Afro-Jamaican traditions and labor organizing on United Fruit Company plantations in Costa Rica, 1910

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1995 by Avi Chomsky

There is reason to suspect, however, that many workers did believe that the British authorities would act in their interest, and that this belief was based on more than just "false consciousness." Abigail Bakan notes that belief in the British Crown as a champion of slave, worker and peasant rights was a constant in Jamaican radical ideology from the colonial period until the 1940s and terms this a "mixed" rather than a false consciousness.(24) In fact, in several key instances of rebellion in Jamaica, the Crown proved that its intervention could overturn the interests of the planter class: after the 1831 "Baptist War," when the Crown abolished slavery, and after the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, when the new Crown Colony government proved much more concerned with peasant interests than the planter-dominated Assembly.(25) Thus, especially in the nineteenth century, slaves and peasants often correctly perceived the Crown as antagonistic to the will of the planters. In Costa Rica, Jamaican workers had even more justification for believing that the Crown or its agents would defend its citizens against a US company or the Costa Rican government.

In fact the workers used quite different language when appealing to Costa Rican president Jimenez to intervene on their behalf: they accused the "powerful Foreign Companies [Empresas Eztranjeras (sic)]" of "stomping even on the national spirit [pisoteando hasta el espiritu nacional]."(26) This too was probably a combination of instrumentalism - exhausting all possibilities - and a not-altogether-impossible hope that Jimenez would uphold his own anti-imperialist rhetoric and stand up to the Company - as indeed he did on other occasions. Thus the workers did not simply accept or mimic the dominant ideology, rather, they used the elements of that ideology which served their own interests, and challenged those in power to live up to their lofty rhetoric. And the workers proved quite adept at adjusting the language of their appeals according to the audience.

Many established members of the Jamaican community played a more supportive or at least more ambiguous role during the strike than did the British and Costa Rican authorities. The Times took up a subscription to raise funds for food and clothing for the Leeward Island laborers,(27) and it printed numerous articles in favor of the strikers. The Costa Rican authorities reacted sharply against the paper, even briefly jailing its General Manager for having criticized the police.(28)

The workers also appealed to the local Protestant ministers to support their cause, with varying degrees of success. Both the Company and the Governor accused several of the local Protestant ministers of complicity in the strike. However, the Protestant ministers actually played a decidedly ambiguous role in Costa Rica, just as they had in Jamaica. An examination of the role of Protestant Non-conformism is especially illustrative of the sometimes paradoxical interconnections among differing forms of consciousness and action. Protestantism could lead to slave and worker docility as well as resistance, and to either individual or collective solutions to the problems facing the working classes. The various Protestant sects which ministered to the slaves starting in the late eighteenth century created an enormous tension within slave society because of their dual message, which acknowledged the slaves' humanity and promised a better world in the hereafter, at the same time as they preached obedience in this world. During times of protest and rebellion, both slaves and planters often believed that Non-conformist missionaries supported the slaves, even while their actions placed them firmly on the side of law and order.(29) In the early nineteenth century this tension was resolved in favor of slave resistance to a certain extent with the growth of Black Baptism, a syncretic form which incorporated African forms of worship - drumming, dancing and spirit possession - and, equally important, translated the missionaries' other-worldly message emphatically into the terms of this world. Black Baptists played leading roles in the slave rebellion of 1831-32 and the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865.(30)