It is at this time of the year that we celebrate our emancipation from slavery, but what has amazed me over the years is that some Anguillians are of the view that this island was never a slave society. And there are others who do not like to admit it, either through ignorance or because of a deliberate effort to deny that part of their history. The question we need to ask ourselves is: If Anguilla did not have slaves, how did we all get here? If Anguilla did not have slaves, why is our population of predominantly African descent? The answer is: it is predominantly of African descent, because our ancestors were brought here as slaves, from Africa, to work on the sugar and other plantations owned by white English planters. And according to our slave register, there were 2,354 slaves on this island at the time of emancipation on Monday 1st August 1834.
We must be thankful for emancipation because during slavery our ancestors were not supposed to be people but rather property for the production of wealth. They were like animals and equipment which could be passed on from person to person. Listen to this excerpt from the will of our Deputy Governor John Richardson dated 9th January 1739: “I give unto Catharine Red in consideration of several good deeds done for me one negroe boy and one negroe wench to be put to the wash tub . . .”. And now an excerpt from the will of John Carter, a white planter, dated 21st July 1795: “. . . I give unto my Daughter Mary Harragin, a Negroe Wench Called Dinah . . . [and] unto my Wife Ruth Carter a Negroe Girl Called Rebecca . . . to dispose of as she may think Proper . . .”. That’s the way the white planters regarded our ancestors: as animals and pieces of equipment which could be passed on from person to person. Our ancestors were also used for the payment of debt. If one planter owed another planter money, and could not find the cash to pay him, he could have paid the debt with slaves. Incidentally, at the time of the writing of the American constitution, in 1776, an African slave was considered three-fifths of a man. And it was not until the late 1830s that the Church of Rome considered a slave a human being.
The fact that our ancestors were not regarded as people was also borne out by their treatment before the courts. The courts, which consisted of all white magistrates and jurors, were merciless when it came to sentencing slaves. I will give you one example of the harshness of their treatment to highlight the injustice, savagery and humiliation that our forefathers endured in a most repressive institution of forced labour. On 22nd September 1820 six slaves: Jacob Brookes, Scipio Brookes, London Brookes, Miranda Brookes, Bacchus Derrick and Scipio Bryan were found guilty, by an all white jury, of the burglary of a dwelling house belonging to a white woman, and were sentenced to death. Three days later, on 25th September 1820, all six of them were hanged at Crocus Bay, between 10.00 am and 12 noon. Imagine that: five men and a woman were hanged like dogs within the space of two hours, all because they had broken into the house of a white woman and had stolen some of her belongings.
During slavery, Anguillian society was stratified such that there was a small white class (who owned the wealth) at the top, a coloured (light-skinned) class, comprising the offspring and descendants of white slave masters and black women, in the middle, and the mass of black slaves at the bottom. But then there were basically two classes of slaves: the field slaves who worked in the cane and cotton fields, and the house slaves who worked in the master’s house or around the house. The field slaves toiled in the fields from morning till evening doing what I would refer to as hard labour with lashes on their backs in case their work slowed down because of fatigue or other physical reasons. On the other hand, the house slaves had it much easier and were certainly treated much better than the field slaves. Their closeness to the master gave them certain privileges and one way of “keeping good” with the master, of “keeping in the master’s good book”, was to carry news on the field slaves; and if there was no news to carry, they made up some to carry.
Having looked briefly at some of the key components of slavery as it existed in its heyday, I will now answer the question: Did the Emancipation Act bring an end to slavery in Anguilla in 1834? The answer is yes and no. Firstly, the yes answer. On Monday 1st August 1834 some 2,354 Anguillians were emancipated from physical slavery. They experienced emancipation – experienced freedom – from forced labour, physical bondage, from chains around their ankles and from the crack of whips on their backs. For the first time in their lives they were regarded as human beings, and were free to rebuild their lives. Despite the harsh economic times, they nonetheless laid the groundwork upon which present and future generations of Anguillians could build. Very importantly, they did not abandon their island in the 1840s, as the British Government had proposed, but stayed here and held on to the rock so that we could have a place to call home.
Secondly, the no answer. While emancipation in 1834 brought an end to physical slavery, it did not bring an end to mental slavery because many of us, to this day, continue to think the way our ancestors did when they were in physical bondage. Physical slavery has gone but mental slavery is very much alive. Mental slavery refers to our inability to see our world – to see our social, economic and political environment – other than through the eyes of our enslaved ancestors.
Most definitely, physical slavery: the chains, the whips, are gone, but the way we think continues to be reflective of the days when our forebears were in chains. In other words, we are still slaves mentally, and now listen to the evidence. In today’s Anguilla many of us still see ourselves as being inferior to the people who enslaved us. We still see the white race as superior and the black race as inferior. We continue to carry an inferiority complex which was planted during physical slavery. A consequence of feeling inferior is that we often hate ourselves and those of our colour. We despise our own black colour which we call low colour. Many of us still talk about people of high colour – the whiter the colour the higher the colour – and we forget that our colour is beautiful also. Such thinking is a classic case of mental slavery which is often exhibited when our people, particularly our women, bleach their skin to make it lighter and to feel more acceptable.
I say further that when we black people say that we have bad hair, and that the hair of the white man is good hair, then that is also evidence of mental slavery. Even today, many of us think that our hair is bad – we hate it – because it is not straight – and that the straighter the hair the better. It is to get their hair as straight as that of the whites that our women resort to using the ironing comb or some kinds of hair-straight. And I want to say to all of you in this church this morning that: all hair is good. Love yours. The purpose of the hair on our heads is to protect the head, and the organs contained therein, from excessive hot or excessive cold temperatures. Hair is a temperature regulator. We must thank God for it and always remember that there is nothing called bad hair, and that when we hate our hair, when we hate our colour, we hate ourselves.
Additional evidence that we are mentally enslaved could be seen at our work places particularly in the hotel sector. We have a house slave vs field slave situation where the workers closest to the managers, who won the favour of the managers, carry news on their co-workers and make life very difficult for them. And if there is no news to carry, then they make up some to carry. This practice which created conflict between the field slaves and the house slaves, during chattel slavery, worked to the masters’ advantage. For example, it kept the slaves divided so that they could not unite to fight against their masters. Today, this house slave-field slave mentality weakens the bargaining power of Anguillian workers for higher wages and better working conditions. It is even adversely affecting the creation of an effective labour union where those workers closest to management are reluctant to join ranks with their co-workers.
Also, there are situations in our hotels where some Anguillians, having kept close to expatriate managers, are promoted and eventually end up giving their co-workers hell. The fact that this is still happening in our society – that workers allow themselves to be used by some expatriate managers to make life difficult for their co-workers – is further proof of the existence of mental slavery. At this point, I want to refer to a picture I have in my museum which shows a slave with a long whip in hand walking behind his white master as they make their rounds on the plantation. One day, an Anguillian visitor to the museum looked at the picture and said to me: “Mr Petty, this is the same thing that is happening in Anguilla today. Some expatriate managers and dem are using we black people to beat one another – they have us doing their dirty work for them”. When I reflected on what he said, I had to agree that there was some truth in it.
The prevalence of mental slavery in our island is also demonstrated by the fact that Anguillian society is not united as it should be – our people are not very supportive of one another. For example, some of them are glad when they learn that a fellow Anguillian has lost his job or that the bank has taken his house or car. Indeed, jealousy of one another is widespread. A well-known local saying, something we hear almost everyday is that, we, Anguillians, don’t like to see another Anguillian succeed, and that we are always willing to pull one another down. In this regard, I quote a writer in The Anguillian newspaper of 25th July 2014 who asked: “When do we [Anguillians] retire our crab in the barrel mentality and start uplifting each other?” Surely, we pull down, rather than uplift. In the same issue of the paper another writer, in suggesting why Chinese businesses are flourishing, and Anguillian businesses are not, said that: “Anguillians shopped by the Chinese stores because they don’t like to see other Anguillians prosper”. Those comments give some credence to the widely held view that Anguillians continue to be enslaved mentally. So too is the fact that we have a habit of not thinking for ourselves. Actually, our history tells us that our ancestors were not supposed to be thinkers. Their masters thought for them for they were not supposed to be human. They were to be hewers of wood and carriers of water who needed no thinking skills or even reading skills.
One way of keeping the slaves subordinate was to keep them ignorant – deny them access to education. This was the practice throughout the British West Indies. The white planters and planter-governments considered it dangerous to have an educated slave population. Actually, the educating of slaves was regarded as a crime. F. R. Augier et al., in their book The Making of the West Indies, wrote about a Governor (in the eighteenth century) who declared, “If you ever teach a negro to read and I hear about it I will banish you from the colony immediately”.
A long-term consequence of that situation is that, today, many Anguillians do not like to read. They prefer hearsay and rumour than reading for themselves. Our Honourable Chief Minister, Hubert Hughes, has a habit of saying that if you want to hide something from an Anguillian all you have to do is to put it in a book. If he could make that remark in this day and age, in twenty-first century Anguilla, it tells us that we have not advanced, as much as we should have, since the chains were removed from around the ankles of our ancestors. Those chains now need to be removed from around our brains. Having said that, I recall attending a political meeting, in 1993, when one of our politicians spoke as follows: “They say the Anguilla Democratic Party loves the white man. We love the white man . . . Without the white man, Anguilla is nowhere . . .”. There is nothing wrong in saying that we love the white man, because we must love all of God’s people, but to say that without the white man “Anguilla is nowhere” suggests a lack of confidence in the abilities of we black people. If we are to develop as a proud and independent people we have to move beyond that type of negative thinking about ourselves.
Having shown that we have not been emancipated mentally, I hasten to stress that mental emancipation is critical to our development as a people with pride, dignity, respect for ourselves and confidence in ourselves and in our abilities. In short, we need to remove the mental shackles that inhibit our development. How do we remove those shackles? In advising us to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, the legendary Bob Marley told us, in song, that “none but ourselves can free our minds!” And how do we free our minds? Through education. Education will, among other things, give us a better appreciation of from whence we came, of our history, and in the process help us to learn to love ourselves and to live in unity. Education will upgrade our mental faculties, improve our intellect, and help us to discover and devise ways and means of maximising our innovative and creative talents and skills, in order to elevate socially, economically and politically. A critical component of the education process must be a culture of reading, the lack of which kept our forefathers ignorant and insubordinate.
There is little doubt that the consequences of mental slavery negatively impact the wellbeing of Anguillian society. Our emancipation from it may very well be a long way off but whenever it comes, with God’s help, Anguilla will be a stronger, more caring and cohesive society.
