DO YOU REMEMBER? — Kim Johnson

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Reading Time 9 mins

August 06, 2019

BDN Introduction

When I first came across the photograph of the slave it felt white-hot with meaning, as if it would burn The Observer page on which it was printed. For years I’ve kept that newspaper among my working files, but always face down. Neither the subject nor the photographer was named, only the date and the place: 1863, a Louisiana cotton plantation. And the fact that the man was a slave who had been flogged by his “owner”.

Photographs of suffering and oppression are commonplace, have been for a long time. Dachau, Tennessee, Biafra, Hanoi, Bangladesh, right down to today-Rwanda, Bosnia, Ethiopia. Despite the anaesthetic effect of surfeit, they still can evoke moral outrage.

And then there are those which pierce you, personally, in your heart.
Susan Sontag, the Jewish-American writer, describes this. “One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany,” she says in her collection of essays On Photography. “For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belson and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1. Nothing I have ever seen-in photographs or in real life-ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was 12) and after.”

On the Holocaust Monument in Israel, dedicated to the victims of the Nazis, is the inscription: “This must never happen again.”

We in the Caribbean have been more ambivalent towards the horror and shame that was plantation slavery. The sons and daughters of both slaves and slave-owners must live together, and indeed have gone far towards building a civilisation from the charnel house of history. Our monument is ourselves, our society and culture. Its inscription: “Do you remember the days of slavery?”

Memory can transport you through time. A fleeting glance at the photograph pulls me back into an earlier incomprehension. Adult explanations, resolutions, theories, all the understanding I’ve dearly earned over the years, scatter like a flock of little birds.

I become a little boy sitting in a darkened cinema with my brother Lee, who is seven years older. Showing is an historical movie of the Ben Hur genre, in which some slaves are being whipped. My nose is snotty and tears pour from my eyes.

“I eh taking you theatre again if you going to behave so stupid, eh,” says Lee.

Fast forward. Many years later in UWI, Jamaica, I am obliged to attend
lectures in West Indian history. The lecturer, a Canadian man friendly in the way they can be, describes the cruelty of the Middle Passage and slavery in the Caribbean. I walk out, never to return. But there is no escape. CLR James’ Black Jacobins must be read:

“There was no ingenuity that fear or a depraved imagination could devise which has not been employed… irons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slaves eating the sugarcane, the iron collar. Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim. Salt, pepper citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears, and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense. Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them; fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their excrement, drink their urine, and lick the saliva of other slaves. One colonist was known in moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into their flesh.”

Later in the year Burning Spear gave a concert on campus. He sang the hit from his latest album, Garvey’s Ghost, which was on the radio as often as Bob Marley’s Natty Dread. “Do you remember the days of slavery?” he chanted in a voice as ancient as the Blue Mountains and which still echoes in my heart today: “Try to remember the days of slavery.” It is a memory that changes over time and, according to UWI Professor of History Barry Higman, finds “its most complete expression in the celebration of the anniversary of emancipation.”

On July 31, 1833 the Abolition Act was passed by the British Parliament to
end slavery at midnight in a year’s time. The date had been determined by
Jamaican slave owners, because August 1 was the formal end of the sugar crop in Jamaica. After that the hurricane season doubled shipping insurance.

As a result the celebration of Emancipation Day in Jamaica was coloured
by the older Crop Over festivities at which whites danced reels and country
dances with slave girls and Africans danced to the goombay drum. So the white upper classes took a leading role in the 1838 Emancipation Day celebrations, especially those whites in dissenting churches, in Jamaica. The Lord Bishop exhorted the ex-slaves to “labour diligently”. The following day thousands went to the races; fireworks were let off, cannons were discharged and houses were decorated with flags and flowers.

Trinidad was different. After the period of “apprenticeship” ended in 1938
the Trinidad Auxiliary Anti-Slavery Society (Tass) held public dinners almost every August 1 for two decades.

Tass was comprised of ambitious men, coloured rather than black. They
stressed their identity with the ex-slaves, however, and their August 1 dinners were occasions for political speeches attacking government policies. Consequently, they were vilified by the conservative press for being “hot-headed demagogues”, “itinerant pedagogues”, “vile-tempered fanatics”.

“Let the emancipated rejoice by all means and celebrate the anniversary
of their freedom as they list,” declared the Port of Spain Gazette when the
Government declared August 1, 1842 a public holiday, “but we do not think it a case to authorise the suspension or interruption of public business.”

Two years later an anonymous policeman wrote to the paper remembering the days of slavery. “The labourer was a labourer, and instead of idling away the greater part of his time in dancing and drinking rum, attending radical meetings and keeping seven wives, he wrought for his living by the sweat of his brow,” he rhapsodised. “Those were the days when the island was not as yet cursed by the prophets and the sons of prophets and all the ragtail and bobtail of pseudo-philanthropy.”

Baptist churches organised a few August 1 meetings down South, but
overall the ex-slaves of Trinidad, unlike those in Tobago, remained unimpressed. For them, Carnival and its Canboulay procession were the true celebration of freedom. The fishermen of Carenage held Emancipation celebrations, singing and dancing and drinking for three days, much to the disgust of the parish cur*. And even that stopped after 1883 when the priest formally pronounced anathema on the venue: “cette case du diable”.

“African slavery played a major role in Trinidad for a very short period, effectively 50 years…perhaps the briefest experience of African slavery of any plantation colony in the New World,” suggests UWI historian Bridget Brereton in explanation. Besides, there were many Africans here who didn’t consider themselves “fuss augus niggers”, having been freed generations before 1834.

As for the whites, they sat silently hoping that slavery-and perhaps
Emancipation-would soon be forgotten. And by 1860 it seemed to have been. That year the black scholar John Jacob Thomas complained bitterly of “the guilty reticence with which, year after year, we sneak through the 24 significant hours of the First of August, which should have been the great commemorative day.”

In the 1880s politics intervened again. The constitutional Reform Movement, the activities of radical Chief Justice John Gorrie, JJ Thomas’ polemics with English writers Thomas Carlysle and Anthony Froude, all served to galvanise young black and coloured lawyers, teachers and civil servants. As the 1888 jubilee approached (a holiday in Tobago but not Trinidad), public debates were initiated on slavery, race relations, progress since 1838.

The young radicals organised a jubilee banquet, and the older liberals did so too, whereas conservatives of all races preached amnesia. “Why should a few noisy agitators remind respectable people of the misfortunes of their ancestors,” asked one black correspondent, “and give fresh vitality to sentiments of hostility that are fast sinking into oblivion?” One white newspaper editor pointed out that the young radicals were coloured men as much descended from Europe as Africa, from slave owners as slaves.

As ever the poor and the black, at least in Port of Spain, stayed away.
Outside, however, in San Fernando, Arima, Arouca, Chatham, Couva, California, Tortuga, Mayo, they marked the day with drumming and dancing in the streets. In Mayaro an 80-year-old woman recalled the days of slavery.

Thereafter the commemoration of slavery’s demise languished in Trinidad
(in Tobago it persisted long after) as the young coloured and black professionals found other outlets for their political ambitions, and August 1 became a celebration of Columbus’ arrival in 1498-Discovery Day-until another half-century had elapsed.

Like the 1880s the 1930s were a time of economic depression and cultural and political resurgence. Significantly, it was largely through the lobbying of an Afro-Chinese cultural and social activist, Patrick Jones the pyrotechnist, who sang calypsoes under the sobriquet of Chinee Patrick, that the memory of slavery was revived and a holiday granted on August 1, 1933.

But it wasn’t the centenary of the partial emancipation of the slaves (1834)
or their full emancipation (1838) but of the Abolition Act which was passed in 1833, and of the death of William Wilberforce which took place in the same month, both of which were celebrated in Britain, according to historian Seymor Drescher, “as an imperial triumph in behalf of humanity”.

Even so, Trinidadians were ambivalent. Fireworks were organised for
Discovery Day and an essay competition held on the life of Wilberforce. One
store advertised Discovery Day Bargains (a neat ladies’ dark brown shoe with medium heels-$1.50), while the Trinidad Electric Company offered to let “peace, contentment and freedom reign in the home when you use electrical appliances” (the new turbo-vaporizer rids you of your cold overnight).

The churches got into the act too. On Sunday 23 in La Brea the Methodists claimed “Methodism covered itself with glory in the struggle for freedom.” At the CIC cathedral Rev Fr O’Dea claimed that “the abolition of slavery was due primarily and chiefly to the teaching and influence of the Catholic Church down the ages.”

The Anglican Vicar General EJ Holt in the Trinity Cathedral noted that “the
(anti-slavery) movement revived the rich idea of a Catholic Church even though they, the originators narrowed down the meaning of catholicity.” Besides, he continued, “(under slavery) many women, children and aged people were well provided for, and many of the planters were kind-hearted men who treated their slaves generously.”

Unlike the jubilee, however, the centenary attracted the masses because it
was promoted as a Carnival. From morning bands paraded the streets and mas and calypso competitions were held before 10,000 spectators at the Oval. Atilla, Lion, Beginner, Radio, Executor and other bards mounted a three-act Emancipation Drama.

Meanwhile an old Baptist woman walked the streets of the city ringing a
bell and calling down fire and brimstone for the Carnivalesque desecration of the day. And just before noon, the rains came.

For three hours the city was flooded. The St Ann’s River burst its banks
and swept away houses and their contents from Belmont down. Harpe Place to Nelson Street was hit especially hard. From St James to the Oval was almost waist-deep. It was the worst flood in living memory. Hundreds lost homes and all their belongings, and 58 were compensated sums ranging from one to ten dollars.

Thereafter Emancipation Day was forgotten for another half-century, during which CLR James and Eric Williams reinterpreted the history of slavery and emancipation in The Black Jacobins and Capitalism and Slavery respectively. James was awarded a doctorate in Hull, Wilberforce’s hometown, in 1983, and William’s book was the subject of a conference in 1984. Two years later the government of Trinidad and Tobago declared August 1 a public holiday to mark the abolition of slavery.

Kim Johnson is currently the Director of the Carnival Institute of Trinidad and Tobago, and is considered by some to be the foremost historian of pan. In the 1990s he worked as a journalist. In 2001 he was awarded a PhD in sociology from UWI, Mona and thereafter as a Senior Research Fellow at The Academy for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs at The University of Trinidad and Tobago. In 2011 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga Prize for excellence in Arts & letters.