PRESENTED BY:ANISA MALAYHEATHER RAMLALREBECCA RAMDEENNIALA SEUDATSINGH

RESPONSES OF THE CARIBBEAN PEOPLE TO

OPPRESSION AND GENOCIDE

OPPRESSIONBefore we can understand the responses of the Caribbean people that occurred because of oppression we must first understand the meaning of the word. So…what is oppression?

Oppression, simply put, is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner.

HOW WERE CARIBBEAN PEOPLE OPPRESSED?In order to understand the true depth of the oppression experienced by Caribbean People, it is vital that slavery, which is believed to be at the helm of oppression, be addressed. Europeans first came into contact with the Caribbean after Columbus's journeys in 1492, 1496 and 1498. The desire for expansion and trade led to the settlement of the colonies. The indigenous peoples, mostly peaceful Tainos and warlike Caribs, proved to be unsuitable for slave labor in the newly formed plantations, and they were quickly and brutally annihilated.

HOW WERE CARIBBEAN PEOPLE OPPRESSED? (CONT.)The slave trade which had already begun on the West Coast of Africa provided the labor needed for the sugar, coffee, cotton and cocoa plantations in the Caribbean to thrive; and the period from 1496 to 1838 saw Africans flogged and tortured in an effort to assimilate them into the plantation economy. The British were the first to attempt to abolish slavery in the Caribbean during the early 19th century, but complete emancipation was not achieved until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (effective 1834). Despite the population's freedom from slavery, living conditions on the islands did not improve much over the next several decades.

More advance European weaponry gave European slave masters superiority thus they dominated the slaves.

The Africans were treated harshly, overworked, beaten, tortured, killed at the whim of the Europeans.

African were regarded as chattel, i.e. property, not HUMAN, and once born into slavery could not escape.

Christianizing the slaves were apart of the process.

GENOCIDE AND OPPRESSION: SLAVERY

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE GENOCIDE OF THE TAINO NATION.

Christopher Columbus is well known for discovering the New World and is seen as a hero of medieval exploration by many scholars today. However, what many text books fail to mention is the fact that he set in motion what would become probably the worst case of genocide imposed on one nation of human beings by another.

Obsessed with finding a sea rout to Asia and the Far East, Columbus set out on his ‘Enterprise of the Indies’ in 1492, backed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.  However, instead of finding a rout to the rich trade in the East, Columbus and his crew discovered the New World, and soon set about subjugating and murdering the local population and removing the vast wealth from the land.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE GENOCIDE OF THE TAINO NATION.A small colony was established in Hispaniola consisting of thirty-nine of his crew, the rest returned to Spain with Columbus along with gold, spices and natives taken as slaves to be given as gifts for his royal patrons.

The following year, he led a second expedition comprising of seventeen large ships and one and half thousand new colonists, arriving in the Americas a month later.  By the time he got back to Hispaniola, his men there had been slaughtered by the locals and a second colony was founded.

Columbus punished the local tribe, known as the Taino, severely.  He enslaved many and executed many more; by 1496, the population had been reduced from as many as eight million to around three million.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE GENOCIDE OF THE TAINO NATION.On his third expedition he exploring the region then returned to Hispaniola in 1498 where he had left his brothers in charge, Diego and Bartholomew.  Conditions there were in decline so he stepped up the terror campaign against the Taino, ruling with an iron hand causing resentment from the colonists and local chiefs alike.  Complaints of his brutality got back to the Spanish monarchs and in 1500 they sent a Chief Justice to bring him and his brothers back to Spain in chains.

However he was released on his arrival and allowed a fourth and final expedition, which he conducted with the same brutality as previous ones.  By the time he finally left in 1504, the Taino had been reduced to around 100,000 people arguably making Columbus a war criminal by today’s standards and  guilty of committing some of the worst atrocities against another race in history.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND THE GENOCIDE OF THE TAINO NATION.Some were killed directly as punishments for ‘crimes’ such as not paying tribute to the invaders.  Many who could not or would not pay had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death.  Columbus and his men are documented by the chronicles of Las Casas, know as Brev’sima relaci—n,  to have partaken in mass hangings, roasting people on spits, burnings at the stake and even hacking young children to death and feeding them to dogs as punishment for the most minor of crimes. The Spanish masters massacred the natives, sometimes hundreds at a time for sport, making bets on who could split a man in two, or cut a head off in one blow.

Defenders of Columbus argue that a large amount of the victims were killed by disease however they fail to recognize that most of these diseases were caused by poor living conditions in forced labour camps.  Deprived of their crops and fields, many fell prey to dysentery and typhus, were worked to death or were left to starve to death. After his death his terrible legacy would live on, by 1514, a census showed only 22,000 Taino remained alive.  By 1542 there were only 200 remaining and after they were considered extinct, as was becoming more and more the case throughout the Caribbean basin. In around fifty years Columbus and those that followed him had all but eliminated a population of around fifteen million people.  This process was just the start and an estimated 100 million people were wiped out by Europeans in the so called ‘civilisation’ of the Western Hemisphere making the discovery of the New World the start of what was arguably the worst case of mass genocide in history

The Amerindians under the system of the encomienda and the Africans under the process of slavery, were viewed as economic tools that aided the production process albeit at a low cost. Both communities suffered but they did not necessarily suffer in silence. Their disagreement with their subjugation was manifested in several practices.

RESISTANCE AND REVOLT TO EUROPEAN FORMS OF

PRODUCTION

RESISTANCE IN THE CARIBBEANThe resistance culture of the Caribbean has played pivotal roles in the emancipation of enslaved Africans and the fight of the underclass. It is this culture which heralds people like Sam Sharpe, Miss Lou, Paul Bogle, Marcus Garvey, Uriah Butler, Maurice Bishop, and Walter Rodney.

One of the primary motivating forces behind early resistance culture among African-Caribbeans, was the search for an African identity.

The Maroons in Jamaica, St. Kitts, and Barbados, for example, waged 50 years of resistance against plantation owners, and formed their own communities with their own leaders.In addition to the relentless pressure on the sugar plantations by the Maroons, there were numerous other rebellions. Toussaint L'ouverture led Haiti to independence in a war against the French. Sam Sharpe led a plantation uprising in 1831 protesting the harsh treatment under slavery.

Paul Bogle led the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865. All these individuals were protesting dehumanization and deculturation brought about by the European Slave Trade.Even after the Africans were freed, they continued their resistance movement, refusing to work for former slave owners in an attempt to destroy the plantation economy. Africans waged their resistance to slavery and cultural domination on other fronts. They fought back through music to express anger and frustration. The blaring of the abeng (cow horn) was a call to take up arms.

THE ABENG

 Drumming was used to dispel the forces perpetrating self-hatred and a rejection of Africa. And though the drumming was forbidden, Africans resisted vehemently. They adapted European music to suit their own needs, being forced to participate in it.

Reggae music is also at the root of protest culture in Jamaica, as well as some parts of the Caribbean, England, and North America. It is largely the Jamaican populace in those countries that help to maintain the use of reggae in protesting racism and other forms of social injustice in England, Canada, and the United States.When they participated in Carnival processions, Africans performed stick-fighting rituals. The Africans also used their sticks to provide rhythmic sound. To the slave-owners this was unsettling, as the sticks were effective weapons. This was soon banned, and the Africans had to find other forms of rhythm. By hammering the surfaces of drums and dividing them to produce different sounds, the steel band was born. To the African, the steel drum made a powerful political statement - it symbolized African creativity, power, and ownership.

African resistance to enslavement had a huge impact on the abolition movement. From the moment of capture to arrival in the Americas, Africans sought ways to escape and to fight back. The authorities responded to these acts through violence and repression, and the constant threat of uprisings or their actual occurrence meant there was an almost continuous state of war in the Caribbean at the end of the 18th century.

In the Caribbean and Americas sabotage of machinery and equipment, poisonings, feigning illness, killing livestock, infanticide and full blown organised uprisings were ways in which enslaved Africans resisted their condition. The enslaved Africans in St Domingue (today’s Haiti) took control of the island in 1791 and defeated the French, British and Spanish armies during a bloody 12 year war..

REVOLT BY THE CARIBBEAN PEOPLE

Escaped slaves in Jamaica and Surinam established communities in the mountainous regions of their islands and waged guerrilla wars against the authorities. Other insurrections like Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, and Fedon’s in Grenada in 1795, inspired other enslaved Africans to rebel.

Unlike the revolts of slaves, which could affect large numbers of slaves and could involve several plantations, the revolts of indentured workers had slightly different characteristics. Generally speaking, the uprisings of indentured workers were short-lived, small in scale and did not spread to other plantations, revealing the effectiveness of isolation, harsh plantation discipline, and hierarchical structures. Although similar conditions had existed under slavery, perhaps the fact that these workers had, for the most part, willingly signed contracts of labour, and felt that they lacked the leverage or justification for complaint, prevented the large-scale rebellions experienced during the era of slavery.

Those revolts that did occur were often the result of workers having their existing conditions reduced in some way, such as reduced wages or direct assault of a co-worker, and did not occur in support of demands for new gains. Any protest, regardless of the underlying reason, was put down severely by plantation owners.

Even if the workers were granted some or all of their demands, which was the case only through the intervention of the Immigration Department, the ringleaders would still be singled out for punishment.

Any protest, regardless of the underlying reason, was put down severely by plantation owners. Even if the workers were granted some or all of their demands, which was the case only through the intervention of the Immigration Department, the ringleaders would still be singled out for punishment.

The largest plantation revolt occurred in 1913 in Demerara (Jamaica), at the plantation known as Rose Hall. Although the conflict was ruled to be the result of broken faith and repeated failures by the manager to explain himself to his workers, when trouble began it was the Indians who were held responsible. The workers protested on their being denied the four days holiday which had been promised them at the end of the grinding season by refusing to go to work the next day. Although they returned to work the day after, seven of the leaders of the rebellion were summoned to court.

The revolt, though suppressed, demonstrated the potential for solidarity of indentured estate workers, potential which was especially visible in the Caribbean as well as in Fiji, in the South Pacific, and Natal, Africa. In the latter region, the efforts of Mohandras Ghandi a young lawyer, were instrumental in drawing attention to the oppression and exploitation suffered by Indian labourers there. Generally, the organisation and success of revolts and strikes improved with the ending of indenture, when workers became more informed of their rights and began organising the first trade unions in the 1930s. Working-class Africans in Jamaica responded to oppression and ill treatment, not with further violence, but, after a series of protests in 1859, with a spiritual and moral regeneration movement, known as the Great Revival.

DEVELOPMENT OF PEASANT GROUPS

The emergence of a peasant class in the 1830s in sum of the smaller islands of the Caribbean occurred as the plantation system declined with former sugar workers becoming ‘Peasants’. These peasants (in Grenada and Jamaica in particular) became prosperous and their exports were increasing thus the question of land tenure became an issue which could have been regarded as a problem that would affect the development of the peasants.

It is by obtaining land that workers were able to free themselves from exploitation of the plantation, thereby becoming economically independent and able to produce food for themselves, the local market as well as the export market . The peasants often linked the cultivation of their land with activities such as fishing, shop-keeping and casual estate work. This combination of tasks had reduced the amount of labour expended in agricultural production.