Description
“Their grand design was to choose them a king, one Cuffee an Ancient Gold Coast Negro, who should have been Crowned the 12th of June past in a Chair of State exquisitely wrought and carved after their mode; with Bowes and Arrowes to be likewise carried in State before his Majesty their intended king.”
Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins to
Secretary for Colonies, Sir Joseph Williamson
October 3, 1675, CSPC 1675–1675
In the 1600s Barbados attained a double identity. It became the site where the English pioneered the sugar plantation chattel slave economy, and it also hosted the planning for the creation of the first free Black state outside of Africa. From the annals of history, renowned Caribbean Historian Hilary McD Beckles unearths the story of King Cuffee and his 1675 Freedom Plan – the first comprehensive revolutionary plan to topple a colonial regime and replace it with an African government.
Meticulously researched and recorded, Beckles presents King Cuffee, the would-be First Freedom Figure in Barbados and the wider Americas, the New World, and builds on his earlier works postulating the political and cultural contribution of enslaved Africans to global appreciation of human rights, freedom, and justice. The Akan of Ghana, he argues, crafted the “first and most politically sophisticated counter-slavery strategy in the Americas,” and Cuffee, a Barbados Coromantee, was the epitome of the political consciousness and culture of the Akan of Ghana in the Caribbean.
Barbados: Cuffee’s Kingdom brings to light yet another hidden component in the greatest crime against humanity – the transatlantic and global chattel enslavement of over 50 million Africans for Western enrichmenty – and richly adds to the ongoing rediscovery and recitation of the global experiences of Africans.
