Slave Rebellions

& the Black Radical Tradition

SOC3703 Social Movements, Conflict & Change
Week 14
Cedric Robinson (1940–2016)
• Professor in the Department of Black
Studies and the Department of Political
Science at the University of California,
Santa Barbara

• A key theoretical figure pushing to

radicalise Black Studies, focusing on
racism, the political economy of
capitalism, black identity &
decolonisation

• Activist as a student in late 1960s and

participating in the Afro-Americal
Association, which later attracted Huey
P. Newton & became the Black Panther
Party
 “Black radicalism, consequently, cannot be understood
within the particular context of its genesis. It is not a
variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen
to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to
an oppression emergent from the immediate
determinants of European development in the modern
era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven
into the interstices of European social life from the
inception of Western civilization”
–Cedric Robinson
 ‘Racial Capitalism’
• ‘Slave’ — origin of term

• Capitalism was racial because racism already permeated European

societies — race begins in Europe

• Irish, Jews, Roma, Slavs, victims of colonialism & slavery within Europe

• Capitalism begins with expropriation and dispossession of the

commons

• North American settlers need to control indigenous people, unruly

white working class (initially in bondage), and coerced African labour

• Freeing whites and giving them land takes them on-side. Racism a
tool to control whites. State violence enough for non-whites.
 The importance of African
Culture
• ‘the cargoes of labourers also contained African cultures, critical
mixtures and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology
and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. … African labor
brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on
it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension.’

• ‘… meant also the transfer of … African presumptions of the

organization and significance of social structure; African codes
embodying historical consciousness and social experience; and
African ideological and behavioral constructions for the resolution
of the inevitable conflict between the actual and the normative.’

• Reappropriation of religion and biblical references, e.g. the Israelites

• With this in mind…

• Watch documentary about the Haitian Revolution (1791–

1804)

• Discuss & debate of some of its aspects in light of Robinson’s

arguments
 Haitian Revolution — Some
questions

• How important was the role of….

• Voodoo?
• The French Revolution?
• Strategy?

• What does ‘freedom’ look like?

 Maroonage
• Barbara Kopytoff: “During the era of slavery, communities of maroons,
or escaped slaves, sprang up throughout the New World. Wherever
there were slave plantations, there was resistance in the form of
runaways and slave revolts; and wherever mountains, swamps, or
forests permitted the escaped slaves to gather, they formed
communities.

• ‘…. by the beginning of the seventeenth century, independent Black

communities with legal standing in the eyes of state agents had begun
to appear'

• ‘In Brazil, which we have seen dominated the Portuguese slave trade,
the maroon settlements (quilombos) that began in the sixteenth
century would extend into the next.’
http://qilombo.org/about/
 Obeah
• ‘To the unassimilated … Obeah was both a genuine religion and a potent source of medicine.
Obeah (like the Haitian Voodoo, or the Jamaican variant, Myalism, or Trinidadian Shango)
sought ritualistic links with the spirit world beyond the shadows and the sacred trees, providing
a mystical sense of continuity between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born.’

• ‘In the British West Indies, the elimination of obeah had become an official preoccupation. —
And for good reason. Obeah men and women were frequently the source of ideology for the
slave rebellions’

• ‘Obeah functioned largely in the numerous rebellions of the slaves. This was particularly the
case with the obeah-men from the Gold Coast. . . . In the plotting of these rebellions the
obeah-man was essential in administering oaths of secrecy, and, in cases, distributing fetishes
which were supposed to immunize the insurgents from the arms of the whites’

• ‘obeah … was never extinguished. It continued its mutational adaptation and development in
Jamaica (and elsewhere) over the centuries, successively manifesting itself in the societies of
Myalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Pocomania movement of the late
nineteenth, and the Rastafarians of the present’
 Black Resistance in North
America
• Stono Uprising (1739) S. Carolina. ‘A group of slaves struck a violent but abortive blow for
liberation which resulted in the deaths of more than sixty people. Fewer than twenty-five
white lives were taken, and property damage was localized, but the episode represented a
new dimension in overt resistance.’

• Nat Turner rebellion (1831) Southampton County, Virginia. His confession http://
docsouth.unc.edu/neh/turner/turner.html
• Full or references to prophesies, divine inspiration, signs in the sky, miracles
• ‘Ques. Do you not find yourself mistaken now? Ans. Was not Christ crucified. And by signs in
the heavens that it would make known to me when I should commence the great work—and
until the first sign appeared, I should conceal it from the knowledge of men—And on the
appearance of the sign, (the eclipse of the sun last February) I should arise and prepare
myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons. And immediately on the sign appearing
in the heavens, the seal was removed from my lips, and I communicated the great work laid
out for me to do, to four in whom I had the greatest confidence, (Henry, Hark, Nelson, and
Sam)--It was intended by us to have begun the work of death on the 4th July last’
• rebel slaves killed from 55 to 65 people
 The Haitian Revolution
• ‘voodoo, which James termed "the medium of the conspiracy" (of
1791), had also inspired earlier maroon revolts, the most important of
which had occurred barely thirty years before under the guide of
Mackandel; two of the Revolution's first leaders were maroons:
Boukman "a fugitive slave from Jamaica," and Jean Francois ”who had
spent the last few years prior to 1791 as a maroon”;'

• ‘The maroons, it would seem, were an integral part of the disparate

elements that crystallized into the Haitian Revolution. But they had
been party to the genesis of a pariah nation, a Black republic that, in
the first years of the nineteenth century, threatened the slave societies
that were its neighbors and confounded the heirs to the more recent
racial ideology. Haiti's maroons were part of an unacceptable entity.’
 Black Brazil
• ‘It was Yoruba who were the basis for the urban revolt that broke out in Bahia in April 1830: ‘A
number of Yorubas broke into the hardware stores, from which they took arms and ammunition,
proceeded then to the arming of some hundred more Negroes, and with this considerable band,
attacked the police station of Soledade in one of the city's suburbs.’

• ‘The great revolt of 1835 in Bahia, Ramos continues, was primarily a Hausa revolt and
consequently Islamic in inspiration. "Their aggressiveness was a direct social heritage from the
century old wars of religion which had assured the spread of Islam in Africa. ...The preponderant
cause, let it be repeated, was religious.”’

• ‘[But] … sources were biased by the presumption that "every Muslim was a rebel and every rebel a
Muslim.” "The Male-led revolt of 1835," Kent concludes, "will be understood in all of its aspects only
through a most minute study of data relating to the intra-African relations within Bahia itself.”'

• “The mightiest guarantee for the security of large Brazilian towns is the incompatibility of various
African nations for if they ever overlook the enmity which naturally disunites them, those of
Agomes will become brothers with the Nagos, the Geges with the Aussas, the Tapas with Sentys,
and in this way the great and inevitable peril will darken and devastate Brazil. And, there is no
doubt that misfortune can bring about the brotherhood of the unfortunate.”
 Resistance in the
British West Indies
• ‘In 1815, a parliamentary campaign resulted in the first Order-in-Council for the Registry. The registration
of slaves could now proceed in the Crown colonies (those without assemblies), and colonial governors
would encourage colonial assemblies to enact their own registration procedures. The planters, however,
recognized the Registry for what it was: an initiative to destroy the slave system."Four months into 1816,
in Barbados, it became clear that the Africans also recognized the import of the Registry”'

• ‘“The rebellion broke out with shocking suddenness on Easter Sunday night, 14 April 1816, at a time
when the slaves were free from work and had ample opportunities for organization under cover of the
permitted festivities. Cane-field and cane-trash houses were fired as beacons in the south-eastern
parishes, particularly St. Philip, one of the driest areas, with the highest ratio of slaves to whites. Up to
seventy estates were affected. . . . Only 2 whites were killed in the fighting but probably about loo slaves,
with a further 144 executed, 170 deported, and innumerable floggings. Roaming slaves were shot on
sight and Negro houses burned. . . . Captives were commonly tortured. . . . Convicted rebels were
publicly executed in different parts of the island and their bodies-sometimes just their heads-in many
cases exposed on their home estates.”’

• ‘The Africans who participated in what they called the Bussa Rebellion knew the situation differently from
the governor. They had the "Mingo" revolution (Haiti) as their model, their source of aid, and they knew
their benefactor, Great Britain, required their active assistance in the struggle against slavery.’
 Jamaica
• Three large and immediately imposing volumes, originally amassed by the Colonial Office concerning this
event, rest in Britain's Public Records Office at Kew Gardens. They contain the official records from Jamaica
of the trials of 626 men and women who took part in the "Slave Rebellion of 1831”.

• The influence of Sharpe and his Baptist co-conspirators, … was largely confined to those slaves whose
conversion to Christianity had prepared them for passive resistance and sacrifice. Some slaves within that
tradition, however, found such a position unacceptable. They chose instead armed revolt. Still others relied
on the older tradition among them, the one that had sustained rebellion and marronage.

• They chose to forego passive resistance and banded together to form the Black Regiment. Their model it
would appear was drawn from the British West India Regiments organized between 1808 and 1815 but by
now largely disbanded. … The West India Regiments had fought against the Napoleonic armies in the West
Indies (in some instances Blacks had commanded white troops)

• Most of the estates involved in the rebellion were neither part of the rebels' rudimentary military
organization, nor organized for passive resistance. Their rebellion consisted chiefly in the destruction of
white property, and a brief heady disregard for routine combined with assertions of freedom.

• many of them ended up like David Atkinson, "the Shell Blower," whose trial disposition read: "Hanged by
the Neck, til he is dead, dead, dead.” Just how many can never be known. But the official parish returns
were horrible enough: 626 tried, 312 executed, 300 flogged, imprisoned for life or transported.
 The Nature of the Black Radical
Tradition – Cedric Robinson

• Let us read aloud and discuss some key quotes from his
argument