General Background
Various groups are found in the ethnic composition of the
Caribbean but none is as demographically dominant as the one formed by people of African descent. They were brought to the West Indies as slaves to replace the Arawaks. The context of the colonization of the West Indies by Spain contained, from the beginning, the political directive of using the Indians as a slave labor force to harvest the riches of the
islands. The Arawaks, however, had a very high rate of mortality from suicide, back braking slave labor, massacres and the lack of immune resistance to European diseases like measles, influenza and small pox. One epidemic of small pox, for example, killed 200.000 Arawaks of Hispagnola in the early Fifteenhundreds. When the Arawaks inhabitants of an island disappeared, there was the possibility of replacing them by importing Indian labor from another island. One example of
this system of replacement was the deportation of the Lucayans of the Bahamas. Between 1500 and 1520, the total Lucayan population which was about 40.000 was carried off to work in the gold mines, the pearl fisheries of other parts of the West Indies. The importation of the African slaves was less cost effective than the utilization of the local Arawaks population. It might not have been necessary, to introduce the African Slave
in the Caribbean, if the the global ecosystem (the Arawaks included) were able to resist the biologic and political assault created by the Spanish, and keep providing the human labor force necessary to the harvesting of the goods/commodities that were shipped to Spain. When the Arawaks population started to disappear within a few years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the lack of man power fermented the idea of the
introduction of the African slaves. Gradually, the importation of the African Slaves, which, around the year 1502, was only a logistical alternative, became an operational necessity
The first group of African slaves were brought to the West Indies around 1503 in the Island of Hispagnola ( today Haiti and Dominican Republic) .
At that time, the Spanish colonist objected to their introduction in Hispagnola. They thought that the black slaves could corrupt
the good nature of the Indians and push them into revolt. Through an interdiction from Charles V, the king of Spain, the importation of African slaves was stopped. However, because the Indian population was disappearing very fast and because of the persistent intervention of Friar Bartholomew de Las Cassas, the protector of the Indians, the Spanish king lifted the interdiction on the importation of the slaves to the West Indies. The importation resumed in 1517
At first, They were not taken directly from Africa but from the slave population of Spain. They were called the Ladinos.
The existence of African slaves in Spain and also in Portugal prior to their arrival in the New world makes us understand that the subsequent massive extraction of African people done during the slave trade was just a natural evolution of the relation between Europe and Africa. As a matter of fact, the triangle of
historical events formed by the accidental discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus, the subjugation and elimination of the natives and their replacement by the Africans is better understood once one learns about the historical actions of Henry the navigator, Prince of Portugal.
Prince Henry dispatched several expeditions to Africa. He hoped to find a sea route to the Orient and also lots of gold. For centuries gold objects from sub-Saharan Africa had made
their way to Europe. Some Portuguese even believed that the objects came from a "River of Gold."
In 1441, two of Henry's captains, Antam Gonclaves and Nuno Tristao, set out, separately, to Cape Bianco on the western coast of Africa. To the south of the Cape they came across a market run by black Muslims dressed in white robes and turbans. The two captains received a small amount of gold dust. The Portuguese crew also seized twelve black Africans to take
back to Portugal, not as slaves, but as exhibits to show Prince Henry. (These would not be Portugal's first African slaves.)
The new captives included a local chief who spoke Arabic. The chief negotiated his own release, the terms of which were that if he and a boy from his family were taken back to their homeland and released, they would provide other black slaves in exchange.
In 1442, Antam Goncalves sailed back to Cape Bianco, then
returned with more gold dust and ten black Africans. The following year, Portuguese explorers returned from Africa with nearly thirty slaves.
Within ten years, around 1453, thousands of slaves had been transported by sea to Portugal and the Portuguese Islands.
The voyage of Columbus which happened fifty years after the introduction of the African to Europe was part of the context of colonization of the rest of the world and its transformation,
along with the natives, into a natural resource of Europe. Once we understanding this context, it becomes easy to realizes that the subjugation of the Indians was part of the central directive of the colonization, that their dispossession not only of themselves, as human beings, but also of their right on the land was part of the governing principle of the conquest and the subsequent bequeathal of the land of the New world to Spain by the Pope.
The replacement of the Indians by the African was nothing but the replacement of one commodity/tool by another. The African was being transformed gradually into the human tool of the European. Wherever the European went, he brought his tool with him. If the local tools were efficient and resistant to the demands of the projected labor, the familiar tools were not necessary but if they happened not to be able to resist to the
wear and tears of labor, or simply become useless, they would be replaced. It is therefore not an accident that once the Indians started showing signs of being useless as tools of the Spanish they were replaced by the familiar human tool of Europe, the African slave.
The first African slave was introduced to the Caribbean/America some 60 years after the first capture of an African by the Portugueses and only 11 years after Columbus landed somewhere in the Bahamas..
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Sugar cane and the sweet tooth of Europe
The destiny of the African slave in the West Indies will be tightly
linked, for the next 300 years, to a plant introduced by Christopher Columbus in his second voyage. That plant is the sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum)
Sugarcane Sugarcane, or Saccharum Officinarum, is a grass plant that grows
naturally in tropical areas. Its stalk contains a sweet juice from which sugar can be extracted. Believed to be native to New Guinea, sugarcane can now be found in parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Central, South, and North America. It is grown by planting "seed cane," or pieces of sugarcane stalk that germinate and produce new sugarcane plants. Generally, at least three annual crops can be harvested from a single planting, the
original plant cane crop plus two or three additional cuttings, called "ratoon" crops.
Sugarcane can grow to tremendous heights. Some modern experimental varieties have exceeded 20 feet, but heights of between six and nine feet are the norm.
Prior to the colonization, Sugarcane was cultivated in the Portuguese colonies by African Slaves. The Spanish did not pursue the cultivation of sugar cane with the same vigor than the English and the French colonist.
The Spanish were mainly pursuing gold and considered each island that had no gold as an "isla inutile"
The history of the years of massive colonial prosperity of the West Indies, specially in (English) Jamaica and (French) StDomingue ( today Haiti) is centered around the economic unit of production which was the sugar cane plantation.
The key element of labor in the sugarcane plantation was the African slave. The flow of slave to the West Indies which was
at first a trickle became a flood in the 18th century. At that time, an increase of the demand for sugar in Europe triggered the astronomic growth of its production by the West Indies. This increase of production was not possible without an augmentation of the work input of the slaves. Therefore, a direct consequence of the huge demand for sugar in Europe was a geometric increase of the African population of the West Indies. At some point, around the time of the French
revolution, in 1789, the ratio between black and white people in the West Indies was 15 to 1. BACK TO THE TOP
The Slave as a Commodity
The African slaves were brought to the Caribbean in slave ships
who departed from Europe to go the Africa. From Africa, they went to the New World to deliver their slave cargo, and from the new world they took a cargo of sugar and several other products like coffee and cotton to Europe. This is called the triangular commerce.
Slaves embarkation
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to see a larger version
In Africa, the slaves were acquired through direct capture and exchanges with the slave traders of the continent. .As the slave commerce flourished, the slaves were kept in slave forts on the
west coast of Africa. From there, they were loaded on the slave ships.
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THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
The middle passage, as it was called at the time, was done under conditions that were the most humiliating to human beings. The slaves were attached by chains to one another in the lower portion of the ship. Everyone of them was chained to the boat and had to lie in his urine and feces.
Slave transport from Africa
to the American continent
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to see a larger version
For some slaves, the middle passage took sometimes up to three months because the slave ships had to go to several area
in Africa to get the slaves and the supplies necessary for the voyage . To have a feel for the middle passage, one has to try to see with the eyes of ones imagination the cavernous dark hall of a slave ship and to let ones mind create the persistent stench caused by the mixture of sweat, urine and feces.
Slaves in the middle passage BACK TO THE TOP
THE SLAVE MARKET AND THE WEALTH OF THE PLANTATION OWNER
When the slave ship reached the Caribbean, the slaves were sold by auction, like cattle, on slave markets. Going to the slave market to acquire some healthy slaves to increase or
replenish the stock was part of the management of the plantation by its owner. The more slaves a plantation owner had the more prestige he had in the community and in the world. In fact the more healthy and skillful slave a plantation had the greater was its capacity to produce goods and to enrich its owner
Slavery was a very profitable business that generated some great fortunes for the slave traders, the ships owners, the
colonial companies that manage the transfer of commodity to Europe and the plantation owners. The plantation and slave owners of the Caribbean were very rich. Depending on the climate of the Island, the plantation could export a wide variety of products like hide, tallow, dye wood, indigo, cocoa, cotton and spices. However, it was mainly sugar that powered the wealth of the "rich Creole" that went to Europe to flaunt his new wealth. Sugar profits built impressive town houses in London
and bath in Paris, Nantes and Bordeaux. In the colonies the plantation owners lived in magnificent master houses that were built for the comfort of the landlord and his guests. Once such house is the the great house of the Dallas plantation in Jamaica. The plantation and the great house belonged to Alexander Dallas who migrated to the United states in the 18th Century and became secretary of the treasury. His son, George Mifflin
Dallas, was vice president during the Polk administration. The city of Dallas, in the State of Texas, was named for him.
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Slaves auction
BACK TO THE TOP INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION OF SLAVERY, TRAINING AND MANAGEMENT OF SLAVES
The intellectual foundation of the management of the slaves by
the owner can be found in Aristotle's Politics. According to Aristotle, the slave was a tool of the master much like the instruments used to tilt the land or the animals used to pull them. By writing this text, Aristotle was, to our knowledge, the first, in recorded human history, to address the question of the human use of other human beings. Aristotle system of management of the property and the slaves rested on the
assumption that the slaves were subhuman who did not have the high intellectual ability of a person like himself who was a philosopher, a physician and pioneer in the investigation of several sciences. History would prove that he was gravely mistaken.
The slave owners of the west Indies and of the Americas in general believed that Africans were an inferior race whose sole purpose was to be enslaved by the white man.
Slaves branding
Based on this idea, the plantation owners demanded absolute obedience from the slaves and enforced this demand with some extreme forms of punishment. Much like a beast of burden, the slave was trained to obey and, must importantly, to understand that he or she existed for the soul purpose to serve the master.
\Slaves beating
However efficient the training of slave was, it did not prevent
the revolt of slaves all over American continent. By looking at the succession of slaves revolt in Caribbean and in the rest of the American continent, one can say that as an institution, an economic system of production and a form of utilization of human by other human beings to produce goods, slavery seems to contain, within itself, the element of its own destruction. This element is the humanity of the slave which is the key to the
entropy factor that powers the revolt of the slave
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DYNAMIC OF PRODUCTION AND THE ENTROPY OF SLAVERY
The first slave revolt in the Caribbean happened in 1522 on the plantations of Don Diego Columbus, the son of the Christopher Columbus, who was restored by the King Charles V to the possession of the titles and privileges of his father. Since that time, through one form or another of passive or active resistance, until the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, the slaves have resisted against slavery. The most widely spread
form of active resistance was the escape from the plantations. Gradually this created several organized groups of marooned slaves in several island but most notably in the English colony of Jamaica and in French colony St. Domingue (Haiti). The passive forms of resistance included suicide, infanticide and self mutilation.
The outbreak of violence by the slaves of the Caribbean and their prolonged passive resistance against slavery proved the
assertion of Norbert Winner and Hegel that you cannot successfully enslaved eternally an other organism of your own species. One could even use the resources of thermodynamics to prove that the coercion of human beings to produce goods in slavery is not only hazardous to the health of the master, who runs the risk of being killed by his slaves, but, most importantly, is a tremendous waste of human potential.
To frame the master/slave relation in a thermodynamic model, we will consider the slave as the source/unit of energy which is used by the master to produce a particular orderly activity/work which is W. We will also see each slave as source of resistance to work/order, an agent of entropy in the general machinery of the system.
Human beings commit themselves voluntarily to a particular work agenda because of established individual and collective
motivational goals that are rooted in the imperative of personal survivor. In slavery, the key element is the high jack of the imperative of survivor of the slave by the master. As a matter of fact, the free human being who becomes a slave loses the possession of himself/herself as a tool dedicated to the promotion of his/her personal right to exist.
As a captive whose life belongs to the master, the slave has two choices. He could either work under the directive of the master
or accept the preordained sentence of punishment or death. Under those circumstances, the destruction of slavery itself as an institution, the escape from the plantation, the sabotage of the production, the killing of the master or his representatives become the necessary means for the slave to recapture his freedom.
Those means and the underlying imperative of freedom make the slave an agent of the increase of disorder and of the ultimate
destruction of the production system. That force of disorder, which tends to destroy any established order and return any energetic ensemble to a probabilistic system where the initial governing condition will prevail, is Entropy.
The initial condition which governs humanity and tends to destroy any coercive system which deprives people of self governance of their existence is FREEDOM. Human being may accept temporarily to survive by trading freedom for food and
shelter but ultimately they will tend to return to their initial condition of self governance and attempt to destroy the oppressive system. Being based on the absolute lack of self governance by the slave, slavery generates the highest quantity of natural human resistance to coercive order and therefore the highest level of entropy.
Through the work of the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, we learned that in the utilization of energy to accomplish a particular
work the more we increase the work the more we increase the dispersion or lost of energy which he called entropy. The increase of Entropy should naturally leads to a chaotic situation which will destroyed the prevailing order. The equation set forth by Boltzmann to resume this situation is: S = KlogW.
S representing Entropy is proportional to K ( the Boltzmann constant) multiply by log W representing the logarithm of the work produced or projected.
The concept of Entropy work well inside physics and biology. Applying it to the study of slavery is new and risky. It does not work well inside the traditional disciplines of sociology or economics but it could yield some results if we use it inside a discipline that use the biologic foundation of human existence as a key to understand the social organization and the production of commodities by human being. That discipline is
sociobiology. Within sociobiology we can understand the genetic foundation of the imperative of freedom. Most importantly, we can see why this genetically based imperative is the initial condition of all human life and understand that all human social complexities tend to progress toward a situation which favors the probabilistic expressions of the imperative of self governance for every single human being.
When the slave master/plantation owner needed to increase the
work ( W) he had two choices. One was to force the existing population of slaves to work more, the other was to increase the number of slaves. In the first case, the increase of the amount of work would increase the physical destruction of the slave as biological organism, lead gradually to inefficiency and, ultimately, a decreased of the quality and quantity of the production. By looking at the rapid explosion of the slave
population in the West Indies in the 18th century, one can assume that the slave masters were forced by the constraints of nature to make the second choice which was to increase the population of slaves.
At this juncture of our discussion, we have to remember that each slave, as a human being, is naturally resistant against slavery, and should therefore be considered not only as a source of directed energy but as a potential source of entropy.
By basing our judgment on those elements, we can predict that the increase of the demand for work would lead to a statistical increase of entropy and therefore of the possibility for revolt.
One can say that the more the mass of slave energy needed to increase the amount work increased, the more the entropy within the global mechanic of the colonial machinery increased. In some instances, like in the case of the French colony of St.
Domingue (Haiti) the colonial machinery was completely destroyed by the slaves.
BACK TO THE TOP Inheritance of the land and the cultural context
The global population of black people transported to the west Indies as slaves to work the land, build the houses, cook the food of their master and be the nanny of their children reached several millions. They were in the lower bottom of the totem pole of the Caribbean existence but they had a huge demographic advantage
By looking at the number of the descendants of the African
slaves living now not only in the Caribbean but all over the American continent we can have an idea about the number of people that were plucked from Africa by the slave traders. According to some historian the estimated number of people uprooted from Africa varies between sixty and one hundred millions (60 and 100.000.000). Lots of African people died in the middle passage but lots of them survived. And, after nearly
300 years of struggle the people of African descent became the inheritors of the lands of the Caribbean.
The European powers did not realized that by bringing so many slaves to the Caribbean they were in fact establishing the future rulers of the landscape. The governance of the Caribbean by people of African descent started with the Haitian Revolution which put Toussaint Louverture in power as the Governor of St. Domingue and lead to the independence of Haiti in 1804.
Aside of the inheritance of the land , the African people of the West Indies brought with them the cultural and religious traditions of their ancestors.
The colonial power fought with all their might and intellectual resources against the African influence but it persisted underground and even covered itself with Western/Christian symbols. The pure forms of the west African religions are found today all over the Caribbean The names could be
different but one can easily recognize the same deities, the same spiritual concepts.
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The musical expression of the Caribbean is dominated by the rhythmic expressions of Africa. The treads of African music are easily identified in Salsa, Meringue, Konpa, Reggae and Zouk.
During the carnivals, which happen in lots of countries all over the Caribbean, the African background expresses itself in a festival of color and music.
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