Captured, and arrived in Jamaica

TWO SUNDAYS ago, we conclude Part I with: “The distinction of his funeral was conveyed not only by the attendance of white landowners, who turned up at the funerals of black elites, such as well-considered slave drivers, but also by the quality of the stone slab acquired by Archibald’s grave and the elaborate preparation of (his) biography itself.

“The thick, plain, black graphite slab that still marks Archibald Monteath’s grave in the Carmel churchyard occupies the row parallel to that with graves memorialised with similarly styled slabs where the 19th-century overseas missionaries were laid to rest.”

It is a quotation from Professor Maureen Warner-Lewis’ book, Archibald Monteath, Igo, Jamaican, Moravian. In another document, she says Jamaica of the 1800s was very different from the Jamaica which we now live in. Whites and blacks and mulattos co-habited, but were legally forbidden to marry. It was a world dominated by Europeans who owned land, people, political, military, and economic power, and who had close family and financial ties with England, Scotland, and Wales.

In the 19th century, public cemeteries did not exist. People were buried the day after death in churchyards or on their properties. But the main church in operation at the time was the Church of England, and there was only one in each parish capital. Methodists, Moravians and Baptists had chapels, but these were few and widely scattered.

Enslaved people were at the very bottom of the social and economic hierarchies. They had no private land on which they were buried. They were interred all over the place, in spots that were not valuable to the planters, and where there were no graves with headstones or any other visible markers. Enslaved people for the most part were regarded as chattels, properties, not as people with souls, worthy of headstones. The discrimination in death was as deep as it was in life.

So, how did this formerly enslaved person get to spend eternity beside enslavers in a Moravian cemetery in Westmoreland? Who was he really? Warner-Lewis’ voluminous work can answer many of the questions that people might have about him. And, she had learned much of what she knows from Monteath’s autobiography, to which she has dedicated Chapter 1, History of the Autobiographical Texts.

The life story of Aniaso, later Archibald Monteath, is one of the few Caribbean slave narratives to have so far been recovered. It encapsulates the experience that converted an Igbo boy from West Africa into a slave on estates along the St Elizabeth/Westmoreland parish borders on the Caribbean island of Jamaica,” Warner-Lewis writes.

She starts Chapter 2 with, “Archibald initiates his narrative by stating his personal name as Aniaso, spelled Aneaso in the texts. Four of the five extended accounts of Aniaso’s life begin with lineage information, memories of some of the beliefs and customs in Igboland, and an outline of his capture and enslavement.”

He is said to be from a ‘royal family’ through his maternal grandfather as Warner-Lewis says, “Aniaso recalled that his maternal grandfather ‘was a prince, and the daughter (Dirinejah) was named after the father’. In a patrilineal society, a woman was unlikely to have been accorded the name of her father, unless he was particularly great … Dirineja’s father was clearly a man of very high rank. Was he particularly dedicated to the Earth cult, and was Aniaso’s name a reflection of an inherited family association?”

Whether it was or not, it could not stop Aniaso from being captured through deception by someone he knew. “While we remain unsure of the captor’s motive, Aniaso’s account certainly furnishes much evidence of his own naivety. Such evidence suggests he was both visibly and mentally a child when he was enslaved … the manner of his abduction reveals his trusting nature of a child towards a familiar, who easily lured him from home by promises of a treat to his eyes,” Warner-Lewis writes. At the coast, Aniaso was put in a boat and forcibly taken to a ship.

“The man who had brought me from home and sold me to the traders looked on unmoved as I was hurried to the water’s edge, and I could only implore him to take a last message to my dear father, letting him know what had become of me,” Aniaso’s narrative goes. “When the boat put off for the ship I was so exhausted with crying that the gentle rocking motion lulled me into a sound sleep from which I awoke to find that we were being lifted into the vessel.”

Warner Lewis also writes that Aniaso reported that he and about 11 other boys travelled across the Atlantic in the captain’s cabin and were allowed freedom to play and move about. After several weeks at sea, the ship in which Aniaso was transport arrived in Kingston, Jamaica.