JAMAICA | Commemorating Sam Sharpe, Jamaica's first labour leader, hanged on May 23,1832

MONTEGO BAY Jamaica, May 23, 2023 -  On the 23rd of May, Jamaicans will commemorate Labour Day, when we pay homage to the workers of Jamaica who have built the nation brick by brick and have made our nation one of the greatest little countries in the world whose size belies its strength and its capability.

One hundred and ninety two years ago, May 23, 1832, A man who was to become one of Jamaica’s National Heroes, Samuel Sharpe, was hanged on the gallows on this date, in the square in Montego Bay that was later to bear his name, when he dared to lead enslaved workers in a fight to be compensated for the work they were being forced to do.

Sam Sharpe’s martyrdom was also symbolic in relation to the millions of enslaved Africans who were brought to Jamaica by the British planters and summarily worked to death on the sugar plantations.  They were replaced by more enslaved Africans who were again killed by the strain of the back breaking plantation work dedicated to the building of the British empire.

Professor H. Orlando Patterson extrapolates that over a period of 183 years, there were 5,731,302 missing enslaved Africans in Jamaica in 1830, as a result of physical mass genocide, extermination,  and ethnocide inflicted by the white planters on the Jamaican enslaved population.

This he said was the result of, not only what he called social death and ethnocide but what he described as , physical mass genocide, extermination, inflicted by the white planters on the Jamaican slave population. 

He painted a picture where there was mass rape of the women by the planter class, pointing out that within three months of landing in Jamaica, the deracinated women were subjected to venereal diseases of some kind, passed on by the white farmers.

This, of course, affected their ability to bear children, and when they did, there was a high incidence of infant mortality. Ethnocide, he calls it. Where the Jamaican planters pursued a demographic strategy of preventing births thus effecting cultural genocide and mental harm to the Jamaican enslaved population.

The result of this was that  the enslaved workers in western Jamaica crafted a plan for industrial action in the form of a strike just after the Christmas holidays in 1831.

The plan was that after the 27th of December the slaves would refuse to work until there was a commitment from the plantation owners that they would be paid. 

However, if the planters refused to give the assurance that the slaves would begin to receive wages, any attempt to force them to go back to work would be met with violent resistance.

On the night of  December 27, 1831, when it became obvious that the planters were not relenting, the Kensington estate was set on fire.

While there are conflicting accounts as to who started that fire, whether the enslaved girl or John Dunbar, the resident slave doctor (medicine man or myalist) at the slave hospital, there is no confusion that the insurrection was led by Sam Sharpe.

That night, at the Start of the 1831/32 Emancipation War, when Kensington torch of freedom was lit to signal the start of the war (which gave rise to Emancipation), Palmyra to the East Saluted!  Then Falmouth Trelawny Responded! The emancipation war, the ‘Sam Sharpe War’ had begun.

When the war started some 900 great houses were in Jamaica.  When it ended, only 15 remained.

Within 10 days, the war was over but its impact was monumental. It had the effect of countering the rumour by the West India Lobby, composed of absentee landowners and powerful London Merchants, who claimed that slaves in Jamaica did not want slavery to be abolished as they would be very unhappy if they were not owned by anyone!

On April 19, 1832, the following sentence, signed by John Coates, Robert Thomas Downer and H. A. Plummer, was handed down against a man who all Jamaica should remember today, December 26, amidst the Christmas and Kwanzaa celebrations:

“The King against Samuel Sharpe- Tried and found guilty the 19th day of April 1832 -

Sentence – That the said Negro man slave named Samuel Sharpe be taken from hence to the place from whence he came and from thence to the place of Execution at such time and place as shall be appointed by His Excellency the Governor and there to be hanged by the neck until he be dead -

Just over a month later, on May 23, 1832, that execution was carried out. A proud and defiant Sam Sharpe was publicly hanged in the Montego Bay Square, that now bears his name,  fulfilling words he uttered: “I would rather die on yonder gallows than live one more day of slavery”. 

He had accepted death on the scaffold as freedom from the unbearable and repugnant miseries of slavery and as the only means by which freedom was attainable.

Sharpe had paid the ultimate price for his revolutionary thoughts and actions.

Sharpe was executed for leading the first known industrial action in Jamaica. The enslaved workers first had a strike in support of their need to be paid, and when that did not work, they decided to fight in support of their wages.

The war for emancipation from chattel enslavement and British terrorism that Sharpe led, was a major one in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean.

A petition from enslavers to the Jamaica House of Assembly in 1832 described what they called “rebellion” but we know was a war, as one “unparalleled in the history of the colony, whether for depth of design or the extent of misery and ruin which it has entailed on the inhabitants”.

The legacy of Sam Sharpe and the 1831 uprising was instrumental in precipitating the historic vote in the British House of Commons in August 1833, leading to the passage of the Slave Emancipation Act. This landmark legislation marked the beginning of the end for slavery within the British Commonwealth.

Those “inhabitants” to which the petitioners referred, were plantation owners and other enslavers whose wealth was threatened by African freedom.

They could not stop the tide of Emancipation, though. Africans before and After Sharpe, used every strategy at their disposal to ensure the defeat of enslavers.

Professor Verene A. Shepherd, a renowned social historian and head of the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies, Mona, has emphasized the monumental scale of the war led by Sam Sharpe.

Describing the uprising as a significant milestone in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean, Shepherd points out that the conflict was more than a mere rebellion; it was a war for emancipation from chattel enslavement and British terrorism.

The 1832 petition from enslavers to the Jamaica House of Assembly, which they described as a rebellion, indeed marked a turning point in the struggle for emancipation.

She puts it this way: “ In Jamaica, calls for a shift from the monarchical system of government to a Republic is seen as mere symbolism rather than a final act of emancipation. It is time for us to lose our “intellectual timidity” as Hilary Beckles has said, and complete the mission of our ancestors; otherwise it would appear as if Daddy Sharpe and his army of revolutionaries died in vain and that his elevation to the status of National Hero of Jamaica was “mere symbolism.”

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