Part 3
Causes of turmoil in Jamaica
By Pat Chin
Part 1 covered the recent
upsurge of violence in Jamaica within the context of capitalist
globalization. Part 2 covered
Jamaica's early history under Spanish and British colonialism,
the rise of the slave trade and sugar industry, and resistance
to terror and exploitation.
Three short years after Sam Sharpe's Christmas Rebellion
shook Jamaica in 1831, slavery was formally abolished in all
British-held colonial possessions. The costs connected to
successive slave rebellions had become staggering, and sugar
production was becoming unprofitable. In addition, the needs of
the planter class in the colonies were fast becoming secondary
to those of the rising industrial bourgeoisie.
"From the standpoint of metropolitan politics," wrote Eric
Williams, former Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister, "the
abolition of the Caribbean slave system was, on the one hand, a
part of that general struggle of the industrial bourgeoisie
against the landed aristocracy which began in France with the
French Revolution of 1789, advanced in England with the First
Reform Bill of 1832, triumphed with the repeal of the English
Corn Laws in 1846, and culminated in the victory of the North
over the South in the Civil War in the United States." ("From
Columbus to Castro: the History of the Caribbean")
Emancipation was formally declared on Aug. 1, 1834, but, in
typical colonial style, there was a cruel catch in the form of
a mandatory four-year period of apprenticeship before full
emancipation. This was calculated to convert chattel slavery to
wage labor--a cheaper production method at a time when slavery
had become unviable and there were no trade unions or political
rights for the Black colonial subjects. The slave masters had
also been paid huge sums as compensation for the loss of their
slaves.
During the post-emancipation period, the planters were faced
with a severe shortage of workers. The former slaves were taxed
at every turn by the colonial regime as a way of ensuring a
continuous flow of labor. This included levying rents on homes
and provisions and even taxing the burial sites of their
ancestors.
From chattel slavery
to wage slavery
Many Black Jamaicans, however, resisted becoming wage
slaves. They responded by rushing to the hills, seizing parcels
of land and forming free villages. This gave rise to the
peasantry, but many of them were still forced to work full- or
part-time as wage earners on the big estates, in addition to
tending their crops. Faced with a shortfall of cheap labor,
6,000 East Indians were imported by the colonialists as
indentured servants between 1834 and 1865, along with people
from Germany, Scotland, Ireland, China and Africa.
According to estimates cited in Horace Campbell's book,
"Rasta and Resistance," 218,530 of the 317,000 African slaves
in Jamaica were freed in 1838. "By 1840 there were
approximately 3,000 who owned land of over 10 acres. About
20,000 owned plots of 2-10 acres, while the vast majority were
strugglers who operated as workers and small farmers. It was
this mass of struggling blacks who formed the embryo of the
Jamaican working class."
Sugar production continued its decline, and by 1860 half of
all plantations had gone bankrupt. The white British planter
class started allowing a new class of landowners made up of
"mixed-bloods" and Jewish merchants of Spanish and Portuguese
ancestry to buy bankrupt plantations.
The old oligarchic system of government remained, however,
with the legislature being elected and controlled by a small
minority of rich propertied British males who upheld racism and
exploitation. "Below these planters were the Jews and an
energetic stratum of mulattoes, the product of white and black
miscegeny," explains Campbell. "By 1860 the Jews had begun to
dominate local parish politics, while the mulattoes spurned
agricultural work and sought to dominate the professions, which
serviced the plantation system."
Conditions for the Black majority continued to deteriorate
with the demise of the sugar industry and the flight of
profits. The planter-dominated legislature responded by
increasing taxes, which included a levy on imported foods eaten
by Black Jamaicans. After the imposition of high road taxes and
toll charges forced the former slaves to transport their
produce by sea, canoes were taxed in addition to the existing
tariff on donkeys. These outrageous levies led to the toll gate
rebellions of 1859 in the western parishes of Trelawny and
Westmoreland.
Coercive laws were also passed to restrict the movement of
Black people, including one that enabled the arrest of anyone
carrying agricultural produce without written permission from
the owner of the land on which it was grown. Whites would often
shoot the goats and pigs of poor Blacks.
Strikes broke out on several sugar estates between 1863 and
1864 as poverty and oppression deepened. But Black workers had
no cohesive organization through which to defend themselves and
the free villages became the centers of protest where many
forms of cultural resistance were practiced. This included a
revival of "obeah"--the ritual casting out of evil spirits, and
religious expressions of resistance like Myalism, and Pocomania
with its intense drumming and shell blowing, which had been
banned by the colonialists.
1865: The Morant Bay Rebellion
Things came to a head in October 1865 in the eastern parish
of St. Thomas with an uprising known as the Morant Bay
Rebellion. It erupted within the context of wrenching poverty,
unjust taxation, the denial of political rights, as well as
widespread hunger caused by a drought and the interruption of
food imports due to the U.S. Civil War.
The parish had become a hotbed of cultural resistance, and
Paul Bogle was the spiritual leader of Stony Gut, a free
village community that was once a sugar estate. The residents
of Stony Gut had refused to pay rent, and when the planters
tried to use the legal system to have them evicted, they
resisted.
The armed uprising that followed was a milestone in Jamaican
history. Carefully planned under cover of numerous revival
meetings, it embodied the struggle for land and
self-determination and started as follows:
"Whilst a black man was being brought up for trial before
justice," states the colonial record, "a large number of the
peasantry armed with bludgeons and preceded by music came into
the court house-openly expressing the determination to rescue
the man about to be tried. One of their party having created a
considerable disturbance in the court was ordered into custody,
whereupon the mob rushed in and rescued the prisoner and
maltreated the policeman in attendance."
An arrest warrant was issued for scores of people including
Bogle. But the policemen sent to Stony Gut were captured
through force of arms. The next day Bogle and his men marched
on Morant Bay, shouting along the way, "Cleave to the black,
color for color." (Quoted in Campbell)
Campbell recounts the procession in vivid terms: "Blowing
the conch shell as a sign of war and beating the drums, the
soldiers of Bogle's army reached the courthouse, where the
planter Baron was trembling as he read the riot act. Before he
could finish ordering the police to shoot, Bogle and his men
surrounded the vestry (Parish Council). The Baron was killed
and his assistant was roasted in the fire which razed the court
house. The prisoners, mostly tax defaulters, were set
free."
Bogle's army captured several estates, where they freed the
oppressed workers. Whites who were known to be sympathetic were
spared. The rebel army took control of the parish for three
days in a 30-mile radius around Morant Bay. Bogle tried to
extend the armed struggle west but was outgunned in the end.
Vicious reprisals followed the defeat of his revolutionary
band.
Paul Bogle is today a Jamaican national hero. He took up
arms against the colonizers, lost the battle and was hanged on
Oct. 24, 1865. George William Gordon, a mulatto legislator and
sympathizer, also faced the gallows, even though he was not
present in Morant Bay when the rebellion erupted. He too is a
national hero. So shaken was the planter class by the
insurrection that they surrendered their ancient constitution
for the lesser Crown Colony form of government.
Bogle was militarily defeated but his heroic action had
far-reaching effects that spanned the next hundred years,
laying as it did the groundwork for continued resistance.
Next: From Garveyism to
independence and neocolonialism.
Reprinted from the Oct. 18, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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