Story of how Black people were boiled in sugar and whipped thereafter in the 1800s

At the crow of every cock, we get to read a different story prior to the ones we were told last night in how black people were being treated with cruelty in the hands of the Caucasians. The amount of evil acts they experienced was nothing to be compared with presently, as it got to a stage they would rather take their lives than be held captive.

Interestingly, Africans haven’t forgotten history but learned to move on. But what’s most important is the glorious history of how black was a disease in their sight should be passed on to our coming generation and told to repeat itself. This would give us an informed decision on how we interact with our oppressors.

Part of the worst suffered by our people during the slavery era happened in the plantations. It ranged from breeding farms where males and females of the same kinsmen were matched to have sex and reproduce, to rape, murder, and killing of men, women, and children. In the plantations, the Black people who were taken into slavery suffered the worst fate known to man.

According to history from the British museum, slaves were boiled in sugar vats, as punishment in the Carribean (West Indies).

In the 17th and 18th centuries respectively, slaves were exported from Africa to the West Indies to work on sugar plantations, planting, harvesting, milling them in the sugar refineries. This industry and the slave trade made British ports and merchants very wealthy.

During those eras, the most efficient method of growing sugar was on large plantations with many laborers. The sugar plantation system became the main industry of the Caribbean. Because of the lack of more hands in the Caribbean, vast numbers of Africans were imported to work on the sugar plantations throughout the 18th century. Every slave was expected to work which spans from women, children and the elders.

Life as a slave on the plantations was extremely difficult with a third of newly imported slaves dying within three years. This created a high demand for new slaves to replace them.

The Sugar Plantation in the Caribbean (Barbados) began in the 1640s and was primarily farmed by a combination of Africans and Prisoners from the British Isles. The elites would later find a way to reach Africa and steal Black people who they brought to the Plantations to work. The Africans enslaved came mostly from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West-Central Africa while few of them came from Southeast Africa.

The process of planting and processing sugarcane was tasking. Many enslaved Africans died of malnutrition, disease, exhaustion or were killed by slaves who wanted to teach others a lesson. Enslaved people worked from sunup to sundown, to make life easy and enjoyable for their masters. Enslaved women who served as wet-nurses had to care for their masters’ children instead of their own.

History reports that if an enslaved African was unwell and could not work on the plantation. The plantation supervisor would not have any of that, because he wanted more output and profit for his masters, so he decided to throw the young African into a boiling vat of sugar and pinned him down with a stick so that the sick young man could drown a bit.

After boiling him for some minutes in the sugar juice, the overseer would have him brought out and whipped him so much that it took the young enslaved African another six months to recover from the wounds and scalding on his skin.

In a petition by Wilberforce, for the abolishment of slavery on 18th April 1791, he confirmed the evil punishment of boiling slaves by saying that: “an overseer would throw a slave into the boiling cane juice, who would later die after four days; he was not punished otherwise than by replacing the slave and being dismissed from service.”

A doctor, named James Ramsay, who worked in the sugar plantations in St Kitts, reveals some shocking details as to how slaves were maliciously treated by the overseers. In a book he wrote he gave a gory detailed of it all: “The ordinary punishments of slaves, for the common crimes of absence from work, theft, neglect, eating the sugar cane, are cart whipping, beating with a stick, sometimes to the breaking of bones, the chain, an iron crook about the neck, a ring about the ankle, and confinement in the dungeon. Also, on rare occasions have been instances of slitting of ears, breaking of limbs, so as to make amputation necessary, beating out of eyes, and castration, In short, in the place of decency, sympathy, morality, and religion; slavery produces cruelty and oppression. It is true, that the unfeeling application of the ordinary punishments ruins the constitution, and shortens the life of many a poor wretch.”

To date, the slave trade is still alive but invisible. Africans are still taken into slavery and treated like animals. Africans are still being killed, raped et al and there has not been a universal law to protect black lives. Black in other countries still walk and work with fear. There is a need for the revolution of the black people.