Elderly Women and Plantation Resistance in Jamaica

At the tail end of the eighteenth century, a Jamaican woman reported to her enslaver that she had been cursed. Specifically, the woman’s stepmother had cast an obeah spell upon her, and now worried that death awaited her, like it had for so many of her stepmother’s supposed victims. Although he immediately dismissed the claim, the planter was quickly inundated by others on the estate who insisted that the woman’s stepmother was indeed possessed of supernatural powers, and that she had waged a campaign of terror on the community. They were particularly fearful of two characteristics: first, she was over eighty years old, an incredibly venerable age in Jamaica’s horrifically brutal society; and second, that she was from Africa, which her peers believed to be elemental to her religious strength. The planter wasted no time. He quickly sold her to Cuban traders, eager to remove a potential threat to his massive profits.[1]

This paper examines the role of elder enslaved women in plantation Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century. They occupied critical roles as laborers, care givers, and community leaders. But most importantly to colonial officials, they retained a great deal of spiritual and medicinal authority. This had long been a source of stability on Jamaican estates, but as both enslaved resistance and anti-slavery activism increased at the end of the eighteenth century, these women’s positions came under direct attack. Using plantation accounts, observers’ notes, and anti-slavery pamphlets, this paper will argue that the spiritual practices of aging Jamaican women were targeted as one of the strongest threats to colonial society and its economy. At the same time, these aging women’s positions within the enslaved community turned vulnerable due to new sources of stress on the plantation.