The Story that still needs to be told

Although I have frequently touched on the role of the enslaved in their emancipation, I believe it is a story that needs to be repeated. For quite a long time the story that was told to us was provided by the Europeans who wanted to show our dependence on them.

After many years of slavery, they wanted to convey an image of themselves as the ones who had come to the rescue of our ancestors and emancipated them, even though they were the ones who set up the system in the first place. The colonies had been subjected to over 300 years of enslavement, where Africans were brought from the continent to be enslaved and work on plantations.

St Vincent was fortunate in that its period of enslavement was only about 72 years. Before the British established the sugar industry and created a slave society, there were a few blacks working as slaves under the French who were allowed to settle in the country. They were however small farmers, a far different situation from the British planters who went into the cultivation of sugar and created a far more brutal society than the one that existed then. The French were not in control. They remained in St Vincent, but the Kalinagos (Red Caribs) were the ones who owned the land, having started arriving since 1200 or thereabout.

The configuration of a slave society had already been formulated in other colonies of what we now call the Eastern Caribbean. The component elements were then transferred to St Vincent later. Despite a short period of slavery, it must be noted that slavery was slavery, and its brutalities were no different, although St Vincent underwent this stage at a time when persons were beginning to question slavery itself. The planters who dominated the Council and Assembly were totally in control. Slavery had become Chattel Slavery and the enslaved were considered their property. Our ancestors resisted slavery in a variety of ways from the time they were kidnapped in Africa and brought to our area through the Middle Passage where many died, some even committing suicide rather than go to a land about which they knew nothing.

They brought nothing that was physical apart from the clothes they wore; that is, apart from their culture, aspects of which which they attempted to recreate in their slave villages. On their arrival, they understood the realities of the environment and society that surrounded them. They were larger in numbers than those who enslaved them, but there was always a militia available on the ground to their oppressors and military help nearby ready to respond to their calls. They however found ways to resist and to strike at the economic foundations of the society. The Europeans pictured them as stupid and unable to understand instructions. This was one of the strategies involved. They were described as thieves and as habitual liars. They killed livestock, set fires to factories, damaged tools, and machinery; they often pretended to be sick, committed suicide and even infanticide, not wanting their children to experience the horrors they did. They lampooned their masters through songs, which the masters never understood. There were individual cases of insurrection, with women often being ring leaders. The case of Nelly Ibo of Mayreau stands out, where with the help of four other women she killed the owner of the plantation. She was suspected or identified as the chief culprit. She was executed in Mayreau and her assistants brought to Kingstown to suffer the same fate.

The Haitian Revolution of 1791 showed clearly that the overthrow of slave society was possible, something that was not lost on the enslaved and those who controlled slave society. The 1816 Bussa rebellion in Barbados created fears among the Vincentian plantocracy. Martial law was declared since the expectation was that the Vincentian enslaved would have followed suit. Then came the Demerara revolt of 1823, and the 1831 Jamaican revolt.

Emancipation was being discussed in parliament and around the country. News of disturbances on the ‘Carib’ country estates in St. Vincent in 1833 reached parliament during the debate. By this time several other factors had come into play, including Britain’s shifting from an agricultural to an industrial country. Adam Smith with his 1776 publication THE WEALTH OF NATIONS can be considered the ‘forefather’ of capitalist thinking. It was his view that free labour was more economical than slave labour. A new type of thinking was accompanying the economic changes. So, several things were happening. The activity of the enslaved in the colonies could not under the conditions be neglected.

For Eric Wiliams in his classic work Capitalism and Slavery – “In 1833, therefore, the alternatives were clear: emancipation from above or emancipation from below. But Emancipation.” The Slavery Abolition Act received Royal Assent on 28 August 1833. On 1 August 1834 slaves in the British colonies were supposed to be freed but then there was a period of Apprenticeship that lasted until 1838 when full freedom came. More research has continued on the role of the enslaved in the abolition of slavery. Jamaican Richard Hart’s SLAVES WHO ABOLISHED SLAVERY: BLACKS IN REBELLION is one product of this research.

• Dr Adrian Fraser is a social commentator and historian