The plantation: a penal institution
Published:Sunday | March 23, 2025 | 9:35 PM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
I am moved to share some thoughts, influenced by Marcus Garvey’s teaching that we should understand and value our history– a history of the people who belonged to the cradle of humanity, which was interrupted and decimated by the transatlantic slave trade. This almost four-centuries-long mass criminal enterprise witnessed the forced removal of millions of Africans to the Americas.
The survivors of that horrific trade landed here to first step on the auction block, then step off, bought and owned. We were shackled and led to the plantation which, Antiguan historian Dr Marion Blair was careful to point out, was a penal institution. These were the prisons to which we were discarded, to spend centuries. These were pens in which we were locked away like – and with – animals, compelled to speak a new language, and confined for the duration of our natural lives. Recall that we were taken from a continent too large for our captors to even imagine. The culture shock, and being forced to endure life sentences were bound to leave in their wake generations of mentally battered people. The plantation was not only a penal institution but, no doubt, a virtual madhouse.
We came here and spent four centuries in captivity, with only 187 years of freedom since 1838. So how can we forget?
So, as we walk through the former crime scene island of Jamaica, Garvey teaches us to be fully aware of this journey. We laboured hundreds of years, making life better and easier for white people, who used the wealth we created to enrich their families in perpetuity. We had to live through the violent regime, where these plantations were not just agricultural enterprises, but also a place where our children were produced to feed their workforce. A prison where, to be caught after an escape, resulted in amputation. There were no courts, no concept of justice for the workers, but rather, the master ruled with total savagery and cruelty. To seek freedom was deemed a crime. No woman dared to say “no” to a planter who desired her body.
We did not have to wear prison clothes to be known as a captive people. Our skin colour was our identifying mark. This must have led to the hate of our colour which has, centuries later, manifested in so many descendants bleaching– to remove what they see as the curse of blackness. This post-traumatic slave syndrome continues today.
We must never forget the suffering of generations of the enslaved, whose blood runs through our veins. A time we feared to love our own children, because, at any time, Massa may remove them from the plantation to a place unknown to their parents. This legacy is what makes the claim for reparations from the prosperous enslavers of Europe a justified call which cannot go away. As long as we live, we must vow that it can’t just go so. Today, we recount the encouraging words of Marley, “ they made their world so hard, every day we got to keep on fighting”; and fight we will, because the horrifying life on the plantation cannot be forgotten, and that’s why ah reparations we seh.
BERT SAMUELS
Pan-Africanist Attorney-at-Law