In 1845, the great Black abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass explained that these so-called holidays were “one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave.” On Christmas day of 1521, twenty Africans of the Muslim Wolof people launched that island’s first slave rebellion. Taking advantage of the holiday lull, the Muslims gathered twenty more to their cause and tried to effect their escape. They killed and captured those who tried to stop them and burned plantations as they made their way. The Europeans quickly responded in force and in a few days the rebellion was thwarted. The rebels were hanged along the roadway, their dead bodies serving as a warning to other Africans. On Christmas Day in 1701, fifteen Blacks on the tiny Caribbean Island of Antigua celebrated by rising up and giving the caucasian sugar planter who enslaved them a present to remember: they hacked him to pieces, killed because of the manner he treated his female slaves. The dead Major Samuel Martin was also the Speaker of the Antiguan Assembly. Their rebellion was short-lived, however; they were overpowered by the island’s well-armed militia. And though their dreams of freedom were frustrated, their spirited yuletide example permeated the colonial Caribbean. Our Jamaican brothers and sisters weren’t waiting for Santa either. In 1831, under the command of a Black “house slave” named Samuel Sharpe, they rose up against the white oppressors. A true believer in Jesus, our Baptist Brother Samuel used his insider position to secretly organize a peaceful Christmas strike among his fellow captives in order to win better working conditions. Word leaked out to the whites, who violently responded, turning the peaceful action into a full-scale Christmas rebellion. Sharpe’s forces grew steadily in number, some say to 40,000 and they traversed the island burning down nearly 160 large sugar plantations one by one. Within a week the rebels controlled the entire western interior of Jamaica, including the mountainous regions. The rebels targeted property and not people, as shown by the fact that only 12 whites were killed. But the British responded with both their militia and their navy, and they massacred more than 200 of the freedom-seeking Blacks. 300 more Africans were systematically executed in a horrifying manner, along with Bro. Samuel Sharpe. Now known in Jamaica as the 1831 Christmas Rebellion, it sent shockwaves through Britain, which ultimately decided to abolish slavery, not because of any awakened sympathy or morality, but because the Baptist Bro. Sharpe and his freedom-fighting rebel forces had made slavery too costly and thus unprofitable. Sometimes the white masters would come to the slave quarters to watch the celebration... Later, it became known as Jonkonnu / Junkanoo and made profitable!
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 14:56:10 +0000
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