Very early in the morning African-born Nanny, leader of the Jamaican Maroons, prepared to escape. With her brothers, Cudjoe, Accompong, Johnny, Cuffy and Quao she set out to fight a guerrilla war and establish rebel strongholds in the mountains. This desperate and defiant act wrest the Maroons independence from 18th century British colonial rule and plantation slavery, and made Nanny a national heroine of Jamaica.
Rebellion in the British Caribbean has its roots in the annals of the slave trade. The intrepid Nanny was one of millions of Africans shipped across the Atlantic Ocean between 1662 and 1807. Landed in the British-owned colonies, they were sold as slaves to work the plantations. This brought huge financial gain to slave owners – and misery to their captives. Little wonder, that captive Africans constantly rebelled against the inhumanity of slavery from the day they landed. And this continued right up to Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the declaration of emancipation in 1834 after more than 300 years of slavery.
Slave rebels
Nanny of the Maroons was one of many heroes of the Age of Black Revolution in the British West Indies. Tacky's rebellion, for example, was a clarion call for freedom sounded on Easter Sunday 1760. Tacky, a Coromantee chief was from Guinea on the West Coast of Africa, was sold to work plantations in St. Mary's Parish, Jamaica. In a well-planned assault Tacky and his followers killed their masters, seized firearms and marched on to overrun adjacent plantations and free the slaves.
Following a fateful decision to fight on, Tacky and his followers were killed, burned, hung or starved to death. But their spirited acts lived on; rebellions broke out all over Jamaica and Tacky's monument stands proud in Claude Stuart Park in Port Maria.
Julien Fédon was another firebrand rebel of the British Caribbean colonies. He almost succeeded in overthrowing chattel slavery and British rule in Grenada. For 16 months the colony was literally under his control. In the end it took 10,000 British-led troops and German mercenaries to defeat Fédon and restore slavery and British rule in 1795-96. Legend has it that Fédon was never captured. His final whereabouts and fate remain a mystery to this day. But his rebellious actions made him a folk hero and his name is honoured at Morne Fédon mountain.
Bussa, an African enslaved at Bayleys plantation, led the most famous revolt in Barbados. From 16 April 1816, Bussa and his band of 400 insurgents defied the slave owners and took on the might of Britain's First West India Regiment. He died in battle, yet his followers continued the fight with the cry of "Bussa and freedom" echoing in their ranks until defeated. They are remembered as heroes of Bussa's Rebellion with an Emancipation Statue.
Sam Sharpe, a pacifist Baptist preacher, led a protest against oppressive working conditions that escalated into a full scale rebellion at Christmas 1831. In its wake, the rebels destroyed the symbols and products of their enslavement: they killed the whites, burned the cane fields and demolished the master's Great House. The revolt's end came when 500 rebels were executed and Sharpe was hung. Today, the Christmas Rebellion is celebrated as a key event in the fight for the abolition of slavery and its leader is remembered in the name Sam Sharpe Square in Montego Bay.
Impact and significance
Thousands of miles away the brutal shape and exploitative focus of slavery and the slave trade were captured in the slave narratives of Blacks in Britain. Prominent personalities or Black Abolitionists highlighted the ship board terrors and the cruelty meted out on the plantations. Their slave narratives struck horror in the British public. They told of "chains, chains, chains, chains! Two by two, people like them shackled and tied, shackled and tied with little water, food or sanitation. And, white faced people guarding their black captives".
The "loathsomeness of the stench" and "brutal cruelty" appalled the 11-year-old Olaudah Equiano 1745-1797, an Igbo of Nigeria captured by the British and transported to Barbados. Later, the writer and activist described the plight of kidnapped Africans in his best-selling book of late 18th century Britain, The Life of Gustavus Vassa.
Ignatius Sancho 1729-1780 struck another chord with the British public. Sancho was born on a slave ship and brought to England as a child slave and domestic servant. His campaign for abolition, stoutly argued in his Letters of Ignatius Sancho, played a crucial part in bringing the evils of slavery to a wider audience.
It was Ottobah Cuguano, however, who wrote the grand expose of slavery and the slave trade, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species published 1787. Cuguano was born in the 1750s in what is now Ghana, in West Africa. Captured in his teens and sold into slavery, Cuguano was transported across the Atlantic Ocean and sold first to a plantation-owner in Grenada and then passed on to an Englishman in London as a personal servant.
Cuguano's narrative paints a graphic scene of rape and cruelty on board the slave ships: "It was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies; but the men were chained and pent up in holes." He concludes with a lament: "From the time that I was kidnapped and conducted to a factory, and from thence in the brutish, base, but fashionable way of traffic, consigned to Grenada, the grievous thoughts which I then felt, still pant in my heart".
By these narratives the Black Abolitionists shone a light on the appalling connection between colonial slavery and contemporary British society. Over more than 300 years, the benefits of the slave trade were entrenched in every class of British society. The Anglican Church with its plantations in Barbados benefited. Companies that insured the ships, cargo and slave auctions gained as well. Benefits flowed to the top levels of the Bank of England and the 40 or more slave owners in parliament and their descendants and down to the corner shopkeeper selling sugar, cotton and tobacco. Historians tell us that Black slave labour financed Britain's Industrial Revolution.
Nevertheless, the combined assaults of rebel Blacks like Nanny of the Maroons were so powerful they would change the course of history. Others came to their aid and the agro-industrial slave economies soon took a turn for the worse, we know. But when African plantation workers downed their tools, went on strike and turned their crude machetes against their oppressors and British troops they threatened to topple the plantation system. Heroically, they launched the earliest campaigns of workers against capitalist exploitation, as the scholar Eric Williams suggests in his book Capitalism and Slavery (Deutsch 1944).
Caribbean historians now recognise that the rebels and Black Abolitionists were harbingers of a new consciousness of the worth of human dignity. Moreover, the freedom quest deserves wider acceptance, says Gelien Matthews in Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Louisiana State University Press 2006). Hence, the book "fills a gap left in mainstream narratives on the history of anti-slavery in Britain by demonstrating that slaves in rebellion commandeered humanitarian attention". This, says Matthews, was never acknowledged by William Wilberforce and his fellow evangelical Christians. Furthermore, until recently few Britons have wanted to recognise the crucial self-liberating role of the Caribbean rebels and Black Abolitionists who forced the pace of change from slavery to freedom.
Of course, legal freedom finally came from above, from metropolitan governments, the repentant Anglican Church, financiers, agro-industrialists and reluctant colonial elites. But at a point when we are trying to reckon with British colonial history we must admit one essential truth. The end of the slave trade and of slavery itself was a response to the whirlwind of change that travelled with the currents of the Atlantic to the hallowed halls of Westminster.
Nanny and her fellow rebel leaders must be celebrated as 18th century guerrilla fighters against corporate international powers. They fought for land and freedom. When their rough-hewn tactics failed they died or sued for peace and reconciliation. It is in this enhanced context that we can see how the rebel uprisings energised and shaped history. Political defeat did not stifle a victory of spirit. Moreover, the rebellions of African workers in the British colonies were a part of a transCaribbean and transoceanic revolutionary process – in Haiti as well as Brazil and the southern American states – that characterises the emancipation struggles of Black people in all plantation societies and regimes built on slavery.
Send us your opinions about Rebel Issues. Better still, tell us what you can do to celebrate the Age of Black Revolution as part of the2007 bicentenary celebrations. Email the editor at tb@thechronicle.demon.co.uk
Appendix: A New World Calendar of Slave Revolts
Sourced from Russell L. Adams, Professor and Chair of Howard University's Department of Afro- American Studies, USA
1519 Africans revolt in Spanish Hispaniola
1522 Revolt in Puerto Rico
1530 Revolt in Mexico
1550 Revolt in Panama and Peru
1630-1697 Thousands of enslaved Africans establish Palmares, Brazil
1639 First British West Indies African revolt (Providence Island)
1655 Revolt of 1,500 Africans in Jamaica
1663-1739 Nearly 76 years of insurrections by enslaved Jamaicans
1674 Revolt in Barbados
1687 Revolt in Antigua
1691 First revolt in Haiti
1712 New York City's Africans accused of "freedom fires"
1715-1763 Enslaved Africans revolt in Surinam
1739 Stono, South Carolina enslaved Africans revolt
1741 Suspected city-wide arson plan by New York City's enslaved Africans
1760 Major revolt in Jamaica led by "Tackey"
1763 Major revolt of enslaved Africans in Dutch Surinam
1765 Revolt by enslaved Africans in Honduras
1768 Discovery of revolt plot on St. Kitts
1773 Enslaved Jamaicans in major revolt
1791-1803 Some 500,000 enslaved Africans successfully revolt in Haiti
1796 Enslaved Africans revolt in St. Lucia
1800 Gabriel Prosser and 1,000 fellow Africans plot Virginia revolt
1801 Revolt of enslaved Africans in Guadeloupe
1811 Revolt of enslaved Africans in St. John's Parish, Louisiana
1816 Attempted revolt in Fredericksburg, Virginia
1819 Attempted revolt in Augusta, Georgia
1822 Revolt plot in South Carolina by Denmark Vesey and 5,000 enslaved Africans
1823 Major slave revolt in Guyana
1828-1837 Revolt of enslaved Africans in Brazil
1831 Revolt of enslaved Africans in Antigua, in Jamaica led by Samuel Sharpe,
Major U.S. enslaved Africans revolt under Nat Turner in Virginia
1844 Revolt of enslaved Africans in Cuba
1848 Revolt of enslaved Africans in the Virgin Islands
