Martin Henry WHAT REALLY happened at Morant Bay in October of 1865? And how should those events be interpreted? Paul Bogle, having been elevated to National Hero, and the month of October selected for a National Heroes Day, contrary views to the heroic history which we have been fed may be regarded as sacrilege.
When the centennial of the Uprising was commemorated in 1965 a golden opportunity was presented to tap into a lively, residual folk memory of those events. That memory, now more faded with time, has been in all probability significantly compromised by the propaganda of official heroic history. The truth is usually best established in the rubbing together of contrary views even when firsthand accounts are available, much more second-hand. The Jamaican Historical Society, now celebrating 60 years, in two issues of its Bulletin (October 1996 and October 2000) has run 'Another Voice from the Past' on the Morant Bay Rebellion alongside the one we have grown most accustomed to.
The JHS was founded "to encourage the objective study of history in Jamaica and work for the preservation of monuments and historical material." The Society, based at Richmond Park House, 58 Half Way Tree Road and which can be contacted on 754-9430, needs a major influx of young blood interested in our past and willing to support the study of it.
White Jamaican and UWI Professor of History, Douglas Hall's rather unflattering assessment of Bogle, Gordon and what he summarily dismissed as the poorly organised and purely local 'Morant Bay riot', in his book 'Free Jamaica' has been quietly forgiven and forgotten and he was awarded the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in History just before his death. Gordon "was only one of many talkative demagogues" and "perhaps more popular than he really deserved to be." "- Bogle, who although he certainly does not merit recognition as a leader or lieutenant of organised rebellion, showed himself to be a dangerous man who could command a large body of followers, especially in a time of general hardship in a parish in which the local officials were unpopular." Truth or sacrilege?
Both men are heroes by state fiat. But in Jamaica today, full of hardship and corruption and with an increasingly unpopular Government, if Hall is only half right then the authorities should deeply fear the emergence of another Bogle and Gordon.
CLASH OF VIEWS
"Sacrilege!" says the Rev. Devon Dick, who has become a substantial Bogle scholar from the perspective of a common Baptist faith, in his article, 'The Cross and the Cutlass: Paul Bogle, a Man of Peace and Justice', representing the mainstream view in the clash of views in the JHS Bulletin of October 2000. "Bogle as visionary and his followers," Dick says, "used practical Christianity to judge the society and to call for justice. He indeed was a man of peace and justice" in whose honour a church should be named, Dick proposes.
In introducing "contrary views of the Morant Bay Rebellion", K.E. Ingram in the JHS Bulletin of October 1996 hoped that they would raise considerations such as the authenticity of sources in writing history, the importance of critical judgement, veracity and impartiality in the handling of sources.
The Rev. William Clark Murray, Methodist Minister in Bath, wrote as an eyewitness condemning the excesses of Governor Eyre. Murray felt that the people, "Wesleyans, weakly more than wickedly, were led into mischief."
INTRIGUING AFFIRMATION
Then, absolving "the emancipated people of Jamaica", he makes a most intriguing affirmation: "I boldly affirm, as the result of my own careful observation, that in this locality Africans chiefly were concerned - not the black people proper of the Island." Long after school history, I learned from the JIS Parish Profile for St. Thomas (published 1991) that 11,400 free Africans were brought to Jamaica after Emancipation and many of them settled in Morant Bay and in the Plantain Garden River Valley.
Viscount Ellibank, who served on the infamous Wolverene as a young lieutenant, insisted in old age that from second-hand information from a wounded white man taken on board after the white men had been murdered, the Negro women sat on the corpses and gashed them with broken glass. The men opened the skulls, scooped out the brains into calabashes mixed them with rum and drank the mixture in the Baptist Chapel in the presence of Mr. Croall, Gordon's "chaplain", while giving thanks to Almighty God for the glorious work they had done. Ellibank, in charge of a hanging party, recalled willing Negroes voluntarily erecting the gallows and digging the trenches for burying the bodies.
Wicked, malicious and racist testimony? Exaggeration and the forgetfulness of old age? Or some smattering of truth, at least?
DENOMINATIONAL HOPPING
Rev. Hogg writing on October 23 of that year from the safety of the New Broughton Presbyterian Church in Newport Manchester (JHSB October 2000), gave a detailed account of what he had heard about the "outbreak attended with shocking barbarities" by a "maddened mob of Negro men and women" led by demagogues. He thought Gordon was "not exactly compos mentis," citing his denominational hopping.
Is there a parallel today to the Gordon/Bogle movement where the activism of proclaimed clean, "Christian", well-meaning politicians for justice and development is allegedly infiltrated by thugs advancing their own agenda and producing our dreadful tribal politics of death and destruction?
The Presbyterian Hogg, critical of the role of the Baptist missionaries in incitement and counteracting the Dick thesis some 130 years in advance, felt no "uneasiness about the disloyalty or rebelliousness on the part of the Church-going people of Manchester. He attributed the uprising to ignorance and heathenism particularly pronounced in the East, "one of the darkest districts of the island". The pompous and condescending views of a white missionary, or some kernel of truth as part of the full story?
Evidently, as another National Heroes Day approaches, the glorious revolution of 1865 stands in need of further study and evaluation with the search for truth, not heroism, as a point of departure.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
