Today holds particular significance in the context of the Year of Peoples of African Descent; it is the anniversary of the outbreak of the great uprising of 1763, which also fell on a Sunday. Since the calendar is unequivocal about the fact that today is February 27, many people must be puzzled, since they assumed Republic Day – February 23 – was the date when the rising started. In fact for thirty years historians in the field have known that this was incorrect, although the population in general and the educational authorities in particular, have proved very resistant to incorporating this information into their sequence of historical events.
But that is the trouble with history; it is subject to constant revision – which is no doubt bad news for some of our political writers in this country who would like their versions of the past to be accepted as received wisdom and to remain unamended for all eternity. But history is not like that; new details of what happened are uncovered as time passes, and new generations bring different perspectives, perceptions and concerns to bear, even on well-worked periods and material. Historical writing is not like great literature; it tends to sink into obscurity over time, unless it constitutes a near contemporary chronicle; or primary sources for the period which it covers have not survived; or it contributes in a unique way to the historiographical tradition; or, as in the case of Gibbon, because it is a work of literature in its own right.
Where 1763 is concerned, the revision referred to above, relates to basic data, not so much an interpretation of that data. It simply reflects the fact that we know a bit more about what happened 248 years ago than we did when February 23 was settled on as Republic Day.
Along with the change of date goes another revision related to a popular misconception: that the 1763 Uprising began on Magdalenenburg in Canje. It did not. It started on Plantation Hollandia, which was sited on the left bank of the main Berbice River below the Wiruni Creek, next door to Lelienburg, from which Coffy came. For all of that the Canje story is not a figment of some historian’s over-active imagination. There was indeed a rebellion on Plantation Magdalenenburg in Canje on February 23, but it was a localized affair, involving the people from that estate – around 73 – along with a few from La Providence next door. To the best of our knowledge, Coffy was never on Magdalenenburg, although whether the Magdalenenburgers themselves had ever heard of him or of the conspiracy on the Berbice River proper, is not something which can be said at this stage.
The point is, however, that the rest of the Canje River remained quiet after February 23, and when the sailors which Governor Van Hoogenheim sent overland to deal with the Magdalenenburgers arrived, they found the rebels had fled to the Corentyne. The Dutch historian Ineke Velzing has drawn attention to the fact that Canje did not rise up until Coffy sent agents there to stir up revolt in early March.
One imagines that Coffy and his co-conspirators heard about this small-scale revolt, but if they did, it does not seem to have affected their altogether more sweeping plans. There is some evidence that the uprising began before its planned date, both from what Coffy said in one of his letters to Van Hoogenheim and from the testimony that was given to the Dutch authorities in 1764. If he is to be understood correctly, Coffy was “angry” about it. The revolutionaries on Hollandia appear to have believed that the plot had been betrayed by one of their bombas (drivers), which is why they decided to act immediately – ie, on February 27. Premature or not, Sunday was a very good day for revolt, because nearly all the planters were upriver in church, and the rising could get under way without interruption. Lelienburg was situated next door to Hollandia, and after the action started, according to one account, Coffy and Accara were present when the chests and cupboards were broken open to retrieve the weapons and ammunition. They then returned to Lelienburg where the same thing was done.
Perhaps the mistake made about the date in 1970 was serendipitous. The Mashramani parade, however enjoyable, does not seem the ideal way to commemorate an event as momentous as the 1763 Uprising. While the numbers involved were small in comparison to other risings in the region, such as Tacky’s revolt in Jamaica three years earlier or the one in 1823 in Demerara, 1763 is exceptional on all kinds of other grounds. Not until 1791 in St Domingue (Haiti) were those held in bondage in a West Indian colony to attempt to create – however briefly – an independent state. There were, it is true, maroon territories in Suriname and Jamaica (among other places), whose inhabitants fought to maintain the space they had carved out for themselves; but their genesis was different. They were not the product of almost an entire colony rising up against the plantocracy.
There are many other things which also distinguish the 1763 uprising from its predecessors, including the length of time it lasted and the military skill of the revolutionaries; both Coffy and Atta who came after him trained their army, and confronted the Dutch for the most part with firearms. Then there is the correspondence between Coffy and Van Hoogenheim, which must be almost unique in the history of slave risings. Haiti aside, there can hardly be another revolt of this scale where the leader of the revolutionaries committed his views to paper and attempted to negotiate with the enemy. (He did not read and write himself; he dictated his letters.) It might be noted too that thirty years before Toussaint, Coffy confronted the problem of the kind of economy which there would need to be, and came more-or-less to the same conclusion, namely, to keep the estates functioning. That the arrangements he appears to have tried to set up did not succeed, was not entirely his fault.
It is hard at this distance in time to understand the full implications of what it meant to try and take on the slave system frontally in this part of the world, and in particular what it meant to do so in the full knowledge that failure would bring terrible consequences in its train. And failure, it must be remembered, was the usual outcome of revolts of this kind, which the revolutionaries well knew. As said above, the February 23 float parade is not the time, therefore, to reflect on the raw courage of those who conspired not just to throw off the bonds of slavery, but to set up their own government. They should be commemorated on the true anniversary of the start of an uprising which shook Dutch rule in the Guianas to its very foundations.