By Winston McGowan
This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in Stabroek News in the ‘History This Week’ series on September 7, 2000.
The 1823 Demerara uprising has several distinguishing features. Firstly, it is one of only two major slave rebellions in Guyanese history, occurring sixty years after the better-known Berbice slave insurrection of 1763, led initially by Kofi. Slave revolts, in fact, were a relatively rare feature in the history of most slave societies in the Americas. This rarity