A missing piece of our history
Dear Editor,
I am not an advanced student of history so there are many things I do not know. One of them being that a Bible was published specifically for the slaves in the West Indies and the Americas.
My attention was drawn to this from listening to a British Broadcasting Corporation ( BBC) world programme some weeks ago.
This prompted me to conduct a Google search, and I was surprised to find that this was so. The full title is Select Parts of the Holy Bible For The Use Of The Negro Slaves In The British West-India Islands. This was published by Law and Gilbert of London in 1807. A copy is now on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC.
This so-called ‘Bible’, drawn from the King James version, omitted 90 per cent of the old testament and about 50 per cent of the new, reducing it to 14 books in total. The parts which it contains are selected chapters and verses that told slaves how to behave and how to show loyalty to their masters and how the masters should treat the slaves — punishment and all.
Maybe it was fortunate that most slaves were illiterate, and even if the masters owned a copy it was carefully hidden.
I do hope that this will be published so that our students will be further educated on aspects of our history not told to us, since many of our early history books were written by people who were the descendants of the slavers and not the slaves.
Trevor Samuels.
tasamuels@cwjamaica .com