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WRITTEN BY LEONARD TIM HECTOR


HERE I FOUND AN INSIGHTFUL AND HISTORICALLY RESOURCEFUL PIECE...KINDA LONG....HARD TO START...BUT AS YOU READ ON IT GETS INTERESTING




July 26, 2002


The First Carnival in 1831, PART I

On August 7, 1833, the British Parliament passed the Emancipation Act, which made enslaved Africans in the English-speaking Caribbean, no longer chattel slaves, but apprentices until 1838.

Antigua alone went directly to abolition. Here, the planters found by calculation that it was cheaper to pay the ex-slaves a wage, rather than be responsible for their food, clothing and shelter, as they were during slavery.

One of the planters singled out for attack even by the Coloured, Henry Loving, when he went to England, not for the abolition of slavery, which abolition he opposed, but for rights and privileges for the Coloureds, to make the free Coloureds equal to whites, was Samuel Otto Baijer. Otto Baijer was a hated planter, off whom Ottos is named. This is so because the descendants of slaves here have no views about the horrors inflicted on their forebears, and therefore named places, “Ottos”, “Gambles” off hated Planters. The slaves who suffered at their hands are still turning in their graves, for the honour, the place names their descendants have accorded their tormentors. Even with political independence these hateful planters’ names still adorn places. Unconsciousness is perhaps endemic.

Anyway, the planter, S. Otto Baijer was a member of the Assembly, was a Judge, and, at the same time, adjutant-general in the militia. Much power was concentrated in a single white individual, as part of the terror and the time.

This is what Otto Baijer told his fellow planters and Governor Ross in the Assembly on September 11, 1833 when the Antiguan planters were persuaded by him to adopt full and immediate abolition of all slaves, without an apprenticeship.

Said S. Otto Baijer:

“Gentlemen my previous sentiments on this subject [Emancipation of the slaves] are well known to you all: be not surprised to learn that they have undergone an entire change. I have not altered my views without mature deliberation. For several days past, I have been making calculations with regard to the probable results of emancipation and I have ascertained, beyond a doubt, that I can cultivate my estate at least one third cheaper by free labour, than by slave labour.”

There you have it clear, calculated and cruelly cold.

Baijer’s argument won the day. So at Abolition on August 1, 1834, exactly 29,131 slaves in Antigua, of which there were some 6,000 children, were emancipated from chattel slavery. Antigua, already with some 30,000 slaves, had surplus labour, therefore could the wage-labour of the free slaves be more effectively exploited. So much so, sugar estates could produce sugar “one third cheaper with free labour than with slave labour”. Emancipation was not freedom. In fact, exploitation intensified.

Bird “hagiography” has noised it around and it has been reproduced by “scholars” holding high government positions that there was no “Apprenticeship” in Antigua as in other English-speaking Caribbean islands between 1834-1838 because “Antigua was so advanced.” It is not just myth, it is pure nonsense.

Similar nonsense to the Bird government naming a street “Prince Klass St” because a woman, Ms Lanaghan, writing very bad history, at best travelogue, in Antigua & Antiguans, admitted that she was using a fictional name Prince Klass in place of King Court. We now prefer European fiction about ourselves than the truth of the African name. Our national self-hate is self-evident.

Perhaps I should interpose that where there were 29,131 slaves here on abolition of slavery in 1834 and there was surplus labour, there was also surplus cruelty. That is borne out by these statistics from the Slave Registration Orders of 1812 – 1834. St Kitts had a death rate of 36.2 and a natural increase of 4.6 per thousand. Antigua between 1828 and 1832 had a death rate of 34.7 and a natural increase (watch this carefully) of -2 per thousand. In Antigua the death rate not only exceeded the birth rate, but the birth rate, the natural increase, was a minus factor! Poverty and the diseases of exploitation were the lot of the slaves, accounting for this phenomenal death rate.

Consequently, Meredith John, on the basis of life tables he received found that slave life “was indeed pernicious”. Less than half the children born attained the age of 5. Female slaves who reached the age of 15 lived an average of 30 years! Correspondingly, slave males had a life expectancy of 26 years! To smile when death encompassed you all around was achievement aplenty, to sing and dance was a great effort at humanisation in the face of racist exploitation and death.

I just want to emphasise here that the slaves made an unliveable life, liveable by reliance on their own traditions, values and practices, which they brought with them from Africa.

As the eminent Dr Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool recorded in his marvellous and compelling work, rich in scholarship and historical detail, and entitled Rituals of Power and Rebellion: “Throughout much of Africa songs were used for social control, particular forms of music, musical instruments and activities selected for special events and occasions. Such songs lampooned the pompous and condemned those who neglected their duties or who were cruel and tyrannical. William Piersen explained that “among the Ashanti – from the Gold Coast, now Ghana, from where most Antiguans are descended – such satire was directly institutionalised” in ceremonies “where ridicule of authority was especially sanctioned and encouraged for a limited period.”

I said that Africans enslaved here, as in the Caribbean made the rigours and terrors of life as a slave on a sugar plantation, far, far from home, liveable. It was not an everyday thing. Quotidian.

As the same Dr Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool has so importantly recorded “Work songs were a favourite vehicle for African satire. Piersen showed in his writings that many of the work songs from Sierra Leone, Ghana, the Kongo and Nigeria, while they were entertaining, were loaded with satirical intent.”

Permit me another interjection here. It might tell us something in Antigua that the essential African tradition in song, and therefore in calypso here, is that one must be entertaining though loaded with satirical intent, or acid social commentary. The one, the commentary without the other, the entertainment content, is buggy without a horse. The more we become Euro-American, the more we move away from our own traditions in song, as in economics and politics. Now back to the subject.

Slaves here worked from dawn to dusk. Without street lighting, night after night, dusk became night impenetrable. Sleep was the natural recourse to rise to work at dawn again.

But it seemed that African slaves here in particular developed an African custom or tradition at Sunday Market, the one day, the single day they did not work on the plantation. They were freer to realise themselves in their own personality on that solitary day a week – Sunday Market. The slaves turned it into a special occasion – Sunday Market.

John Atkins travelling in Africa recorded this: “As part of the diversion of evening entertainments the inhabitants of Sierra Leone would gather in an open part of town to form all round in a circle talking and laughing, and with uncouth notes, blame or praise somebody in the company or in the society.” Now we are all “blame” and praise is reserved for the innocuous.

However we look at it, turn it and twist it which ever way you want, this ancient African custom, of mainly youths gathering in a circle, talking and laughing, taunting or commanding each other, or with withering tongue lashing the ‘hierarchy’ is known in modern times as a “lime”.

This “lime” would land the slaves in Antigua in serious trouble in 1831, and will prove the point that since the freedom of slaves in the first Black Republic at the very dawn of the 19th century, slaves were agitating all over the Caribbean. So that British slavery in the Caribbean if not abolished when it was, would have been abolished by the slaves themselves, following the example of Haiti. That, of course, you may say is mere speculation. There were then going beyond speculation, numerous revolts throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. There was a revolt little mentioned in history in Trinidad in 1806. In the end scores of slaves were flogged mercilessly, some were put to death, while others after being flogged had their ears cut off. Anthony De Verteuil, a French white in Trinidad, in his own account of the times 1800-1900, speaks of planned revolts in Trinidad alone in 1819, 1823, 1831. The slaves, the enslaved Africans, were restive about slavery. They had become their own abolitionists!

TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT POST

PART 2

Indeed, in 1831 there were revolts planned or executed all over the Caribbean as slaves themselves sought to abolish slavery. Because it is carnival in Antigua I shall concentrate upon Antigua to prove that in 1831 Carnival began here as part of rebellion and resistance to oppression.

It is not commonly known, but since the case of Grace Jones and Mary Prince, agitation against slavery was ceaseless in Antigua.

Indeed, it is felt, but has not been proven though several English and Caribbean writers have accused me of “laying a foundation to the argument that since 1823 slaves in Antigua and moreso Barbuda expected freedom,” to quote the highly respected historian Douglas Hall.

The fact of the matter is, in May of 1823 when Thomas Buxton became or was becoming more important than Wilberforce as the leading abolitionist – incidentally the village now called Tyrells was called Buxton out of anti-slavery sentiment when the village was established after Liberta in 1834 – yes in 1823, slaves here believed or got word that Buxton had led and achieved the abolition of slavery. They were certain of this on learning of Buxton’s resolution.

Buxton’s resolution in Parliament was said to have been conveyed to slaves here by either Grace Jones or Mary Prince or both. To this day, the heroism of these two slave women of Antigua has not been honoured, not even by a street name!

Buxton’s resolution of 1823 went like this in part, and unlettered slaves here knew it by heart, as the same Otto Baijer lamented in the Assembly, claiming it made the slaves “uppity”, a word more common to the U.S. than here. Buxton’s resolution had said:

“That the state of Slavery is repugnant to the principles of the British Constitution and of the Christian religion and that it ought to be gradually abolished throughout the British colonies.”

Two other women, a black, Elizabeth Thwaites and Anne Gilbert, wife of John Gilbert, made Buxton’s resolution popular here, before their deaths, (before emancipation) in 1833. Both women are unknown for the most part and unsung therefore, because the essentials of our history are corked down in fiction, like King Court is under the fiction of “Prince Klass.”

After Buxton’s resolution had seized hold of the slave masses here, in April 1824, a number of merchants sought to put an end to the slaves’ enjoyment of Sunday Market, where they gathered in circles talking and laughing, and ridiculing those in planter power. The white merchants hid behind religion to put the blacks “back in their place.”

The white merchants claimed and complained that the slaves “Sunday Market awfully and presumptuously profaned the Sabbath by the open and unrestrained vending of provisions, liquors and other articles of merchandise.” Sunday Market, nearly a century old, suddenly became “awful” and “profane” to men who insisted on the worst profanity in history.

And, said the white merchants, this vending “was to the opprobrium of the colony at large.” And believe it or not, said the white merchants, was “a scandal to orderly and religiously disposed persons”. The planters and merchants who themselves had opposed the teaching of Christianity to their slaves until it was proven that Christianity “made slaves more servile”, now called Christianity and the Sabbath to their aid, in order to subordinate the slaves even more.

The white merchants and planters failed, in their bid in 1824 to abolish the day – Sunday Market - which slaves here had for themselves. However, the planters and merchants succeeded in getting the bill through the Assembly in 1831. There was to be no more Sunday market here after March 18, 1831. No other day was substituted for the Sunday market! The Planters and Merchants obviously thought they would get away with all forms of repression and oppression.

The slaves though, this time, were intent that they were not going to lose to the planters and merchants. The one day per week they had for themselves, free from the plantation and all its miserable works, they were going to retain or the entire slave colony would be engulfed in hell fire, literally.

On Friday, 18 March 1831 thousands of slaves, by whatever means, mobilised themselves and assembled “at the great Market in St John’s and in other places.” (Source; Colonial Office Records)

According to then Governor Ross, the slaves left no doubt that they would overthrow slavery itself. According to Governor Ross they were “frequently violent and menacing and accompanied by furious gesticulations and cudgels.” More than Sunday Market was at stake. Slavery itself was under siege.

The Governor, terrified that slaves would end slavery, recognised that the town police, militia and garrison were not enough. He called on the 86th Regiment from Fort Shirley. Several pitched battles were fought between Soldiers and Slaves after, according to Ms Lanaghan, “much buckling on of spurs and bracing of swords” with “such displays of epaulets and aiguillettes”. “Generals” she said, “galloped here and colonels there” and the “Governor” could be seen hustling, here, there and everywhere “as fresh intelligence arrived of fires breaking out.” The fire next time was no longer a Biblical prophecy. The word had become flesh.

The slaves could not respond to armed force for long with stones. They had to fight fire with fire. Fires were set all during the week following March 18, 1831, “especially in the Parish of St Philips” the easternmost part of the island while there were other fires encircling St John’s or in St John’s. Armageddon was a-coming?

In the end, the military won over the slaves. Slave arsonists, or suspected arsonists, were tried in April and May in Court Martial and a slave from St Philips declared “the ringleader” was hanged. He unfortunately remains unknown. However, a statue of the unknown slave who fought for freedom here times repeatedly, is long overdue.

Nevertheless, the Sunday market could not be closed. It continued. At Christmas in 1831 the slaves celebrated their triumph. They turned “the innocent amusements” which the planters allowed them “into bands” with men marching behind those with the horns of oxen on their heads. The drums and masks and masquerades were all over. It was the first Carnival. It was also, liberation time, because the slaves thought that “Free Paper Come”.

Abolition, however, did not mean freedom. But defending their Sunday Market in 1831 produced the first ever Carnival here.

1831 saw the first Carnival. It saw musical innovation that led to what we call “Benna” the adoption of African polyrhythms to satirical content with Caribbean content, exclusively. In time the beat would change. We await such another change.

Whenever I find myself in difficulty with what I think, I return to Plato because of the tightness of his logic, though I do not support Plato’s world view with his philosopher-King. However this by Plato (B.C. 428-347) has always struck me with the force of truth: “Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for, when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with it,” said Plato.

WOW! Great post Bffan. I learned alot especially the history of why villages you listed have the names they have today like"Ottos", "Gambles"and "Liberta"-which my grandfather is from.

Didn't see this before and found it by accident...thanks BFFan!

tanx for de info.

Very Interesting!

Thanks BFFAN you're always coming up with interesting info. :cool2

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