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Thursday, November 17, 2011

Revolution That Failed in Berbice - Torch of Liberation Hoisted by Slaves

Revolution That Failed in Berbice - Torch of Liberation Hoisted by Slaves - Meaning of Earthquakes by Sydney King
“A rebellion is taken to be more or less organised armed resistance against authority with the primary intention of forcing a change of policy, or even of removing individual rulers.
But when the same rebellion takes into its head to bring about, not a change of government but a change of a regime, to smash once and for all the whole basis of relations between a ruler and ruled; to replace the people identified as rulers by a group hitherto identified as ruled, the movement is a revolution.”
So writes Sydney King in this challenging interpretation of the Berbice rebellion which occurred in 1763 when Berbice was under the Dutch. Buxton-born Sydney King is perhaps the most revolutionary figure in Guiana. He was Assistant General-Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party and was detained at Atkinson during the crisis 1953. He subsequently became Secretary of the People’s National Congress, schoolteacher by profession, he is principal of the County High School at Buxton. Buxton-born Sydney King is perhaps the most revolutionary figure in Guiana. He was Assistant General-Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party and was detained at Atkinson during the crisis 1953. He subsequently became Secretary of the People’s National Congress, schoolteacher by profession, he is principal of the County High School at Buxton.

CHALLENGING INTERPRETATION
The Berbice Slave Rebellion was an episode of worldwide historic significance. In order to be of worldwide significance an episode needs only to present new historical qualities that are at all significant. The magnitude of the event is not of the first importance. It is sufficient that in quality the event is a new, or contains a new historical precedent.
Yet, where a small number of human agents are able, all things taken into consideration, to achieve a result that is astonishing to reasonable men, historical magnitude has been produced.
Where a unique clash of forces has taken place, where unique, economic, social, spiritual and emotional factors are present, and then the historical significance cannot be hidden in “gaulin” waist coat pockets. The rising of the Berbice slaves is, on these conditions, a challenge to historians to place a major episode in an obscure country and involving an “obscure” people in its proper historical setting.

FEATURES
The rising of ‘63 took place before the revolt of the thirteen colonies in North America, before the Haitian revolution, a hundred years before the Paris Commune, a hundred and fifty years before the October revolution and nearly two hundred years before the launching of the Cuban perpetual revolution. It contains in embryo features of all these revolutions and it foreshadowed, as many other uprisings have done, some of Lenin’s revolutionary formulations. It could teach lessons to the Haitian slaves, to the Paris Communards, to the Castro guerrillas, the American rebels, and the October Bolsheviks. On the other hand, it is quite distinct from the English Revolution, the French Revolution, and the German Revolution of 1919. An attempt will be made on this bicentenary of the glorious Berbice Rising to put the rebellion in the place due to it in history. The attempt does not profess to say the last word, nor claim complete originality or accuracy. It is an attempt to draw what appears to be fair, human conclusions from the bare naked chronicles that give little help indeed to the writer that dares to interpret and not merely to record.
CONVULSIONS
The Juxtaposition of the Berbice Rising to the other armed explosions of the oppressed, the nearness or the relative historical distance of these uprisings, tell eloquently that the event took place in the context of world convulsions when the established order stood in jeopardy every hour and was to remain so eternally. The spirit of man, awakened by the Reformation, refined by the Renaissance and made vigilant by the industrial revolution was in the quest of liberation. It would be strange indeed, if Africa, the cradle of civilisation, could be untouched by this earthquake of uneasiness. And even if the “slumbering giant” had been drunk with the old wine of isolation, his sons, packed and shipped to the West Indies, so organically a part of the industrial Revolution, could not fail to be sensible of a salient and odious bondage. Slaves could be completely dehumanised, corrupted by terror, denationalised, crammed with self-pity, and self-hate, have the spirit broken to powder so that it ceased sighing; they could be deprived of their gods as they had been deprived of their goods, made to sink, sink, in the suck sand of despair. This undoubtedly happened to slaves, to thousands of slaves, to millions of slaves. But “Cuffy took death to them”

COMPETITION
The economic basis of the slave trade was the practice of capitalism in general and the mercantilist ideology in particular. The whole history of the traffic shows in sharp relief the competition of growing European nationalism. The system of Negro slavery developed with the rise of march antiales ideas and the decay of the system coincided with the decline of mercantilist ideas and the rise of Free Trade.
In 1763 when the Berbice slaves revolted, mercantilism was not dead, but dying. It was still strong enough to crush rebellion. It is disquieting to reflect that the decline of mercantilism did not put an end to the imperialist gunboat. crush rebellion. It is disquieting to reflect that the decline of mercantilism did not put an end to the imperialist gunboat. The Rebellion was an effective challenge to mercantilism in general and to the system of slavery in particular. It predated that greatest challenge of all which was to shake mercantilism to its very foundation, the revolt of the thirteen colonies in North America. A European idea expressed in economic policy, or uneconomic policy, was being challenged in precisely those places where it had been justifying itself. This is one aspect of the historical significance of the Berbice Rising.

PROPERTY
Before drawing the next conclusion, it is necessary to define the West Indian slave as an economic factor of production in his given historical context. He was a slave in so far as he was the property of another, in so far as he utterly lacked rights and surfeited in wrongs, in so far as he worked for nothing, there being no element of contract or consent in the subsistence rations which his master shovelled into him in order to keep up production. But in so far as he constituted the labour force for a capitalist enterprise, in which money was invested for profits, in so far as he was a slave without property of his own, the west Indian slave was a proletarian. He was the infant son of the modern industrial proletarian in one sense, and in another sense he was its father. The rebellion against his owners was not only a rebellion of property against property. It was a rebellion of proletarians against property owners.
There were present all the essential prerequisites of a proletarian revolution, eighty years before the publication of the Communist Manifesto. It was perhaps the first proletarian revolution in the history or capitalism and certainly the first in the western Hemisphere. Again, it is because they were true proletarians that they revolted.
It is necessary to explain for the casual reader the use at times of the term “revolution”
A rebellion is taken to be more or less organised armed resistance against authority with the primary intention of forcing a change of policy, or even of removing individual rulers. But when the same rebellion takes into its head to bring about, not a change of government but a change of a regime, to smash once and for all the whole basis of relations between a ruler and ruled; to replace the people identified as rulers by a group hitherto identified as ruled, the movement is a revolution. That is why it is here claim that the Berbice Rebellion was the first proletarian revolution in the history of capitalism, at least in the Western Hemisphere. This second aspect of the historical significance of the Berbice Rising.

PRODUCTION
Is it necessary to argue this point? In 1763 capitalist productions in agriculture was bloom in the Guiana settlements, as in all the West Indies. The joint stock owners or private owners invested in land, in tools, in slaves, and in equipment and made a profit out of the employment of these factors of production. They could not carry on this production without a dispossessed labour force. It was not merely surplus production, but in the context of a money economy, it was production for profit. It was not factory capitalism, but it was capitalism nevertheless. It was capitalism in the age of mercantilism, and that is what account for the fact that this glaring contradiction of slave labour in the context of capitalism was possible. In the Age of Free Trade capitalism dropped slave labour and began to recruit a labour force that was formally and physically free.

The Berbice slaves revolted against private property when the more advanced European counterparts, precisely because they were free and perhaps more because they were involved in the nation to extent that the Berbice slaves never were, could not conceive of a revolution. Could only vex the system with bitter and spasmodic rebellion?

GREATNESS
When the rebellion began it was perhaps no more than a rebellion against the immediate masters of the insurrectionists. But because they had taken the first step, and because they represented a sentiment that was so widespread among their brethren the uprising became a revolutionary movement against owners of property, for the slaves had come to realise that there could be no turning back after their challenge
When the force of the rebels grew from 150 to 900 and, then twice that number, as greatness of the moment gripped the Africans, and when, as a result things had come to the stage that the territory of Berbice, east of the Berbice River, was in hands of the rebels, when the slave leader could conceive the idea of a Treaty with the Dutch enemy, the Berbice rebellion took on the complexion of a national revolution. Cuffy's Letter to Van Hoogenheim was a declaration of Independence, a powerful claim to self-determination. Cuffy and his partisans were boldly attempting to build a nation.

The rebellion had made them potentially a nation. It forced them to recognise that it was impossible to realise the rights they claimed while they and their oppressors lived on the same territory. They were not a nation when the revolution began, but the realities of the struggle forced them to take up a national position. They could not realise the necessary proletarian aspirations of the uprising outside of the national context. So that the torch of national liberation was raised in the Western Hemisphere by the Berbice slaves. To accuse them of apartheid or of separatism is to forget, that they knew white men only as masters, capitalist, and imperialist oppressors. They showed no desire to expel those white soldiers who had deserted to their ranks and left the ranks of the company officials.
The third aspect of the historical significance of Berbice is the fact that a proletarian rising sought a national tent in order to be free to work out its own salvation. It was the apparent father of national revolutions in the Western Hemisphere.
The question may now be raised whether the revolution had it been let to live, would have pursued what could be identified at that time as proletarian aims and proletarian policy. It is hardly likely that such a course would have been followed. The most likely outcome was, that the slaves, torn as they were from their native environment and confronted with the management of plantations organised in a certain way, would imitate the state organisation of the Dutch West India Company.’
Cuffy had already styled himself, the Dutch governor of Berbice. This is probably contradicted by the history of the Bush Negroes of Surinam, But it appears that the Bush Negroes had escaped from the plantations whereas the Berbice slaves had taken control of them and would have to decide how to organise production. Unless they could very soon make a commercial nation, they might be forced to abandon sugar cultivation and turn to subsistence farming. It is true that 80 years after, the liberated Africans, after the Act of Emancipation, were able to create a new civilisation, the village system, showing a genius for cooperative enterprise. What they would have done if they had the old plantations to manage, considering the example open to them, is a matter of speculation.
The Berbice slaves were extremely resourceful and creative during the ten months that shook Berbice. Its hard core, or party, learning from the failure of ‘62, took the offensive from the very start, adumbrating guerrilla tactics in their use of forest and savannah; They had the enemy on the run. The principle that the defensive is the death of any uprising was clearly understood by them much Moore than? By the Paris commundaries who wanted in as vague a way as the Berbice slaves to change society but “did not want to start a civil war”.
The Berbice rebels took the offensive and overcame plantation after plantation. The Berbice whites were in total disarray. Their wisdom and their forts seemed to avail them nothing. Even after the arrival of the warship “Betsy” from Surinam, the revolutionaries remained on the offensive. When the Africans caught up with the Dutch again they, the Dutch, were concentrated at Plantation Dageraad which soon became the focal point of the war. It seemed to be one of the plantations on which the Dutch could find something of an African base.
In May, the rebels launched an attack on the Dutch, throwing all they had into the battle. Repulsed, the revolutionaries withdrew to their base and reconsidered their strategy. It was now time to throw diplomacy into the war, diplomacy in its best sense. The slave leadership wrote to the Dutch Governor a letter outstanding for its statesmanship and humanity. Cuffy proposed Peace with Honour and at the same time he began to prepare for an all out attack on Dageraad

THE SPLIT
It has happened so many times that an external factor has decided the fate of a movement and has proved to be the life and death of a cause.
When the revolutionary High Command split, doubtless on questions of strategy and tactics, the fate of the revolution, so far as it aimed at controlling the plantations, the property of the capitalists, was already decided by the arrival of the Dutch warships and soldiers. Still, it is possible that the split in the High Command, due in part to the new military situation, put the whole revolutionary movement on the defensive and made it easier for the imperialist troops to crush the rising. The Berbice rebellion has kindred features with the Haitian revolution, because Berbice, like Haiti, was a rising of slaves for rights to which they considered themselves entitled. Berbice had kindred features to the American revolution because Berbice was in effect a challenge to mercantilism and because in its later development it raised the banner of self-determination. It is unlike the American revolution because the revolt of the thirteen colonies was a revolt of property owners. It raised strikingly many of the questions which confronted the Russian proletariat in 1917 and guerrilla fighters the world over then to now.
Official historians of all trends are likely to scoff at many of the claims and judgments made for and in respect of the Berbice Revolution that failed. Disproving them or refuting them, however, may not be an easier matter. It is only to be hoped that
In the interests of the truth, trained historians, and even amateurs like the writer, will pitch into the discussion, with or with polemic and with all heat not unattended by light. May the discussion serve as a serious attempt to give to the Berbicians of ‘63 nothing more and nothing less than the place they have won for themselves in the history of men dying valiantly in order to live?
Source: Revolution…torch of Liberty Hoisted by Slaves: Berbice Slave Rebellion Sunday Chronicle, March 3, 1963: page 13














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