Sweet-Tooth Politics: African in the Caribbean - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 326

and Mauritius, thereby swelling their slave-descended African populations. On the coast of
western Africa, the British took the area of Sierra Leone under crown protection and estab-
lished the appropriately named Freetown as a home for newly freed slaves.
HOW DID BRITISH SUGAR PLANTATIONS GENERATE WEALTH AFTER THE
END OF SLAVERY?
The answer was contract labor and indentured servitude. From where would they come?
Whose poverty might induce them to take up the hard work of sugarcane cultivation? One
obvious source was China. The very word coolie hints at explanation: coolie means “bitter
work.” But the Manchu mandarins frequently closed their ports to emigration. Who else
might be willing to emigrate to find bitter work? The answer lay within the British Empire:
India.
Hindu and Muslim laborers fanned out across the empire's sugar plantations. Many
came to the Durban area of South Africa; and when whites-only laws became oppressive,
the Indian colony brought a promising young lawyer to plead their cause in South Africa's
courts. In 1894 Mohandas Gandhi challenged South Africa's oppressive laws, and when
that failed to improve the lot of Indian workers, he taught his fellow Indians the non-violent
protest embodied in the doctrine of Satyagraha . That doctrine later became the basis for
Gandhi's civil disobedience campaign against the British in India, and in 1964 it made its
way across the Atlantic to the Birmingham jail where Martin Luther King, Jr. adapted civil
disobedience as a tactic against American discrimination. Its own time and leaders shaped
the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Its genesis lay in many places, and not
least among them was the shadow of the sugarcane.
AFTER 1834, HOW DID FRENCH, SPANISH, AND DANISH COLONIES GET
SUGAR WORKERS?
Slave smugglers continued to evade British patrols, including those exported from the Un-
ited States. Slave colonies produced their own crop of slave babies. But as the nineteenth
century moved forward, each of the Caribbean colonies created its own schedule for ma-
numission (emancipation from slavery). White plantation owners and their white overseers
had always been only a tiny portion of their island's population. And by the time slave im-
porting and slavery ended, each island had become Africa in exile.
HOW HAS THE SUGARCANE AFFECTED POLITICS IN TODAY'S BLACK
CARIBBEAN?
The Caribbean Sea extends over 750,000 square miles, nestled between Central and South
America and the southeastern United States. In its water lie more than 7,000 islands, ran-
ging in size from the Great Antilles (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica) to scores of