IT’S NO SURPRISE that Grenville Phillips II should rush in to respond to the discourse of historical writing and white supremacy in our country. This much is expected.
It’s a surprise, though, that he should rush to judgment on a subject he knows little about, and to hurl himself into a conclusion that conceals more about his mentality than it reveals about history.
It’s nonsense to speak of two methodologies. Both Dr Karl Watson and myself used the Assembly’s report on the rebellion in which both Bussa and Franklin are mentioned.
The difference is that he stays with that official report, which every professional historian knows is a politically contrived document, designed to justify why the poor Whites, and their planter leaders, went on a murderous, bloodthirsty rampage, killing hundreds of Blacks, and placed a rope around Franklin’s neck. He was an innocent even if troubled man.
Where Dr Watson and I depart, however, is in the area of new, additional data. There has been a silence around these data for decades. We have found them in archives in New York and London, written by the people who were involved in the rebellion.
The records of the British soldiers show that the rebellion was headquartered at Bayley’s where Bussa lived. The troops rallied from all over Barbados to Bayley’s and the first large-scale bloody war took place there.
I have presented these military reports. They document in detail the first massacre at Bayley’s.
Then there is the matter of how oppressed people get to record their own history. Blacks had no voice in the official record of the Assembly. But the moment Emancipation came, and they had their own newspaper, and the opportunity came to speak, they wrote in explicit terms that the 1816 rebellion was the “War of General Bussa”.
Then they gave official testimony on the fact that Bussa was their iconic leader. Even a white official, a Mr Sinclair from St Philip, declared in his 1914 book that the rebellion was led by Bussa.
Franklin, as a mulatto boy, disappeared from the records the moment Blacks began to report on what they did, and how they did it. No black writer or newspaper or any black literary source in the 19th century makes reference to Franklin. He is invented by the white imagination.
Murdered
They murdered him. His white father had left him property and the white legal system took it away from him. He protested and the first chance they got, they executed him.
The refusal to accept the overwhelming legitimacy of the data – logistical, literary and oral – points to a greater problem in white Barbadian historical writing.
For decades the war of General Bussa was described by white historians as a small skirmish in St Philip. Then they said it was confined to the southern parishes; then it was led by non-Blacks. And yet, the archives say the contrary. This is a part of the psychosis; an inability to be objective about black achievement. Most of the literature on West Indies cricket success is the same.
The more than 1 000 Blacks slaughtered in three days by poor Whites in militia uniforms, who were considered out of control by the British army, knew their relations to Bussa. This is why the first chance the black community got to speak, they involved the name of their leader, General Bussa.
– SIR HILARY BECKLES