lactation practices of the Africans brought over to Jamaica, its key feature being prolonged breast-feeding. Because Africans constituted a much larger proportion of the Jamaican population throughout the period of slavery than of the U.S. Black population, they argue, this factor largely explains the huge difference in survival and reproduction rates. In simple terms, an African cultural pattern is to be blamed for the demographic disaster in Jamaica, not the attitudes of the planters or their brutal treatment of the enslaved. There are numerous problems with this argument, beginning with the quality of their data, leading the authors to admit in the end that it is ‘highly speculative’. One major hurdle is Barbados, which, with similar lactation practices as Jamaica, had a rate of reproduction more like America’s.163 Another was the severe understatement of infant deaths in the registration data on which they relied,164 which leads one to question whether Jamaican and U.S. mortality rates were that similar. Furthermore, as Kiple has pointed out, while the fat and protein quality of the milk of lactating African women is lower than in the U.S., studies have shown that prolonged breast feeding offered the best chance of survival for the child since ‘it at least contains a high-quality protein that the child will be without when he is finally weaned’.165 Thus, far from accounting for the lower rate of reproduction, the lactation practices of Jamaican enslaved women may well have prevented a disastrous situation from being even more catastrophic by delaying the moment when the enslaved child was weaned into the deathly environment of malnutrition and planter indifference, if not downright hostility, throughout the period of the slave trade. Slave women may also well have prolonged lactation as a form of birth control to prevent bringing children into the horrors of the plantation, and to provide opportunities for relief from the dawn to dusk burden of field labour, not to mention the sexual predation of the whites and slave drivers. Verene Shepherd referred to this as the enslaved women’s effort to free their ‘enchained wombs’.166 Not considered, too, is the fact that sexual assault was a source of chronic venereal diseases, causing widespread sterility. On Thistlewood’s estate, almost every woman of childbearing age had gonorrhea, Africans infected within days of arrival in the island167 and there is every reason to believe that this was the case throughout the island. It is now established medical fact that, among women, untreated gonorrhea causes pelvic inflammatory disease that permanently damages the reproductive system, leading to infertility, in addition to stillbirth or miscarriage.168 It also causes epididymitis in men which also leads to infertility. Kenneth Morgan, in an otherwise sound piece, has played this down, confounding it with the spurious issue of slave women’s morality.169 The real issue, however, was the chronic raping of enslaved women. As Burnard correctly points out: ‘White men molested slave women in part because they could do so without fear of social consequence and in part because they constantly needed to show slaves the extent of their dominance. The institutional dominance of white men had to be translated into personal dominance.’170 In doing so they rapidly spread the more virulent strain of gonorrhea they brought from Europe, to the detriment of the fertility of enslaved women.
Another kind of evidence demolishes this attempt to blame African lactation practices for Jamaica’s demographic disaster. Tadman171 has shown that in the Louisiana sugar belt of the slave South, where the lactation practices of the enslaved were similar to those of other North American enslaved as well as their white enslavers, a similar pattern of massive demographic decline is found, resulting from the same combination of inhumane treatment and imbalanced sex-ratios. The horrendous overworking of women on the Louisiana cane fields reduced their fertility, reinforcing Dunn’s argument that ‘the sugar labor performed by the Mesopotamia women [of Jamaica] in their prime childbearing years was the main cause of their low birthrate’.172 This heavy toll on fertility, argues Tadman, combined with the ability to replace the dead by buying a male-dominated workforce from the older slave states, was the lethal combination accounting for the catastrophic demographic decline of the Jamaican population, not African lactation practices, not even yellow fever.173
Perhaps the strongest evidence that it was the peculiar savagery of the condition of enslavement in Jamaica that most accounts for the demographic decline is how swiftly the Jamaican population began to reproduce almost immediately after abolition, in spite of persisting African-type lactation practices among the formerly enslaved African and creole blacks (who had similar practices) and has never stopped growing.174 Ironically, recent studies have shown that the decline of traditional breast-feeding practices among Jamaican and other West Indian peasant and urban working-class women since the 1950s, and their replacement with commercially promoted infant formulas, has led to a disastrous increase in infant malnutrition, illnesses and mortality.175
This being so, consider Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 shows the relative percentage of slaves taken to Jamaica and the North American mainland by decade between 1651 and 1830. Between 1651 and 1660, North America received far more slaves than Jamaica. In 1655 Jamaica was taken by the British from the Spanish and, instantly, everything changed. Between five and ten times more slaves were delivered to Jamaica than to North America during the six decades after 1660, and the last three decades of the 18th century and more than twice as many in the middle decades in between. Figure 2 shows the cumulative effect in absolute numbers: between 1650 and 1830, a total of 1,017,109 Africans were disembarked in Jamaica, while only 388,233 were taken to North America.176 However, in 1830 there were 2,009,048 enslaved in America and, including free blacks, some 2,328,642 Black souls. At that time, there were only 319,074 enslaved in Jamaica and, all told, 359,147 people of some Black ancestry.
What this astonishing difference amounts to is this: had Africans and their descendants experienced the same rate of increase in Jamaica as had occurred in North America, the theoretically possible 1830 enslaved population in the island would have been 5,262,522 and its total Black population (including free coloured or people of mixed ancestry) would have been 6,100,620. Taking account of the 359,147 survivors in 1830, and using North American slavery as a counterfactual yardstick, we must conclude that there were 5,741,473 missing Black Jamaicans in 1830, which is a measure of British protracted genocide of Black people in the island between 1655 and 1830. To express this in the stronger causal terms of a counterfactual conditional: had it not been for the distinctive features of Jamaican slavery, 5,741,473 Jamaican lives would not have been lost. (My estimate, I hasten to add, is confined to the Jamaican enslaved population, both the Africans brought there and their descendants, with no implications for African lives lost in Africa.)177 This figure, we might note, is not much smaller than the six million Jews eliminated in the Nazi holocaust. Jamaican slavery, we conclude, was a clear case of genocide.
Figure 1. Relative Percentages of Slaves Disembarked in Jamaica and North America
Figure 2. A Counterfactual Picture of Jamaican Genocide: Jamaican & North American Slavery Compared, 1650–1830
Graphs composed by author from Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates
To be sure, there are varieties of genocide.178 The British genocide of Blacks in Jamaica took place over 183 years rather than the twelve years of the Nazi holocaust and 2–4 years of the Ottoman genocide of at least 1.1 million Armenians between 1915 and 1919. This suggests a distinction between protracted or slow-moving and concentrated genocide. Several scholars have drawn attention to the differences and similarities between slavery and the Jewish genocide ‘without lapsing into facile equation or producing crude hierarchies of suffering’, as A. Dirk Moses aptly puts it.179
