Formerly enslaved African has a headstone

IN AN April 6, 2016 article, I said, “The burial grounds of enslaved Africans are very hard to find in Jamaica. They were buried in arbitrary places in unmarked graves”. And, in some parts of Jamaica, the narrative is that, wherever there are piles of stones and crotons growing in secluded spots in the bushes, those spots are regarded as possible graves of formerly enslaved people.

I subsequently learnt that there was indeed at least one grave of a formerly enslaved African, Archibald John Monteath (born Aniaso), with a headstone. It is in the graveyard of the Carmel Moravian Church in Westmoreland, because Monteath, born in Igboland, Africa, was converted to a devout Moravian. I travelled to see the grave, saw it, and took some pictures, which were destroyed by a computer virus.

In response to the article, University of the West Indies Professor Maureen Warner-Lewis said, “But Archibald’s grave with its clear headstone lies in the churchyard of the Carmel Moravian Church, in close proximity to the graves of European Moravian missionaries who died here, because Archibald had become a significant evangelist in the early Moravian Church. Jamaica of the 1800s was very different from the Jamaica which we now live in”.

The writing of the aforementioned article, and another, published on Monday, March 28, 2016, was inspired by the uncovering of a burial ground at Paynestown, near Newmarket in St Elizabeth. The property on which it was established was called The Kep estate, operated primarily as a livestock pen of horses and cattle and a few sheep, with coffee grown for export to Glasgow. When I was told that the ‘graveyard’ was that of enslaved people, I knew it was not because there is no known burial ground for such people, at least not in Jamaica.

“My own interest in the discovery of headstones at Paynestown stems from my research into the life and times of Archibald John Monteath who had been enslaved at Kep estate since boyhood. He had been kidnapped in Igboland in present-day Nigeria in the early 1800s and brought to Jamaica where he was sold to John Monteath of Glasgow, Scotland,” Professor Warner Lewis also writes.

“Monteath died in 1815 and was buried at Kep. It is therefore highly likely that the cemetery that has just been uncovered is the resting place of John Monteath, just as it was the resting place of George Marcy, who bought The Kep in 1820 and who was buried at Kep on December 31, 1851 at the age of 81. In John Monteath’s time, after John Monteath died in 1815, the Cornwall Chronicle newspaper carried ‘for sale’ ads in respect of his property.

In the 19th century, public cemeteries did not exist. People were buried the day after death in churchyards or on their properties. But the main church in operation at the time was the Church of England and there was only one in each parish capital. Methodists and Moravians and Baptists had chapels, but these were few and widely scattered. “Although these graves belong to slave owners at Paynestown, Kep, and neighbouring estates, they are part of the intricate web of our Caribbean history. Ironically, the grave of the Igbo (Ebo) Archibald John Monteath remains the only location of an identifiable enslaved person in the whole of Jamaica,” Professor Warner-Lewis writes.

But, who really was Archibald Monteath, and how did he come to be buried beneath his own headstone in a Moravian church? When I was told that the ‘graveyard’ was that of enslaved people, I knew it was not, because there is no known burial ground for such people.

Professor Warner-Lewis has the answers to these questions and many more in her 2007 book, Archibald Monteath, Igo, Jamaican, Moravian, published nine years before the uncovering of the graves at Paynestown.

“In the case of Archibald Monteath, it is that this force of personality and his particular dedication to the cause of Christianity endeared him to the missionaries with whom he came into contact. There were many other Christian converts whose commitment made the missionaries’ arduous work of conversion in far-flung territories seem worth the struggle. But, the intensity and the extent of Archibald’s service to the Christian faith came at a time that was particularly meaningful to the ‘toilers in the vineyard’,” Professor Warner-Lewis writes.

“The distinction of his funeral was conveyed not only by the attendance of white landowners, who turned up at the funerals of black elites, such as well-considered slave drivers, but also by the quality of the stone slab acquired by Archibald’s grave and the elaborate preparation of (his) biography itself. The thick, plain, black graphite slab that still marks Archibald Monteath’s grave in the Carmel churchyard occupies the row parallel to that with graves memorialised with similarly styled slabs where the 19th-century overseas missionaries were laid to rest.”