Peter the “Captain” of the bamboo raft is an extremely observant Seven Day Adventist and a mine of information on the Marla Brae river, on Jamaica’s North coast. He gushed with details of the history of the area, the flora, the fish, the weather, the termites, the ganja, the rum and of course, the Lord. As we floated effortlessly down stream, the river bloated by last night’s rains, he explained why he doesn’t eat shellfish, has never drank and how he observes the Sabbath in its entirety. The local Rastamen and himself – despite their religious differences – are “brothers’, sharing a deep love for the land, the nature, football, cricket and the power of the Almighty.
This is Trelawny Parish, not so far from the glitzy Montego Bay but spiritually about as far as you can get from that “all-you-can-eat” five star buffet gluttony of the typical beach resort.
Trelawny is also this Usain Bolt country. The world’s fastest man is born in the village. His mother worships in Peter’s church. Bolt was always incredibly athletic but, according to the Captain, his flamboyant running style was honed dashing through the fields to school to avoid a “flogging” when the young Usain, ever acting the maggot, missed the one school bus.
Jamaica has an image for spliff, reggae, hanging out, chilling, not to mention, the out-of-control gang violence, terrifyingly captured in Marlon James’ Booker Prize winner novel “A Short History of Seven Killings”. But there is another Jamaica, an observant, Christian Jamaica.
Tiny churches are dotted all over the place – at every crossroads and up each country lane. There is choice of Christian denominations in every village. Earlier today, at the Caribbean Development Bank’s Annual Meeting (where I am speaking) lunchtime grace was enthusiastically belted out before anyone touched a morsel.
When quizzed as to why the people have such faith, Peter reckoned it was a legacy of slavery. When everything is taken from you, he laughed, “what man got to get he through?”
Further down at a bend in the river, lay the remains of a sugar plantation and the cemetery of the long gone, plantation owners. There are no cemeteries to the slaves. There are constant reminders to the true horror of slavery everywhere. It is impossible to ignore. It is also amazing that a culture can survive such trauma, rebuild itself and function. The Captain suggested that God plays a huge part of overcoming the collective damage that slavery wrought.
We floated away lazily on his bamboo raft in the late afternoon heat, chatting about the Lord, Jah and the voodoo witches and their chicken slaughtering ceremonies that are practiced widely around these parts.
All this belief, faith or superstition, call it what you will, unifies people. It gives them a sense of purpose and a laudable set of rules. As we nattered away, Peter pointed out some wild sugar cane growing on the banks. I’d never seen cane before, have you?
When you see the size of sugar cane, you realize how awful cultivating this crop must have been. It is huge and when you see it you understand how much work went into growing, chopping, crushing and refining the juice. In slave times, there were few implements – almost everything was done by hand. In the mills, the cane was fed into rollers and the slightest mistake costs mangled limbs. In fact, the boiling cane created a scalding syrup, which stuck like glue to the misfortune whose arms of legs got splashed by this molten goo.
All this backbreaking work was done by brutalized slaves.
In all, over ten million slaves were taken from Africa to the Caribbean alone. These were just the ones who survived the passage. At least as many again, died horribly en route.
Jamaica was at the centre of a two hundred year financial, economic and trading system called the Atlantic system of the Triangular trade. British and, I suppose, lots of Irish, people were central to this.
The first leg of the trade was British goods were sold to African slave traders. These manufacturing goods would have been guns, nails and gunpowder.
These goods were exchanged for human beings, captured slaves who were then sent on to the Caribbean to work in the plantations. The plantations owners bought the slaves with money they made from selling sugar used to sweeten coffee. Soon after it was brought back from South America, coffee became the drink of choice for the chattering classes of London, Edinburgh and Dublin. 17th and 18th century Dublin was full of coffee houses and salons where the intelligentsia hung out, addicted to sweetened caffeine.
The Caribbean slave islands also bought food from Ireland and Britain because all the cultivated land was given over to this cash crop, sugar, so they imported lots of foodstuffs, salted beef and eventually salted butter. Some of the so-called merchant prince families of Cork had deep 18th and 19th century trading links with the Caribbean. This would not have been unusual because the Caribbean was a crucial corner of triangle trading system.
Slavery was eventually abolished in the 1830s, thanks in no small measure to men like Daniel O’Connell who saw the obvious parallels between slavery and Catholic emancipation here in Ireland. O’Connell was a tireless anti-slavery campaigner. Ultimately, the British commercial class was shamed into abolishing slavery by more and more evidence, produced in independent journals about the brutality of the slave trade.
However, black slaves were merely replaced by the next victims, indentured labour from India. This explains the large Indian populations of the Caribbean islands. In time, this too was phased out but not before thousands of Indians suffered similar, if not quite as horrific, fates. VS Naipaul’s account of the Indian Trinidad community is a good source on this particular exiled tribe.
Like all trades, the slave trade generated huge profits for the countries involved. Some economic historians argue that two hundred years of profits on the back of black slaves gave Britain the capital needed to fuel the industrial revolution and the Empire’s expansion. This allegation is very difficult to quantify but equally difficult to refute, at least, in part.
The brutality, violations, the starvation, the rapes and floggings meant that the Caribbean slaves, unlike those in the Southern State of the USA, actually died quicker than they reproduced. More and more slaves had to be brought from Africa simply to keep the slave populations static. All had to endure a period of “seasoning’ which referred to the torture in the first few weeks when the slaves arrived. “Seasoning” was designed to weed out troublemakers and break resistance. You can only imagine.
The sun was going down on the river and the swarms of mosquitoes were having a field day. We were chatting away, a few of us now, at a fantastic little shack called “Tarzans” at the side of the river eating Conk stew, washed down with cans of Red Stripe. Junior Gong – Bob Marley’s son – was playing in the background, as one of the young Rastas did his best Robbie Keane goal celebration impression, for the benefit of me, the Irish guest.
As I waved to these few lads, maybe eight in all, while the Captain tried to negotiate the current, I thought about the serendipity of life, the luck and the bizarre lottery of it all and how you can never tell who you are going to be, where you’ll be born, in what era into either poverty of privilege?
We headed to towards the village, past shacks and babies running around barefoot. It was nearly dark and we turned into the makeshift jetty. There, the raft was welcomed by a huge billboard of a smiling Usian Bolt, directly under a massive logo of his sponsor for this summers’ Olympics, Digicel.
The Irish are still trading here.
It was time to go home.
We can say and do nothing as others are cast into misfortune.
Calculated misfortune.
No slaves, no pyramids, no woman no cry.
Daniel O’ Connell campaigned for Catholic emancipation, notably in the British parliament. And the Irish have a very iffy record when it comes to slavery in the Windies. William Wilberforce, an Englishman, campaigned for 20 years from 1787 for the abolition of slavery, resulting in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and the abolition of slavery itself in 1833. O’ Connell’s political life didn’t really get going until the 1810s. In 1823, the Anti-Slavery Society was founded in London, with members such as Wilberforce, Joseph Sturge, Thomas Clarkson, Henry Brougham, Elizabeth Heyrick and Jane Smeal, as well as… Read more »
I find it ironic that people in Jamaica talk about slavery & Christianity as if they were both mutually exclusive. How is it that a parallel cannot be drawn by a people so affected by slavery.Christianity as well as other beliefs thrived on slavery & to this day still has written rules governing it.
The only serendipitous thing I’m getting from this piece is that too much rum can have a strange effect on some people.
”In all, more than ten million slaves were taken from Africa to the Caribbean alone.” This is very inaccurate. It should read 10 million were taken to the Americas. 1-2 million died on route. That is the equivalent of totals in major Irish famines. About 5 million went to Brazil alone where they the mortality rate for slaves was far higher than anywhere else. It was a brutal environment. Brazil has the largest population of people of African or partially African descent outside of Africa. Slavery lasted until 1888 there, however the effects live on. There has only been one… Read more »
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Nice total distraction to discuss irrelevant subjects as the world looks forward to economic collapse caused by the same people who financed the slave traders.
International financiers.
The more things change the more things stay the same.
No doubt it is true as Mr McWilliams observes that: “…you can never tell who you are going to be, where you’ll be born, in what era into either poverty of privilege?” But regardless of the era, the challenges facing the people have remained the same. Debt bondage is still regarded as a corner stone of proper economic functioning and as almost a civic duty for people to enter into, that he or she may stand in the proper relationship to the corp/state. All that has changed are the PR skills of the ruling class to engender that such a… Read more »
Henry Makow — a Canada Firster — again informing u that the indentured-slavery is actually to be in perpetuity for u & ur offspring & their offspring … until 1 of ewes all the way finally has the moral courage to WAKE UP ! But, it is not a nice experience “waking urself up” ; Having to dump all those illusions that u are so proud of learning from ur schooling, the main-stream Media [ Radio, TV, & Newsprint, & Movies ], the intelligentsia approved books, & even the internet [ Well, the main-stream stuff & the dis-info stuff (… Read more »
“Democracy and Capitalism stand in opposition to one another.” i agree in general except with this statement. Bad mouthing Capitalism is a ploy of the internationalist, financier. It is to prevent the average person from employing the one method of economic activity that provides the greatest benefit to the most number of people. True capitalism can only operate as the result of thrift and providing the savings that can be deployed to obtain the capital resources required to acquire the plant , equipment and training of the personnel that operate for wages. Our current system relies upon money that is… Read more »
David I haven’t looked in here for a few weeks because of the trolling, although I read your articles. Looking at this thread I estimate that the vast majority of the comments (apart from Adam and perhaps one or two others – and that’s being optimistic) come from one poster. I came across this on another blog in the past(though with a different man of course, and he’s still at it as far as I can tell). In both cases the contributor is, I’d say, manic depressive. If you look at the comments on certain YouTube videos, those of a… Read more »
Hi Adam!
Slavery is something I feel very passionate about.
My little girl is 1/2 Irish, 1/4 Montserratian (some Irish in there too) and 1/4 Black American, meaning she has the remnants of slavery everywhere in her precious genes.
If you really want to wind me up (difficult) that’s my weak spot.
Any thinking person will enjoy this essay by Hugo Salinas Price. He discusses the errors of modern economists in the use of numerical data as against the economic study of the actions of people in making choices of preference. Each leads to widely different conclusions.
currently the decisions of policy makers based on numerical scientific data are driving us all to economic and social oblivion. The coming world will be unrecognizable compared to the generally accepted view points we have today.
http://plata.com.mx/Mplata/articulos/articlesFilt.asp?fiidarticulo=288
This blog is being turned into a ‘man’ playground – seriously, get a grip! This squabble nonsense is just petty. I for one do not think that Coldblow is a troll, clearly there is a conflict of opinion, but that’s what makes these discussions amusing. These troll allegations flying around at the moment are a turn off for anyone parting their precious 10-15minutes in trying to catch up with the blog. It’s simply demeaning for the intelligent reader. David, I appreciate that this blog is censor free, but, maybe consider a ‘mute’ button (https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-mute/) for your readers to drown out… Read more »
Hi Grzegorz, Ref. P.S. I think I agree with you that Ms Le Pen might be a controlled opposition. A bit like neo-Nazis in Germany controlled by BND. In 2 lands even directly run by them. It never seizes to amaze me how little coverage this thing got that : Twice they tried to de=legalise neo-Nazism in Germany AND Twice it turned out you could not because they had been controlled by the state. I think her aim is to focus all debate on immigration without any attempts to reform the whole system ; Socialism is good ; But, only… Read more »
“Conclusion: Since everyone is involved, no one will be identified or accused. The best thing American citizens can do is probably to stay far away from Capitol Hill. Take care of yourself and your family and be prepared for a variety of unfolding scenarios. Nothing is certain but the corruption.”
http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/irs-malfeasance-is-part-of-larger-government-corruption/
The message is repeated. All government and associates are corrupted. Look after yourself as nobody else will.
Hillary Clinton email shocker – wow that is a surprise.
The “spin” is going to be mighty.
The democrats have a tough decision.
The US electorate have an even tougher decision ahead of them.
White Male Supremacy is raising its’ ugly head.
It strikes me that we have kkk lodges, orange lodges etc oh and beaver lodges.
Do the frer masons have too?
May their gods guide them.
NOT ENGAGING Ulster Bank are selling 900 owner occupier mortgages and 2000 investment mortgages that are in arrears to a vulture fund because they say that mortgage holders are not engaging. False financial reporting by Irish banks and the claims of not engaging have never been reported on by the Irish media including some of the print media that think that restructures and writedowns are only for themselves. We know that failed professional Irish bankers completely ignored the basic principles of banking( official 2011 banking report) while they overvalued the debt on land banks by 900%, apartments by 200% and… Read more »
Sorry
The restructured split level mortgage would surely retain the full “asset quality value” on the banks books as the split capital portion is just warehoused till end of term.
Banks are the centre of corrupt activities. enabled by the central banking system and supported by corrupt government and blind regulators.
http://usawatchdog.com/criminal-bankers-threaten-entire-world-economy-helen-chaitman/
Well one more appeal. It has been 6 weeks or more now.
Non of the other avenues to the webmaster seem to be open. I still get no emails of postings.
At the beginning of each essay and it resulting in my first posting, I dutifully tick the box that asks for me to receive the aforementioned postings.
The box promptly disappears and that is the last of it.
There are still no postings to my email.
Please, please, pretty please, has anyone a suggestion as to why this is??
History Channels new series ‘Roots’ looks interesting. Chronicling the history of an African slave sold to America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZwaqFhs9fo