Jamaica

Jamaica and Saint Domingue, the centerpieces of the eighteenth century British and French colonial systems, respectively, were societies driven by conflict. Built on the dazzling expansion of sugar wealth, these societies reduced 90 percent of their populations to perpetual slavery and consumed the lives of thousands of imported Africans each year. The tiny white minorities that aimed to govern them lived in proximity to, but also in fear of, the African majority that they sought to dominate and profit from. White authorities were particularly frightened by African's use of esoteric spiritual knowledge. ~ Diana Paton

Oliver Cromwell intended Jamaica to serve as a base for plunder, much like Providence Island a few decades before—including the creation of Admiralty courts, so captains could condemn their prizes immediately after the island was taken from the Spanish in 1655. However, Colonel Edward Doyley, governor of the recently conquered military state, struggled to command the men who remained in the West Indies after the Western Design, as well as the new arrivals yearning for a better life on the island. ~ Mark G. Hanna

Jamaica is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea Spanning 10,990 square kilometres (4,240 sq mi) in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles| and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about 145 kilometres (90 mi) south of Cuba, and 191 kilometres (119 mi) west of Hispaniola (the island containing the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic); the British Overseas Territory of the Cayman Islands lies some 215 kilometres (134 mi) to the north-west.

Quotes

B

• Although oath-taking at the outset of Obeah Jack’s 1824 rebellion had followed the eighteenth century pattern, which was reportedly African, specifically drawing on Akan rites, the oaths administered in preparation for what proved to be the last major rebellion before the end of slavery began to incorporate elements of Christianity. This reflects the growing importance of missionary activities in the British Caribbean, which were sparse before the late eighteenth century. One of the earliest missionaries to arrive in Jamaica was George Liele, a formerly enslaved man from Virginia who formed the first Baptist Church in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1780s. Liele’s followers were primarily enslaved and free people of color with a few poor whites. Orthodox Baptist missionaries arrived in Jamaica in 1814, and by the time they did, Liele’s congregation had divided into several independent sects, one of which was led by a man named George Lewis and became known as the Native Baptists. Liele and other more orthodox Baptists criticized the Native Baptists and referred to their beliefs and practices as “absurd,” “superstitious,” and “Christianized obeahs.”
  • Danielle N. Boaz, “Witchcraft, Witchdoctors and Empire: The Proscription and Prosecution of African Spiritual Practices in British Atlantic Colonies, 1760-1960s”, Miami.edu, (2014-07-31), pp. 47-48

• In addition to the Baptists, Methodist missionaries commenced a concerted effort to convert Africans in Jamaica around the turn of the nineteenth century. Both groups repeatedly faced impediments by the Jamaican legislature who passed laws specifically prohibiting “preaching of ill-disposed, illiterate, or ignorant enthusiasts” in 1802 (primarily to suppress the colored and black preachers), and generally banning preaching to slaves in 1807. A central component of the official concern about these missionaries was that people of color were serving as leaders of the congregations and converts displayed an unacceptable degree of familiarity and equality between individuals of different races. Missionaries also incurred the wrath of plantation owners by stating that enslaved persons should observe Sunday as the Sabbath and not work. Pressures from Britain forced the Jamaican legislature to allow missionaries to preach to slaves in 1816 but they continued to be wary of black preachers, and in the slave codes of 1823 and 1826 prohibited “ignorant, superstitious, or designing slaves” from giving sermons.
  • Danielle N. Boaz, “Witchcraft, Witchdoctors and Empire: The Proscription and Prosecution of African Spiritual Practices in British Atlantic Colonies, 1760-1960s”, Miami.edu, (2014-07-31), p. 48

• Although black preachers were common in both Methodist and Native Baptist ministries, the latter would become the central figures in uprisings from the 1830s to at least the 1860s. During the Christmas holiday in Jamaica in 1831, enslaved persons joined in a revolt organized by a man named Sam Sharpe, who was a preacher and leader in the Native Baptist Church. In preparation for this rebellion, participants took several oaths, sworn by kissing a bible, not to work after Christmas until they achieved their freedom, and not to reveal the plans of the revolt. The participants also swore that they would not speak against their brothers and sisters, and if they did so, they asked that they might burn in hell.
  • Danielle N. Boaz, “Witchcraft, Witchdoctors and Empire: The Proscription and Prosecution of African Spiritual Practices in British Atlantic Colonies, 1760-1960s”, Miami.edu, (2014-07-31), p. 49

• [N]ewspaper and journal articles from the mid-nineteenth century suggest that colonial authorities suppressed the practice of myalism, in part, because the unorthodox healing rituals of practitioners were viewed as a form of fraud. Amidst outbreaks of cholera and other diseases, black Jamaicans increasingly sought treatment from myalist healers because western medical care was wholly inadequate to serve the population of Jamaica, with a mere fifty physicians in the entire colony in 1860, a decline from around two hundred on the eve of emancipation in 1833. Colonial officials and missionaries frequently argued that unless the number western medical practitioners increased, Jamaicans would continue to seek treatment from “charlatans” for their ailments. For instance, in 1840, Joseph John Gurney ­ who travelled to the Caribbean as a missionary, observed that myalism prevailed in some parts of Jamaica stating that “deprived as the negroes now are of regular medical attendance, some of them have recourse to these medical quack doctors, to the great danger of their lives.”
  • Danielle N. Boaz, “Witchcraft, Witchdoctors and Empire: The Proscription and Prosecution of African Spiritual Practices in British Atlantic Colonies, 1760-1960s”, Miami.edu, (2014-07-31), p. 97

C

• It is an incredibly provincial and oppressive place. There are things about it like the landscape, and some of the people, that I really love, but I hate the classism that I grew up with. I hate the system of oppressing other people of color. I hate pettiness, obsession with appearance, what things look like, how you appear to the outside world. It's such a waste of time. I hate the sexism, the extraordinary double standards. It's unbelievable! See, I experienced a lot of it as a negative place, but also it breaks my heart when I think what might have been.
  • Michelle Cliff, interview published in African American Review (Summer 1994)

• when I was growing up in Jamaica it was still a colony, and the teachers I had at Saint Andrews were, for the most part, white women or light-skinned Jamaican women who believed in white supremacy and English supremacy - the Empire. The Jamaicans were somehow to feel ashamed of Jamaica, and the English were horrendously superior. You felt inadequate. I don't know how else to put it. You were taught to worship something you could never really be a part of, and you were taught to be grateful to these people. But I always hated this. It was hard not to hate them.
  • Michelle Cliff, interview published in African American Review (Summer 1994)

G

• Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being.
  • Lorna Goodison, interview (2013)

H

• Oliver Cromwell intended Jamaica to serve as a base for plunder, much like Providence Island a few decades before—including the creation of Admiralty courts, so captains could condemn their prizes immediately after the island was taken from the Spanish in 1655. However, Colonel Edward Doyley, governor of the recently conquered military state, struggled to command the men who remained in the West Indies after the Western Design, as well as the new arrivals yearning for a better life on the island.
  • Mark G. Hanna, “Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740”, University of North Carolina Press, ch.3, “Contesting Jamaica’s Future”, 1655–1688, p. 102

I

• A 2021 decision by the Jamaica Court of Appeal, whose grounds have recently been published, discusses the interesting question whether instructions from a judge to a jury using language taken from the Bible breach constitutional principles of separation of church and state, and may mislead the jurors thus leading to an invalid decision.
  • Massimo Introvigne, "Jamaica: Judge’s Use of Biblical Language Does Not Invalidate Decision", Bitter Winter (January 19, 2022)

M

• If we look about us we see the lengthening shadows of a thousand small corruptions creeping across the landscape of our nation. This is monstrous, for it is not the evening of our history; it is the morning and the shadows should be forming the other way.
  • Michael Manley, collected in The Search for Solutions: Selections from the Speeches and writings of Michael Manley edited by John Hearne (writer) (1976)

P

• Jamaica and Saint Domingue, the centerpieces of the eighteenth century British and French colonial systems, respectively, were societies driven by conflict. Built on the dazzling expansion of sugar wealth, these societies reduced 90 percent of their populations to perpetual slavery and consumed the lives of thousands of imported Africans each year. The tiny white minorities that aimed to govern them lived in proximity to, but also in fear of, the African majority that they sought to dominate and profit from. White authorities were particularly frightened by African's use of esoteric spiritual knowledge. In the middle years of the century, these white fears crystallized in each society when heightened activity by enslaved people seemed to threaten the slave system during the events culminating in 1757-58 that became known as Makandal's conspiracy in Saint Domingue, and during Tacky's Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760. Makandal inspired a network of Maroons and plantation slaves whose secret spiritual medicine, understood by slaveholders as poison, was used in religious ceremonies. The combatants involved in Tacky's Rebellion used oaths and spiritually protective rituals to sustain the most substantial armed rebellion in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean.
  These two events, very close to each other in time and in colonies only a couple of hundred miles apart, both involved the ritual use of spiritually powerful substances to strengthen attacks on the plantocracy. They have, however, generally been considered separately by historians. Tacky's Rebellion has been investigated within the category of slave rebellions and in particular as an example of an "ethnic" African rebellion, due to its organization through networks of Akan speakers. The spiritual and religious aspect of the rebellion has been an important element of the story of obeah's development in the Anglophone Caribbean.
  • Diana Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 2 (April 2012), pp. 235

• In response to Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760 in Jamaica, the colony’s House of Assembly passed a law naming a new crime, “obeah.” This important statute led the way in establishing obeah as a phenomenon understood by colonial authorities as a singular and dangerous problem. Investigating the Jamaica assembly’s decision within a wider Caribbean and Atlantic context and alongside the near-contemporaneous “Makandal conspiracy” in Saint Domingue, which was interpreted by French planters as a mass outbreak of poisoning, shows how similar practices came to be interpreted and constructed in different ways in different colonial cultures. The practices used by Tacky’s “obeah man” and Makandal’s followers were conceptually and practically similar, deriving from African understandings of medicine in which substances could be imbued with spiritual power. Why, then, did the French colonists emphasize poison while the British emphasized obeah (which they glossed with the term “witchcraft”)?
  • Diana Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery”, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 2 (April 2012), pp. 235

R

• Going to Jamaica is like going back into the nineteenth century.
  • Joan Riley in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out by Donna Marie Perry (1993)

• Jamaicans don't like to admit to all of the things that are wrong with their society. Children are unprotected. They are fair game, basically. Violence against women and children is endemic and accepted. Academics write about it as if it is a subversive act. Women are simply expendable, and when they write about it, it is always a woman's fault somehow. A woman is mad because she is drinking or something. There's never any rational reason why somebody reaches this point.
  • Joan Riley in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out by Donna Marie Perry (1993)

See also

• Americas
• Cuba
• Haiti