Last time we saw how the Portuguese began the European raids on Africa and how the slave trade grew; how the British first through William John Hawkins and Queen Elizabeth I relished the trade in African slaves, each making fortunes. Yet we here not only named a street after Hawkins, we still persist with the British monarchy dyed deep in the blood of African slavery; we saw too, how the British became the biggest marauders in Africa and slave trading nation, and then on abolition paid reparations – to the slaveowners in the Caribbean.
For the record let me show that these reparations to the criminal slave owners were paid in each and every European slave owning colony. Reparations in the French colonies amounted to 126 million francs, at a rate which amounted to 430 francs per slave in Martinique; 470 francs in Guadeloupe; and 618 francs in French Guiana (Cayenne). Reparations in the Danish Virgin Islands came up to 5,500,000 francs, or about 2 million U.S. dollars, or 12 pounds sterling per slave.
The Dutch reparations in 1857 estimated reparations to be 16 million florins for each slave employed in sugar in Suriname, 325 florins for each slave employed in cocoa and coffee, 700 florins for domestics and from 50 to 500 in the islands.
A rider to the Dutch proposal for reparations to the slave owners, was that each emancipated slave had to contribute to the reparations to the slave-owner for each slave’s own suffering and oppression! Racism is criminal in name and nature. It is unlimited in terms of what it has done, still does, and will continue to do to its age-old victims.
In Puerto Rico the reparations amounted to 35 million pesetas. Peculiarly, and that peculiarity is by hindsight, no reparations were paid in Cuba to the slave owners. Not because Spain was more sensitive. Spain was equally crass. But the Spanish government could not have paid reparations to planters who had joined the Cuban revolutionary war of independence from Spain. And it could not pay some, while not paying other slave owners. It was too, the Cuban Revolutionary War of Independence, which led to the abolition of slavery in Cuba, in that country’s proud revolutionary history. Spain was furious at the loss of her prize slave colony Cuba, while the USA, once a colony, now acquired the last of Spain’s colonies with glee. American imperialism was on its way. Not by direct rule, but by indirect rule, in Haiti, in Cuba, in the Philippines with Puerto Rico as colony.
However, it ought to be noted that one great white figure in all Europe objected, and objected vehemently, to the payment of reparations to the slaveowners, for slavery – "the single greatest crime against humanity", as he termed it. And, from which crime other heinous crimes like racism, like racial discrimination and racialism flowed from the 15th century down to this day. It is certainly not our fault that Europe and America benefitted from the centuries of injustice and the dehumanisation inflicted on us. It is certainly true though, that the punishment must fit the crime – Reparations must now be paid to the victims for the centuries of slavery and racial oppression. It is not our fault that slavery lasted for centuries. Those who benefited for centuries must now pay for the full time of their crime.
That single, solitary, white European who raised his voice against reparations being paid to the perpetrators of slavery is Victor Schoelcher. Said the all time great Victor Schoelcher of France. "If France owes reparations for this social state of slavery which it has tolerated for centuries and is now suppressing, it owes reparations rather to those who have suffered from that state, rather than to those who have profitted thereby." Clear, concise and precise. It is an indefeasible argument. Today, in 2001, Europe and America still argue with the unarguable point made by Victor Schoelcher – racism and the addiction to Capital, command this insistently irrational stance. So irrational that America well known to be the home of racism, where all men were created equal – except, of course, blacks - has been torn by that contradiction, so much so that it unilaterally walked out of the U.N. Conference on Racism, a slap in the face to all Africans and people of African descent everywhere. Unilaterialism was at its worst.
One Caribbean figure, and only one, raised his voice against the reparations paid to the perpetrators of the crime of slavery. He was Joquin Maria Sanroma in Puerto Rico. This is what he said, in his most notable speech to the assembly of planters or latifundistas on February 17, 1873.
"Do you wish a grand measure for the preparation of the slave for freedom? Give him the compensation, which we reserve for his owner…… The question of reparations is not as minor as some think: it is by economic reform that we must complete the social reform [of abolishing slavery] … Give vocational education to make good and dignified workers of the ex-slave. In this sense and in no other am I prepared to support reparations to the owners." Well said Sanroma, 128 years ago. It is as valid today, even moreso, than it was yesterday.
What Sanroma and the great Victor Schoelcher saw so clearly and so justly more than a hundred years ago, the great minds and rulers of Europe and America cannot now see. So stricken are they with mental sclerosis, brought about more than a hundred years later, by nothing other than racism, and a tar-baby attachment to the Capital they raked in from slavery and racial oppression all over the globe, which now resides in Europe’s and America’s multinationals. There is a line, not often straight, between Capital accumulation from slavery and racial oppression, to capital accumulation by multinationals in trade liberalisation.
But, I want now to bury a myth, a myth perpetrated and perpetuated by racist historians, however liberal. Slavery was not abolished because of the work of any abolitionist society. Slavery was not abolished by Wilberforce, by Clarkson, by Fox or Pitt, or any of that sacred gang. William Garrison and Frederick Douglass were the greatest abolitionists, and their tremendous and incomparable work did not abolish slavery.
Let me put it as clearly, as concisely, and as unequivocally as possible: Slaves abolished slavery. Directly or indirectly, slaves abolished slavery. And that is the long and short of the matter. Now here is my chance to make history with the proof.
Throughout the 18th century, especially since King Court in this very Antigua, raised the standard of slave revolution, the planters feared, were terrified at the slaves abolishing slavery by insurrection. And King Court’s other achievement was not the intended revolution of 1736. It was the solidarity he patiently and systematically built up among the slaves, cruelly divided one against all, and all against one, by both the terror and benevolence of the oppressing planters. Benevolence and terror were twin sides of the same lethal weapon to enforce slavery. From that time, 1736, the oppressing planters lived not in annual or periodic fear of insurrection among the slaves, but the fear was constant. And not just annual or monthly, it was quotidian fear, daily fear, day in and day out. The terrorists of the slaves were themselves terrorised by the fear of slave revolution.
The point must be made, the essential point, that African slaves always revolted against slavery, even on the slaveships, proving that no race can lay greater claim to a longer struggle for freedom and the beginning of truly human history, than the African race. It disproves the fallacy that white Anglo-Saxons are the appointed or self appointed embodiments of freedom, despite being the authors of African slavery and the racism that flowed from and justified it.
Take for instance this from David Davidson writing in his essay "Negro Slave Control and Resistance in Colonial Mexico 1519-1650":
"By the 1650’s slaves from the mines of the north of Mexico were terrorising the regions from Guadalajara to Zacatecas, allying with the Indians and raiding ranches".
Arthur Ramos, in The Negro in Brazil had this to say of African slaves in Brazil:
"From the beginning of slavery escapes were frequent. The escaped African slaves, called locally quilombolas gathered together in organised groups known in Brazil as quilombas …. From the beginning the owners complained of the frequent escape of the slaves demanding protection and security from the public authorities."
Indeed, the first revolutionary black state in the world, was established by slaves very, very early. In 1645, for example, Bartholomeus Lintz, acting as a scout for the expeditions which the Dutch were to mount against the revolutionary Black Kingdom of Palmares was the first hostile European to "discover" that the black state of Palmares, in Brazil, consisted of several settlements. By 1677 there were ten black city-states, or palmers, one of which was the capital – Macoco, where the black King, Ganga-Zumba, from the Zanda, signifying consensus rule, resided. The whole state of Palmares spanning over sixty leagues. Quite some achievement that. Indeed, an historic chapter in man’s long struggle for freedom beneath the stars. But we cannot tarry here now.
That the slaves by insurrection would revolt was a constant fear which drove the latifundistas or planters to alternate benevolence with terror in the treatment of the slaves.
Fear became reality when the slaves themselves, by revolution, abolished slavery altogether in Haiti in 1804. The only successful slave revolution in the long history of humankind. And too, established the first Black Republic in human history, which every white power, acting on the dictates of racism, refused to recognise. And which too, every white power, even those far removed from slavery, sought by complicity, open or tacit, to destroy.
Nevertheless, the fear that slaves would abolish slavery led first to the abolition of the slave trade three years after the Haitian revolution, and the first emancipation of slaves 30 years after the Haitian revolution in 1834.
The thesis I am advancing is that once the slaves successfully revolted in Haiti slavery was as dead as a dodo, abolitionist or no abolitionist. They were but the catalysts, in an inevitable historical reaction.
Let us begin with the French. The French emancipation proclamation of 1848 found the slaves in revolt against slavery. In Martinique from 1836-1848 white slave-owners were being massacred and plantations burnt. Guadeloupe too, was in a permanent state of siege over the same period. Three quarters of the slaves had left the plantations in French Guiana. I tell you, so serious was the impending revolution among the slaves that the French Governor of Martinique actually proclaimed emancipation before the official decree arrived from France. The decree only formally abolished what, in fact, had actually been abolished informally.
In the Danish Virgin Islands the slave revolution came like a thief in the night – sudden, unexpected, but in deadly earnest.
Let the facts speak for themselves. The Governor-General arrived in St Croix from St Thomas on July 2. All was calm. He partied as usual with the elite planters. Drank the best wines and ate sumptuously like Roman nobles used to do in their excessive bacchanalian feasts, celebrating the excess of plunder, towards the end of the Roman Empire. The same Governor-General, with a woeful hang-over, was awakened at 2:00 a.m. in the morning of July 3 with alarming accounts of a slave revolution. The same slaves that thronged the streets, smiling and clapping as he passed in his caravan of buggies, that very afternoon, were slaying all before them before break of day. In a twinkling of an eye from passivity and apathy, to insurrection, total.
The leader of this revolution in St Croix was a man named Buddoe, born in St. Kitts, resident in Antigua from age 5-12, young, handsome and dashing. He was, to be sure, proclaimed guess what? The Toussaint L’Ouverture of St Croix. Under his command, he being able to create a rare but tight solidarity of the oppressed, nearly all of the whites fled Fredericksted and took refuge on vessels in the Harbour. In that moment as they fled, Danish slavery was in effect and in fact abolished.
The white commander remonstrated with the organised and revolutionary slaves. The African slaves demanded immediate freedom. Their demand as stated by their leader, Buddoe, who spoke excellent English, which he could both read and write, but chose to speak in the language of the people, so that all assembled could fully understand. Buddoe’s words should be known to every Caribbean school girl and boy. But they are not, in our consciousness. They were as follows. "Massa we poor negga cannot fight sojer [soldier] we no have no gun; but we can burn and destroy Santa Cruz if we no get free. And that we goin’ do!" No buts, ifs or maybes. Simply, "And that we goin’ do". The resolution was absolute – "if we no get free".
The Governor General reached Fredericksted by three o’clock in the afternoon. He met an ultimatum. Freedom by 4 o’clock, or the slaves would burn the town down. The Governor-General at 3:20 ordered the proclamation of emancipation to be read out. The first statement bears reproduction. "All unfree in the Danish West Indies are from today free." Anything else in James Baldwin’s classic biblical words would have brought about: The fire next time.
Now we come briefly, constrained by space to the British colonies. British Guiana was set ablaze in 1823. The total slave revolutionaries involved were 12,000 on fifty plantations. The slaves demanded unconditional emancipation. The Governor reasoned with them. Then reported to the Secretary of State for the colonies this: "These things I said were no comfort to them. God, they said, had made them of the same flesh and blood as the whites. They were tired of being slaves to whites. They should be free and they would not work any more." They were tired "of being slaves to whites" is putting it most mildly. They were fed up, angered, outraged. But we will accept "they were tired of being slaves to whites" from the white Governor. Rosa Parks more than a century later was "tired" and sat not at the back of the bus as Jim Crow Racism demanded, but sat in the front. Tiredness is, after all, a revolutionary impulse.
No sooner than British Guiana had been temporarily pacified, than the domino effect of revolution surfaced in Jamaica in 1824, though limited mainly to Hanover Parish. They were suppressed. However, before being hanged one of he leaders of the insurrection said this. "The revolt may be subdued for now, but the war had only begun." Slaves knew they could and would abolish slavery.
British Guiana again erupted in revolt in 1825. The Governor on this occasion wrote that further delay of emancipation could ruin the entire British possession. The colonial authorities, however racist, got the revolutionary message and knew what to do to save their property.
I end now with my own Antigua. In 1831 African slaves in Antigua rose in revolt. They put into practice what an American leader in the Civil Rights revolution was to proclaim in words in the 1960’s – Burn Baby, burn. Then that same year in Jamaica, revolutionary slaves set slave revolution in motion. And again the Governor of Jamaica wrote some memorable words, after noting that the leaders of the slave insurrection in Jamaica, as in Antigua, were those employed in positions of the greatest confidence. As to their motives for the revolution, said the Governor, it was born "out of a desire of affecting their freedom and in some cases possessing themselves of the property belonging to their masters." The slave recognised that he could not be other than slave without "possessing" herself and himself "of the property of their masters."
In my view the property the accumulated wealth from slavery and racial oppression, normally called colonialism, is the only just reparation for slavery. Fidel Castro alone among all Caribbean leaders has effected that will of our revolutionary slave ancestors. The rest of us have wittingly betrayed that irrevocable Last Will and Testament of our revolutionary slave ancestors. History will not absolve us.
Racism will not depart this earth until all property acquired through it becomes, in fact, the property of oppressed peoples. And then, none dominate over any by virtue of ownership and control of common property. And this with due advantages and affirmative action for the most oppressed - blacks, and women of all races. That reparation may not come in my life time, but it will certainly come before the 21st century reaches its first quarter. Mark my word.
But remember, slaves abolished slavery. And remember too, that reparations were paid to the slaveowners for inflicting suffering and extracting wealth for all of at least three centuries. World peace and justice demands that reparations be paid to the victims of slavery and their descendants for centuries of dehumanisation. Other than that world barbarism will be our lot.
TO BE CONTINUED