The story of the Caribs and Arawaks
Part 6
What's
more, Indians began to barter slaves with the Spanish. Girolano Benzoni,
after his description of the raid which I quoted earlier, recalled how,
"our captain then... led us to the house of a poor chief, a friend of
the Spaniards, and giving him a jug of wine, a shirt, and some knives,
with civil words entreated him to lead him to a place where slaves could
be caught. The chief went off with a party of his men, and returned the
following day bringing sixteen Indians with their hands tied behind
their backs." Some Indians, observed Raleigh (1595), "will for three or
four hatchets sell the sons and daughters of their own brethren and
sisters, and for somewhat more even their own daughters." Captives of Indians in Dominica, recounted Luisa Navarette
who had been one herself, were put to work in tobacco fields. The
English and the French bought the tobacco.
The process Luisa witnessed in 17th century Dominica had taken place
centuries before at the fringes of the Roman empire and was well
underway in western and central Africa: tribes primitive enough to have
been relatively egalitarian were evolving into more complex societies.
By this process a sexual division of labour geared to reproduction was
evolving into a social division of labour geared to commodity
production. And this entailed the emergence within the tribes of
different classes of people, some of whom exploited the labour of
others.
And yet, we must not overstate this case. It was precisely the pristine
primitiveness of the Kalina, the fluidity of their societies, which
allowed them to wage guerilla warfare for three centuries. The
hierarchic Taino chiefdoms of the Greater Antilles, the Aztec state
society of Mexico, both having hereditary leaders, were paralysed when
these leaders were captured or killed - something the Spanish quickly
learned. Even without this, they would have been incapable of resisting
for any length of time once their economies were disrupted. That is why
many of the Taino died of starvation. Not so the Kalina: they just ran
up into the bush, chose a new war leader and returned for revenge.
Thus, in 1560 at Rouen Montaigne met three Indians brought by a
navigator from the Amazon. What are the privileges of chiefs, he asked
one who had been himself a chief. The Indian replied, "it was to march
forward in any time of warfare."
No wonder the Garifuna, a tribe of mixed Carib-African stock, were able
to keep the Europeans at bay in St. Vincent until well into the 18th
century. They only acceeded to being deported by the British to Honduras
in 1797, and even so skirm-ishes continued on the island until 1799.
Only in 1803 did the British feel confident enough to offer a reward of
$20 "for each Charaib man or woman killed or brought in prisoner."
To my mind, people have not really understood the nature of revenge,
seeing it as an aspect of the Indians' vindictiveness. Imagine a tribe,
one so simple that there is really no police or leader or council of
elders. How did a man redress an injustice? He took personal revenge, a
course of action which easily turned into a feud. Lex talionis, said
William Hilhouse describing the Arawaks of Guyana in 1825, "is observed
rigidly... Most of the blood feuds originate in jealousy, and the
revenge of connubial injuries, of which they are highly resentful." "If anyone among them suffers an injury or affront without endeavouring to revenge himself, he is slighted by all the rest and
accounted a coward, and a person of no esteem," said Rochefort
(1658). Pere Labat, speaking of the Kalina, was more forceful: "Frown at
an Indian and you fight him. Fight an Indian and you must kill him or be
killed."
This individualism was not, as often thought, just a matter of spite 'it
was condition of the Indians' mode of existence as much as the courts of
law are of ours and as such it was practiced quite apart from the
varying cultural attitudes, the differences in tribal temperament, such
as those noticed by most observers. And consequently this had to be
impressed upon the mind of the Spanish. The primitive individualism of
the Indians, then, in ways came close to being a definition of freedom.
"Many carib Indians," complained Antonio de Herreira (1547), the last of
the great chroniclers, "were coming from the islands, of Trinidad,
Guadeloupe, Dominica, Santa Cruz, Matino, and other islands, causing
great damage." And this continued for quite some time. Take
the example of the Nepoio named Hierreima whom the Spanish in Trinidad
enslaved: he ran away, killed two Spaniards, and thereafter dedicated
his life to killing the rest. In 1636 a Netherlander, Jacques Ousiel,
wrote: "This Hierreima came to Tobago... offering his services in
driving the Spaniards out of the aforesaid island with 100 or 80 white
musketeers and 400 Indians that he would add thereto, declaring that as
an assurance of his good intentions and purposes, he would leave all
their women and children and old men as hostages."
The ensuing years did see the Spaniards being driven out of all but the
three largest islands of the Caribbean. But the spoils of those
victories went to the English and the French, not the Indians. So
Hierreima is as forgotten as is the Ciguayan. The Lokono and the Kalina,
although they are still to be found in the Guianas, their memory has
been covered with calumny. And now, looking back, we wonder what was
this all about? What remains? Did it only mean that Spain got a few less
gold trinkets and pearls and the smaller islands were preserved for the
English and the French to later turn them into sugar factories powered
with African blood? That the word 'anthropophagi' could be replaced by
'cannibal'? And the memory of the past linger on only as a demeaning
myth of peaceful Arawaks and warlike Caribs?
There is another story to be told, one so subterranean that at times it
seemed only exist as a dream. We pick up the trail in the writing of
Thomas More who set his fictional island of Utopia in the Caribbean
where was also located Erasmus's Fortunate Isles. It was plaited of a
thread inspired by the courage and egalitarianism of both Arawaks and
Caribs. It first found expression in the startling idea of Las Casas
that, "the inhabitants (of Cuba) had the right to wage war on the
Admiral and his Christians in order to rescue their neighbors and
compatriots." Symptomatically, it was the French, who colonised the
Carib islands, who took it up - Montaigne, Voltaire and then Rousseau's
noble savage. By 1776, the year of the American Revolution, when Abbe
Raynal picked up the thread, the Indians had been replaced by Africans.
"The slave, an instrument in the hands of wickedness, is below the dog
which the Spaniard let loose against the American," he wrote: "A
courageous chief only is wanted." Those lines were closely read, over
and over, by a middle-aged black slave in San Domingue who shared the
same dream. His name was Toussaint L'Ouverture and his dream was no less
than the dream of freedom.
Written by: Kim Johnson