The Caribbean branch of the Toronto-based Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) this week welcomed British Prime Minister Tony Blair's comments on the horrors of slavery, saying he has done much more for the cause than "our own" Black-led governments in the region on the issue. Maxie Fox, a spokesman for the GAC formed in Barbados in 2002, said the GAC and other Afro organizations have been trying for years to persuade regional governments to "have a discourse" on slavery, its effects on Blacks and even reparations, but only Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo, a Hindu, has seen it fit to acknowledge correspondence.
Reviews Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and slaves; Keith Albert Sandiford's Cultural politics of sugar; Doris Y. Kadish's Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World; C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins
(Special from The North Star News) - The Caribbean Community Secretariat, an organization representing 15 Caribbean countries in a common market, soon will present a plan to Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Spain concerning reparations for the Transatlantic slave trade. The Caribbean countries that are members of CARICOM are: Antigua and Barbuda, The Baha mas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago. The Caribbean was the scene of a number of slave revolts. They included work slowdowns, sabotage of plantation production and sometimes suicide. Some slaves escaped and joined maroons, or communities of escaped slaves.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
197 p., Focusing on slave revolts that took place in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, and in Jamaica in 1831--32, identifies four key aspects in British abolitionist propaganda regarding Caribbean slavery: the denial that antislavery activism prompted slave revolts, the attempt to understand and recount slave uprisings from the slaves' perspectives, the portrayal of slave rebels as victims of armed suppressors and as agents of the antislavery movement, and the presentation of revolts as a rationale against the continuance of slavery.
