Such an Innocent Sounding Word…Slavery

By Sankofie | Published September 1, 2025 | 2 Comments

I grew up in Jamaica and in school I heard about slavery.  I am being very clear, I heard.  I heard about the Spanish people who came the English people who came after and, of course, as the also ran, were the then discovered Arawak now Taíno, people.  It seemed Jamaican history started when Christopher Colombus sailed, with the blessing of Isabella, from Spain and presented himself proudly to the Caribbean, arriving in Jamaica on his second voyage.  We were told some things but I did not, in school, gather a sufficiency of knowledge to have made meaning of my history and that of my country. But that was a long time ago. 

Since then I have participated in some learning about slavery and come into some knowledge that has even put me on the verge of questioning, not only God but indeed also Oneness of God.  I discovered that the Spanish capture was led by an Italian man and that they, unable to read the winds and the skies were in truth and in fact very lost in Caribbean waters.  In the process of losing even their senses and as a desperate act they captured and called us the West Indies as they probably thought they were somewhere near India, their initially planned destination.  Among so many other curses they brought with them slavery, a royally approved situation occupied by slaves and slave masters.  

The slaves in slavery were the peoples who were captured on their own land, those captured in far off places like Africa and made to work for no wages on big sugarcane plantations.  They were sophisticated, worked with advanced technologies, spilled wisdom instead of water and had developed cultures that expressed life and living in balance and harmony.  As a slave your whole person, your whole life, language, customs, identity everything belonged to the slave master.  The slave masters in slavery were the British individuals, families, companies, churches who claimed ownership and possession of the land, the people and all that sprung forth.   As a slave master you owned inferior, childlike, uncivilized ‘property’ with no rights, but which could work on the plantation and become a stage for the performance of a white culture lacking any intrinsic value or worth.  

Today some say slavery was an institution. The scope, breath, depth of this institution was never explained.  It was not impressed upon us that this institution overtook everything you were and were about in life. Everything.  It redefined person and personhood, confused its own language dynamics of place, person and thing, destroyed time and existence validated cultures and cultural practices and like the way the courses of rivers are rerouted, readjusted the whole trajectory of the growth and development of many peoples.  A powerful institution said to be biblical and natural to human society. How could a simple word harbour such utter destruction.

I wonder how and what I would have done or done differently had I known some certain things earlier.  That, for example, what happened to our Taíno people, who lived here a thousand years before, is what is now called genocide and declared in present time to be an international crime.  I heard that people were beaten and hung but it was never highlighted that this was a feature of daily, like e-ver-y-day, life. That women, children were repetitiously raped daily and nightly for no other reason than that rape existed in white vocabulary and also for white profit making. Would this knowledge have mandated me to certain actions?

I have learned that the smooth sounding, quite encompassing word, slavery, embraces some of the most absolutely horrendous cultural facets and behaviours of people and institutions that enslaved.  With the uprising, pun intended, and increasing popularity of DNA and genealogical studies I have learned that the people upon on whom slavery was performed were biologically related to me.  That the drastic interruption to their lives, called slavery, disconnected me from them over time, space and memory. 

Now that I have visited some places of learning, even becoming my own teacher and student I understand that it was slavery that visited and introduced the beating and mutilation of people, rape, murder upon the land we now call Jamaica. That it was slavery, supposedly a civilizing lifestyle, that caused women to do abortions, murder their children, commit suicide. That it was slavery that fostered the childlike and grew them to betray.  This word, though innocent sounding, was never ever innocent.  But do we even now truly understand and are able to make meaning of the depth of it? 

A single word… that even today, everyday
Hammers nails deep into the flesh of our ancestors

A single word…that does not sound an alarm 
Against the insanity that perches on the brink of our understanding

A single word…that consistently denotes
A path to insanity 

A single word…whose innocence keeps us protected
From the expanse of its barbarity 

September 2025