Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast

The book kept me awake several nights in order to read it. Very interesting, it gives a very good picture of the horrible abuse of the slave system..

I enjoyed learning about the history of Guyana. As a Guyanese, I was unaware of many of the things that were mentioned. I knew about Coffi and the rebellion but not the details. This book piqued my interest to learn more of Guyana history.

This book is excellently written and vital in understanding slave revolts in the Atlantic World. Should be required reading for any course discussing slavery.

"I had never heard of Berbice or of the 1763 slave rebellion. Few have: no one has studied the uprising in depth."Marjoleine Kars’ words in the prologue prepare the reader for the uncharted territory she embarks upon in her new book (which releases August 11) Blood on the River. I teach AP World History, a course in which slave rebellions occupy a not-insignificant place in the curriculum, and I had never heard of the Berbice slave rebellion. That could be said of many concepts or events in history, so I asked a private Facebook group of over 6,000 AP World History teachers, a group where you can ask almost any question about another culture or any nation’s history (providing it has a definitive answer) and receive an answer within minutes. What answer did I get? …Crickets. It seems that Kars is right. Few have heard of this slave rebellion. But as Kars unfolds the story, I began to wonder why such a narrative doesn’t occupy a larger portion of our awareness.Berbice was a Dutch colony in modern-day Guyana (South America) with the vast majority of the population enslaved on plantations. Ordinary African-descended people started a rebellion and they were able to take control of half the colony for almost a year before being defeated by a coalition of European colonial forces. Given the overwhelming success of the Berbice rebellion and the extent to which it worried other colonial powers, it is positively shocking how thoroughly it had been lost to history. Marjoleine Kars has done tremendous work in unearthing the details of the Berbice rebellion from the Dutch colonial documents where the truth has sat, unheralded, for centuries.One of the most impressive aspects of Kars’ Blood on the River is the depth to which she gives the enslaved people agency and voices in the narrative. We, as Westerners, tend to think of individual liberty and natural rights as a thoroughly Western concept, one that started with the Enlightenment and exploded into the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American Revolutions. But Kars explains that such a narrative is too simple and does not give gravity to the same notions being held by African-descended people:Historians of slavery have argued that enslaved people held similar understandings (to those in the later American Revolution). In lives of incessant violence and acute exploitation, enslaved people, like oppressed workers everywhere, nevertheless expected a modicum of fairness and predictability. They labored with an expectation of sufficient food to do the work, time off, some autonomy, reasonable rules with clear consequences, and a chance at building families and communities. The terms of social “contracts” differed from place to place, shaped by local law and custom, the particular plantation economy, and the historical contingencies that shaped the struggles between enslavers and enslaved. Such expectations about conditions do not mean that people accepted their enslavement. Nor do they mean that the enslaved people did not resist their exploitation in daily life. Rather, ruled by terror, and wary of armed rebellion, most begrudgingly accommodated themselves to their enslavement as long as certain minimum standards were observed, in order to survive.Despite the serious nature of the content, Kars even finds opportunities for levity and humor, usually to throw shade at the Dutch colonizers. When a colonial official and Coffij (the leader of the formerly-enslaved rebels) are communicating back and forth in hopes of agreeing to end the fighting, Kars writes of the official:Dispensing with any honorifics in a bid to assert dominance he did not possess, Van Hoogenheim addressed his letter merely “Aan den Neeger* Coffij.”(Note: “Neeger”, despite its modern similarity to a terrible word, meant “Black” in Dutch. So the translation is still a disrespectful “to the Black Coffij”, but they had … other words he could have used if he wanted to be downright insulting.)I don’t know, “…in order to re-assert dominance he did not possess” really got me there. But another passage is even more humorous in its shock value. The Dutch go “on a reconnaissance mission to Company plantation Hooftplantage to ascertain whether the bomba (an enslaved person who directed work crews and received extra rations and privileges in return) and his people remained loyal to the Dutch.” Kars then writes:The next morning, Hooftplantage appeared deserted, except for two men who dared the Dutch to come ashore. One of them rang the plantation bell (perhaps in mockery of this call to work or as a signal to his friends). Then he patted his buttocks and yelled, “Lick my a**” (censoring mine). That seemed a clear answer regarding loyalty, so the captain turned his ship around.Both of these passages, and others as well, add a dose of levity to the narrative while also upending the assumptions of white supremacy that originally led to the horrors of slavery.Kars is also clear, however, on how this all ended. And it wasn’t because the Dutch were more powerful by themselves, not in the least. It was the reigning world trade system, favoring the Europeans, which allowed the Dutch to reconquer the lives of these men and women:Coffij’s lack of a global trade network was his undoing. His strategy was solid. Taking advantage of the rebels’ position of strength, he worked to convince the Dutch to end all hostilities. A treaty would have allowed him to redeploy his resources from military to peaceful ends, cultivate gardens, and rebuild his political coalition.But that treaty was not to come to fruition. French and British colonial forces joined with the Dutch because Europeans benefited from European hegemony, and Coffij didn’t have a trade network to lean on to keep pace. The unjust system squelched the Berbice rebellion, and the unjust system continued. The rebels were not given fair trials, most were killed, and the rest were subjected to slavery again. Kars describes in detail the unjust system of “justice” that reigned in post-rebellion Berbice, culminating in this quote:The need to control slaves, made alien by their legal status and manufactured racial differences, justified the hollowing out of an already weak and arbitrary judicial system.Blood on the River provides a terrific vantage point from which to learn about an almost-unknown event in world history. It is groundbreaking in more than just its subject matter. If you love history, especially if you are looking for antiracist history, you need to read it. (While you’re at it, check out the other books by The New Press, because they’ve got some great-looking ones right now.)I received a review copy of Blood on the River courtesy of The New Press and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

Marjoleine Kars' Blood on the River explores a massive rebellion of enslaved people in the 18th century colony of Dutch Berbice which few people had ever heard about before. The story of how formerly enslaved rebels pushed Dutch colonizers out of the half the colony and negotiated to set up their own empire is fascinating. Few rebellions of enslaved have ever been this successful (over a year) and few historians have ever managed to capture the voices of rebels and enslaved before in such vivid, living detail. Almost every source in multiple languages is from archives, meaning Kars had to dig this story out herself, identify the major players and construct a timeline--years of work. But you don't feel that effort in a seamless, exciting narrative. Just gripping.

Marjoleine Kars takes what must have been a very small amount of archival material from an obscure piece of history and brings this little known slave rebellion to life in a nonfiction narrative that reads like a novel.The subject matter is grim and the outcome is known, but  Marjoleine Kars gives a behind the scenes look that reveals a more complicated and interesting social/political situation than I would have imagined. At times I found myself having hope for the rebels, and in fact as the story unfolds you can feel that at several times they must have been realistically hopeful.It is important to learn about the gruesome topic of global slave trade and the legacy of injustice that carries on, especially in light of the current racial and social unrest. This work contributes to that understanding.

Incredible timing! “Blood on the River” is published just as protests against police brutality towards Blacks in The U.S. have been rocking the Nation. This history of slavery in Dutch Guyana in the 1700’s details the extremes of physical cruelty used by masters to keep slaves in slavery. It would not be too much of a stretch to compare those methods to black men in the streets of the U.S. dying under the knees of policemen. “Blood on the River” foreshadows White on black violence in the West. George Floyd was not a slave, but the way he died suggests he was heir to this history.

A well research and well told narrative of a 18th century slave revolt in a Dutch colony. Two key points stand out for me: 1) The vision of the young governor and the Colonel in agreement regarding the unfitness of European soldiers to fight in the jungle with the need to use indigenous forces and ex-rebels to do the dirty work. 2) The fear of that the European soldiers would recognize the similarity between the way the ruling class dealt with the slaves and with the soldiers. Nice piece of race and class analysis.