As my two estates are at the two extremities of the island, I am entitled to say from my own knowledge … that book-keepers and overseers kick black women in the belly from one end of Jamaica to the other.

Whether responding to the horrendous conditions of plantation life, the sadistic vagaries of their captors or the ‘peculiar burdens of their sex’, their collective sanity relied on a highly subversive adaptation of the values and cultures they smuggled with them naked from different parts of Africa. … By sustaining or adapting remembered cultural practices – be it music, storytelling, preparing food, administering medicines, fixing hair, birthing and naming rites or rituals for burying their dead – they ensured that the lives of chattel slaves retained both meaning and purpose.

As long as imported African labour was relatively cheap to replenish, planters could afford to use people rather than animals to perform the most back-breaking tasks. After all, slaves were dispensable, whereas horses and oxen were costlier to import and less likely to survive in the unforgiving climate.

The pitiless eye of the manager patrolled the gang of several foremen armed with long whips, moving periodically between them, giving stinging blows to all who, worn out by fatigue, were compelled to take a rest – men or women, young or old without distinction.

According to Dickson, it was not uncommon to see women ‘far gone in their pregnancy, toiling in the field’ or to see ‘naked infants … exposed to the weather, sprawling on a goatskin or in a wooden tray’. He grew used to hearing ‘drivers curse both them and their squalling brats, when they were suckling them’.

Did any of the bystanders think of the pain that wrung the hearts of the Negro woman and her young ones? No, no! They weren’t all bad, I dare say, but slavery hardens white people’s hearts towards the blacks.

There was a great many woman in the workhouse, and several have sucking child; and there was one woman quite big with child, and them make her dance the mill too, morning and evening. She not able to dance good and them flog her; she complain about her stomach hurt her, and I see her several time go and beg the overseer not to work her on the mill, but him say not him send her there

I have not passed six months in Jamaica, and I have already found on one of my estates a woman who had been kicked in the womb by a white book-keeper, by which she was crippled herself, and on another of my estates another woman who had been kicked in the womb by another white book-keeper, by which he had crippled the child … and thus, as my two estates are at the two extremities of the island, I am entitled to say, from my own knowledge … that white book-keepers kick black women in the belly from one end of Jamaica to the other.

Another woman, a field hand by the name of Jenny who was recovering from an accident, insisted on returning to the hospital after absconding to tend to her provision grounds. When refused readmittance, she went to the extremes of reinfecting her hand, tying packthread around it and rubbing dirt into the wound in order to receive her full entitlement of convalescence.

Monk Lewis also had cause to complain about a ‘Petticoat Rebellion’, when the women labourers on his estate downed tools and ‘one and all refused to carry away the trash … without the slightest pretence’. The mill was shut down for several days, yet the women stubbornly refused to go back to work. When the driver attempted to persuade them, ‘a fierce young devil of a Miss Whaunica flew at his throat and endeavoured to strangle him’.

Like Cubah, Minelta, Mary Anne, Jenny and their countless anonymous sisters, they possessed far deeper resources than those for which they’ve been given credit. The most powerful and enduring of these was their role as the primary conveyors of culture. This meant clinging to their belief in the medicinal powers of plants; adhering to remembered birthing and weaning practices; adapting their song, dances, dress and food preparation; and reviving their traditional leadership roles. By passing this knowledge on to each new generation, these women ensured that Africa’s lost children would not only retain their cultural identity but survive to tell the tale.

Even so, there is evidence that some enslaved women made a conscious decision to limit or control their own fertility. In doing so, they were exercising one of the few subjective choices available to them to strike at the very heart of the plantation system.

One way of asserting this sense of agency was by adhering to African cultures, values and belief systems. In practice (and among other things), this meant clinging to their knowledge of the medicinal powers of plants; following remembered birthing and weaning practices; adapting stories, musical instruments and festivals; and reinventing traditional leadership roles. By passing this collective wisdom on to each new generation, enslaved women were able to mount a concerted and enduring defence against their owners’ daily assaults on their humanity.

Nanny’s importance as a fighter and leader raises some intriguing questions about the status of Maroon women. They are typically described as slaves or drudges, the hapless victims of plunder by marauding males whose very survival depended on seizing women from local plantations. As always, this view was based on accounts by European men who tended to believe their own hype. Their preconceived notions of Africans and the ‘dark continent’ tainted whatever they saw. Characterising African women as brutalised and debauched amounted to an act of self-exoneration, for it allowed them to present their own much greater crime against Africans as a necessary ‘civilising’ intervention.10

Another problem with financial reparations is that money cannot begin to address the deeply ingrained racist attitudes that are now so embedded in our society. The so-called ‘Windrush’ scandal, as well as the hostile environment that led to the expulsion of countless British Caribbean citizens who contributed to Britain’s post-war development, is a stark reminder that black people’s labour remains exploited and undervalued to this day.