REGINALD DUMAS
Conclusion of article on Reginald Dumas's great-grandfather, Norman McNeil. According to the February 1822 Annual Return of Plantation Slaves, he was born on the Dunvegan Estate, in the Whim district of Tobago, on July 3, 1821. Today is his 200th birth anniversary. The first part was published on Friday.
THE HISTORY of relations between the Christian church in general and the institution of slavery is an inglorious one. While there were missionaries and priests and clergymen who saw, and were appalled by, the obvious conflict between the tenets of their religion and the realities of slavery, the economics of the sugar plantation prevailed.
Well might the biblical book of Galatians urge that we should 'stand fast…in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage,' and proclaim that 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free.' But such concepts were, understandably, anathema to the planter class; no self-respecting slaveowner could possibly accept them. It is a little-known fact that a so-called 'slave Bible' was therefore written, specifically for use by the enslaved, which deliberately omitted passages like those, deemed subversive.
The reality was that profit trumped pulpit. An accommodation was reached between priest and planter, made easier by their common conviction that the slave was not in any case entirely human: both agreed that emphasis would be placed on obedience. The late Elsa Goveia, Professor of History at the University of the West Indies, described the arrangement this way:
'To secure toleration for their efforts to propagate the Christian religion among the slaves, the missionaries accepted the system of enslavement and the necessity for subordination which it created…(O)ne of the chief tasks of all the Christian missions (was) to inculcate among their Negro converts the duty of submitting to authority, particularly the duty of obeying their masters…'
It was cynical, if effective, symmetry. The theme of obedience was common to both areas of activity: obedience to the plantation lord, obedience to the Christian Lord. In starting his day and Sunday schools in 1829, the owner of the Whim estate, John Hamilton, brilliantly merged both concepts: he kept slaves, but he was also, bewilderingly, an Anglican reverend. A planter-cleric, he obviously saw no contradiction in simultaneously and contentedly serving God and Mammon.
Mind you, Hamilton was careful not to let his young slaves get ideas of freedom and equality, and forget who they really were: the day school operated only three times a week - emphasis, naturally, was on scriptural studies - and only from six to eight in the morning. Thereafter, it was back to the fields. Only in 2006 did the Church of England formally apologise for its unheroic role in slavery and the slave trade. 168 years after emancipation! These things take time, I suppose.
Emancipation or not, however, the psychology of the plantation continued to hold sway, an
