‘Let’s get something straight,” the politician told me, “we are now owning you.” Though this was meant as a warm welcome, hearing it from an eminent state official made me wonder what I had got myself into. Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s influential minister of culture, gender, entertainment and sport, looked me in the eyes: “You are Jamaican now, you are part of us.”
I met Grange last April, on a hot day in Port Maria in St Mary parish on the northern coast of Jamaica. Both of us had come to the town to commemorate the second annual Chief Takyi Day. Grange had established the holiday in 2022, instigating the government’s proclamation that henceforth 8 April would honour Takyi, or Tacky, as he was generally called in English, the best-known leader of the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in the 18th-century British empire. I was invited to the event because I had written the first book about Tacky’s revolt.
I was honoured, but I can’t say that I was comfortable. It was a sweltering day at the start of mango season, and I was sweating in my suit and tie. A crowd of about 80 people sat on folding plastic chairs under a canopy that kept us shaded but also blocked any breezes that might have brought relief.
The heat did not stifle the festive mood. Roots reggae music vibrated from the sound system. Two troupes of dancers performed traditional choreography between speeches by politicians and activists. Locals from the area were dressed up for the celebration, many of them in the green, gold and black of the Jamaican flag, and the crowd seemed excited. St Mary is a 90-minute drive over the Blue Mountains from Kingston, Jamaica’s bustling capital, and while tourists sometimes come to visit the parish’s beautiful coves and beaches, the region is lightly developed and materially impoverished. An appearance by a cabinet member such as Grange was a big deal, as was the event itself: it signalled official recognition of local history, which many people hoped would gain national attention.
My presence, as a Harvard professor and the author of the most extensive scholarly treatment of the slave uprising, was supposed to add the authority of a global institution to the occasion. But the event was also a big deal for me. Grange and others involved in the commemoration of Tacky’s rebellion had cited my book as an inspiration for the holiday, and I’d been flattered when the organisers asked me to give remarks from the perspective of an American historian.
Academics don’t often get to see the impact of their books in the world, and initially I was just as eager as the locals to see Tacky celebrated with a national holiday. A historian’s job is to help us remember the past, and for someone in my line of work there are few greater satisfactions than knowing that you helped bring some previously obscure slice of history into common awareness.
During my time in Jamaica, however, I came to realise that the situation was not as simple as I’d imagined, and that my own feelings were far from settled. This was a national effort, and I was not a Jamaican national. I was grateful to hear the minister’s welcoming words, but they weren’t quite true. I was a part of something, though maybe not something I fully understood or agreed with. Along with Black people throughout the Americas, Jamaicans and I together belonged to the African diaspora. But as with scattered people everywhere – Jews, Armenians, Chinese, south Asians – there was no guarantee of mutual understanding or accord. There was nothing predetermined about how we would commemorate our common history, and the history of Tacky’s revolt was no exception.
* * *
In the mid-18th century, Jamaica was Great Britain’s most profitable colony in the Americas. Not coincidentally, it was also the colony that exploited enslaved labour most aggressively. About 90% of the population, around 150,000 people, lived in bondage, and their work made their enslavers stupendously rich. The island society was tumultuous, with frequent uprisings of varying scale and intensity, some of which threatened the very foundations of imperial power.
Tacky’s revolt, as it has come to be known, began in the parish of St Mary in early April 1760, when enslaved Africans hailing from the region that is now Ghana attacked and overwhelmed Fort Haldane, the British garrison overlooking Port Maria harbour. From there the rebels made their way through the agricultural heart of the 235 sq mile (600 sq km) district, liberating people and setting sugar plantations on fire as they went. Their numbers swelled into the hundreds as they fought off planter militias and British army regulars.
Not much is known about Tacky himself. Judging from his name, which can mean “chief” in the Akan and Ga languages, he appears to have had some significant political or military standing before he was taken from the Gold Coast of Africa by force and put to work on a plantation in St Mary. His role as a principal leader of the uprising that would bear his name was recorded by Edward Long, the English enslaver historian who, in 1774, published an account of the rebellion in his three-volume History of Jamaica.
In my own account, however, which drew on records from archives in several countries, Tacky was just one of many leaders of the rebellion, and perhaps not the most important one. Though he led the early attacks from Fort Haldane to Downes’ Cove, about 20 miles from Port Maria, he was killed soon thereafter, and his decapitated head was put on public display in Spanish Town, then the colony’s capital.
The British largely quelled the uprising in St Mary within two weeks, but the fight for freedom spread throughout Jamaica, ultimately engulfing the entire island. Some of the fiercest clashes took place in the parish of Westmoreland, on the south-western end of the island. Combatants on each side gave no quarter, slaying each other with muskets, cutlasses, knives, blunt objects and bare hands. Over the course of 18 months, the rebels killed 60 white people and destroyed an enormous amount of property. During the suppression of the revolt and the repression that followed, more than 500 Black men and women were killed in battle, executed or driven to suicide. The colonial government banished another 500 from the island for life.
The slave rebellion took place in the midst of Britain’s seven years’ war with France and other European rivals. While the British emerged from the war victorious, with vast new territories and resources, the disruption inspired a series of British imperial reforms that were meant to tighten the administrative control of the empire. These reforms, in the shape of new taxes, regulations and military deployments, indirectly provoked the North American rebellion of 1776. But the slave revolt also led to a burst of colonial legislation to curtail the trade in potentially dangerous African captives, and the brutal crackdown generated a wave of sympathy in some sectors, ultimately helping to turn the British public against the Atlantic slave trade, which Britain outlawed in 1807.
* * *
The full history of Atlantic slavery is scarcely taught in the US or the UK, and so it’s not surprising that few people in either country know much about Tacky’s revolt. Until recently, however, I didn’t realise that Jamaicans don’t know this history much better. I had assumed that in a country with a Black majority population, which had emerged from one of the most brutal slave societies in human history, basic education would have offered a much better understanding of slavery and its legacies than the one I had received in the US. I was wrong.
While no one in Jamaica denies the importance of slavery’s history, little is known about antislavery uprisings. I asked my friend Sutopa, a high school teacher in Massachusetts who grew up in Jamaica, what she had learned about slavery and slave revolt in primary school. She paused and pursed her lips, then shook her head and smiled ruefully: “Almost nothing.” I asked Verene Shepherd, a professor at the University of the West Indies and one of Jamaica’s most prominent historians of slavery, the same question. “I heard nothing about [slave revolts] when I was growing up,” she told me. “And history is still not a compulsory subject in our schools, so you could go through school without learning about these wars of resistance.” A principal reason to commemorate Tacky is to draw more attention to an empowering history, perhaps helping to revitalise what the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, the historian Hilary McD Beckles, once called the “self-liberation ethos of enslaved blacks”.
In Jamaica, the campaign to remember Tacky, and to make him a national hero, has been most closely associated with Derrick “Black X” Robinson. Raised in St Mary in the late 1960s and 70s, Black X moved to Kingston as a teenager, before returning to the parish as an adult in 2005. There he first learned the story of Tacky’s uprising from the local people, and from the dub poet Mutabaruka, who insisted on Tacky’s heroism. He learned more from scholars and activists including Shepherd and Prof Carolyn Cooper, and Sister Kabu Maat Kheru, who had a popular radio show on Irie FM.
Black X recognised something great in the story of the African rebellion, an inspirational event that could draw attention – as well as tourism and development – to the poor and overlooked rural area of St Mary. He committed himself to making Tacky a “household name among Jamaicans at home and abroad” – and he had a plan. To promote Tacky, each year he would undertake solitary walks across the island, often wearing a rusted 30lb (13.5kg) chain around his neck to symbolise the burdens carried by his enslaved ancestors, and to signify the continuity of that oppression.
In common with most successful activists, Black X is relentless. He is always angling, always pressing, always on the lookout for how his contacts might help him achieve his ends. In 2013, he made his case to the politician Andrew Holness, then leader of the opposition in Jamaica’s parliament. Ten years later, with Holness now serving as prime minister, Black X wrote to him to “request a courtesy visit”. He hoped to share his vision for how the promotion of Chief Takyi would “further inspire our nation, enhance our international goodwill, build and sustain new entrepreneurial initiatives, and positively impact our country’s GDP”. He offered to hand-deliver a copy of my book to the PM’s office, sure that the authority of the scholarship would strengthen his case.
I had first encountered Black X on the Jamaican radio show Bitter Sugar, which caters to the Rastafarian community, in March 2020. It was a few weeks after my book had been published, and Black X and I were both guests on the show. “From an inspirational standpoint,” he told me, “I knew that we had to connect” with the international dimensions of the story. “So I was saying to the government: make Tacky a national hero, and give us that platform to promote him globally. Brother Brown, you have given us that platform with this book now.”
As a Rastaman himself, Black X said he considers it to be his “daily duty to contribute to the uplifting and continuous enlightenment of myself and my fellow African brothers and sisters”. Rastafarianism began in the early 20th century as a millenarian cult that emphasised the continuity between the cultures of Africa and Black people in the Americas. As the Jamaican social theorist Stuart Hall explained in a perceptive essay, Rastafarianism also helped many Black people see their poverty as a form of bondage that continued the trauma of enslavement in a modern-day Babylon, and their mission as a struggle to reform social conditions and maintain vigilance against racism. Though stridently pro-Black and antiracist, Rastafarian denunciations of colonialism and white rule emanate from within a message of universal love; loving Black people’s culture and history is the only route to loving all people. For Black X, making Tacky a national hero was one route to promoting this message of uplift, enlightenment and love.
Soon after my book was published, Black X gave a copy to Barbara Blake-Hannah, a prominent Rastafarian author, who had been the first Black television journalist in the UK and the first Rastafarian representative in Jamaica’s parliament. Blake-Hannah, in turn, passed the book on to Olivia Grange, the minister for culture, and it was thanks to an invitation from her office that I found myself in Port Maria.
* * *
The son of a university scientist and a high-school mathematics teacher, I grew up in smugly forward-thinking 1970s southern California, and my own education on the subject of slavery was poor. In other US states during my youth, educators were busy teaching apologies for the Confederacy, which explicitly aimed to maintain human bondage for ever. In the UK, meanwhile, it was much more common to learn about how the British abolished slavery than it was to learn how the British set up and maintained the system they later turned against.
In the absence of relevant schooling, I had been drawn to the history of slavery and slave revolt by lessons I had learned from Rastafarians in my youth. My high-school instruction in Black history largely consisted of a brief unit on the US civil war and a quick tour of the civil rights movement. The main interest seemed to be Black people’s role in disturbing or advancing the civility of American civilisation. When I listened to roots reggae music, however, I noticed that its Rastafarian composers seemed to have something more interesting and important in mind.
I first saw the reggae band Steel Pulse play live in 1987, at my college gymnasium in San Diego. They made an immediate impression. David Hinds, the band’s singer, had a massive column of matted dreadlock that extended from his head like a great leaning tower. It bobbed with the rhythm of the music and swayed with the emotion of his voice. Steel Pulse’s songs told stories about Black history that sounded like parables. They seemed to offer hidden wisdom about the ways of the world alongside strident calls for the popular mobilisation needed to change it. Rally around the flag, they sang. Rally around the red, gold, black and green: “Red for the blood that flowed like the river / Green for the land Africa / Yellow for the gold that they [the Europeans] stole / Black for the people it was looted from.”
At some point in the show, I was sitting on a bleacher with my friend David, who was from Jamaica. He thought there was something shallow about the engagement of the largely white crowd. They were too content, he thought, too complacent. They didn’t catch the righteous fire that made the music vital and important. David was furtively puffing a joint – marijuana was still very much illegal in those days, though at reggae shows enforcement was always lax. He paused as he passed it to me, as if he was about to impart some serious insight: “They are all grooving to Steel Pulse, but let’s see if they can handle Burning Spear.” I took a long drag on the spliff and passed it back; I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was determined to find out. Burning Spear would play the same auditorium in a few weeks, and now I knew I had to go.
In the years that followed, I rarely missed a reggae show that came to town. There was a ritual element to it, something that felt like an immersion in ancestral knowledge, a “history no more a mystery”. The first time I heard Burning Spear, AKA Winston Rodney, ask: “Do you remember the days of slavery?”, I didn’t have a reply. I eventually answered by becoming a historian of the subject. My calling found me not in a classroom but in a concert hall. By the time I let my own hair “go dread”, as we used to say, it felt less like the adoption of an exotic fashion than the growth of a seed that had been planted by Black artists who taught me that knowing our past might empower us to determine our future. I never became a Rastafarian, but like Black X, I committed myself to teaching history as a way to contribute to the “uplifting and continuous enlightenment” of myself and others.
* * *
I met Black X in person for the first time last year, at Emancipation Park in Kingston. It was 7 April, the day before the Chief Takyi Day event in Port Maria. A light rain was falling, and there were only a few people in the park, which comprises a six-acre public common of gardens, fountains and public art. I saw some youths practising a dance routine and couples strolling around the perimeter. A group of teenage kids recognised Black X’s distinctive stride and pointed excitedly. His walks had made him a celebrity.
The main boulevard through Emancipation Park passes through a gallery of Jamaica’s national heroes. All of the figures represent resistance to slavery, empire and white supremacy, established in an attempt to forge a new national consensus after the 1962 independence from Britain. The busts sat high on tall marble plinths so that you had to tilt your head up respectfully to meet their gaze.
The first was Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican leader of one of the largest transnational social movements of the 20th century. (During Garvey’s time in the US, the government considered him a “notorious negro agitator” and deported him in 1927.) Alongside Garvey was Queen Nanny, a leader of the Maroons, a formerly enslaved people who gained recognition of their freedom by treaty in 1740, when they could not be conquered by the British. There were also busts of Sam Sharpe, the Black Baptist leader of the slave revolt in the early 1830s that precipitated the 1834 British emancipation decree; George William Gordon and Paul Bogle, who were credited as inspirations for the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion; Norman W Manley, founder of the People’s National Party, iconic legislator and statesman; and Alexander Bustamante, a founder of the Jamaican Labour party and advocate for independence.
There was one plinth without a bust, where Black X and other activists hoped to place a likeness of Tacky. In their minds, Chief Takyi would symbolise Jamaicans’ African ancestry and embody the aspirations of its poorest citizens. In previous years, Black X had ended his walks at Emancipation Park, and the empty plinth was where he had laid his chain when he finished.
On the night we met, however, he planned to trek from Emancipation Park to the Tacky monument in Port Maria. He would walk for 17 hours straight, following the steep and narrow Junction Main Road over the Blue Mountains, considered one of the most treacherous passages on the island. When he arrived in Port Maria the next morning, he would don his commemorative chains for the final leg to the public square, and lay the shackles at the base of the monument.
After we’d spoken on Bitter Sugar, the radio show, Black X was a regular presence in my email inbox and WhatsApp chats. As I got to know him, I came to understand why some of his supporters call him a visionary, even a genius. I also saw why some people wrote him off an eccentric. He combines qualities that don’t seem to go together – a performing artist trained as a cultural preservationist, a marketer leveraging political connections, even though he was a man of humble means.
Meeting him in person for the first time, he struck me as both formidable and vulnerable. Tall and dark-skinned, he had a beguiling grin and the intensity of an ascetic. But he had recently had surgery to remove polyps from his vocal chords, and spoke in a hoarse whisper. At 58, he was just a few years older than me; we had grown up in the same times, with distinct vantage points on late 20th-century struggles against racism and colonialism. His enthusiasm for Black history was contagious. We embraced, brother to brother.
Black X told me his strategy for promoting Chief Tacky – the idea behind the walks and the chain and the poetic praises – was to create “simple moral spectacles until the evidence comes”. Having provided evidence for the next stage of his morality play, I began to see how a dreadlocked Harvard professor might perform an important role in the movement. In a way, I was in that movement now. Black X had conscripted me.
* * *
“Now we have a book that symbolises everything we have been saying all along,” Black X had told a reporter in 2020. Two years later, after Grange declared 8 April an official day of commemoration for Chief Tacky, Black X told me that the publication of my book had been pivotal to the decision. But it was becoming clear to me that we were in fact saying something quite different from each other. There were tensions between my approach to history and that of the campaign to make Tacky a national hero. Black X wanted to valorise Tacky in the hopes of elevating him to the Order of National Heroes, to make him a kind of founding father of Jamaica, a great man worthy of a commemorative bust.
What I saw in Tacky’s story, by contrast, was a complex story about empire, war and the Atlantic slave trade that had played out across three continents. Some of my interest in this broader perspective came from my academic training, which coincided with the so-called “transnational turn” in history departments in the 1990s. But it was also the case that reggae had taught me to think about history from a transnational point of view. Whereas national borders had hedged and fenced the history I learned in school – events only mattered to the extent they told a story about the US – reggae seemed to encompass the whole of Black history from Africa to the Americas. The music encouraged me to think about war and colonialism; about how and why migrants – free and unfree – crossed oceans and made new lives in strange new lands; about global processes of dynamic transformation that began long ago and remain with us today.
What’s more, in my own life, I’ve seen how the usual habit of telling history from national perspectives has distorted the way people think about relationships between people within their countries, blinding them to what they shared in common. I once had a conversation with a friend in east London, a university-educated white British guy, who was married to an Indian woman. When I told him I was researching Jamaican history, he asked why Jamaicans speak English. His wife yelled at him: “Colonialism, you bloody idiot, why the hell do you think I speak English?!” Her response was quintessentially British, but so was his question. He had learned in British schools, much as I had in my American ones, to think of history as taking place within the territorial boundaries of the national state.
In recent years we’ve seen a wide range of efforts, on the part of universities, newspapers (including the Guardian) and street demonstrators, to show how the legacies of slavery and colonialism pervade modern societies. Yet even where slavery is acknowledged as a fundamental feature of national history, its transnational history is largely ignored. To take one example, Americans are often taught that slavery began in Virginia, one of the 13 colonies that would become the United States. In fact, the ancient institution had its New World origins in the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas, with English North America as an offshoot of a vast transatlantic web of war, trade and economic exploitation.
My own family does indeed have its roots in Virginia, but today’s US Black population has drawn increasingly on more recent migrants from Africa and its diaspora. When we teach the history of slavery in national terms, my students with parents from Africa and the Caribbean think it has little to do with them. My white students feel the same way. However, a broader perspective shows them how they are part of the story as well, even if their ancestors didn’t land in the early North American British colonies. Complex stories of conflict, migration and belonging speak to them more directly than national chronicles rooted in blood and territory.
To my mind, Tacky’s revolt is an example of the kind of history that cannot be encompassed by a nation state, or be symbolised by a national monument. Many survivors of the British crackdown on the rebellion were transported to Virginia, where they would be sold to new captors. Scores of these condemned Black people carried their memory of Jamaica’s war against enslavement to North America in the years leading up to the American revolution. Embodied by those migrants, Jamaican history was part of US history already at its founding, just as it was part of African history, world history, and quite possibly my own family history.
* * *
Tacky’s revolt was also not just a story of Black solidarity against oppression. It was as much a war among Black people as between enslavers and the enslaved, and its complexities presented further challenges to the Jamaican campaign to make Tacky a national hero. Organised and executed principally by Africans from the Gold Coast, the uprising was the work of recent immigrants. To organise their uprising, rebels had to contend with other Black people who did not always use their language, worship their deities or share their goals. There were Black people on every side of the fighting, and the disunity among them was critical to the outcome of the wars. The British suppressed the revolt with crucial support from the Maroons, whose treaties with the British obliged them to suppress slave uprisings. The Maroons possessed more skill at fighting in the mountainous bush than colonial militia or British army regulars, and were instrumental to securing the rebels’ defeat.
Olivia Grange had found a clever way to account for this in her Takyi Day speech: that the British needed the Maroons to help put down the rebels, she suggested, showed that only Black people could defeat other Black people, implying that we could take pride even from this example of disunity. The minister’s rhetorical sleight of hand highlighted something important. Commemoration of Tacky’s revolt would necessarily smooth over its complexities, mythologising the events, as symbolic recognition generally does. That complexity is awkward for activists like Black X, who want to use history to create a unifying folklore, but the more straightforward telling was awkward for me. As uncomfortable as I was with the constraints of nationalism, I was equally concerned with the simplification required to rewrite a many-sided conflict as a story of individual heroism.
The Jamaican writer Suzanne Francis-Brown raised the issue with me directly. She worried that advocates of the campaign to make Tacky a national hero were reading the historical record too selectively, leaving out inconvenient complications. Didn’t I see a responsibility to guide the conversation and correct misinformation? Shouldn’t I be pushing to expand the discussion beyond Tacky and the parish of St Mary?
“You do have to begin somewhere,” I answered ambivalently. I reminded her that my book was an academic work, and that it was unlikely to be picked up by someone who didn’t have an interest in the subject already. Perhaps popular culture – whether in artwork, film, folklore or an event like Chief Takyi Day – could spark curiosity for more serious history. “What I hope,” I said, “is that the bigger the story gets, the more emotionally appealing it is, the more people care about it, the more they’ll be drawn to the historically accurate version.”
Suzanne was unconvinced. “I think that’s a great thing to hope,” she said. “[But] I don’t think that those things happen just as a matter of course. Somebody has to be pushing people to do that.”
Her points were well taken. I agreed with her that a singular focus on Tacky seemed to betray the collective efforts of the nameless men, women and children who have always driven the fight for freedom. At the same time, I was hesitant, as a foreigner, to lecture people on what they should find important in their own national history. Already I was all too conscious that some people might say my telling of Jamaican history was cultural appropriation by an American academic working at the richest university in the world. I wanted to respect the Jamaican people’s version of their history, to recognise those who were trying to do something locally and nationally in Jamaica to draw attention to it. Like postcolonial peoples across the world, they were trying to reclaim their stories from generations of disparagement and neglect. By making Tacky’s uprising an integral part of national identity, and turning him into an emblem of the state, Black X and his supporters hoped to translate the brutal legacy of slavery into a more encouraging parable of self-determination.
As a professional historian, I weigh documentary evidence and interpret the past with great confidence. I am less certain of my authority to make the past accountable to the needs of the present. To accomplish that task, Black X stressed his own desire to be “unsponsored”, because he needed “to venture out of areas of specifics and specialities” and into the more evocative realm of myth and legend. It was clear that the craft of history writing and the politics of commemoration may overlap, but they are not the same things.
Historians do not get to decide what to memorialise, or how, or where. The way societies choose to mark history depends on whose stories can command material support and whose sensitivities must be treated with care. As the Brazilian historian Ana Lucia Araujo has put it, “public memory is about power relations”. People fight over history not just to know the truth, but because stories about the past continue to shape the present. All over the world, how the past is understood influences everything from how governments allocate healthcare and welfare to how business opportunities are distributed and who gains admission to universities.
Likewise, monuments to past ordeals and triumphs – such as Admiral Nelson’s statue at Trafalgar Square in London, or a proposed tribute to the heroism of an African warrior – shape the present, and the future, in ways that are always uncertain. They could inspire future generations, or they might instead herald a chauvinism that impedes attempts to solve today’s problems. When a story that has been refused becomes the head cornerstone of state image-making, there is no guarantee of accommodation for all.
* * *
While I was in Jamaica, I decided to tour Fort Haldane, the site of the rebels’ first attack. I was soon disappointed. Someone that people described as a “madman with a machete” had padlocked the entrance to the fort. He had stabbed his blade into the ground by the road as a warning sign, and stood in the way of the entrance looking ragged and angry.
Black X was already there when I pulled up. He and the man were exchanging angry words. From what I could tell, the man viewed Black X’s efforts to bring attention to Fort Haldane as a kind of crass commercialisation. He considered himself to be the true keeper of the place and its meaning. “Nobody looks after this place,” the man said. “I am the one who looks after it.” He demanded appropriate respect as its custodian. He refused to open the gate, declaring that the only person who could grant us access was the prime minister of Jamaica himself. Indeed, he said, the PM would have to come to Fort Haldane and make the request in person.
Black X had a history with this man, and the mistrust between them was palpable. The man called Black X a “trickster”, and Black X referred to him as “his nemesis”. He would later tell me that the man was a drifter who was now “preying on the site like a vulture”.
Yet it was also clear that Black X considered the man to be less a danger than an obstacle. For the legacy of Tacky’s revolt to bring tourism and resources to the parish, visitors had to be able to come and experience the sites for themselves. They should walk Tacky’s path to honour the history of his freedom struggle. We wanted the man to stop blocking our heritage tour, but he kept repeating: “History is in the past, what about the living?”
The man’s lonely protest was hard to ignore. He was undoubtedly a squatter, but I later learned that Fort Haldane had recently been a kind of campground for locals without any permanent residence. This was the use of Fort Haldane that the man defended in his rebellion against Black X and the St Mary parish council, against the mayor of Port Maria, the members of parliament, the minister of culture, gender, entertainment and sport, and, to be honest, against me. I guess someone could say he was standing in the way of progress, and for that I had to have some sympathy.
* * *
Before I left the island, on a morning show called Smile Jamaica, the host asked me if I thought Tacky should be made a national hero. I had been trying to avoid answering that question directly. “That’s a decision for Jamaicans to make,” I demurred, much as I had to Suzanne Francis-Brown. There were strong arguments in favour, including the benefits to popular self-esteem, public education and material development. The people of St Mary had kept the story of Tacky’s revolt alive for generations before activists, government officials and scholars like me had come to it. It would be perverse to deny to them the same kind of official recognition of their folklore that people have demanded from their representatives throughout history. The host pressed the counterargument by raising the question of the rebel’s foreign birth: “If Tacky was born in Africa and not Jamaica, then how could he be our national hero?”
My answer remained noncommittal, but it was at that moment I knew that I absolutely did hope for the success of Black X’s campaign, despite my misgivings. If the best argument for Tacky’s exclusion was his foreignness, that was reason enough for me to support his promotion. His elevation would mean that an African immigrant fighting for liberation could represent Jamaican heroism to the world, and that an American historian could indeed find Black solidarity across national borders. It would show that national governments could not enclose our historical memory.
A bust on a plinth, a majestic face on public buildings, currency and posters can all be invitations to learn vital lessons about the past, just as they could be made into instruments of propaganda. The great Italian oral historian Alessandro Portelli urged his readers to understand that “memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings”. Here I was part of that process, watching it unfold, unsure of how it might turn out. I am a historian because I am convinced that comprehending the legacies of colonial conquest, slavery and imperial warfare that have shaped our world is essential to our hopes to remake it. As a creator of memory, though, I know that the history we need doesn’t usually deliver the folklore that we want.
Vincent Brown
Vincent Brown is a historian, film-maker and co-founder of Timestamp Media. He is the Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard, and is the author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
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• This article was amended on 29 March 2024 to include the name of Norman W Manley in the gallery of Jamaica’s national heroes.
