Women in the St. Kitts Island Uprising: Afro-Kittitian Knowledge-Keepers Speak

This book details the perspectives of women of African ancestry who witnessed a twentieth-century uprising in St. Kitts. They chronicle the story of how they and other women of African descent navigated the slavery afterlife on an island dominated by sugar plantations, institutions, and laws that reinforced enslavement 100 years after the Act to Abolish Slavery had been passed. The stories highlight the women’s political consciousness, leadership and participation in the protracted liberation struggle to reclaim their humanity, and collaterally decenter the colonized version of the event that has dominated accounts of the historical moment. They reveal the agility of the strategies women utilized including religious rituals, arson, a network of children to communicate messages within and between villages, on occasion taking the frontlines of the protest, providing sanctuaries for protestors, and serving expertly as character witnesses and alibis in court trials of persons who were charged as rioters. Their first language - an oral, ancestral proto-language, yet unnamed, and facing extinction - is incorporated into the history to honour their memory. Their remarkable memories reveal a noticeable shift in understanding of the uprising, and the dynamics of the defining moment in Caribbean history. The book encourages us to think critically about the subjects of history and who tells the story.

Hermia Morton Anthony is of Kittitian heritage and African descent. She earned a Ph.D. in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto, with a dissertation entitled ’Decolonizing Narratives: Kittitian Women, Knowledge Production and Protest’. She has a personal and professional interest in the sustainability of endangered knowledges in colonized societies.