Journal of Social History, Summer 1995 v28 n4 p837(19)
Afro-Jamaican traditions and labor organizing on United Fruit
Company plantations in Costa Rica, 1910. Avi Chomsky.
Author's Abstract: COPYRIGHT Peter N. Stearns 1995
Between 1900 and 1913 some 20,000 West Indians, mostly from Jamaica, migrated to
Costa Rica to work on the United Fruit Company's newly established banana plantations
in the Atlantic Coast province of Limon. Afro-Caribbean traditions, forged in generations
of slavery under the British, shaped the ways that these workers formed a culture of
resistance to the plantation system. They formed alternative institutions in the shadows of
the plantation, including lodges, churches, and friendly societies; they held to their
British identity and maintained faith in the British Crown as the protector of their
interests; they participated in Protestant Non-Conformist sects; and they believed and
participated in Afro-Caribbean religions of obeah and myalism. In 1910, the company
tried to break a newly-formed and flourishing labor union by importing hundreds of
strike-breakers from St. Kitts. Instead, the St. Kitts workers joined Jamaican unionists in
protesting their work conditions. British consular officials and Protestant ministers, both
black and white, provided mixed support for striking workers, while two obeah-men
became among the strike's most important leaders. Racial and ethnic identities, and
cultural traditions, played key roles.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Peter N. Stearns 1995
While Costa Rica's reputation of being the most pacific and homogeneous of the
countries of Latin America is not entirely undeserved, historians have increasingly called
this view into question. Recent works have documented inequalities in land tenure,
concentrations of power, and social struggles which make Costa Rica look more like its
Central American neighbors than had previously been assumed.(1)
Left out of the consensual view of Costa Rican history, in particular, have been social and
political developments in the country's Atlantic Coast province of Limon. Central
America's Atlantic coast has traditionally been more closely linked to the Caribbean than
to the rest of the isthmus, and Limon's tropical rainforests have remained isolated from
Costa Rica's cool, coffee-growing highlands until the present. However, in the late
nineteenth century U.S.-based companies began to build railroads and plant bananas in
Limon, recruiting workers primarily from Jamaica. Thus the society which developed in
Limon was an English-speaking enclave of white North American managers and black
Jamaican workers, with a culture and history quite distinct from the rest of Costa Rica,
although inevitably intertwined.(2) In particular, the extreme polarization of race and
class on the Atlantic Coast contrasts sharply with the more homogeneous central valley.
Although Costa Rican nationalists and anti-imperialists have protested the United Fruit
Company's domination of the Atlantic Coast for close to a century, they have generally
had little contact with the Jamaican banana workers themselves.(3) This paper focuses on
these workers and seeks to uncover the ways in which they attempted to challenge the
presumably dominant plantation system by creating a very different kind of life and
society in its shadows. The workers brought with them a rich cultural tradition, based on
their African background and their generations of plantation work under slavery for the
British, which became the basis for organizations and collective action which allowed
them to escape from, or to resist, Company domination. This culture of resistance
encompassed several apparently contradictory elements: a British identity and a faith in
the British Crown as the protector of the slave or worker's interests; involvement in
Protestant Non-Conformist sects; and belief and participation in African-based religious
forms.(4) In particular, I seek to illuminate the ways in which culture, belief systems and
everyday forms of resistance grow into, or intersect with, those areas more commonly
studied by labor historians: working-class organizations, unions, and strikes. I focus on
the first labor union formed by the UFCO's Jamaican workers, and a three-week strike it
led in late 1910, as a window into the lives and culture of the workers.
Between 1900 and 1913 some 20,000 Jamaicans migrated to Costa Rica, attracted by the
newly-established United Fruit Company banana plantations. The earliest migrants were
single men who lived in Company barracks, but soon families followed and a thriving
Jamaican community developed in the Limon area.(5) Through the late 1920s the UFCO
maintained a core of some 5,000 Jamaican workers, along with some 2,000 native Costa
Ricans, while many others worked as tenants or contractors for the UFCO or for large
Costa Rican planters. These migrants were part of a stream of West Indians who left in
the decades after emancipation when depression in the sugar industry and unavailability
of land for alternative cultivation made subsistence impossible at home.(6) As in Panama,
where they went to work on the railroad and canal-building projects, many Jamaicans
were mobile and in-and out-migration were high, but by the early 1900s a fairly stable
community had developed as well.
The UFCO faced a myriad of difficulties in establishing a labor force to grow its bananas.
Finding "free" labor to work in plantation agriculture has been notoriously difficult
throughout the history of the Americas, yet the Company had to somehow recruit
workers. Until the 1920s, few Costa Ricans were attracted to the coast.
The Jamaicans who came to Costa Rica were mostly second-generation ex-slaves
(slavery was abolished in Jamaica in the 1830s), and came from a cultural tradition which
shared both an aversion to what they considered slave-like about plantation agriculture,
and a language, religion and organized social life developed to survive, mitigate or
challenge these "slave-like" conditions. The solutions that the workers in Costa Rica
sought to the challenges confronting them have strong parallels in the Jamaican slave
tradition. Workers wanted access to land, for both subsistence and market production.
They tried to maximize their independence with respect to the plantation, and they forged
social ties outside of plantation domination in their families, communities, organizations,
and religions, both Christian and African. In particular, Afro-Jamaican religious tradition
which encompassed Protestant Non-conformism and obeah and myalism - two Africanbased religious forms which flourished among the slaves, and which was a major factor
behind a number of slave and post-slavery rebellions in Jamaica - played a crucial role in
labor organizing in Costa Rica. The Jamaicans in Costa Rica, as had the slaves in
Jamaica, attempted in both confrontational and accommodationist ways to develop in the
shadows of the plantation a system which satisfied their material and spiritual needs.
Under ordinary conditions, slaves and workers leave few records of their own about their
activities. Activities which challenge the social order are especially likely to remain
invisible, because workers take pains to conceal them from those who are maintaining the
records. It is only when a challenge becomes overt, as in the case of strikes, that the
record becomes fuller. Even so, hostile accounts in Company and government records
make it difficult to discern what workers were really doing and thinking during a strike.
Nonetheless, the written record on strikes in Limon allows us to piece together many
aspects of workers' lives and culture.
Until 1910, strikes on UFCO plantations were sporadic, short-lived and generally
unsuccessful. Most of them took place among workers in newly-opened land, where
conditions were the most onerous, and were carried out by newly-arrived workers, who
did not have the infrastructure of family or community support which older workers had
developed and which could act as a cushion in hard times. Newly arrived workers could
also have been given an unrealistic picture of what awaited them in Costa Rica by a labor
contractor in Jamaica, as we shall see was the case in 1910. Also, new workers did not
yet have an investment in their life in Costa Rica. Although the chances of a strike's
success may have been slim, they probably felt that they had much less to lose than did
established workers.
Several factors militated against any sort of worker organization. Migrant workers are
generally reluctant to organize because of vulnerability to repression, high turnover, and a
common desire to earn some money and move on, rather than struggle for improved
conditions. In the absence of any sort of union, it was not surprising that the Company
was able to quickly break any strikes which did occur. For example, when 7 dockworkers
declared themselves on strike in 1904, the Company brought in 165 laborers from
outlying plantations within a few hours to finish their task. The strikers were
suspended.(7) The Company's reaction also suggests why strikes were not more frequent
among its workers.
But by 1910 the Jamaican community of Limon had developed a complex social life of
churches, newspapers, mutual aid societies, and lodges, all outside of Company control.
These provided a strong institutional network for the Artisans and Labourers' Union,
founded in January of that year with 2,000 members, in response to a supervisor beating
two Jamaican workers.(8) The union members described themselves as "workers and
farmers [agricultores]," and in many ways the union appears to have been more of a
cross-class alliance of Jamaicans (hence its name, Artisans and Labourers' Union) than a
class-based alliance of workers. No Costa Rican workers participated. Nonetheless, the
union signalled a major shift in worker consciousness and in workers' ability to seriously
challenge the Company's domination and to have a voice in determining their work
conditions. It also threatened to undermine the Company's ability to mobilize
strikebreakers.
In the early days of its existence, the Union's main function was to provide mutual aid
and organize social functions, along the lines of the Jamaican churches, lodges and
Friendly Societies in Costa Rica. It also ran a cooperative store or commissary,(9) and a
bar where meetings were held. The union store is a good example of how workers sought
ways to improve their situation without directly placing any demands on the Company.
The Company generally paid workers with coupons which could be used only in
Company commissaries. Other local stores discounted the coupons 20-25% off their
marked value, the rate at which the Company would redeem them (in merchandise). If a
worker wanted to be paid in cash, he would often have to wait up to two weeks after the
end of the month to receive his pay; coupons could be obtained in advance. Whenever
workers voiced their complaints against the Company, the coupon system ranked high on
the list.(10) The union commissary may have circumvented these problems by allowing
members to buy on credit, thus enabling them to wait for their pay in cash instead of
accepting coupons.
The union's first actual demand to the Company occurred on July 16, 1910, when it
notified the UFCO that it intended to declare August 1, Jamaican Emancipation Day, a
holiday, and refrain from working that day. Emancipation Day, a public holiday in
Jamaica, held great symbolic importance - not only affirming the difference in workers'
status from that of slaves, but also asserting a Jamaican identity through a celebration
unacknowledged by either the UFCO or Costa Rica.(11) The fact that the union's first
demand concerned national identity and dignity rather than wages or working conditions
is further indication of the race/ethnic rather than the class nature of the union.
The following day the Company locked out some 600 workers identified as belonging to
the Union and told them that they were relieved of their positions.(12) The Company thus
turned what had begun as a social and cultural celebration into an issue of labor discipline
and control, which in turn suggested to the workers that their freedom still had severe
limitations.
Both the Company and the workers turned immediately to the Costa Rican government
for support. The workers' protest focused on pay issues, in particular, the system of
hourly wages which resulted in workers never receiving the daily wage they had been
guaranteed. They also protested long waits before the monthly pay check arrived, the
coupon system, and the money discounted for the Company hospital. In addition, they
denounced merciless supervisors who "turn the respect and obedience of the workers into
a perfect slavery. They have them jailed and everything that comes into the heads of such
lords [caciques], they engage in physical abuse [torturar en el trozo], abolished by law,
orders which are followed by the Police Officers, because since they are subsidized by
the Allied Companies, they are afraid of losing this bonus [sobresueldo]."(13) The
Company, for its part, complained that the union "is nothing less than a threat to the
industrial interests of the country."(14) It named three of the union's leaders as "very
dangerous" and asked that they be deported.(15) But the government had little
institutional presence on the isolated Atlantic Coast and was slow to respond, so the
Company quickly resorted to its own power.
Its next attempt to break the union consisted of sending its recruiting agent to St. Kitts
(one of the Leeward Islands, another British West Indian colony) to import a large
number of workers who could replace Jamaican union members. These 725 men arrived,
on a ship licensed to carry 300, on November 16. The Company offered them 70 cents a
day (Jamaicans were then receiving $1 per day), and immediately scattered them among
outlying farms.
The efforts of the Jamaican unionists, combined with the unifying force of an underlying
Afro-Caribbean tradition which the Jamaicans and St. Kitts men shared, however,
allowed the two groups to overcome what Michael Conniff has called the "interisland
jealousy" that undermined labor organizing among Panama Canal workers.(16) Instead of
despising the St. Kitts men as scabs, a number of union activists made it their business to
contact them immediately upon their arrival and to convince them to refuse to work while
Jamaican union members were locked out. The St. Kitts men found out right away that
the wages they were being offered were substantially below what the Jamaicans were
earning, and this became one of their principal grievances in refusing to work. In
addition, they complained that the pay, food and quarters that they were provided were
far below what had been promised by the recruiting agent. According to the British
Consul, Jamaican "agitators . . . told the St. Kitts men that the country was unhealthy"
and provoked panic among them. "The Jamaicans in Limon were caring for the St. Kitts
men, some in good faith, but some also with the idea of working them up to fight the
authorities," the Consul went on.(17)
The St. Kitts men fled back to the city of Limon from the farms where they had been
assigned, and demanded redress from the British Vice Consul in Limon, the Costa Rican
government, the Company, the Union, and prominent members of the Jamaican
community. These different actors' varying reactions determined the course of the strike,
and the future of the union.
Once the St. Kitts men's strike had begun, the Costa Rican government overcame any
lingering hesitation it had felt about supporting the Company. By December 1 it had sent
250 soldiers and 50 extra police to Limon, and posted guards all along the railway line to
ensure that no more of the laborers could reach the city. The Governor also informed the
men on November 24th that "anybody who is found not working tomorrow 25th
November will be locked up and punished for vagrancy."(18) The arrival of an American
gunboat in the Limon harbor backed up the notice, but this only further milled the
Jamaican community around the workers and against the UFCO. The Jamaican-owned
Limon Times editorialized: "We are all British Subjects . . . we all belong to a worldwide Empire, and on the strength of that assertion, all British Subjects have every right to
be treated with the greatest amount of respect; and should not be so subjected to
American aggression."(19)
The workers made several appeals to the British Vice Consul, C. G. McGrigor, to
intervene and arrange for the men to be transported back to St. Kitts, but as the Times
repeatedly pointed out: "What can one expect when he is an employee of the United Fruit
Company?"(20) When this route proved fruitless, the workers went over McGrigor's head
to the Consul in San Jose and then to the Minister in Panama. The Consul, aware of how
discredited McGrigor had become, arrived from San Jose on November 29, and issued a
public notice affirming his support for the Company.
You and all British subjects here are under the authority of the PRESIDENT OF COSTA
RICA, and the Officials named by him, and I hereby order you to obey such authorities
absolutely.
The laws of this Country oblige all men to work; and for those who refuse, the Vagrancy
Acts are in force, and such men are liable to be arrested and taken to any part of the
Country, and there forced to work.
You are hereby directed to return, as free men, to work at the farms of the United Fruit
Company . . .
I advise you to work as free men, and save money, rather than to be forced to work, and
have nothing.(21)
Small wonder that the workers often wondered whether the difference between slavery
and "free labor" was really so great after all.
The workers then circulated a petition which they sent to the Minister in Panama,
protesting the attitude of the local British authorities, but there is no record of any
response to this. Despite this lack of support from above, however, the St. Kitts strikers
remained firm for three weeks, and generated substantial support among the Jamaican
community.
The workers' apparent faith in appeal to ever-higher British authorities has several
possible explanations. Scholars sometimes attribute such faith to a kind of false
consciousness: the socially weak and disempowered share in a belief system which serves
to maintain their low position in the existing hierarchy, thus supporting the interests of
the more powerful.(22) In fact the powerful are able to maintain their position partially
through their ability to impose their ideology on the rest of society. The Jamaican and St.
Kitts workers, however, did not seem to suffer from this sort of false consciousness. They
certainly were not disposed to accept British authorities' decisions when these
contradicted what the workers believed to be just. The British Consul recognized quite
well that his position would not be enough to ensure the goodwill of the workers, and felt
obliged to ask for police protection while he was in Limon.(23)
Another possible explanation is workers knew quite well that the British authorities had
more interest in maintaining the existing order than in upholding workers' rights, but
were consciously manipulating the hypocrisies in the system which claimed to protect
them. The workers' challenge to British authorities to uphold their rights could have been
strictly instrumental: regardless of their degree of faith in the outcome, it was worth
pursuing all possible routes to their goal. More cynical workers may have also felt that a
failed attempt to mobilize British authority on their behalf would convince the more
credulous of the need for more militant action. The workers could easily have made their
appeals to Consul McGrigor in this spirit.
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 183132 and the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865.(30)
Like earlier plantation owners, the UFCO quickly realized the advantages that organized
religion could bring to production, and built company churches and hired ministers to
serve their workers. In 1906 one newspaper article commented that the
general conduct and character of the Jamaican laborers . . . shows how much the
companies and private capitalists . . . owe to the . . . missionaries. . . . Without the Gospel
following up those people the American racial idea would have created an insuperable
barrier to any satisfactory adjustment in this country between the white man as capitalist
and the black man as laborer. This, the preaching of the Gospel, has happily obviated and
adjusted.(31)
But by providing an institutional basis for maintaining Jamaican cultural ties and habits
and an affirmation of the rights and humanity of workers, the various churches in Limon
also formed the basis for the alternative society that the Jamaicans maintained in the
shadow of the plantations. As in Jamaica, the plantation workers could sometimes
interpret in subversive ways the message of the ministers and missionaries who preached
resignation and obedience.(32)
Four local ministers - at least two of them black - played visible roles during the strike.
Reverends Glasspole (or Grasspole) and E. A. Pitt, both black Jamaicans, initially
provided at least moral support for the strikers,(33) but when the British Consul from San
Jose insisted that the St. Kitts men end their strike Pitt appeared with him and reiterated
the "necessity of going to work at once."(34) A UFCO-employed minister, Reverend
John Henderson, was "politely asked to resign on some pretext or other" after the strike
because of his supposed support for the strikers.(35) Another minister, Reverend R.
Waite-Smith, published several articles in the Times supporting the strikers and the union
and attacking the Company with strong language. Waite-Smith escaped arrest only by
seeking sanctuary in the church.(36) According to the Governor of Limon, the British
Consul shared his view that "those responsible for this [rebellious] attitude [among the
strikers] are Reverend Waite-Smith and the other protestant ministers."(37) Thus as in
nineteenth century Jamaica, Protestant ministers did, to a certain extent, support the
aspirations of the plantation workers. But their support, while important, was not enough
to swing the balance in favor of the workers.
The union itself was divided on the issue of supporting the St. Kitts men when they went
on strike. Many union members clearly realized that creating ties of solidarity with the St.
Kitts workers was a more constructive approach than simply rejecting them as scabs, and
the militancy of the St. Kitts men themselves certainly contributed to making this
approach a success. However, a number of union members, and in particular some of the
leadership, were not pleased with the militant turn events had taken. Up until recently the
union had served more as a sort of social club for Jamaicans; now it was suddenly
involved in a bitter labor dispute, supporting strikers who were not even Jamaican.
Two of the leaders of the union abandoned it two weeks after the strike began. The
President appears to have fled the country, carrying most of the union's funds with him.
As the official leadership collapsed, however, some of the more militant members of the
rank and file rose to take their places and, along with many of the St. Kitts workers, kept
the strike alive.
Those who came to the fore during the 1910 strike - who replaced the union's official
leaders, created ties of solidarity between the Jamaican and the St. Kitts workers, and
through their words and actions, turned the strike into a strong and militant movement were a curious combination of people. In addition to the black ministers, two were known
as obeah-men. Charles Ferguson, the Jamaican who appears to have been the real
ringleader of the strike, was known for his close relations with those who kept alive an
African-based tradition of healing and supernatural power, in particular, obeah. And his
ties to an obeah-man from St. Kitts seem to have been crucial in allowing the two groups
to unite. A closer look at some of these individuals reveals some of the links between
alternative, Afro-Caribbean based cultural forms and political organizing.
Much more than the ministers or the British officials, Ferguson took the real leadership
role in encouraging the St. Kitts men to strike, rallying the Jamaican community around
them and resurrecting the union after its leadership fell apart. Ferguson was not a
Company employee, but he was certainly an active member of the Jamaican community.
He worked at various odd jobs in Limon, bookkeeping and translating, and also owned
several properties, including a small business in Bocas del Toro (Panama).(38) There was
wide-spread agreement about Ferguson's role in promoting the strike, and he was put on
the new Executive Board of the Union that was formed on December 5. Workers called
Ferguson the "alma mater of the strike," because "he didn't rest, he was always going
from group to group perorating, in one, collecting signatures in another. . . ."(39)
Ferguson earned the nickname "Consul" by trying to fulfill the role that workers believed
the Consul should have carried out. One worker explained that "due to his harangues of
oratory among the blacks he acquired the nickname of 'Consul' ... he used very harsh
words against the English Consul and went around collecting signatures to present
petitions to the English Minister in Panama, with the goal that the British Government
come to intervene in this affair on the side of the St. Kitts Blacks."(40) The Company
demanded that the government take action against him, in addition to the union officials
and Joseph Nathan, the St. Kitts leader.
But it took months for Ferguson's case to be prosecuted, and the investigation that the
government launched against him unveiled some of the links among the political, cultural
and religious identifications of the Jamaican community. For what made Ferguson seem
so threatening to the Company - and what made him such an effective leader to the
workers - was not just the fact that he circulated a petition to the Minister in Panama.
Ferguson was deeply enmeshed in a network made up of obeah-men and others with
access to the supernatural, as well as labor organizers, who used their power to challenge
the existing order on many levels. One UFCO foreman warned ominously that Ferguson
was a "dangerous element" because of his "influence among a certain class of
people."(41) The Costa Rican government, the British consular officials, and the UFCO
all accused Ferguson, in addition to his role in the strike, of associating with other
subversive Jamaicans: J. Washington Sterling, an obeah-man who was practicing
medicine illegally in Limon, and Francis (nobody ever discovered his last name), whom
the investigators referred to as a sorcerer [brujo]. The UFCO administration accused
Ferguson and Sterling together and the Costa Rican authorities investigated and tried
them together and finally expelled them from the country together.(42)
The government's investigation found many who were willing to testify against Ferguson
- mostly Costa Rican officials, British officials, and UFCO management-level employees,
though some Jamaicans cooperated as well. While Ferguson was accused primarily for
his role as a labor organizer, his associate J. Washington Sterling's crimes were of a
medical - and supernatural - nature. Sterling challenged the hegemony of the government
and fruit company doctors by practicing medicine without a license. He also apparently
tried to establish a pharmacy along with Charles Bryan, former Secretary of the Union,
another connection between his world and that of the labor organizers. Ferguson's role, as
Sterling's associate, was to recruit patients for him.(43) But Sterling was no ordinary
doctor: he was an obeah-man who relied on supernatural as well as physical means for
his cures, and whose powers extended beyond healing.
Obeah and myalism were the two African-based belief systems predominating in Jamaica
in the eighteenth century. Both were clandestine, but myalism was a group worship,
while obeah was usually a power invested in an individual obeah-man. Monica Schuler
called myalism "a powerful catalyst for African and Afro-Jamaican resistance to
European values and control."(44) The Jamaican Black Baptist movement, which as we
have seen was a driving force behind the 1831 slave rebellion in Jamaica, was closely
associated with myalism.(45) And myalism and Black Baptism have remained linked. A
myalist revival in the 1840s followed the same geographical limits of Black Baptist
Moses Baker's following,(46) and the 1860s revivalist movement which preceded the
Morant Bay uprising of 1865 "partook of the Myal tradition," and so "could also be
revolutionary."(47) A wave of pocomania revivalism, a nineteenth century African
import, like myalism based on dance, drumming, singing and spirit possession, was
closely associated geographically with the areas of rebellion in 1938 in Jamaica, carrying
on the link of religious revivalism and rebellion.(48) Although there is no evidence of
Black Baptist activity in Limon, myalism clearly had a thriving presence there in the
period during and especially after the strike.
Obeah too was politically subversive from its first appearance. It was outlawed in
Jamaica as early as 1760 for inspiring a slave rebellion in that year.(49) Orlando
Patterson writes that
obeah functioned largely in the numerous rebellions of the slaves .... In the plotting of
these rebellions the obeah-man was essential in administering oaths of secrecy, and, in
cases, distributing fetishes which were supposed to immunize the insurgents from the
arms of the whites.(50)
Also notable in the contemporary descriptions of both myalism and obeah is the medical
importance that they held. Myal doctors often worked in plantation hospitals,(51) myal
leaders were referred to as "Doctor", for they were trained in medicinal herbs in Africa
and "served important medicinal functions."(52) The obeah-man was "doctor,
philosopher, and priest,"(53) and "sometimes exercised considerable power over a slave
community in opposition to that of white medical practice."(54)
Everybody interviewed from the UFCO Administrator to the British Consul E Nutter Cox
to the workers - concurred in identifying Sterling as an obeah-man.(55) And it seems to
have been Sterling and Ferguson's ties to obeah which allowed them to link up
immediately with one of the St. Kitts men, Joseph Nathan, who was both a leader of the
strike and, according to the UFCO, an obeah-man. In soliciting Nathan's expulsion from
Costa Rica during the heat of the strike, the UFCO Administrator used language
strikingly similar to that which the foreman had used against Ferguson when he wrote
that Nathan was "what the Jamaicans and Blacks of the 'Leeward Islands' call an 'Obeah
man', and he has absolute influence over the others."(56) And it seems to have been
Nathan's deportation, on December 7, that signalled the end of the strike.(57) Thus the
two main leaders of the strike, one from Jamaica and one from St. Kitts, both had close
ties to obeah. This could well have accounted for their ability to rally the workers around
them, overcoming inter-island differences. This was probably how they managed to
convince the St. Kitts workers to support, rather than undermine, the Jamaicans' union,
and the Jamaicans to organize, rather than to despise, the St. Kitts workers.
In addition to the combination of fear and respect with which West Indians viewed
obeah-men, they may well have had dimly-held notions or even very specific
recollections, from stories passed down through the generations, of the supernatural
ability of obeah-men to successfully challenge or even overturn the social order. In
addition, the Afro-Jamaicans' shared yet clandestine adherence to a system of belief and
collective ritual could provide, even more than the collective but open organizations like
lodges and friendly societies, the foundation for organized resistance to those in power.
The cultural tradition embodied in the two obeah-men was probably a major factor
contributing to the strength of the movement.
The Protestant ministers and British consular officials were intermediate figures: outside
of the workers' community, yet riot obviously allied with the Company either. The
workers clearly felt that Crown representatives should support their struggle, and felt
betrayed when they did not, as in the case of Vice-Consul McGrigor. This betrayal, while
probably contributing to the eventual dissolution of the strike and the union, also helped
to strengthen the African element. For men like Sterling, Ferguson and Nathan, who
represented the African more than the British component of Afro-Caribbean culture,
stood unequivocally on the side of the workers. Yet it is interesting that even Ferguson,
with his close ties to obeah and the African tradition, emphasized appeals to Great
Britain, rather than obeah, in his attempts to further the strike. Or it may be that Ferguson
did invoke obeah, but in ways which eluded those who maintained the written record.(58)
By attributing such a crucial role to individuals with supernatural powers, the obeah
tradition may have actually contributed to weakening the collective organization of the
workers in the long run. This may be one reason why the strike eventually collapsed and
why the workers were never able to successfully resurrect the union. If the power and
unity of purpose of the group resides in one or two individuals, this disempowers the
other members even while perhaps galvanizing the group with respect to its adversary, in
this case the UFCO. The fact that Nathan's expulsion coincided with the breakdown in
resolve among the St. Kitts workers lends support to this view.
The multifaceted role that religion could play in the community is further revealed by the
wave of religious revivalism - public, mass religious meetings and healings, with the
dancing, drumming and spirit possession characteristic of myalism, Black Baptism, and
pocomania - which followed the demise of the union. As in Jamaica, religious revivalism
in Limon seems to have had a continuous, if underground, existence. But the outburst in
1911-1912 stands out in size, variety and longevity. In June of 1911 the Times
complained that followers of Sterling were engaging in "vile practices [revival meetings]
which have stirred the town during the past month the like of which has never been
known in the previous history of Port Limon."(59) What made Sterling's followers leave
the privacy of their homes and bring their religion in to the streets and yards, to the horror
of Limon's Jamaican middle class?
In Jamaica, scholars have found that outbursts of religious revivalism have preceded
periods of social protest.(60) In Limon, there is little evidence of religious revivalism
prior to the 1910 strike. Rather than an impetus to rebellion, religious revival in Limon
seems to have been a reaction to the failure of a political movement.(61) It may also have
been a reaction to the failure of the Nonconformists to fulfill the leadership roles the
workers wanted them to. The two ministers who remained supportive of the workers Reverend Henderson and Reverend Waite-Smith - both left Limon voluntarily shortly
after the strike ended.(62) Ferguson and Sterling, in contrast, remained in the country
until they were deported later in 1911, after pursuing every possible delaying tactic. Not
only that, they both remained active in challenging the UFCO. Ferguson helped to
organize another strike in April.(63) Both men were accused of aiding two of their
friends who burglarized the Company railroad offices; Sterling allegedly used obeah to
help the accused escape from prison afterwards.(64)
Thus the behavior of the various community leaders after as well as during the strike
contributed to, or continued, workers' adherence to African rather than British traditions.
At the same time, the lack of any outside or institutional system of support for
organization based on this Afro-Caribbean tradition made it extremely vulnerable. Yet
even with the union and the strike crushed, the community remained imbedded in the
Afro-Caribbean religious tradition. Revivalism, however, though abhorrent to the
Jamaican middle class, proved to be little threat to the UFCO or the Costa Rican
authorities. In fact, by dividing the Jamaicans along class lines, it may have served the
purposes of those who were threatened by the union.
The social institutions like schools, churches and clubs, which the Company fostered in
its paternalism, interacted with other types of organization which were fully independent
of Company control, like Lodges, newspapers, and friendly and mutual aid societies.
These latter provided the basis for organized resistance. People on both sides of the
strike, and divided over the legitimacy of Sterling and Ferguson's activities, were active
members of Limon's various churches and lodges.(65) Interestingly, the coexistence of
Protestantism, obeah and Masonry seemed to pose no conflicts to the workers. Their
testimony during the government's investigation of Sterling and Ferguson makes it
abundantly clear that most of them were members of lodges and churches as well as
believers in obeah.
Evidence from one of the few novels written by a Jamaican Costa Rican confirms this.
The protagonist, a second generation Jamaican immigrant and a Protestant minister,
married an obeah-man's daughter and felt no hesitation about consulting an obeah-man
himself. His own father's advice, given on his deathbed, was that he should use the sign
of his Lodge if he was ever in danger.(66) Part of the rite that his father-in-law (the
obeah-man) instructed him to follow to undo an evil spell that a neighbor had cast on his
fields was to repeat "The Lord is great and strong" seven times every day.(67) Thus the
three traditions - Masonry, Protestantism and obeah - could easily coexist. What did
appear to be in "total conflict" with the world of these three traditions was Western
medicine, science, and what one learned in school.(68)
The events of 1910, important in their own right, also serve as a window into cultural
traditions which are ordinarily invisible to the historian. The Artisans and Labourers'
Union was one source of strength for the workers in 1910, but this strength was nourished
by individuals like Charles Ferguson and Joseph Nathan who embodied the values and
traditions of the community which had survived from their African past, molded by the
experiences of plantation slavery. While the organized mutualism and unionism of the
Jamaican workers have resembled the experience of European and U.S. workers in the
early period of industrialization, the role of obeah-men in mobilizing the workers has its
parallels in the slave rebellions of the Caribbean. The Company discovered the Christian
religion, mutualism and even unionization to be acceptable (and occasionally even
advantageous),(69) but it certainly never fomented the underground traditions of African
belief systems, and when they became visible, both Costa Rican and British authorities
and the Company always attacked them.
Even the Jamaican community, despite its impressive solidarity behind the union and the
St. Kitts workers, was divided when it came to obeah and myalism. The Jamaican-owned
Limon Times, which had so vigorously denounced the Company and the British
authorities during the strike, had nothing but scorn for the "crowds of the unwashed"
attending myalist ceremonies and the "obnoxious vermins as these obeahmen."(70) Thus,
strikingly, Afro-Caribbean cultural identity proved to be both the cement that held a
multi-class Jamaican community together around the striking workers and, in the end, the
issue which divided the community, apparently along class lines. For while Jamaican
ministers and newspaper editors could support the workers in their struggle to maintain
their cultural identity, their dignity, their rights as workers with respect to the Company,
and their union, these respectable Jamaicans could not condone those aspects of AfroJamaican identity which proved most potentially subversive to the social order: obeah
and myalism. These belief systems, perhaps because of their very clandestine quality,
were able to nourish the strike when the workers were under attack from all sides.
In the best of times, UFCO workers' affirmation of Afro-Jamaican cultural identity
constituted a form of everyday resistance to Company domination. The confrontation in
1910 grew directly out of the workers' attempts to celebrate this cultural identity. But as
the confrontation escalated, fault lines became apparent in the apparently unified
community. When everyday resistance grew into a movement which challenged the
Company's right to complete control of the conditions of work, representatives of the
established, public institutions of Jamaican cultural life abandoned the workers' cause
rather than risk losing their respectability, and workers' resistance was driven
underground. The underground aspects of Jamaican cultural identity - obeah and myalism
- proved to be the only sources capable of sustaining support for open challenge to the
social order.
History Department Lewiston, ME 04240
ENDNOTES
I wish to thank Cindy Forster and David McCreery for helpful comments on earlier
versions of this paper.
1. See the Introduction to Lowell Gudmundson's Costa Rica Before Coffee (Baton
Rouge, 1986) for a discussion of the "white legend" in Costa Rican historiography. Social
histories which discuss labor struggles in Costa Rica include Marielos Aguilar, Carlos
Luis Fallas: su epoca y sus luchas, (San Jose, 1983), Victor Hugo Acuna, La huelga
bananera de 1934 (San Jose, 1978) and Los origenes de la clase obrera en Costa Rica: las
huelgas de 1920 por la jornada de ocho horas (San Jose, 1986), Daniel Camacho et al.,
Desarrollo del movimiento sindical en Costa Rica (San Jose, 1985), Vladimir de la Cruz,
Las luchas sociales en Costa Rica (San Jose, 1984), and Los martires de Chicago y el 1
de mayo de 1913 (San Jose, 1985), Arnoldo Ferreto, La huelga bananera 1934 (San Jose,
1987), Mario Oliva Medina, Artesanos y obreros costarricenses (San Jose, 1985), and
Carlos Luis Fallas Monge, El movimiento obrero en Costa Rica, 1830-1902 (San Jose,
1983). Studies of Costa Rica's Atlantic coast, or of the West Indian community,
inevitably touch on social or labor struggles, without necessarily exploring them in depth.
See Roy Simon Bryce-Laporte, "Family, Household and Intergenerational Relations in a
'Jamaican' Village in Limon, Costa Rica," in Stanford N. Gerber, ed., The Family in the
Caribbean (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1973 ), Jeffrey Casey Gaspar, Limon, 1880-1940
(San Jose, 1979), Ronald N. Harpelle, "West Indians in Costa Rica: Racism, Class and
Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Community" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Toronto, 1992), Charles Koch, "Jamaican Blacks and their Descendants in Costa Rica,"
Social and Economic Studies 26:3 (September 1977): 339-61, Carlos Melendez and
Quince Duncan, El negro en Costa Rica (San Jose, 1981), Paula Palmer, "What Happen":
A Folk History of Costa Rica's Talamanca Coast (San Jose, 1977), Trevor Purcell,
Banana Fallout: Class, Color, and Culture among West Indians in Costa Rica (Los
Angeles, 1993). Two recent articles have documented the events of the 1910 strike:
Elisavinda Echeverri-Gent's "Forgotten Workers: British West Indians and the Early
Days of the Banana Industry in Costa Rica and Honduras," Journal of Latin American
Studies 24 (May 1992), 275-308 and Carlos Hernandez, "Los inmigrantes de Saint Kitts:
1910, un capitulo en la historia de los conflictos bananeros costarricenses," Revista de
Historia 23 (1991), 191-240. Even those authors who have written about actual strikes,
however, have failed to discern the rich organizational life of the West Indian workers,
and the way in which social and cultural organizations provided the basis for labor
activity firmly rooted in Afro-Caribbean culture. Gudmundson has characterized Costa
Rican labor history as "pre-Thompsonian" because of its focus on leadership, politics and
institutions rather than on working class lives and culture (Elizabeth Fonseca C. and
Mario Samper K., "Entrevista a Lowell Gudmundson," Revista de Historia 16 [1988],
28).
2. For all its notoriety, the United Fruit Company has inspired remarkably little serious
literature. What studies do exist tend to be either official company histories, or critiques
of the Company's political intervention in the countries in which it operated. Company
histories include Frederick Upham Adams, Conquest of the Tropics: The Story of the
Creative Enterprises Conducted by the United Fruit Company (New York, 1914); B.C.
Forbes, Men Who are Making America (New York, 1917); Samuel Crowther, The
Romance and Rise of the American Tropics (New York, 1929); Charles Morrow Wilson,
Empire in Green and Gold: The Story of the American Banana Trade (New York, 1947);
and Stacy May and Galo Plaza, The United Fruit Company in Latin America (New York,
1958). Notable among political critiques are Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller,
Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York, 1974); Paul
Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in
Guatemala, 1899-1940 (Wilmington, DE, 1993); Charles Kepner and Jay Soothill, The
Banana Empire: A Case Study in Economic Imperialism (New York, 1935); Vilma
Lafnez and Victor Meza, "El enclave bananero en la historia de Honduras," Estudios
Sociales Centroamericanos 2:5 (May-August 1973), 115-56; Stephen Schlesinger and
Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New
York, 1982). Only a very few have begun to apply the approaches of social history,
which have inspired such a wealth of literature on other plantation societies, to Central
America's banana plantations. See Catherine LeGrand, "Colombian Transformations:
Peasants and Wage Laborers in the Santa Marta Banana Zone," Journal of Peasant
Studies 11:4 (July 1984), 178-200; Philippe Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor
on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore, 1989).
3. See my "West Indian Workers in Costa Rican Racial and Nationalist Ideology, 19001950," The Americas: A Quarterly Journal of Inter-American Cultural History, 51:1 (July
1994), 11-40 for further discussion of this. An important exception in the 1930s was
Communist labor organizer Carlos Luis Fallas, author of the classic Mamita Yunai (San
Jose, 1986).
4. Abigail Bakan argues that Jamaican slave and worker resistance is based on a common
ideology of faith in the Crown and the use of religious idiom, organizations and
authorities. But she does not explore the African belief systems which I believe were just
as important, if not more so, in sustaining the workers' culture of resistance in Costa Rica.
See Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion (Montreal,
1990), 11-16 and passim.
5. The Company reported in 1912 that its hospital in Limon served 4,200 black
employees and 2,000 of their dependents. In Guatemala during the same year, it noted
that 35% of its laborers had wives, and 20% had children, implying that the work force
was overwhelmingly male. See United Fruit Company Medical Department, Annual
Report (1912), 27, 36.
6. See Bonham Richardson, Caribbean Migrants (Knoxville, 1983) and Panama Money in
Barbados (Knoxville, 1985) for discussion of this phenomenon in St. Kitts and Nevis and
Barbados. For the West lndies generally, see Elizabeth Thomas-Hope, "The
Establishment of a Migration Tradition: British West Indian Movements to the Hispanic
Caribbean in the Century after Emancipation," in Colin G. Clarke, ed., Caribbean Social
Relations (Liverpool, 1978).
7. Limon Weekly News 194, June 11, 1904.
8. According to a report in the Heraldo del Atlantico 4:153, March 10, 1913. The
relationship between fraternal societies and unionization has been traced in Europe as
well. See, for example, William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language
of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980). The corporate trade
associations he discusses, out of which trade unions grew, were also mutual aid and
social organizations. His discussion of compagnonnage (47-55) especially emphasizes the
ritualistic and mutual aid functions of such societies. E. P. Thompson has called lodges
and friendly societies "the subculture out of which the less stable trade unions grew, and
in which trade union officers were trained" (The Making of the English Working Class
[New York, 1963!, 421).
9. The commissary is mentioned in "Narrative Report of the Disturbances in Limon,
Costa Rica among the Labourers imported from the Leeward Islands," Enclosure No. 1 in
Mr. Consul Cox's Despatch Commercial No. 12 of the 8th of December 1910, British
Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 288/125:279.
10. See the petition signed by 63 non-UFCO merchants and testimony given by numerous
workers to a government investigative commission in 1912, all collected in Archivo
Nacional de Costa Rica (hereafter ANCR) Serie Congreso 9875. Workers voiced an
almost identical protest 25 years later (Costa Rica Ministerio de Gobernacion Memoria
[1937-38], 25).
11. Emancipation Day was a holiday of equal importance to Christmas and New Years in
early 20th century Jamaica. See Olive Lewin, "Emancipation Songs and Festivities,"
Jamaica Journal 17:3 (1984), 18-23 for a description of the holiday's celebration.
12. "Nosotros los delegados nombrados por los Trabajadores y Obreros de Limon, a Vos.
con reverencia decimos," petition to Costa Rican President Jimenez from 600 Limon
workers, August 8, 1910, ANCR Serie Gobernacion 3134 fol. 1.
13. Ibid., fol. 4.
14. UFCO Administrator to Secretario de Estado en el Despacho de Gobernacion,
September 24, 1910, ANCR Serie Gobernacion 3134, fols. 12-13.
15. C.J. Veitch to E. J. Hitchcock, August 8, 1910, ANCR Serie Gobernacion 3134, fols.
10-11.
16. Michael Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981 (Pittsburgh,
1985), 9.
17. "Narrative Report," Enclosure No. 1 in Mr. Consul Cox's Despatch Commercial No.
12 of the 8th December 1910, FO 288/125:279-80.
18. Government Notice of November 24, 1910, published in the Times 1:7, November
25, 1910.
19. Times 1:8, November 26, 1910.
20. Times 1:6, November 24, 1910.
21. E Nutter Cox, British Consul, San Jose, "To the British Subjects from the Leeward
Islands, from his Britannic Majesty's Consul in Costa Rica," November 29, 1910, FO
288/125:274.
22. Ken Post applies this concept, developed by Marx and Gramsci, to the Jamaican case
in Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and its Aftermath (The
Hague, 1978). For example, he attributes a Jamaican peasants' appeal to "God and British
Justice" to false consciousness, since "neither ... was likely to be on the side of the poor
Jamaican peasant" (57).
23. Limon Governor Pardo to Ministro de Gobernacion, November 27, 1910, ANCR
Serie Gobernacion 3134, fol. 24.
24. Abigail Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica, 135. Even Maroon
communities in Jamaica apparently shared this view of the good King, as noted by R. C.
Dallas in The History of the Maroons v.II (London, [1803] 1968), 208-209.
25. Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict, 65, 91.
26. "Nosotros los delegados," ANCR Serie Gobernacion 3134, fol. 2.
27. Times 1:10, November 29, 1910.
28. Times 1:9, November 27, 1910.
29. For the 1831-32 rebellion see Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The
Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Urbana, 1982), 154-66; for the
Morant Bay uprising see Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict, 90.
30. Ken Post discusses of the role of syncretic religious forms in the development of
slave and peasant consciousness in Jamaica generally (Arise Ye Starvelings: 140-48). For
the role of Black Baptism in the 1831 rebellion, see Turner, Slaves and Missionaries,
148-53; for the Morant Bay rebellion, see Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White:
Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792-1865 (Westport, CT, 1981), 190.
31. Limon Weekly News 297, July 7, 1906.
32. In addition to the case discussed here, Philippe Bourgois mentions that a Baptist
minister led a strike on a UFCO plantation in Sixaola in 1918-19 (Ethnicity at Work, 253
n. 11).
33. "Narrative Report of the Disturbances in Limon, Costa Rica among the Labourers
imported from the Leeward Islands," Enclosure No. 1 in Mr. Consul Cox's Despatch
Commercial No. 12 of the 8th of December 1910, FO 288/125: 278.
34. Times 1:10, November 29, 1910. He based his appeal on the fact that "you are all
men of the same color as myself, and many of you belong to the same country as myself."
35. Times 1:83, March 2, 1911. Unfortunately I was unable to ascertain whether
Henderson was white or black. He remained in Limon for some time after his dismissal,
and remained active in his Lodge (Times 1:103, March 25, 1911).
36. Limon Governor Pardo to Minister of the Interior, November 25, 1910, ANCR Serie
Gobernacion 3134, fol. 18.
37. Limon Governor Pardo to Minister, November 27, 1910, ANCR Serie Gobernacion
3134, fol. 24.
38. Testimony of C. G. Ferguson and letter from Mayor of Bocas del Toro, ANCR Serie
Gobernacion fol. 44, 51.
39. Testimony of Osmond Phillip Nunes Hart, May 23, 1911, ANCR Serie Gobernacion
2660.
40. Testimony of Charles Nation Kinlock, ANCR Serie Gobernacion 2660.
41. Testimony of Alfred Fitzgerald Coombs, May 24, 1911, ANCR Serie Gobernacion
2660.
42. See copy of the expulsion order in ANCR Serie Gobernacion 2660, fol. 60.
43. Testimony of D.C. de Mercado, ANCR Serie Gobernacion 2660.
44. Schuler, "Alas, Alas, Kongo," A Social History of Indentured African Immigration
into Jamaica, 1841-1865 (Baltimore, 1980), 32.
45. Ibid., 33.
46. Ibid., 34.
47. Ibid., 105.
48. Post, Arise Ye Starvelings, 145.
49. Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820
(Oxford, 1971), 162. Turner concurs that the slaves in the 1760 rebellion "had bound
themselves by obeah oaths" (Slaves and Missionaries, 57).
50. Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins,
Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica ( London, 1967), 192.
51. Schuler, "Alas, Alas, Kongo," 136 n.9.
52. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 187, 191.
53. Brathwaite, Creole Society, 214.
54. Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore,
1984), 271.
55. See letter from UFCO Administrator in San Jose to the Secretary of Gobernacion,
May 23,1911, and letter from F. Nutter Cox to Secretary of Gobernacion, May 26, 1911,
ANCR Serie Gobernacion 2660, fols. 15, 24.
56. Administrator to Jimenez, November 29, 1910, ANCR Serie Gobernacion 3134, fol.
40. Although some authors have identified obeah as a particularly Jamaican phenomenon,
Elsa Goveia found it just as prevalent in the Leeward Islands (Slave Society in the British
Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century [New Haven, 1965!, 248).
This is the only written reference to Nathan's ties to obeah, and it is difficult to ascertain
exactly what this charge meant to a North American UFCO official, or even if he chose
the charge solely because he knew it was the easiest way to convince the Costa Rican
government that Nathan should be deported. Undoubtedly, however, Nathan was
respected by, and had great influence over, the St. Kitts workers.
57. Times 1:18, December 8, 1910.
58. The government investigators clearly asked witnesses whether Ferguson had
circulated petitions or agitated among the workers; they never inquired as to whether he
had used obeah. It may also be that witnesses were afraid to publicly accuse Sterling and
Ferguson of such things, since they could have retaliated by turning their powers against
them. Obeah was clearly a force to be feared as well as admired. Since Nathan was
deported without the benefit of an investigation, we know even less about him.
59. Times 166, June 13, 1911.
60. As mentioned above, the 1831-32 rebellion followed the growth of the Black Baptist
movement (see Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 128), while the 1865 Morant Bay
uprising followed the religious revival of 1862 (see Heuman, Between Black and White,
171,189-90). The 1938 rebellion in Jamaica was nourished by the pocomania revival in
the 1920s and 30s (Post, Arise Ye Starvelings, 145).
61. In this respect, religious revivalism in Limon followed the pattern that E. P.
Thompson called the "chiliasm of despair" in early nineteenth century England.
Thompson's descriptions of these revivalist meetings have much in common with the
character of revivalism in Limon from 1911-1913 (see Thompson, Making of the English
Working Class, 375, 380, 381). While studies of religion in Jamaica have tended to see
revivalism as part of an Afro-Caribbean tradition, comparison with England suggests that
the British Non-conformist sects lent themselves particularly well to such interpretations
in times of social and economic stress.
62. The Times reported on Waite-Smith's departure in February (Times 1:69, February
14, 1911), and Henderson's in March (Times 1:83, March 2, 1911).
63. Testimony of Alfred Fitzgerald Coombs, Llewellyn Brock, and Osmond Phillip
Nunes Hart, ANCR Serie Gobernacion 2660. They do not give details about the strike,
but it was probably a strike among the banana loaders, who travel in the train from farm
to farm loading the fruit which has been cut. These men were protesting a cut in pay and
a change in the way their hours were calculated which reduced the number of hours for
which they would be paid. The Company tried unsuccessfully to force the St. Kitts men
to break this strike. See the Times 1:123 (April 21, 1911), and 1:124 (April 22, 1911).
The Company ended up bringing in 200 Costa Rican strikebreakers from the interior
(Times 1:129 [April 28, 1911!).
64. McGrigor to E. J. Hitchcock, UFCO Manager in San Jose, May 22, 1911, ANCR
Serie Gobernacion 2660, fol. 34. McGrigor added that "for his services he was well paid
and received a house and a peice (sic) of land." See also testimony of Osmond Phillip
Nunes Hart and Llewellyn Brock, also in ANCR Serie Gobernacion 2660.
65. Sterling belonged to one of the Masonic lodges. A fellow member, who changed his
testimony several times over the course of the investigation, claimed that first Sterling
and then another member who was a UFCO foreman invoked these ties of brotherhood to
influence his testimony. See testimony of George Constantine Salomon Dario in ANCR
Serie Gobernacion 2660.
66. Quince Duncan, Los Cuatro Espejos (San Jose, Costa Rica, 1973), 46.
67. Ibid., 79.
68. Ibid., 47.
69. Since the 1960s, the Company has found that the best way to undermine labor
militancy has been to support a docile union. See Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 10.