* The strong black nationalist sentiments of the rural areas of Jamaica
manifested themselves in the religious protests of Alexander Bedward. Bedward had
re-interpreted the bible to depict the whites in the society as the devil, and he
lambasted the merry-go-round of the Governor and his entourage. The British military
were deployed against Bedward; and when his idealism began to become legend, the colonial
authorities declared that he was insane and committed him to a mental asylum. See
Barry Chevanes, Jamaican Lower Class Religion: Struggles Against Oppression, M.A.
Thesis, U.W.I., 1971.
FOOTNOTES
- George Shepperson has done the most thorough study of the Ethiopian
movement in Africa and the New World. The major problem with his writing is that he
tended to examine this nationalist response as a simplistic and idealist movement.
See his article "Ethiopianism Past and Present" in C.G. Baeta, ed., Christianity
in Tropical Africa, Oxford, 1968. For specific development of Ethiopianism in
19th century black American thought see William Scott, "And Ethiopia Shall Stretch
Forth Her Hands: The Origins of Ethiopianism in Afro-American Thought 1767-1896",
Umoja, Spring, 1978.
- W. Scott, ibid.
- George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent Africa,
Edinburgh University Press, 1958.
- The full impact of the Ethiopian movement on the Bambata Revolt of
1906, when more than 4000 Africans lost their lives in the struggle, is in doubt among
scholars. The link between religion and politics found the most concrete expression
in the armed uprising of John Chilembwe in Nyasaland in 1915. White missionaries and
scholars blamed the Pan-African links between Chilembwe and the black American
churches. This revolt was an armed protest against the unjust taxation and forced
labour of the colonialists. See G. Shepperson and T. Price, ibid., and B.G.M.
Sandkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, London, 1964.
- S.K.B. Asante, Pan-African Protest: West Africa and the
Italo-Ethiopia Crisis 1934-1941, Longman, 1977. Asante discusses the political
symbolism for West Africans in the turn of the century, p.11.
