“Both the pot and the kettle were very, very black indeed.”

COMPARED TO SLAVERY IN America, the story of the British slave-holding in the Caribbean has not been scrutinised as much. The British first successfully settled on the America mainland in 1607 and in the West Indies (Caribbean) in 1623. In both colonisations, the British introduced chattel slavery and the wholesale pogrom of native ethnic groups.

The vast majority of slaves in the Caribbean were taken there on British slave ships. Britain alone conveyed between three to four million African slaves to the West Indies and North America. At least two million seven hundred thousand slaves arrived alive. Of this number, two million three hundred thousand went to the West Indies. This was massively more than the number taken to the North American colonies, which is recorded as around four hundred thousand. These figures have a tale to tell: As of 1st August 1834, the four hundred thousand slaves in North America had increased to about two million two hundred thousand and the two million three hundred thousand slaves in British territories had pared down to eight hundred thousand. The number of slaves who ended up on the British Isles was a mere ten to fifteen thousand. There are tens of thousands of white Brits who carry these slave genes, including the quintessentially African one, the sickle cell trait. Last time I looked, there was no malaria to force the evolution of this trait in Britain! Interestingly, the early Africans in Britain did not face much discrimination. The full-blown derision, contempt, and hatred for the black skinned “heathens and savages” started during the abolition period, to convey a “them and us” scenario by the pro-slavery lobby. This concretised in the colonialism period, when the pseudo-scientists and anthropologists went to town on the African subject.

The British slave-holders in the West Indies laid the groundwork on how best to run slave colonies as a profitable business concern. In 1661 the British formulated the infamous Slave Code of Barbados, which elevated chattel slavery to an art form. Tiny Barbados was a sort of slave vivarium for the English slave colonies. Many British slave territories watched the isle’s treatment of its slaves closely. After some cutting and pasting most of the English-speaking slave world adapted and adopted the de-humanising Barbadian slave codes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The British, therefore, can claim bragging rights for the creation and pioneering of these Slave Codes.

British and American slave codes, which came after the Spanish and Portuguese codes, made no pretence at being humane and put the slave-owners above the law. This meant the master could do literally anything to their slaves without interference from the law. The 1661 Slave Act did not attribute any positive rights to slaves because they were not regarded as human beings but as property. The codes did not allow for the manumission of the slave and his/her integration in the society. That’s where the bragging rights come in. On paper, Spanish, Portuguese, and French slave codes were better than British and American ones. However, in practice they were more or less the same. The Europeans all thought that Africans were their ethnic and cultural inferiors. This was a common denominator.

The Barbadian Slave Code, named An Act for Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, (1661) declared:

“If any Negro or slave whatsoever shall offer any violence to any Christian by striking or any other form of violence, such Negro or slave shall for his or her first offence be severely whipped by the Constable. For his second offence of that nature he shall be severely whipped, his nose slit, and be burned in some part of his face with a hot iron. And being brutish slaves, [they] deserve not, for the baseness of their condition, to be tried by the legal trial of twelve men of their peers, as the subjects of England are.

And it is further enacted and ordained that if any Negro or other slave under punishment by his master unfortunately shall suffer in life or member, which seldom happens, no person whatsoever shall be liable to any fine therefore.”

In other words, a white Christian could maim or kill an African pagan slave and not suffer any consequences. The slave-owner was the be-all and end-all as the state, like Pontius Pilate, washed its hands of any oversight.

Minor modifications were made to the Act in 1676, 1682, and 1688.

Regarding the Atlantic slave trade, the British have a recognisably stellar

role. With the use of slave labour, the British have a less pronounced role.

Nonetheless, the British were equally culpable of egregious mistreatment

of slaves in the Caribbean Islands, AKA the West Indies. In fact, by some

accounts, slaves in Barbados and Jamaica were treated worse than slaves in

North America.

The reason American slavery is in everyone’s face is that the Americans

lived with their slaves and raped, whipped, starved, and killed them right in

their front and backyards. In the West Indies, the British had five times more

slaves than their American brothers, but they kept their distance, a good

3,000 miles away in Britain.

The British West Indian slave colonies consisted of St Christopher,

Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis,

Anguilla, Grenada, Montserrat, Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands,

Turks and Caicos Islands, the British Virgin Islands and Dominica. Jamaica

was the jewel in the crown. It had a huge slave population and excelled first

in tobacco, then sugar, coffee, and banana plantations. All these contributed

massively to the British economy. Jamaican plantations expanded massively

after the end its last Maroon War in 1796 and the troubles that the French

competitor, Saint Domingue or Haiti, was having beginning in 1791. These

expansions in plantations, in addition to the inability for the slave population

in Jamaica to self-propagate, led to the importation of more slaves from Africa.

As the slave abolition movements gathered pace in the late eighteenth

century, slavers of the British Caribbean slave sphere realised that hard times

were coming. So, they started importing young male and female slaves in the

child-bearing ages so that they could have a self-propagating slave population

on their islands.

Some slave-owners were resident on the isles, but many lived in Britain. By

staying in Britain, far from the source of their filthy lucre – some in supreme

luxury in the English and Scottish countryside as Africans laboured and died

on their estates – many Brits enjoyed their slave profits for decades but kept

an arm’s length and a clipped nose.

All the inhuman hallmarks of the American slave system were also

present in the British Caribbean slave system. Family separations, whippings,

other forms of torture (amputations, brandings), and killings of slaves were as

much a staple of the British slave-holders as they were of the vile slavers of

the southern United States. Without a doubt, the resident Brits in the West

Indies and the overseers who ran these establishments were every bit as cruel, actually crueller, than their spawns in the American slave states.

In any case, the Brits who went to the Caribbean islands were the same as those who went to mainland America. In both cases, there was a significant number of “scoundrels, wastrels, and buccaneers”. In all slave territories, plantocrats and slavocrats included a liberal sprinkling of aristocrats, hypocritocrats (all niggers bad; female niggers good); pseudo-democrats (all men are created equal by Jehovah, except my slaves); atheistocrats (a man has to believe in something; I believe there is no God); religious philosophocrats (my freedom is given to me by my God, and not my King; my slaves’ freedom is taken by my God and not their King). There were also many racistocrats and parochialcrats.

 

 

PART II

There were, however, some significant differences between slavery on the West Indian Islands and that on the American mainland. Firstly, the demographic patterns were widely different. On the islands, there were far more slave-holders than non-slave-holders, and these slave-holders were generally younger than their American counterparts due to the high mortality rates in the tropics. For instance, more than 80 percent of Jamaicans had slaves compared to 30 percent of American southerners. Secondly, on average, the slave-owners in Jamaica were far wealthier than the average white American or Briton. Jamaica was Acadia to the whites, but a living hell for the blacks. Thirdly, on all islands, the number of slaves was far higher than that of their tormentors. In Jamaica, by the end of the eighteenth century, the ratio of slaves to whites was almost 10 to 1, if not more. In America, the whites outnumbered the slaves, by far. The mortality in whites on the Caribbean islands was also very high. Like with slaves, a natural increase in population of whites was not possible because of this factor. This stopped the establishment of settler communities like in America.

As a result of the demographic pattern, the whites on the islands had a reason to be afraid of slave revolts and were forever on tenterhooks. If it was not the slaves to fear, it was the hurricanes! The whites feared and despised the slaves. The feeling was reciprocated several-fold. With this toxic mix of hatred, antipathy, distrust, and mistrust, the whites on the islands ended up being much more tyrannical and brutish than their mainland brothers. Indeed, the slave system on the isle of Jamaica has been called one of the most dreadful systems of human exploitation developed, with mind-numbing savagery being the norm. The received wisdom – probably fanciful – was that another reason the cruelty of slave-holders was off-scale in Jamaica was because of the paucity of white mistresses. However, it was well-known that

on the American mainland and in Dutch slave territories many women slaveholders

were on par with their men in cruelty to slaves. One of the consequences

of the paucity of white women in Jamaica and other slave islands

was that the R Number was quite high compared to mainland America. The

R or Reproduction number was the average number of children a white male

slave-holder had with his slave women and freedwomen of colour. The R

Number was very high in Portuguese slave colonies like Brazil.

On many British Caribbean slave settlements, a white person who

committed multiple murders of slaves could go scot-free. At most, he would

be expelled from the island of his infamy to go to any other slave territory, and

probably kill more Africans. Murdering one slave was not even considered

worthy of investigation.

Before the abolitionist movement started in earnest, in the last quarter of

the eighteenth century, the Jamaican whites and other Caribbean sadists had

been able to get away with their inhuman treatment of their slaves. This was

partly because, by and large, British society was inured to extreme violence as

corporal punishment in schools, in homes, and in the military was pervasive.

Gruesome executions, including to be “hanged, beheaded, quartered, and

burnt” were at the time common in Britain, and was like a spectator sport.

Working conditions for the poor were abysmal and child labour was a way

of life. At the time, unsurprisingly, slavery was widely accepted and until the

1850s, there were hardly any open sentiments against slavery in Britain.

In Jamaica, this scenario apart, slaves could own a few things. In as

much as they knew that they could not change the system, they performed

manoeuvres to get a few personal items, be allowed to hunt or fish, or sell

some trinkets. Some of these they could do or get if they gave in to their

master’s will and wishes and made him or her more money. Women slaves

usually had to pay by “assenting” to the use of their bodies. Slave women’s

contact with whites was work, punishment, or sexual abuse. A few women

used their sexual encounters to improve their personal lot and the lot of their

children, including getting freedom. Sexual molestation, predation, and rape

were systemic and widespread in all slave territories. Even pre-pubescent

girl-children were not safe from the white sexual predators. The male slaves

also understood what they had to do to get some privileges.

In Jamaica, white males living with slave women and free mulattoes was

a common occurrence and was hardly frowned upon. Many white slaveholders

made it a point to sleep with as many slave women as possible. It was expected, a right that they took without any regard for the sex slaves. With all these sexual encounters there was nary a white Jamaican male who did not have a history of the clap (gonorrhoea) at some time in their life there. Needless to say, the women slaves were also given this same clap, and probably not treated. The toxic atmosphere on this island was such that many white Jamaican males were at one time in their lives rapists and torturers. That’s how bad things were on that island, the island of true deplorables.

Another difference between mainland and island slavery was that the slaves on the islands were usually given provision grounds where they grew their own food and kept a few domestic animals. The slaves, therefore, had a bit of economic power as a result because they were usually allowed to sell their excess produce at markets, after leaving enough to feed themselves. Slave maintenance was less if the slaves produced their own food. Yet another difference was the diet. The diet on islands was different from that of mainland America. Pork and meat were rare and fish a bit more common. The starches were similar as in sweet corn, Indian corn, and sweet potatoes. Some islands had yams and plantain.

PART III

 

For most slaves on the slave isles, the shelter was atrocious, just like on the American mainland. Many slaves had to make their own shelters with minimal support from slave-holders. Of course, there were exceptions. The clothing provisions for slaves in the West Indies was as bad as, if not worse, than mainland America. Because of the warmer weather on the Caribbean islands, many slaves went about with only a loincloth on many plantations in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

By the end of the eighteenth century, most Caribbean islands had far more slaves than slave-holders and non-slave-holders combined. Due to the vicissitudes of slave life, the life expectancy of slaves was short, and their reproductive lives and infant mortality rates were abysmal. Consequently, on most Caribbean islands, the death rates were higher than the birth rates. This meant that the increase in slave numbers was usually from imports from Africa. Because the slave population was increased more by the replenishing of new stock from slave markets than from births, slave women big with children were not treated as tenderly in Jamaica as they were in America.

Due to the huge disparity in numbers, and the insularity of the islands, the slave-holders had to be careful about how they treated their slaves in case of an insurrection. One tactic was divide and rule. The plantations used slaves from different African ethnicities to reduce the cohesion in their slave force. Another tactic was to use the skin tone of the slaves to create a sort of class

system that carried different rewards for each class. Another tactic was to

create some division between African-born slaves – called Bozal slaves – and

slaves born in captivity, called Creole slaves. Yet another tactic was to accept

some slaves as baptised Christians of the Anglican faith, with brand new

Christian names. This put them apart from the other slaves, and they enjoyed

a few more rewards. One of the rewards was to be accorded a Christian

funeral and a decent burial. A decent burial was important, especially to

African-born slaves, as this was a sort of differentiation between them and

animals. This was a differentiation many slave-owners did not recognise. Lest

it be forgotten, there were some Muslims among the slaves in the Americas.

These were mostly from the Senegambia region and northern Nigeria. For

Muslim slaves, in addition to the loss of freedom and daily hard labour, there

was the added indignity of no burial within 24 hours, no 4 wives, no prayers 5

times a day, and for the very young, their foreskins remained intact. To boot,

for the slaves in mainland America, pork was the most common source of

animal protein.

The slavers tried all sorts of social trigonometric tricks to prevent cohesion

among slaves to prevent uprisings. The success of the divide and rule

manoeuvres is probably overstated, though it is known that in Jamaica Creole

slaves did not join the early seventeenth century slave uprisings by Africanborn

slaves.

Four major events impacted the slaving territories of the West Indies

massively: The American Revolution from 1775 to 1783, the French Revolution

from 1789 to 1799, the Haitian (Saint Domingue) Revolution from 1791 to 1804,

and the slave abolition movements beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth

century. The effects of these events on slaving territories have been

covered in the main book. Suffice to add that one of Jamaica’s – and therefore

the British Empire’s – biggest and richest plantation owner and slave-holder,

Simon Taylor, was heavily impacted by all 4 events. These events led to him

developing a kind of depression. His response to the Haitian Revolution

was to advocate for the extirpation of all blacks on Saint Domingue, and the

bringing in of a fresh load of slaves from Africa! This marked Simon Taylor

as both an afrophobe (fear, hate, and dislike of Africans) and a misafrope, a

person who hated Africans enough to wish those not making him money be

removed from the surface of the earth. But lo and behold, Simon Taylor did

not hate African slave women; he only hated African men! The proof of the

pudding? Taylor had numerous mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon children

from both slave women and free black women. Some of his children were free, while others remained as slaves. One can but wonder how many doses of clap Mr Taylor had experienced.

In the words of a missionary, William James Gardner, Taylor was a degraded, imperious, and vulgar man. Additionally, Simon Taylor was a selfish, conceited sex-exploiter.

Extirpate all blacks! What a prig.

By now -– the twenty-first century – Mr Taylor’s considerable fortune must have been seamlessly laundered into respectability, and his descendants must be having a whale of a time, while the millions of Jamaicans and Africans he impacted still have to deal with the ongoing effects of slavery.

Unfortunately, there were millions like Simon Taylor all over the slaving world: governors, senators, clergymen, members of houses of parliament or state assemblies, or congress. In their private lives, many of these people were monsters. Many of these prominent members of white slaving societies were frequent sexual molesters and rapists of their slave women. Some prominent pro-slavery writers and public figures like James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, a former governor and senator, is reported to have raped many of his slave women, including, possibly, his own mulatto slave child.

Monster.

Two possible urban myths should be mentioned here: The use of slave babies for alligator baiting and bum-breaking or buck-breaking, in which male slaves were allegedly raped – in public – by some white male slave owners as punishment. The evidence for these two acts is not convincing. If the acts were done at all, they must have been rare.

Psychopaths like the Jamaican slaver Thomas Thistlewood – mentioned in the main story – terrorised all their slave women, irrespective of marital status. Thistlewood also kept a detailed record of his sexual encounters with his hapless victims for posterity and his descendants to admire. Thistlewood came up with the punishment of one slave defecating in another slave’s mouth. Records seem to indicate, thankfully, that this was one monster whose genetic line ended with his passing in 1786.

Phew!

The descendants of the poachers and human-zoo keepers of the West Indies have cleaned their image by glorifying their credentials as the nation that led the slave trade abolition agenda. This agenda they did lead. However, the narrative isn’t as clean as what they have wanted everyone to swallow for the last two hundred years: We good, good guys; the French, Americans, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilians not good people like us. And the African chiefs who sold us their people, bad, bad people as well.

The good, good guys had orchestrated and led by bad, bad ways for centuries,

and their under-reported Caribbean misadventure is a story as sad as the

worst in the Atlantic rim’s slaving annals.

When they were poachers and human zoo keepers, the Brits kept their

dirty handiwork very far from their financial centre of perfidy in London. And

yes, the British royal family were right at the centre of the slavery maelstrom;

a maelstrom of suffering for Africans and maelstrom of financial empowerment

for the British common man, the elites, and the royal family.

Without any iota of doubt, the West Indies was the deep south of the

British Isle. Sorry Ma’am, there is no running away from the slavery facts.

There are times when sand gets tired of an ostrich’s head. It’s time that the

British royals lifted their heads out of the slavery sands of Africa, owned up

and faced the music, and did the right thing. Their cousins in America are

not ready. But since the Brits led them into temptation, the Brits should lead

the way out of it and do the right thing. A paltry apology by a prime minister

is not enough.

As stated in the main story, forty-six thousand slave-owners in British

territories were paid a total of £20 million. At today’s rate, this is equivalent to

between £2 billion and £20 billion, depending on which conversion formula

is used. This figure was a massive 40 percent of the British Government’s

budget of the 1833-1834 financial cycle. The government arranged a huge loan

to pay slave-holders, and this loan was still being paid off as of 2014. The Brits

of that time and their descendants, and the freed slaves and their descendants

in all British territories were taxed to pay off this loan. Through monies from

the colonies to the British Crown, Africans also paid a part of the £20 million

loan. Chansa’s grandfather in Northern Rhodesia, through taxes to the British

Crown and the excess that Britain siphoned from the copper mines, contributed

a fraction of the money to pay off the loan used to pay the slave-holders

who had enslaved and benefitted from the free labour of his ancestors.

For the record, like in the USA, there are also statues and monuments in

Britain to the fallen heroic slave traders whose actions led to the enslavement

of millions of Africans and tens of thousands of deaths.