Dear Editor,
The recent visit of Charles III with the demands for reparations for slavery evoked the horror of their treatment as chattel and their efforts to recover their humanity through periodic rebellions. While most remember the great rebellions of Berbice in 1763 under the Dutch and Demerara in 1823 under the British, those monumental struggles can obscure the smaller uprisings that also challenged slavery – and the calculated brutality to suppress them. I invoke two that centred on my native village of Uitvlugt, which deserve a place in that memory. Not so incidentally, I want to point out that the owner of Plantation Uitvlugt, founded in 1767, was JBCF Boode and not Ignatius Charles Bourda as GuySuCo annoyingly insists.
The first uprising was in 1772 and the second, which I will describe, was in 1789 and was organised by seven bombas (drivers) from the three contiguous plantations east of Uitvlugt – Vrees en Hoop (later Stewartville), Leonora and Groenveld – indicating they were all in communication with each other. Evidently, the trigger was the recent demotion of one of them, which added to the pressures of life on the coffee plantations that had only been carved out of the west coast Atlantic swamps in the last two decades through the creation of dams in the front and back with canals on the sides connected by cross canals.
On the evening of September 20–21, some thirty to forty enslaved people from the three plantations attacked Uitvlugt, joining participants from there all armed with their machetes. They killed some white overseers but Boode, who was having dinner with his plantation director, was alerted and, with their pistols, the two held off the rebels from coming upstairs.
In one account taken from Petrus Gerardus Duker, the Dutch colonial fiscal responsible for investigating and prosecuting the insurgents, “The insurgents briefly retreated and killed three of the slaves high up in the plantation hierarchy—the crop supervisor (tuinbaas), the scribe, and boiling supervisor (stookbaas). The second and third waves of attack on the house also proved unsuccessful. One of Boode’s own bombas cunningly tried to acquire weapons, by asking his master for guns to defend the estate. His request was denied, however, and a stalemate ensued.” The testimony must be read as that of a suppressor defending his own actions.
Duker reported that the attackers sought weapons and ammunition. Among those subsequently implicated were three of Uitvlugt’s enslaved drivers, or bombas. Soldiers, sailors, armed colonists and most significantly, approximately sixty Indigenous Arawaks and Caribs were mobilized and pursued fugitives through the woods and along the plantation backdams. What is clear was there were Maroons behind the backdams who had escaped their enslavement and were living independently. Some of the rebels were captured while others were shot. Duker’s account provides no complete number killed in these hunting expeditions.
The judicial reckoning was calculatedly precise and terrible; designed to send the message that any attempt to challenge the slave order, would be dealt with condignly. Of forty-four prisoners eventually captured and held at Stabroek, six were acquitted. Three women were whipped and returned to their enslavers while two women and a man were whipped and condemned to living in chains for the rest of their lives.
On October 30 and 31, twelve prisoners were hanged and twenty were broken alive on the wheel. In the latter process, the executioner shattered their limbs with a heavy iron bar and they were then attached to large wooden wheels for display. All thirty-two were then decapitated, their heads displayed on spikes, while thousands of enslaved people were compelled to witness the punishment. Duker described the proceedings as conducted with the utmost “regularity and decency.” This last phrase exposes the moral world of the plantation regime – public torture could be represented as orderly government; resistance to enslavement became the crime requiring exemplary punishment.
Uitvlugt’s history therefore includes more than plantation ownership and production of coffee gradually transitioning to sugar in the early 19th century. It includes people who attempted to overthrow the power that claimed to own them, and an administration determined to make their deaths a warning to others. The rebellions of 1763 and 1823 were the largest landmarks in a longer struggle in what would become British Guiana.
Between them stood other acts of collective resistance—and other scaffolds. Remembering 1789 restores those people to the history of freedom in Guyana and reminds us that reparations from the Dutch must also be pursued.
Sincerely,
Ravi Dev
Discussion