“In order to examine the particular forms of resistance during slavery, we will consider the material under two headings: passive resistance and violent resistance. Passive resistance had various forms, from simply lagging on the job to outright running away from the plantation; another form was the pretense of being ill with an undiagnosable disease. But the most extreme form of passive resistance was that of suicide. This form was especially common among the Ibos of Nigeria, who preferred to take their lives rather than have the slave masters take them from them by degree. Violent resistance was carried out both on an individual and a collective level. Despite the fact that the legal penalty for even imagining the death of the master was a violent death to the slave, many of them did not only imagine the death of their master but actually brought it about. In this case the African sorcerer became prominent in administering deadly poison. The slaves who were trained in the herbal lore of Africa managed to use this technique rather successfully during the period of slavery, as the record will show. Historically, however, the most significant form of violence was collective violence. This was carried out by two different groups. First were the Maroons, or runaway slaves, who congregated in the mountain fastness of certain parts of the New World slave nations. An example of extensive maronage can be found in Jamaica where hundreds of Maroons fought the British in bloody warfare from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. In fact, it was not until Britain signed a peace treaty with them giving them perpetual freedom, that peace was finally restored. Another example comes from Brazil, where the Republic of Palmares was created by runaway slaves and lasted for seventy years. The presence of these Blacks in the forest caused no little harassment and bloodshed for the slave masters. A final example is the so-called Bush Negro of Surinam, who took to the forest in the seventeenth century and was not discovered until the first half of this century. However, the most bloody examples of collective violence come from the spontaneous uprising of plantation slaves in which the lives and properties of both masters and slaves were indiscriminately destroyed. This particular mode of resistance is important in three respects: first, its continuousness; second, its large-scale nature; and third, its effect on the final liberation of the slaves from bondage. As was already said, hardly a year passed from the time of the entrance of the slaves in the New World to the nineteenth century without a major slave insurrection. As for the large-scale nature of the rebellions, this varied from country to country; and in the United States of America we have the greatest exception to the rule. The ratio of whites to Blacks in the United States was always in favor of the whites. Consequently the largest rebellion in the United States, the Nat Turner Rebellion, which numbered less than one hundred slaves, was mild when compared to those of Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti and South America. To cite Jamaica as an example, the average number of slaves involved in revolts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was approximately four hundred. The three most serious revolts on that island—the Maroon war of 1735-40, the 1760 Rebellion and the Sam Sharpe Rebellion of 1831—each involved over a thousand slaves. And, when we turn to Haiti, we no longer see rebellion but, instead, war of a most savage sort. This leads us to the third point, and that is the effect of these rebellions on the liberation of the slaves. When we speak of liberation, we must give the first nod to Haiti, where for the first time in history a slave population fought successfully against their enslavers. Here, under the leadership of the Africans Boukman, Toussaint LOuverture, Dessalines and Christophe, the Black slaves stopped the army of Napoleon and proved that they not only loved liberty, but that they could die for it. Haiti became the second independent nation in the New World and has remained a Black republic to this day. And, turning to the English colonies, the massive revolts there were one of the major factors contributing to the downfall of the plantation system. For many years scholars have speculated that the collapse of the slave system was primarily the work of the humanitarian movement of Great Britain; however, scholars such as Eric Williams of Trinidad contend that one of the main reasons was that the system of production by slaves had become less profitable during the second half of the slave period. And to this may be added that it became less profitable because of the frequency and gravity of collective resistance on the part of the slaves. Slavery was fought not only physically but spiritually.” Leonard E. Barrett “Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion” Page 57
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 17:03:26 +0000
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