Honychurch In the Forests of Freedom

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9957263-0-7
Verlag: Papillote Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 260 Seiten

The Maroons (escaped slaves) of Jamaica are famous. Not so the Maroons of another Caribbean island - Dominica, also a former British colony. Dominica's Maroons once controlled much of this wild and mountainous island but few details of their story of resistance and ultimate defeat have been known - until now. Written by Dominica's leading historian, In the Forests of Freedom is a stirring account of how a displaced and enslaved people challenged the British empire in their struggle to create a free and self-sufficient society. From the Africans who took refuge on the island in the 16th century, through the two brutal Maroon Wars in the last decades of slavery, to the building of a post-emancipation nation, In the Forests of Freedom takes the reader deep into the hinterland of the Dominica story.

Lennox Honychurch is a Dominican historian and anthropologist. He has published numerous books and academic papers on the archaeology and history of Dominica and the Caribbean. His doctorate in anthropology, from Oxford University, focussed on the period of contact and culture exchange between the indigenous Kalinago people of Dominica and the European and African arrivals in the Eastern Caribbean. He is the director of Island Heritage Initiatives, a consultancy and contracting company for restoration projects of heritage sites; most recently he was responsible for the restoration of Fort Shirley at the Cabrits National Park in Dominica.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Honychurch, Lennox

Leseproben

1
A lasting memorial: the leaders of liberty
A speech for the unveiling of the ‘Neg Mawon’ emancipation statue delivered by the author at Peebles Park, Roseau, Dominica, 1 August 2013 Your Excellency the President and Mrs Williams; Acting Prime Minister Hon Ambrose George; Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports Hon Justina Charles, other members of Cabinet and the House of Assembly; Mayor of Roseau Cecil Joseph; distinguished guests; brothers and sisters all of this Commonwealth of Dominica. In a socio-historical study of Dominica carried out in 1984 the Haitian historian Jean Casimir noted that Dominica shows the effects not so much of a plantation society but of a Maroon society. He argued that a late and weak plantation system in Dominica had resulted in a less colonised and thus less regimented and more open modern society.1 Briefly, Dominica was the last island in the Caribbean to be colonised. Its rugged mountainous nature enabled it to be one of the last places of refuge for the the region’s indigenous people, the Kalinago. When the British took over the island in 1763 there were already more than 300 Maroons living in small settlements in the interior. As British and French planters opened up more land for sugar and coffee and imported more enslaved labour so did the Maroon numbers increase. Plantations and villages clung to the coast while inland a vast jumble of forested ravines, cliffs and river valleys combined to create a complex natural maze which confounded the British forces who attempted to reduce the Maroons by any means possible. The call of the conch shell, the kon lambi, echoed across the valleys sending messages and warnings from camp to camp, from one ‘Neg Mawon’ leader to the other. The name ‘Maroon’ had come from the Spanish word cimarrón meaning ‘fugitive, runaway, living on mountaintops’ (from the Spanish cima meaning ‘top, summit’). It was adopted by the English and anglicised into ‘Maroon’. For the French Creoles it became ‘Neg Mawon’; in those days the French word negre did not merely mean black man or Negro, it also referred to a slave. This memorial that we are about to unveil recalls the ‘Neg Mawon’ chiefs such as Balla, Congo Ray, Gorre Greg, Jacko, Cicero, Pharcel, Zombie, Jupiter, Juba, Mabouya, Sandy, Quashie, Nicko, Hall and many others. There were also women among them: Charlotte, Calypso, Angelique, Marie-Rose, Tranquille, Rosay, Victorie and Rachel, and hundreds of others with unrecorded names who, from the 1760s through to the first stage of emancipation in 1834, held out against the plantation forces that were pitted against them. It is significant that most of the senior chiefs had been born in Africa for unlike the Creole, Dominican-born slaves these Africans had once lived in and experienced a society other than the plantation society. They knew that an alternative system existed and they had no difficulty imagining that it could be recreated here on the other side of the Atlantic. In one way I had hoped that this statue would have been erected in a prominent place in the mountainous heartland of our island home. For in those hills the statue would overlook the mighty green citadel of jagged peaks that was the place of liberty and freedom. It was a sanctuary for those who escaped the system and fought to overturn the institution of enslavement that had been imposed upon them. For, up there, among those forested mountains, was truly their land of Zion. Instead, this symbolic representation of Maroon heritage has been placed here on this hill in the centre of the nation’s capital. Within a few hundred yards in every direction there are places that were, for many of the Maroons, familiar: the site of arrival, the site of sale, the place of punishment and the point of death. For this area was indeed their Babylon. Just down the hill in the harbour below us anchored the slave ships that had completed the treacherous Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean from the coast of west Africa. There, on that coast, renegade chiefs, not unlike the drug lords and cocaine dealers of today, had connived with European traders to engage in human trafficking in return for the equivalent of bling and ill-gotten gain. Along the Bay Front stood the warehouses and open yards, the taverns and main marketplace where the sales of the newly arrived slaves were transacted. The last of these buildings to survive is the barracoon building near the end of Dame Eugenia Charles Boulevard on the junction with Hillsborough Street. Besides being a place of sale, the Old Market was the scene of horrific public punishments and executions. After the great Maroon conflict of 1814, the cobblestones are said to have run with blood, so much so that the populace refused to continue to draw water from the public well and it had to be filled in and covered over. Right next to us at Fort Young, the Maroon chief Balla was brought in half dead from the heights of Layou in 1786. According to the British Governor, John Orde, ‘Balla refused answering almost any questions that were put to him… he called upon his captors repeatedly to cut off his head, telling them that they might do so, but that Balla would not die – his Obi or charm and his child were the only things that he expressed much anxiety about. The former he wished to bury, the latter, a boy of about five years old he bid to remember [that] the Beckeys or White Man had killed his father.’2 Balla was taken to the marketplace to be displayed in a narrow iron cage called a gibbet and took a week to die. The people sang a refrain ‘Balla mort, Bwa gattay Oh.’ (‘Balla is dead, the woods are spoilt.’) And, as for his son, Governor Orde took the little boy to England where he was sent to school and where he disappeared into the social whirl of Regency London. But perhaps the greatest tragedy of the whole Maroon campaign was that many of the ‘Neg Mawon’ lost their lives at the hands of their own people, the so-called ‘trusted Negroes’ who joined their masters’ Ranger Corps. You can go to the National Archives on Kennedy Avenue in Roseau and see the receipts for rewards and bills of freedom paid to Rangers in return for killing the aged and respected chief Jacko, on 12 July 1814, and other chiefs. A couple of hundred yards to the south of us is the House of Assembly, which in those days also served as the Court House. There, and at Fort Young and also at the Market House, which still stands overlooking the present Old Market, is where the ‘kangaroo court’ trials of the Maroons took place. The planters produced and quoted legal and religious books to justify the power that they had seized in this colonial society. For we must be frank about this: the Judaic Christian Bible was just as much a tool of colonisation and control as were the draconian laws, the land titles and the maps of appropriation and possession. That House of Assembly echoed with Biblical quotations plucked from the Old and New Testaments to justify the institution of enslavement. Among the most favoured passages used by the planter-legislators was Leviticus 25:44-46: ‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves… and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life…’ In exhorting their human property to accept their state in life, they turned to passages such as Peter 2:18: ‘Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.’ And when they were debating the Amelioration Acts in the 1820s, aimed at reducing some of the greatest abuses of the system, they turned, in their defence, to Exodus 21:20-21: ‘If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.’3 It is fitting to note that as the tide against slavery began to swell, other verses from that same Bible were used by the Anti-Slavery Movement, Methodists and Moravians prominent among them, to ask, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ It is truly a religious text for all seasons. When full emancipation was granted on 1 August 1838, exactly 175 years ago today, it was far from the end of the struggle. The Emancipation Act granted compensation not to the former slaves but to their masters for the loss of their property. The slave holders of Dominica received £275,547 from the British government while the 14,175 former slaves were left with absolutely nothing to start out their lives as free people. This must be taken into account when considering Dominican society today for, when seen in that light, it is remarkable what has been achieved in areas such as education, home and land ownership and self-government, given that the majority of our ancestors started off with nothing. In the decades following emancipation, a raft of laws, such as the wide-ranging vagrancy acts, were passed to keep control of the masses. The aim was to deprive them of land so as to tie them to reliance on the estates, to limit the right to vote and to determine everything in their lives from the rates of their labour to the nature of their sexual activity. The so-called obeah laws were a front for a government policy of de-Africanisation of the...