in 2021 a Gleaner reader wrote to correct Google, whose Independence Day doodle said the black stood for the people’s strength in the face of hardship.

The first design was too close to Tanganyika’s

The joint committee of Parliament first agreed on horizontal stripes, the Daily Gleaner reported on 7 June 1962: a black band in the centre, gold stripes above and below it and green at the top and bottom. The committee had rejected separate colours for racial origins as divisive. The National Library says the design was then found too close to the flag of Tanganyika, now part of Tanzania; Store norske leksikon describes Tanganyika’s flag of 1961 to 1964 as green, black and green stripes of equal width, separated by narrow yellow stripes. The colours were kept and the design changed to the cross, which the House of Representatives approved on 20 June 1962.

A flag with no red, white or blue

The National Library wrote in 2017 that Jamaica’s was one of only two national flags without blue, white or red, the other being Mauritania’s. Mauritania added two red stripes to its flag that August, Burkina24 reported.

Telling it from Burundi’s flag

Burundi’s flag is also divided by a diagonal cross, but its cross is white, its top and bottom triangles are red and its side triangles green, with a white disc holding three red stars in the centre, as Burundi’s presidency describes it. Jamaica’s cross is gold, with green at the top and bottom and black at the sides, and nothing in the centre.