Next Sunday we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Guyana becoming a republic. It will be the 23rd February. The date was chosen in 1970 to coincide with the outbreak of one of the great risings of enslaved in the region: the 1763 Uprising in Berbice. Except that date was not when the revolt started. It did not begin until four days later on 27th February. This year that date will fall on a Thursday, but in 1763, it fell on a Sunday.
Even today, not a few primary schoolchildren learn that the Berbice Uprising began on 23rd February; in some places little attempt seems to have been made to officially correct the information given in the classroom, either because of bureaucratic inertia, or because some in authority had little background in historical events, or because they thought that making an amendment to the data might have appeared like a challenge to the powers-that-be. Whatever the case, many Guyanese of all age groups will confidently assert that February 23rd marks the start of the 1763 Uprising.
It is true that a population which displays a certain ahistoricity in relation to much of the past has at least heard of it, but then it was no minor rebellion; it came to threaten Dutch hegemony in the Guianas, and some of its unique characteristics were not replicated in Caribbean revolts until the Haitian Revolution some 30 years later.
In addition to the matter of the date, there is the issue of where the rising began. There are still at least some people who believe that it started on Plantation Magdalenenburg in Canje under the leadership of Coffy (Cuffy, Kofi). He was its leader, but he did not come from Magdalenenburg, and was never in Canje to the best of anyone’s knowledge. This was a revolt of the Berbice River proper where Coffy was based, although there was a small, localised rebellion on Magdalenen-burg on February 23rd which is what has caused the confusion.
Doubters will want to know how the mistake occurred in the first place. It was not that then Prime Minister Forbes Burnham was not careful and did not seek confirmation that February 23rd was in fact the correct date. The problem at that time was that the major sources were in Dutch, and the English sources which were available were misleading. James Rodway’s history was possibly the most misleading of these, since although it had seemingly included information from a Dutch source of the period, that unfortunately was a scurrilous pamphlet entitled Kortbondige beschryvinge … It had been written by a plantation owner, whose main inspiration seems to have been rumour coupled with fantasy, and even an Amsterdam book reviewer of the time considered it nonsense.
The fact that Rodway had had reference to at least one Dutch source, must have made him a seductive writer for those tasked with establishing the date of the Uprising. It would have given his version a spurious aura of validity, since they would have had no means of establishing at that time the credibility of the Dutch documents or printed works on which he had relied. It is Rodway, in fact, who confidently relates that hundreds of the Canje rebels marched to Berbice, an impossible story which comes straight from the Kortbondige… and which sets up the nexus between the limited Canje rebellion and the large-scale rising on the Berbice River proper.
There were two Dutch sources available in English in 1969-70, one of which was P.M. Netscher’s history of this country dating from the end of the 19th century, and the other the 1770 work by J.J. Hartsinck. The first of these, translated by Walter Roth, appeared in 1929, and the relevant section of the second, also translated by Roth, appeared in instalments in the Journal of the British Guiana Museum and Zoo, beginning in 1958. Neither of these has any reference to the Canje rebels taking themselves off to Berbice to spread the revolt, and Netscher confines himself to saying that news of the action on Magdalenenburg spread like wildfire through the colony. At one point, however, Hartsinck speaks of the February 23rd rising “which, like a running fire, in a short while set the whole Colony ablaze.”
Even if the researchers of 1969-70 had doubts about Rodway’s Canje rebel march, they perhaps came to the conclusion there was nothing in the Hartsinck and Netscher accounts to flatly contradict a February 23rd date. Their problem would have been complicated by the fact that the archives held no Dutch documents about 1763, which, theoretically, they could have had translated. These had originally been held in the vault of State House in New Amsterdam, and had been destroyed by repeated floods.
Nearly all the Dutch accounts of what happened on February 23rd, including the official ones, are broadly in agreement. Briefly, early in the morning on their way to the fields, the enslaved of Magdalenenburg attacked and killed the manager and the carpenter. Somewhat later they went to La Providence, the estate next door, where they recruited ten more people to their cause. By the time a party of sailors sent by the Dutch governor, Van Hoogenheim, to confront them had arrived, they had already left for the Corentyne River where they based themselves. Their end came at the hands of a military detachment sent to the Corentyne by the Governor of Suriname, along with assistance from the Caribs of that river.
Four days after the Magdalenenburgers had risen up, the enslaved of the main Berbice River followed suit on an infinitely larger scale. It is clear that some conspiracy had been in the making in a central part of the river for some time, although whether news of what the Magdalenenburgers had done caused them to bring forward their timetable will probably never be known. All that can be said at the moment is that one former revolutionary told the inquiry at the end of the Uprising that they had decided to act when they did because they thought one of their bombas (foremen) on Plantation Hollandia had betrayed the conspiracy to the manager. For his part, Coffy, in a letter to Van Hoogenheim, said he was very angry that they started the revolt, implying it was premature.
Most Guyanese nowadays associate Coffy with the plantation of Lelienburg, which is correct. Berbice under the Dutch was partitioned into segments called Divisions, and Lelienburg was situated in Head Division, where Fort Nassau, the Dutch headquarters, was also located. It was a group of mostly contiguous plantations on both sides of the river in that Division that supplied most of the early leaders of the Uprising, and these were presumably involved in the conspiracy, which, because of its scale, must have predated the Magdalenenburg revolt – possibly by a fair length of time.
For all that the first two leaders of the rising − Coffy and Accarra – came from Lelienburg, as already stated, it was the enslaved of Hollandia which took action first. According to one official account, they then went and collected Coffy and Accarra from Lelienburg, and in due course Hollandia was made the first revolutionary headquarters. Canje remained quiet in the early stages of the revolt, and did not rise up until Coffy sent agents there in March.
The date of Republic Day is what it is; it cannot be changed. However, it does not diminish it in any way if it is not specifically associated with the Great Uprising of Berbice, which broke out on 27th February, 1763. There is no harm, however, in associating it in a more general sense with a longer revolutionary period in Berbice’s history, which was evident even before the year 1763. There had been another small rebellion in 1762, and the colony was in a state of unrest abounding with rumours of revolt prior to February of the following year. February 23rd, therefore, can perhaps be regarded as another expression of the revolutionary spirit of the time.
Meanwhile, perhaps all primary schoolchildren throughout the country could be taught the right date.
