Neither his life nor his revolt had been taught in the public schools, which were still operating under a basic UK template that had washed the record clean of revolutionary figures and outlaws. Sharpe was placed among the Order of National Heroes on October 1st, 1975 in a public ceremony at a Kingston stadium where the crowd, according to Bertram, was “a sea of blank faces.” Few had ever heard of him. “The wider context was resistance to plantation slavery.”

“Marxism was the language of the day,” said Arnold Bertham, a PNP official who served on the committee.

The government commissioned the respected Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite to write up a short booklet partly dedicated to Sharpe called Wars of Respect that celebrated the “impact of industrial strike action upon the industrial system” and hailed him as a revolutionary icon on the level of a Lenin or Trotsky of the 19th century tropics. Sharpe’s execution had been in the newspapers, which were preserved in the National Library of Jamaica, and the five-page transcript of his kangaroo trial was pasted deep in a binder of dispatches in the Colonial Office in London. The story of Sam Sharpe’s rebellion had stayed alive, thanks to an underground oral tradition in the island as well as the British legal apparatus and its obsessively kept court records. Two other posts were given to contemporary prime ministers.īut what of Jamaica’s period of enslavement under Europeans, from the time when Christopher Columbus first spotted it in 1494 to the British emancipation in 1832? Was there nobody from that time who might have qualified? The independent government established a category called the Order of National Heroes, and included three historical figures: the separatist advocate Marcus Garvey (who had spent considerable time in Harlem), and two martyrs of an attempted coup d’état in 1865. The first was said to represent the beauty of the island, the second its natural wealth, and the last the dark chapters of its past.Īnother important part of building the national identity was to do away with the traditional British lions of the past-mainly sovereigns and governors-whose names were honored on public monuments and replace them with Afro-Caribbean figures. Some of the ambivalence can be seen in its flag, vaguely mimicking the saltire of the Union Jack but colored green, gold and black.

Dressed for Death by Alexa Sharpe