From firebrand preacher to obscurity

ISAAC BARNES was born to parents who were peasants in Nain, St Elizabeth. He founded the Kingston Christadelphian Assembly at 26½ Mark Lane. As a theologian, the polyglot lived and worked in Liberia, Scotland, Britain and South Africa, from which he was deported in 1909, because of racism.

Before his expulsion from South Africa, one of the places he lived at was Norwich in Britain, where he published a theological treatise titled, ‘The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus’, considered in some quarters to be the best among his religious publications.

Another way of getting his messages out was through lectures in big public halls all over Britain. It is said that when Barnes spoke at Christadelphian Bible campaigns, he drew throngs of people, at times, 500 or more. However, his marriage to a Jewish girl of German nationality, who was converted to the Christadelphian faith, took him to Germany where he also experienced racism.

His assistant, W. A. Fried, was the brother of his wife. Together, they established two Christadelphian congregations in Germany, one at Hamburg, and the other in Hanover. These were places that were deeply rooted in white nationalism, yet Barnes was able to convert many of them. After 10 years in Germany, he was South Africa bound. The research did not say anything about his evangelical work in South Africa.

After his expulsion from Apartheid South Africa, the world-class surveyor and engineer who operated gold and diamond mines decided to settle in the United States instead of returning to his native Jamaica where racism was systemic in the colonial government.

His intention in the United States was to raise funds for educational and religious projects in Liberia, where he was responsible for many infrastructural developments, before going back to Britain. In 1916, he opened a church in Harlem and called it Harbinger of a New Era, an affiliation of the international Christadelphian fellowship.

In 1917, a Dr Martin published a sermon given by Barnes who “castigated mainstream churches for preaching ‘two Christs’”, one for whites and one for blacks, and “for being complicit in, and perpetuating, racism”. He raised much funds in Washington, DC for his Liberian projects, being sponsored by Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, and holding public meetings at the YMCAs.

The research says that for the last 10 years of Barnes’ life he acquired up-market properties in Kensington and North London. He rented out some of them because during that time he also lived in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where he worked as a minister of public works, and an educator, especially in the development of geography as a course of study.

When he was 62, in 1919, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London, the second black person to get such a recognition. At age 63, he returned to diamond prospecting and mining, acquiring five acres of land along the Liberia/Sierra Leone border. He is credited with the discovery of the first marketable diamond in West Africa.

While the Liberians who originated in American viewed the natives in the rugged interior with much disdain, Barmes befriended and lived among them, and described them as “the most loving and caring people on Earth”. But, in many circles, including governmental, he was hated for his association with them.

Yet, Barnes worked as a diplomat for the Liberian government between 1910 and 1924. He was appointed chief commissioner by President Arthur Barclay to settle the Liberian/Sierra Leone boundary dispute with the British. However, he was betrayed by Barclay and other government ministers, and was set up to fail.

TROUBLE ABOUNDED

While Barnes was establishing the boundary, a rival for the position of commissioner and other government operatives plotted an ambush, in which Barnes came under a blaze of bullets. He was not harmed. He was seriously hurt, however, when he fell over a precipice while erecting boundary markers. That put his job on hold for a long time. And, he was long past his prime.

“The six years spent in South Africa were the peak of Isaac Barnes’ life. His goal was to live, work, achieve and excel as a man rather than a black man. He knew he was a genius, but he wanted to be thought of as a respected human genius, not a rare black genius … Nothing whatsoever is known about the last four years of his life, and even the date and place of his death are not known with certainty … ,” Alan Eyre and Ouida Lewis write in Jamaica Journal Vol. 32 Nos. 1-2, August 2009.

“Far from being an atheist as biographer McCabe misrepresent him, Dr Isaac Edmestone Barnes was a deeply spiritual activist for ‘back-to-Africa’ redemption, seeking to infuse an almost unique non-racial biblical Christian ethos into the titanic struggle for black, or more accurately, human emancipation.”

The research says that, he might have returned to Jamaica only once, in December 1926, to conduct the funeral of his younger brother, Edward, at Kraal in Clarendon, and arranged for his memorial in the family plot. Barnes himself died in 1930, unknown in Jamaica for his many accomplishments.