Today's Society and Its Roots in 'A Terror'

From The Middle Passage by V.S. Naipaul (1960)

So many things in these West Indian territories, I now began to see, speak of slavery. There is slavery in the vegatation. In the sugarcane, brought by Columbus on that second voyage when, to Queen Isabella’s fury, he proposed the enslavement of the Amerindians. In the breadfruit, cheap slave food, three hundred trees of which were taken to St. Vincent by Captain Bligh in 1793 and sold for a thousand pounds, four years after a similar venture had been frustrated by the Bounty mutiny. And just as in the barren British Guiana savannah lands a clump of cashew trees marks the site of an Amerindian village, so in Jamaica a clump of star-apple trees marks the site of a slave provision ground. (Trinidad, with only forty years of slavery, has proportionately far fewer star-apple trees than Jamaica.) There is slavery in the food, in the saltfish still beloved by the islanders. Slavery in the absence of family life, in the laughter in the cinema at films of German concentration camps, in the fondness for terms of racial abuse, in the physical brutality of strong to weak: nowhere in the world are children beaten as savagely as in the West Indies.

West Indians are frightened and ashamed of the past. They know about Christophe and L’Ouverture in Haiti and the Maroons in Jamaica; but they believe that elsewhere slavery was a settled condition, passively accepted through more than two centuries. It is not widely known that in the eighteenth century slave revolts in the Caribbean were as frequent and violent as hurricanes, and that many were defeated only by the treachery of ‘faithful’ slaves. In Trinidad almost nothing is known of the bush-Negroes of Surinam, though their story might promote a recovery of racial pride.

Negro slaves had always been escaping into the bush in Surinam – in the smaller islands there was no such possibility – but the movement did not become general until 1667, in the interval between the British withdrawal and the Dutch occupation. The movement continued throughout the next hundred years, brutality leading to escape, massacres, reprisals, increased brutality. ‘It is felt as a terror,’ an English traveller wrote as late as 1807, ‘to menace a Negro with selling him to a Dutchman,’ and Stedman’s Narrative shows why. ‘The colony of Surinam,’ Stedman wrote, ‘is reeking and dyed with the blood of African negroes,’ and this was no figure of speech. The first object Stedman saw on landing (and sketched for his book) ‘damped’ his pleasure at being in the tropics. It was:

…a young female slave whose only covering was a rag tied round her loins, which, like her skin, was lacerated in several places by the stroke of the whip. The crim which had been committed by this miserable victim of tyranny, was the non-performance of a task to which she was apparently unequal, for which she was sentenced to receive 200 lashes, and to drag, during some months, a chain several yards in length, one end of which was locked round her ankle, and to the other was affixed a weight of at least 100 pounds … I took a draft of the unhappy sufferer.

The lacerated slave with the chain, the artist with his pad: it is a curious scene. One wonders whether there was any local comment, Stedman reports none, and perhaps there was only that amused surprise with the native feels at the exclamation of the tourist. Torture was a commonplace in Surinam and never concealed. Stedman later spoke and gave a few coins to a slave who was chained for life in a furnace room; he sketched a slave who was hung alive by the ribs from an iron hook and left to die.

In the early nineteenth century the book of ‘dear old Stedman’ – the phrase is Kingsley’s – was popular in England for its natural history and for the story of Stedman’s romance with the mulatto slave-girl Joanna, which Kingsley thought ‘one of the sweetest idylls in the English tongue.’ And this popularity, this talk of idylls, is a puzzle; not only because eighteenth-century refinement falls flat today, particularly in someone like Stedman, to whom it does not come easily; but because Stedman’s story is terrifying and in its nauseous catalogue of atrocities resembles accounts of German concentration camps during the last war. Stedman was no abolitionist – he went out to Surinam to help put down the slave rebellion of 1773 – and his work cannot be dismissed as propaganda. He tried hard to display the fine sensibility which was admired at the time – he apologies, for instance, to his ‘delicated readers’ for speaking of lice – and he cannot be accused of sensationalism. Yet one needs a strong stomach to read Stedman today. The Surinam he describes is like one vast concentration camp, with the difference that visitors were welcome to look round and make notes and sketches. The slave-owner had less on his conscience than the concentration camp commandant: the world was divided into black and white, Christian and heathen. White might conceivably be expected to show some scruples in his relations with black; but the Christian had no such inhibition in his relations with the heathen. In fairness to the Dutch, however, the earlier quotation should be given whole: ‘It is felt as a terror to menance a Negro with selling him to a Dutchman. The Dutchman, however, has a like terror in reserve, and threatens to sell his slave to a free negro.’