By *Jomo Thomas
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” — Audre Lorde, feminist poet of Barbadian and Grenadian roots
I was introduced to Nellie Ebou by Father Mark, the popular Catholic priest who has done quiet but especially important work spreading the gospel across St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
About 12 years ago, I was reading one of his books about life on the Grenadine island of Mayreau and discovered Nellie Ebou, an enslaved Black woman who, along with others, rose in righteous indignation and slew the estate overseer. I committed to telling her story ever since.
So when Dr. Garrey Michael Dennie, one of three local historians commissioned to write the definitive history of St. Vincent and the Grenadines –he others being Drs Adrian Fraser and Cleve Scott — took the stage on Emancipation Day, urging the government to declare Nellie Ebou our first female national hero, I was ecstatic.
To understand the singular importance of the decision to rebel, resist and self-sacrifice, one has to understand the times in which Nellie Ebou lived. The legend is that her supreme act was committed in the first decade of the 19th century, around 1805.
This is a few years after the death of Chief Chatoyer in 1795, the banishment of thousands of conquered Garifunas, the conquest of our homeland by the British colonialists, and the transformation of SVG into a slave society.
Protests, uprisings, and rebellions roiled the Caribbean. The Haitian Revolution had triumphed, and the first free black republic was declared in 1804.
News of this proclamation must have shaken the very foundation of slavery in the Caribbean and inspired the enslaved to strike a blow for their own liberation.
As we will see, the defiantly courageous act of the Nellie Ebou sisterhood was a precursor to the 1816 Bussa rebellion in Barbados and the 1831 Uprising in Jamaica, led by Sam Sharpe. The enslaved were freed less than 30 years later in 1834.
The historical record is replete with stories of the backbreaking work that enslaved Africans performed to fill the coffers of estate owners. The kill rate was so high that enslaved Africans were expected to live no more than seven years.
It was a terrible and deadly time to be a child. The record also paints a horrific story of the gender abuse so prevalent during slavery. The enslavers, masters and overseers simply had their way with our women and girls.
Many were raped, tortured, beaten and killed for resisting the sexual advances of rapist and paedophiles. After all, the cruel slave system viewed our ancestors as chattel, property, in much the same way they viewed an animal.
It was with this understanding that historian Michael Dennie told the Nellie the Ebou story and called for her to be declared a national hero by Emancipation Day 2027, adding that “this is not possible in colonial times, but it is our government [now]. We have the capacity to decide who are our heroes”.
Dr Dennie made his case by noting that “five Black women gave their lives, paid the heaviest price for the freedom that we enjoy today”. And then he went on to make an even more profound point. “Freedom wasn’t simply a gift. Freedom is something we paid for in money and blood.”
Correcting the historical record, Dr. Dennie crowned Nellie the Ebou and her rebellious womenfolk as freedom fighters and rejected the “co-conspirator” label that had been attached to them since their execution.
“We have to understand which stories must be told, which stories have a reverence to which our children must be acquainted,” he said.
“The story of Nelly the Ebo, a Black woman standing against slavery, and with other Black women giving their lives so that we today could enjoy freedom — let us remember them in the most positive way we can. Make Nellie the Ebo a national hero.”
In making decisions about who should be celebrated and honoured, it must be understood that “is freedom we making”. The narrative has to be reinvented; the his-story has to be unlearned and relearned and proclaimed as our story. The language and discourse must be turned inside out.
The colonial narrative of who we were must be abandoned. Where they saw savages who engaged in senseless revolt and murdered their “civilised” enslavers, we must discover masters of many crafts.
The retelling of reality on our island must be repackaged not as glorified revisionism, but as a journey to recapture our sovereignty. Our ancestors’ anger must be reinterpreted as righteous indignation; their trouble-making must be reimagined as good trouble, rebellion, and self-defence.
Only by recrafting our story will we truly grasp what Audre Lorde meant by “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.
Bussa, Cuffy, Sam Sharpe and Fedon rebelled against the oppressive, exploitative and dehumanising slave conditions in Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Grenada.
Nellie Ebou made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom so many of us take for granted today. Because females suffered so much in our march for national advancement, a fitting tribute to their contribution would be to bestow the highest national honour on Nellie Ebou. Our womenfolk deserve nothing less.
*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
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