The document discusses the oppression and genocide experienced by Caribbean peoples, as well as their responses and resistance. It describes how Europeans enslaved and brutally treated Africans and indigenous peoples. It provides details on Christopher Columbus and the near extinction of the Taino nation in Hispaniola. Resistance took many forms, including maroon communities, revolts led by figures like Toussaint L'ouverture and Sam Sharpe, and cultural elements like drumming, stick fighting, and later steel drums and reggae music. Peasants also emerged in the 1830s as the plantation system declined.

1. PRESENTED BY:
ANISA MALAY
HEATHER RAMLAL
REBECCA RAMDEEN
NIALA SEUDATSINGH
RESPONSES OF THE
CARIBBEAN PEOPLE TO
OPPRESSION AND
GENOCIDE

2. OPPRESSION
Before we can understand the responses of the Caribbean
people that occurred because of oppression we must first
understand the meaning of the word. So…what is
oppression?
Oppression, simply put, is the exercise of authority or power
in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner.

3. HOW WERE CARIBBEAN
PEOPLE OPPRESSED?
In order to understand the true depth of the oppression
experienced by Caribbean People, it is vital that slavery,
which is believed to be at the helm of oppression, be
addressed. Europeans first came into contact with
the Caribbean after Columbus's journeys in 1492, 1496 and
1498. The desire for expansion and trade led to the
settlement of the colonies. The indigenous peoples, mostly
peaceful Tainos and warlike Caribs, proved to be unsuitable
for slave labor in the newly formed plantations, and they
were quickly and brutally annihilated.

4. HOW WERE CARIBBEAN
PEOPLE OPPRESSED?
(CONT.)
The slave trade which had already begun on the West Coast
of Africa provided the labor needed for the sugar, coffee,
cotton and cocoa plantations in the Caribbean to thrive; and
the period from 1496 to 1838 saw Africans flogged and
tortured in an effort to assimilate them into the plantation
economy. The British were the first to attempt to abolish
slavery in the Caribbean during the early 19th century, but
complete emancipation was not achieved until the Slavery
Abolition Act of 1833 (effective 1834). Despite the
population's freedom from slavery, living conditions on the
islands did not improve much over the next several decades.

5.  More advance European weaponry
gave European slave masters
superiority thus they dominated the
slaves.
 The Africans were treated harshly,
overworked, beaten, tortured, killed at
the whim of the Europeans.
 African were regarded as chattel, i.e.
property, not HUMAN, and once born
into slavery could not escape.
 Christianizing the slaves were apart of
the process.

GENOCIDE AND
OPPRESSION: SLAVERY

6. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
AND THE GENOCIDE OF THE
TAINO NATION.
Christopher Columbus is well known for discovering the New
World and is seen as a hero of medieval exploration by many
scholars today. However, what many text books fail to
mention is the fact that he set in motion what would become
probably the worst case of genocide imposed on one nation
of human beings by another.
Obsessed with finding a sea rout to Asia and the Far East,
Columbus set out on his ‘Enterprise of the Indies’ in 1492,
backed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of
Spain. However, instead of finding a rout to the rich trade in
the East, Columbus and his crew discovered the New World,
and soon set about subjugating and murdering the local
population and removing the vast wealth from the land.

7. AND THE GENOCIDE OF THE
TAINO NATION.
A small colony was established in Hispaniola consisting of
thirty-nine of his crew, the rest returned to Spain with
Columbus along with gold, spices and natives taken as slaves
to be given as gifts for his royal patrons.
The following year, he led a second expedition comprising of
seventeen large ships and one and half thousand new
colonists, arriving in the Americas a month later. By the time
he got back to Hispaniola, his men there had been slaughtered
by the locals and a second colony was founded.
Columbus punished the local tribe, known as the Taino,
severely. He enslaved many and executed many more; by
1496, the population had been reduced from as many as eight
million to around three million.

8. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
AND THE GENOCIDE OF THE
TAINO NATION.
On his third expedition he exploring the region then returned to
Hispaniola in 1498 where he had left his brothers in charge,
Diego and Bartholomew. Conditions there were in decline so he
stepped up the terror campaign against the Taino, ruling with an
iron hand causing resentment from the colonists and local chiefs
alike. Complaints of his brutality got back to the Spanish
monarchs and in 1500 they sent a Chief Justice to bring him and
his brothers back to Spain in chains.
However he was released on his arrival and allowed a fourth and
final expedition, which he conducted with the same brutality as
previous ones. By the time he finally left in 1504, the Taino had
been reduced to around 100,000 people arguably making
Columbus a war criminal by today’s standards and guilty of
committing some of the worst atrocities against another race in
history.

9. THE GENOCIDE OF THE TAINO
NATION.
Some were killed directly as punishments for ‘crimes’ such as not
paying tribute to the invaders. Many who could not or would not
pay had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to
death. Columbus and his men are documented by the chronicles of
Las Casas, know as Brev’sima relaci—n, to have partaken in mass
hangings, roasting people on spits, burnings at the stake and even
hacking young children to death and feeding them to dogs as
punishment for the most minor of crimes. The Spanish masters
massacred the natives, sometimes hundreds at a time for sport,
making bets on who could split a man in two, or cut a head off in
one blow.

10. Defenders of Columbus argue that a large amount of the victims were
killed by disease however they fail to recognize that most of these
diseases were caused by poor living conditions in forced labour
camps. Deprived of their crops and fields, many fell prey to dysentery
and typhus, were worked to death or were left to starve to death.
After his death his terrible legacy would live on, by 1514, a census
showed only 22,000 Taino remained alive. By 1542 there were only 200
remaining and after they were considered extinct, as was becoming
more and more the case throughout the Caribbean basin.
In around fifty years Columbus and those that followed him had all but
eliminated a population of around fifteen million people. This process
was just the start and an estimated 100 million people were wiped out
by Europeans in the so called ‘civilisation’ of the Western Hemisphere
making the discovery of the New World the start of what was arguably
the worst case of mass genocide in history

11. The Amerindians under the system of the encomienda and
the Africans under the process of slavery, were viewed as
economic tools that aided the production process albeit at
a low cost. Both communities suffered but they did not
necessarily suffer in silence. Their disagreement with their
subjugation was manifested in several practices.
RESISTANCE AND REVOLT TO
EUROPEAN FORMS OF
PRODUCTION

12. CARIBBEAN
The resistance culture of the Caribbean has played pivotal
roles in the emancipation of enslaved Africans and the fight
of the underclass. It is this culture which heralds people
like Sam Sharpe, Miss Lou, Paul Bogle, Marcus Garvey,
Uriah Butler, Maurice Bishop, and Walter Rodney.
One of the primary motivating forces behind early
resistance culture among African-Caribbeans, was the
search for an African identity.

13. The Maroons in Jamaica, St. Kitts, and Barbados, for example,
waged 50 years of resistance against plantation owners, and
formed their own communities with their own leaders.
In addition to the relentless pressure on the sugar plantations by
the Maroons, there were numerous other rebellions. Toussaint
L'ouverture led Haiti to independence in a war against the French.
Sam Sharpe led a plantation uprising in 1831 protesting the harsh
treatment under slavery.

14. Paul Bogle led the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865. All
these individuals were protesting dehumanization and
deculturation brought about by the European Slave Trade.
Even after the Africans were freed, they continued their
resistance movement, refusing to work for former slave owners
in an attempt to destroy the plantation economy.
Africans waged their resistance to slavery and cultural
domination on other fronts. They fought back through music to
express anger and frustration. The blaring of the abeng (cow
horn) was a call to take up arms.

15. THE ABENG

16. Drumming was used to dispel the forces perpetrating self-
hatred and a rejection of Africa. And though the drumming
was forbidden, Africans resisted vehemently. They adapted
European music to suit their own needs, being forced to
participate in it.

17. Reggae music is also at the root of protest culture in
Jamaica, as well as some parts of the Caribbean, England,
and North America. It is largely the Jamaican populace in
those countries that help to maintain the use of reggae in
protesting racism and other forms of social injustice in
England, Canada, and the United States.
When they participated in Carnival processions, Africans
performed stick-fighting rituals. The Africans also used their
sticks to provide rhythmic sound. To the slave-owners this
was unsettling, as the sticks were effective weapons. This
was soon banned, and the Africans had to find other forms
of rhythm. By hammering the surfaces of drums and dividing
them to produce different sounds, the steel band was born.
To the African, the steel drum made a powerful political
statement - it symbolized African creativity, power, and
ownership.

18. African resistance to enslavement had a huge impact on the
abolition movement. From the moment of capture to arrival in the
Americas, Africans sought ways to escape and to fight back. The
authorities responded to these acts through violence and
repression, and the constant threat of uprisings or their actual
occurrence meant there was an almost continuous state of war in
the Caribbean at the end of the 18th century.
In the Caribbean and Americas sabotage of machinery and
equipment, poisonings, feigning illness, killing livestock,
infanticide and full blown organised uprisings were ways in which
enslaved Africans resisted their condition. The enslaved Africans
in St Domingue (today’s Haiti) took control of the island in 1791
and defeated the French, British and Spanish armies during a
bloody 12 year war..
REVOLT BY THE CARIBBEAN
PEOPLE

19. Escaped slaves in Jamaica and Surinam established communities in
the mountainous regions of their islands and waged guerrilla wars
against the authorities. Other insurrections like Tacky’s Revolt in
Jamaica in 1760, and Fedon’s in Grenada in 1795, inspired other
enslaved Africans to rebel.

20. Unlike the revolts of slaves, which could affect large numbers of slaves
and could involve several plantations, the revolts of indentured workers
had slightly different characteristics. Generally speaking, the uprisings
of indentured workers were short-lived, small in scale and did not
spread to other plantations, revealing the effectiveness of isolation,
harsh plantation discipline, and hierarchical structures. Although similar
conditions had existed under slavery, perhaps the fact that these
workers had, for the most part, willingly signed contracts of labour, and
felt that they lacked the leverage or justification for complaint,
prevented the large-scale rebellions experienced during the era of
slavery.
Those revolts that did occur were often the result of workers having
their existing conditions reduced in some way, such as reduced wages
or direct assault of a co-worker, and did not occur in support of
demands for new gains. Any protest, regardless of the underlying
reason, was put down severely by plantation owners.

21. Even if the workers were granted some or all of their demands, which was the
case only through the intervention of the Immigration Department, the
ringleaders would still be singled out for punishment.
Any protest, regardless of the underlying reason, was put down severely by
plantation owners. Even if the workers were granted some or all of their
demands, which was the case only through the intervention of the Immigration
Department, the ringleaders would still be singled out for punishment.
The largest plantation revolt occurred in 1913 in Demerara (Jamaica), at the
plantation known as Rose Hall. Although the conflict was ruled to be the result
of broken faith and repeated failures by the manager to explain himself to his
workers, when trouble began it was the Indians who were held responsible.
The workers protested on their being denied the four days holiday which had
been promised them at the end of the grinding season by refusing to go to
work the next day. Although they returned to work the day after, seven of the
leaders of the rebellion were summoned to court.

22. The revolt, though suppressed, demonstrated the potential
for solidarity of indentured estate workers, potential which
was especially visible in the Caribbean as well as in Fiji, in
the South Pacific, and Natal, Africa. In the latter region, the
efforts of Mohandras Ghandi a young lawyer, were
instrumental in drawing attention to the oppression and
exploitation suffered by Indian labourers there. Generally,
the organisation and success of revolts and strikes
improved with the ending of indenture, when workers
became more informed of their rights and began organising
the first trade unions in the 1930s. Working-class Africans in
Jamaica responded to oppression and ill treatment, not with
further violence, but, after a series of protests in 1859, with
a spiritual and moral regeneration movement, known as the
Great Revival.

23. DEVELOPMENT OF PEASANT
GROUPS
The emergence of a peasant class in the 1830s in sum of
the smaller islands of the Caribbean occurred as the
plantation system declined with former sugar workers
becoming ‘Peasants’. These peasants (in Grenada and
Jamaica in particular) became prosperous and their exports
were increasing thus the question of land tenure became an
issue which could have been regarded as a problem that
would affect the development of the peasants.

24. It is by obtaining land that workers were able to free themselves
from exploitation of the plantation, thereby becoming
economically independent and able to produce food for
themselves, the local market as well as the export market . The
peasants often linked the cultivation of their land with activities
such as fishing, shop-keeping and casual estate work. This
combination of tasks had reduced the amount of labour expended
in agricultural production.