James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Authenticity.

I started this contest because the two times I visited Jamaica, our van drivers pointed out spots where James Bond films had been made, but none made any mention of Samuel Sharpe.  Tourists, obviously, are much more interested in James Bond than Sharpe.  So, my question has been which person should we be most interested in?

According to my unscientific and undemocratic and unsystematic process in which I make up the categories and analysis of this contest as I go along, Sharpe is currently beating Bond, 4 to 3.  Today is the last day of the contest.  So, the most James Bond can hope for is a tie, a prospect he never faces in his movies.

Are you nervous?  Are you sitting on the edge of your seat in anticipation, anxiety and excitement?  No?  Well, give me a break.  I’m a historian, not a film maker.  (See the previous post).

Anyway, today’s category is authenticity.

Hmm.

Well, Samuel Sharpe was a real person.  James Bond is not and has never been a real person.  In fact, not even one of the six James Bonds was real.

Samuel Sharpe wins the pennant!  Samuel Sharpe wins the pennant! Samuel Sharpe wins the pennant!

The name is Bond. James Bond, Bond, Bond, Bond, Bond, Bond.

Wait a minute.  There are further considerations.  Sometimes fictional characters help us to better see what is real and true even if they themselves are not real. The best literature and the best films do that.

And James Bond…does not do that very well.  If we go back to the posts in which James Bond lost out to Samuel Sharpe, we will find that the Bond films do not give us solid insights into redemption, violence, human nature, race, sex or God.  Yeah, James Bond is cool and the stories are fun, but let’s face it, Ian Fleming was no Shakespeare, even though he had that English thing going for him.  Samuel Sharpe, meanwhile, played a key role in the abolition of transatlantic slavery. For that reason, if nothing else, solid historical analysis of Samuel Sharpe gives us a lot more insight into what is real and true about this world we live in.

A real person. OK, a bust of a real person.

So, yeah, go crazy folks, Samuel Sharpe wins it all.

 

Final Score:

James Bond       3

Samuel Sharpe  5

 

Next:  the post-game wrap up.

 

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Missionaries and World Christianity

James Bond, missionaries, and world Christianity?

You may be thinking that I have a topic that really does not fit in my contest about which individual we should be more interested in.  You may be thinking that because I have written a book about missionaries and world Christianity, I am looking for a cheap way to turn the topic back to my interests. You may be thinking that I am playing a literary bait and switch here, using James Bond to hook your interest in something totally different.

You may be right.

But then, again, you may not be.

Granted, the nature of James Bond films compels me to shift the point a bit.  I can’t have a sensible contest based on the question of how world Christianity plays out in these thoroughly secular films.  There is, however, a closely related topic to world Christianity.  What happens when the Bond films cross cultural boundaries?  What does cross-cultural engagement look like?

Let’s just say, not great.  Bond films exude an aura of British superiority.  This ethnocentrism, apparently, was even stronger in the Ian Fleming books.  In fact, the whiff of British exceptionalism was so strong that some storylines had to be revised when the books were made into movies for American audiences.  I guess American audiences don’t like to be depicted as inferior.  Who knew?

It gets worse, however, when dealing with non-Anglos, particularly in the books and early films.  The villains are often nonwhites and they are often deformed.  Furthermore, nonwhites just don’t have the brains, the sensibility, the skills, or the enlightened rationality of the Brits (or the Americans, for the film versions).  In “Dr. No,” Bond enlists the help of a Jamaican assistant to investigate Dr. No’s hideout, but this black guy, like the other

The dragon: ha, ha, it’s just clever technology, folks.

Jamaicans, is deathly afraid of the rumors he has heard about a dragon that inhabits the island.  The “dragon” turns out to be a flame-throwing tractor with big teeth painted on the front.  The foolish, superstitious and cowardly Jamaican assistant gets killed in the ensuing battle, but the film viewers are not supposed to care because, like the villains, his life doesn’t seem to matter much.  (It should be noted that even though they are evil, none of Dr. No’s scientific assistants are black.  His hideout displays a level of intelligence that blacks do not seem capable of achieving.)

The Jamaican assistant’s fear of the “dragon” emerges from a common depiction of race and religion that comes straight from the 18thcentury Enlightenment thinker (and Brit) David Hume.  According to Hume, less rational people, particularly those who have not been blessed with civilization, believe in irrational religious beliefs that express themselves in superstitious behaviors.  Enlightened and rational people, on the other hand, build sophisticated, morally superior civilizations that progress beyond the ignorance of previous

Build your own “Dr. No” Lego dragon! Pretend you are intimidating inferior people!

ages.  “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites,” Hume wrote in Essays, Moral and Political.  “No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences.”  Most people easily spot the racism in Hume’s thinking.  However, his claims about religious faith, which masquerade as rational truth, still infect much of the western world today

Samuel Sharpe, who lived half a century after Hume’s death and more than a century before the first James Bond film, would seem to qualify as a superstitious and naturally inferior “species of men.”

But here is where world Christianity helps expose fallacies in Hume’s and Fleming’s brand of Enlightenment thinking.  Sharpe’s relationship with the missionaries brings out point.  The leaders of this 1831 Jamaican rebellion (as well as a similar rebellion eight years earlier in Demerara, on the north coast of South America) were deacons and evangelists.  Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries from Britain had been ministering among the slaves for the previous decades.  Slaveowners, in fact, complained bitterly that the missionaries were spreading radical and subversive ideas about equality and abolition among the slaves.  (Hume, who believed that evangelical religion led to social disorder, political radicalism, emotional derangement and psychological delusion, would have agreed).

The missionaries, however, did not promote, plan or lead the rebellion.  In fact, they warned the slaves not to plan any resistance, they downplayed the possibility of emancipation getting passed in Parliament, and they did not even know of Sharpe’s rebellion until right before it occurred.

In other words, this movement took off without missionary leadership, in ways they did not expect and could not control.  That is usually what has happened when a movement of Christianity emerged and grew after it had crossed cultural boundaries.

There is also a theological point here about cultural blind spots.  Although they were generally favorable to antislavery ideas, British missionaries preached a simple evangelistic message and stayed away from topics of abolition.  The slaves who had converted to Christianity, however, saw implications in the gospel that white Christians were slow to recognize:  the Exodus story indicates that slavery is not God’s plan for the world.  The same held true for Christian slaves in the American South.  On Sunday mornings they might hear a white minister preach on the text, “slaves obey your masters,” but on Sunday nights, in the privacy of their separate worship, they heard slave preachers draw conclusions about freedom from the Gospel.  And they wrote and sang scores of spirituals with themes of being released from bondage in Egypt and entering in the Promised Land.

These slave spirituals could get emotional, a point that Hume would have looked on with distaste.  The slaves could not boast of “ingenious manufactures” or cool Bondian technology.  They did not display the marks of a “civilized” people.  But they understood truths unknown by rational philosophers like Hume and clever writers like Fleming.

That’s interesting.

 

Score:

James Bond      2

Samuel Sharpe  3

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: The Cool Factor

Round two of our contest raises the question of cool.

Cool is interesting.

Of course, it’s hard to pull off.  I, myself, am not any good at it.  Occasionally I’ve dreamed about dressing for class like my film studies professor friend, Andrew Rudd, who is very cool.  One day, much to my surprise, I came very close to doing it, except that I wasn’t wearing the Converse canvas sneakers with my tweed sports jacket, jeans, and green T-shirt.  It appears, in fact, to have been something like the middle-aged woman who wins a pick-up truck by shooting a puck from center ice into a 5 inch cut-out in the hockey net at intermission of the hockey game.  A lucky shot.  I won’t get that close again.

Pierce Brosnan and an Aston Martin Vanquish take a break from their duties for a moment to show us how to be cool.

To a certain generation (I’m talking about you, Baby Boomers), James Bond was cool.   Always a snappy dresser, Bond was suave, cool and sophisticated.  He drove sleek Aston Martins.  Over the years his films introduced audiences to the latest technology like lasers, videophones and infrared scopes. The latest technology, of course, is cool.  He came with his own theme music, starting with the electric guitar spy riffs in the opening credits of “Dr. No,” and continuing over the years with commissioned music by cool artists like Paul McCartney, Duran Duran, and Alicia Keys.  He always got the woman he wanted.

And of course, there was his famous line:  “The name is Bond.  James Bond.”  That’s a cool line.

Samuel Sharpe wasn’t actually very cool.

Nobody, apparently, told Samuel Sharpe how cool he’d look in dreadlocks.

Many Jamaicans are cool, but Sharpe wasn’t one of them.  If we go by the drawings made of him in the years after he died, he didn’t have dreadlocks.  So he missed a chance, there. Not really a snappy dresser, from what we can tell.  No background music.   His technology, which probably consisted of a shovel and a machete, was not the latest that science had to offer.   Sharpe had to walk everywhere.  He didn’t even form a bobsled team for the Olympics, which was cool there for a while.

Now, he had the chance to pull off a great line.  Imagine Sharpe appearing at the door of the stately home of a slave owner with a band of armed slaves behind him.  He tells the slaveowner, “The name is Sharpe. Samuel Sharpe.”  Then he turns and burns down the guy’s sugar mill.

That would have been cool.

But it didn’t happen that way.

 

Score:

James Bond                 1

Samuel Sharpe            1

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Redemption and Violence

James Bond or Samuel Sharpe:  which one should we be most interested in?  Today begins our head to head competition between the two (see the previous post for details).  Round one begins with the topic of redemption and violence.

James Bond in “Dr. No”

James Bond is in the redemption business.  He tries to save the world from bad guys and bad women who come in all kinds of different sizes, shapes and nationalities.  And he saves the world, every time of course, usually by killing the bad guys.  At one point in “Dr. No,” the first Bond movie (filmed in Jamaica), Bond knifes a guy from behind who was trying to track him down.  “Why did you kill him?” asks Honey Ryder.  “I had to,” replies Bond, coolly.  According to the logic of the film, the world won’t be saved unless Bond kills bad people.  We see him kill five individuals at different points in this film, not including those who might have died when he blows up Dr. No’s secret nuclear powered radio beam laboratory at Crab Key in Jamaica.

But is it interesting?   Well, yes, on one level.  Several Bond films have hit the top 100 grossing films of all time.  A lot of people are quite interested in stories in which a hero or set of heroes kills off bad people who threaten to destroy society.  It is one of the most common stories humankind tells itself.   And it is very common in film.  (Just think Star Wars, Spider Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rambo, the Avengers, Little Mermaid, your typical western, your typical war movie, any film with Arnold Schwarzenegger in it where he does not get pregnant, etc. etc. etc.)

Now, I have to confess that, personally, I don’t find this basic formula extremely interesting, partly because it is so very common.  I am, however, extremely interested in why so many people find this kind of story interesting, but that’s a question for another day.

So what about Samuel Sharpe?

Sharpe was also in the redemption business.  He was a Baptist evangelist, which meant that he was interested in the salvation of souls.  But he also was very interested in saving society from the oppression of slavery.  As a result, he attacked that system.  But his story unfolded much differently than the typical Bond film.  Let me highlight two points.

First, if the goal of a rebellion is to kill the bad guys, the Jamaican slaves proved to be stunningly and amazingly ineffective.   Sixty thousand slaves rose up, fought for one month and in the process killed…..fourteen whites.  60,000 to 14.  Has there ever been a smaller proportional harvest of dead bad guys than that?  James Bond could knock off that many bad guys in about three minutes of hand-to-hand fighting in an ordinary atomic laboratory.

What kind of rebellion was this, anyway?

Jamaican slaves attack a plantation

The Baptist War was a rebellion that intentionally targeted property rather than people.  The slaves burned hundreds of houses and attacked sugar mills.  Sharpe explicitly told the rebels that they were to drive the slaveowners off the estates but they should not harm them, except in self-defense.  What a strange strategy.  More strange was that 60,000 slaves should listen to it. Burdened by a terribly oppressive system and given the opportunity to vent their frustrations, why should they exhibit this amount of self-restraint?

The slave rebellion was crushed.  In the end, 500 slaves were killed or executed.  The rebellion was a failure.  Slavery was not abolished in Jamaica.

But the story does not end there.

Slavery was not abolished, that is, until one year later, when the British Parliament emancipated the slaves in all its colonies (except those under the control of the British East India Company).  And here we come to the second very interesting part of this story.  The self-restraint and relative absence of violence on the part of the slaves played a key role in abolition.  In a round-about way, the slaves won, even after they lost the rebellion.

It’s a long and complicated story, but here are the relevant points for our purposes:  abolitionists in Parliament had been working for decades against formidable opposition.  They had managed to ban the slave trade and slavery in Britain.  It was tougher going to ban slavery in the colonies.

By 1831, political conditions made it look like abolition was in reach.  The key lay in persuading enough politicians and their constituents to put the vote over the top.

But most Brits had the 1791 Haitian slave revolt in the back of their minds.  That revolt left 10,000  blacks and 2000 whites dead.  It provoked an even more violent twelve-year rebellion.  As a result, the Haitian revolt  left an ambiguous legacy.  It proved that abolition was possible.  But the violence of the rebellion terrified whites in Europe and the Americas.  Stores of atrocious acts of violence by blacks (though not those of whites against blacks) circulated among white populations for years afterward.  The revolt reinforced racial stereotypes of blacks as savage beasts and encouraged many whites to believe that emancipation would lead economic ruin and the wholesale slaughter of whites.

Had the Jamaican slaves in 1831, then, set out to kill as many slaveowners as possible, they most likely would have turned a great chunk of British public opinion against them.  Samuel Sharpe, who had received news from missionaries about Parliamentary negotiations, knew this.  Thus, the orders for self-restraint.

And it shaped the political discussion in the months after the Baptist War.  Instead of hearing speeches denouncing savage brutality of blacks who wanted to rape white women and massacre the English, MPs in London heard missionaries testify about the cruelty of the planters and the execution of Christians like Sharpe.  Black slaves no longer looked like savage beasts.  It became more possible to conceive of them as free citizens.  Although there was more to the story, the relative lack of violence by the Jamaican slaves played a key role in their redemption from slavery.  How strange.

And what an interesting story of violence and redemption.

Score:    James Bond         0

Samuel Sharpe    1

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: A head to head competition

James Bond

If you have ever visited Jamaica, there is a good chance that at some point you found yourself in a van driven by a Jamaican driver.  In that affable and jocular way common to many Jamaicans, your driver probably pointed out interesting spots along the way.  And since you probably flew into or docked in Montego Bay or Falmouth, there is a good chance that your driver pointed out a spot on the north shore where they filmed scenes from a couple of James Bond movies.

That is what happened to me.  I have visited Jamaica twice with church members and Malone students on ministry trips.  Two different years, two different drivers, but both mentioned the James Bond movies.  That’s why I think James Bond movies were probably mentioned to you when you visited Jamaica.  Or will be, if you ever visit Jamaica.

OK, I admit this is a terribly unscientific survey of what Jamaican van drivers usually say.  It is a terribly unscientific way to determine what probably happened to you if you ever visited Jamaica.  And it is a terribly unscientific way to predict what will happen to you if you visit Jamaica some day.  But I needed an opening hook for this blog series.  And, anyway, I am still convinced that visitors are likely to hear about James Bond, even though this conviction is terribly unscientific.

Here is what struck me:  neither driver mentioned Samuel Sharpe.  You will find Samuel Sharpe on the Jamaica currency, you will find his face painted on the walls of many Jamaican primary schools, and you will find that the Jamaican government considers Samuel Sharpe to be one of their national heroes.

OK, so who is this Samuel Sharpe guy, you may ask?  And if you didn’t ask, you should, because unless you attended a primary school in Jamaica (a demographic that my blog has not reached in large numbers, for some reason) you probably don’t know who he is.

Samuel Sharpe, a Jamaican hero

Briefly:  Samuel Sharpe was a slave and a Baptist preacher in Jamaica in 1831, when Jamaica was a British colony.  He organized a rebellion against slavery, primarily by working through the Baptist and Methodist church networks, which is why the rebellion is sometimes called the Baptist War.  The rebellion was put down, Sharpe was captured, and he was hanged.  However, the rebellion played a key role in British politics and the abolition cause, which produced the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833, which abolished slavery in all the British colonies.  That’s the short story.  More details will emerge in posts that follow.

It is apparent to me that Jamaican van drivers know about Samuel Sharpe.  But Jamaican van drivers also depend upon the tourist business for their livelihood.  They will point out spots and talk about things that they have found to be of interest to tourists.  That means that the decision to mention James Bond and not Samuel Sharpe is driven by what visitors want to hear.

Now, I think it would be interesting to hear about both.  But I also wondered this:  if visitors to Jamaica are going to hear about only one of these guys, which one should they hear about?

That brings us to my next blog series:  a showdown between James Bond and Samuel Sharpe.  We’ll set them up against each other in a head to head competition, battling it out in a number of categories to determine the answer to this question: which one should we be most interested in?

Stay tuned.