by Ian Thomson
Mass murder. Yet the Black River atrocity caused no immediate outcry in Britain and virtually no press coverage. No inquest followed and certainly no memorial service was held at the Black River Anglican church. The subsequent trial in London of the captain and crew, however, did attract publicity. The court found in favour of the accused, and the insurers lost: killing slaves (‘cargo’) was no different from killing horses, it was ruled. Nevertheless the Zong was to nag long at the British conscience. Abolitionists frequently referred to Black River, and prominent clergymen discussed the enormity in sermons, essays and letters. After the Zong (its horror later memorably evoked in Turner’s painting Slave Ship), calls for an end to the slave trade were increasingly heard.
If the institution of slavery was doomed to die in Jamaica, it was thanks in part to the British abolitionist and missionary William Knibb. On his arrival in Jamaica in 1825 Knibb vowed to destroy the plantation system, and return dignity to the ‘poor, oppressed, benighted, and despised sons of Africa’. Eighteen years had passed since the Imperial Parliament in London abolished the slave trade in 1807 but its official demise had not heralded the end of slavery. Slaves were systematically bred on Jamaican plantations like livestock, and worked almost to death. Slavery, in Knibb’s view, was incompatible with Christianity because God had made all men equal; to be a Christian, therefore, was to be an abolitionist.
For twenty years this patriarchal figure - ‘King Knibb’ to his supporters - attempted to Christianise ‘the swarthy sons of Africa’. His weekly newspaper, The Baptist Herald and Friend of Africa, promoted what became known in Marcus Garvey’s day as ‘Ethiopianism’ - the generic term for an ideal of black self-improvement and salvation. Knibb’s identification of black Jamaicans with the biblical Ethiopia foreshadowed the Afrophile wing of Michael Manley’s PNP, as well as Rastafari and other religions devoted to an ideal of African autonomy. Many freed slaves joined Knibb’s Baptist church for its Revivalist sympathies and its image as a black church - a church of Ethiopia. (Psalm 68: ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.’)
Knibb’s nonconformist sentiments, forged in the working-class Northamptonshire of his birth, were anathema to the establishment Church of Jamaica, with its planter prejudice. Knibb’s most outspoken enemy, the Reverend George Wilson Bridges, was a leading Anglican advocate of slavery, whose two-volume Annals of Jamaica (1828) was perhaps the only work of Jamaican origin to argue the planter’s case in any depth. The book reads like a primer on the British Empire’s ‘civilising mission’ abroad: Africans need the ‘civilising hand’ of the white man, argued Bridges, because the ‘spirit of the negro is to destroy the works of the past, and the hopes of the future’.
To the Reverend Bridges, Knibb was not only a vile dissenter, but a mortal threat to His Majesty’s white subjects in Jamaica. Bridges blamed Knibb for the slave uprising of 1831-2 led by the Baptist preacher and former slave Samuel Sharpe. Sharpe was convinced (seven years before the date) that King George III had declared full freedom for his slaves and that the time had come to ‘cast off the chains’. He was not mad or deluded. As news of abolitionist debate and agitation reached Jamaica from London, it was suspected that a recalcitrant local assembly or parliament was withholding their freedom.
Sharpe planned and led the rebellion. In the Montego Bay area where he preached he urged slaves not to work after Christmas, but to start a campaign of civil disobedience. ‘If the black men did not stand up for themselves and take their freedom,’ Sharpe was said to have proclaimed, ‘the whites would put them out at the muzzles of their guns and shoot them like pigeons.’ Though loss of life in the campaign was low, huge damage, valued at £1.25 million, was done to plantations across Jamaica. The disturbances were finally suppressed by British troops and Sharpe taken into custody awaiting execution. The imperial gallows claimed a further 340 ‘rebels’. Forty years before the Morant War of 1865, this was one of the most spectacular slave revolts in the history of Anglo-America. In the witch-hunt for agitators, the Reverend Bridges called for Baptist missionaries to be hanged; many were beaten and tarred. In the sugar port of Falmouth on Jamaica’s north coast, where Knibb lived and operated, Baptist chapels were burned down by a white mob. Knibb was lucky to escape with his life.
The burning of Baptist churches profoundly shocked the British public and made their demands for emancipation the more clamorous. William Knibb, catching the mood, left Falmouth in 1832 in order to travel round Britain on a lecture tour. In packed church halls he told how planters loyal to the Anglican Church had jabbed him in the chest with bayonets; to further gasps he exhibited the tar-smeared neckerchief of a Baptist colleague who had been almost lynched in front of his children.
The Baptist uprising under Sharpe, and the retributions that followed, at long last convinced Britain that the price for maintaining slavery was too high. Freedom for Jamaica’s slaves was the only alternative - Knibb argued - to island-wide race war on a Haitian scale. In the summer of 1833, fearing further unrest, British Parliament passed the Emancipation Bill. The bill fell short of what Knibb and his supporters had hoped for. To soften the blow for planters, Parliament had decreed that emancipation was to unfold in two stages. First, slaves had to become ‘apprentices’ obligated to work full time (and without pay) for their former masters, in most cases for up to five years. Only then - the second stage - could they be liberated entirely. The real victory came four years later, on 1 August 1838, when Parliament officially declared that nearly 800,000 black men, women and children throughout the British Empire were at last truly free.
In his headquarters at Falmouth, William Knibb presided over a midnight thanksgiving service in the church that became known as the Knibb Baptist Chapel. The church still stands on King Street, a run-down section of Falmouth pervaded by wood smoke and a saltfish odour. Behind the communion table a marble tablet (made in Birmingham) marks the high watermark of post-emancipation fervour in British Jamaica:ERECTED
BY EMANCIPATED SONS OF AFRICA
TO COMMEMORATE
THE BIRTH-DAY OF THEIR FREEDOM
AUGUST THE FIRST 1838
On 31 July 1838 - the eve of emancipation - the Falmouth church was hung with branches and flowers and portraits of William Wilberforce. Into an empty coffin Knibb’s followers placed a symbolic iron punishment collar, a whip and chains, and as twelve o’clock approached they sang, ‘The death-blow is struck - see the monster is dying,’ bursting into cheers at the stroke of midnight. Still cheering, they lowered the coffin into an open grave in the churchyard. The Union Jack was then raised above the grave.
Post-emancipation Falmouth became a place of Baptist zeal, where black ‘freedmen’ were exhorted to rise early, keep clean, work hard, build new homes for themselves and marry (‘buy a ring and put on a feast’, in the island expression). Only then could they bring up God-fearing Christian families. In this missionary vision of black self-determination, independent Jamaica was to be governed by black freeholders - a ‘good society’, said Knibb.
It was, of course, a white man’s utopia. Falmouth after 1838 might have been made in the abolitionist image, but, in spite of Knibb’s proto-‘Ethiopianism’, it took little account of Jamaica’s existing black culture or the African Jamaican experience shaped by the Middle Passage. Knibb’s project, in some ways, was to ‘colonise the interior’ according to deep-rooted British Christian assumptions.
At Bluefields village, not far from Philip Gosse’s home, lives a British artist called Barney Walsh, who unintentionally gave me some insight into the predatory nature of white sexuality in Jamaica. Walsh was a stocky man with reddish skin, his demeanour seeming to hark back to a time when English raffs - often men of ‘good family’ - were packed off to Jamaica with few questions asked. He looked like an eighteenth-century buck, with his hair held in a ponytail. His pale blue eyes, if set in a livelier face, might have been described as ‘penetrating’, but in his they looked vacant, even burned out.
Walsh (who
claimed to be a second cousin to Queen Elizabeth II) boasted among his associates the late Princess Margaret, the late Steve McQueen, the late Patrick Lichfield, the late Ian Fleming and the late Noel Coward, as well as Chris Blackwell. He dropped names as only insecure people can. He loved Jamaica yet he was careful not to become too Jamaican. His exaggeratedly English accent, like his name-dropping of royalty, made him a bit of a bore.
Once Walsh had been considered a good artist, but I found that hard to believe. Samples of his work were stacked on the veranda of his house. Sketches of half-naked women in fantasy chariots drawn by white horses; a lake covered in swans, dragons, castles, dreamy Italian villas, paintings of clowns and vaguely psychedelic seascapes like a Yes album cover. ‘And I did this painting’ - he pulled out a particularly lurid canvas - ‘while I was on an acid trip with Steve McQueen, Papillon, you know.’ It was really quite bad.
Walsh had lived in Bluefields since 1989. His house, Lush Life, stood on an eminence above the Caribbean Sea and seemed to creak and sway in the salt breeze. Dogs prowled round it, one of which bounded up to me, fangs bared. ‘I’m actually known as quite a hard man locally,’ said Walsh, ‘or at any rate an eccentric. People leave me alone.’ He added with some pride, ‘Four locals have had their throats slit on my account.’ The ‘lawlessness and brutality’ of twenty-first-century Jamaica, he said, excited him.
Walsh had been burgled three times and even been shot at. ‘You have to be a bit of a danger-junkie to like Jamaica,’ he went on. ‘There’s always fuckery of one kind or another going on here.’ (His chauffeur, Jon, was a known crack-dealer.) Walsh said he was fascinated by the personality of Thomas Thistlewood, an English rake who ran a sugar estate near Bluefields in the years 1750-86, and who (by his own precise account) had had sexual intercourse on 3,852 occasions throughout his forty-year-long Caribbean rampage. Thistlewood’s strenuous licentiousness, chronicled in schoolboy Latin in a diary he kept (‘About 2 a.m., cum Negro girls’), suggested that sex was intertwined with the very imperial project.
It was not just slave-drivers but slave-trade sailors who were the sexual predators. The Reverend John Newton, in his abolitionist pamphlet Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, published in London in 1788, painted a chilling picture:When the women and girls are taken on board a ship, naked, trembling, terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue, and hunger, they are often exposed to the wanton rudeness of white savages. The poor creatures cannot understand the language they hear, but the looks and manners of the speakers are sufficiently intelligible. In imagination, the prey is divided, upon the spot, and only reserved until opportunity offers.
The British Empire had given Thistlewood and other planters the license to abuse captive women. Barney Walsh, the battered sensualist of Bluefields, said to me with imperial British coarseness, ‘I’ve not fucked a white woman in years.’ A Bluefields go-go dancer called Cherie had briefly been his wife; it was, apparently, love at first sight. ‘And it was real love, not go-go love.’ Hoping to impress his London friends, Walsh took Cherie to dinner at the Dorchester: a trophy poppet from the torrid zones.
After a second bottle of white wine Walsh spoke more candidly of the condition of young women in Jamaica today. ‘Girls lose their virginity here at about the age of eleven. You should see them - tits out here! S’big!’ I found myself despising him. In 2007, concerned by the rise of sex tourism in Jamaican resort areas, the government passed the Trafficking in Persons Act. Jamaica remains a significant source, transit and destination for women and girl-chile (young girls) trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation. It has been so ever since the days of slavery. ‘They recruit them early here’, Walsh said to me.
By six o’clock the sea beyond Lush Life had faded to a dyewood blue. Pelicans - great white slack-jawed birds - swooped out to feed as the artist urged me to watch for a green flash at sunset. A green flash? ‘Yes. Princess Margaret used to say you could see a green ray where the sun vanished below the horizon.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes. Now careful not to blink.’
The sun submerged.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was a blur.’ The sea view, I was made to feel, was rather wasted on me without the green flash.
25
Lord Creator
Tourism, even more than the narcotics trade, has transformed the face of Jamaica. Once Jamaica was a place of servile deference, where a wealthy few could languish in smart hotels. Noel Coward, in his doggerel poem ‘Jamaica’ evoked a paradise of the sort enjoyed by Ian Fleming, in the days of dinner jackets and ‘native Calypsos’:Every tourist who visits these shores
Can thank his benevolent Maker
For taking time off from the rest of His chores
To fashion the Isle of Jamaica.
However, since the advent of the long-haul charter flight, Apexfare tariffs and packaged hedonism, swathes of Jamaica have been marred by breeze-block resorts, shopping arcades and concrete sport-cabin villas. Older Jamaicans complain that tourism has corrupted the island’s youth and brought drugs and crime to oncestable communities. The industry is undoubtedly a mixed blessing; it contributes US $1 billion a year to the island’s economy and has become a part of Jamaican life, with hordes of vendors, hustlers and ‘guides’ ready to hound the unwitting tourist.
Montego Bay - MoBay to Jamaicans - is the island’s main tourist destination and has nightclubs with names like Jiggy Time, X-Tra Naked and X-Tatic Moods. Tourists flock there for a promise of tropical oblivion, and rarely leave their stockaded resorts, spending their days instead on the golf course and their nights in the bars. In the travel brochures MoBay is depicted as a haven, where unbridled sex and drinking abound. Tourists can do things there that they would never dream of doing at home. They can get married in the nude on the beach (sadly, not an uncommon sight), or dress up as Henry Morgan and drink rum on a motorised pirate galleon.
In the hills above Montego Bay, in a village called Cotton Tree, Seventh Day Adventists were holding a ‘crusade’. A large white tent had been hung for the occasion with light bulbs, and rows of chairs were occupied by locals come to hear the Jamaican preacher man. At the entrance an Adventist woman was calling out ‘There’s still room in the inn!’ as she propelled latecomers into their seats. The word ‘crusade’ in Jamaica intends a church meeting held in one of these mobile tent-halls. The tent may stay erected for up to six weeks in one location before moving on. Every ‘clap-hands’ church in Jamaica - Revivalist, Pentecostal - has its army of salvationist preachers. Some are honest types who want only to spread the love of Christ; others are sharks on the lookout for the main chance. Nearly all of them are politically conservative.
At the far end of the tent was a raised rostrum for the preacher, who was now dancing across the stage and cajoling the audience. ‘Come on, church! Oh talk to me church! Young man!’ He turned his gaze on me. ‘Does the candle of the Lord shine upon your soul?’
‘Um ...’
He returned the microphone to its stand. The organ burst out a few fierce notes and the preacher began to hector us again:
‘Oh, you’re mighty cold on me tonight, church! Sit up, my friends! Stay with the preacher!’
Next to me was June Gay Pringle, a thin Jamaican woman of ascetic appearance. She was the sister of Sally Henzell, the late film director Perry Henzell’s widow; extremely committed, she had been a Seventh Day Adventist for over half a century. Even the vilest and most crime-infested alleys of MoBay were no deterrent to June Gay as she brought a happy joy in Christ to waifs and strays. She went to these places on foot and was probably the last middle-class woman in Jamaica to do so. But, like most Adventists, she believed that those who were not Adventist were misguided; no matter how holy and self-sacrificing their Christian lives, God would punish them, in their millions, for being misguided. I liked June Gay; she radiated a quiet gospel energy and, with her horn-rimmed glasses Sellotaped at the bridge, evidently
cared little for money. We were the only two white people in the audience.
The preacher sat down, apparently exhausted, while a female choir, eight-strong, stood up to sing a hymn. They began softly but gradually increased their volume, their faces transformed, eyes uplifted, by the wah-wah electric guitar and Yamaha organ music. Another figure on the rostrum now rose and led a prayer. Around me everyone was singing Lead me to a rock that is higher than I. June Gay, catching the mood, called out from her seat, ‘Yes Lord, yessir. Very right. Uh huh. Right.’
Microphone in hand, the preacher sprang up to deliver a message of salvation. ‘Oh my friends!’ He spread out his arms in a gesture of crucifixion. ‘Jesus will come to investigate. He will judge you! Yes, he will make executions!’ Christ’s imminent advent did not look too jolly to me: American evangelism had come to Cotton Tree.
The preacher wiped his brow with a folded white handkerchief, and began again, his voice amplified round the hills of Cotton Tree. ‘Men marrying men!’ he yelled. A group of women seated behind me tittered. ‘I don’t see men marrying men in the Bible. Oh, don’t tell me about your natural tendencies! Tell me about your word of God.’ He looked furious. ‘What these ... men need is Christ. Jesus Christ alone can change any natural inclination.’
‘But hold on!’ He stopped himself in mid-flow. ‘I don’t believe we should abuse these individuals. Are you following the preacher? What these ... men need is the love of the Lord Jesus.’
‘Lord Jesus!’ a woman answered.
‘Do you love the Lord Jesus?’ the preacher asked her.
‘Yes, preacher man, sir, me does luv the Lawd Jesus.’
‘Good. Because what these ... men have not found is Jesus. So don’t light them a fire. Don’t burn them. Don’t stone them. Jesus died for them.’