Sugar Rush

England drawing Ghana in Group L prompts me to tell a little tale from history...one of those of the 'Hollywood wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' variety.

Tekyi was a Ghanaian chieftain of the Coromantee people who relocated to Jamaica in the second half of the eighteenth century in circumstances that he was clearly none too pleased about. In 1760 he initiated what the locals described as Tacky's Revolt.

This island in the Caribbean was a perhaps unlikely seed of the modern world. It had been one of the most impoverished parts of the Spanish empire and then a redoubt of defiant Jewish pirates, who had assisted Oliver Cromwell in his plan to take it for England's Commonwealth. It might have remained a near-forgotten backwater but for the phenomenon that kick-started global capitalism: a humungous sugar craving.

Slavery had existed in the majority of human civilisations prior to Tekyi's arrival on Jamaica, but already back on Blighty the seeds of the institution's final demise were germinating. The first steps were taken in 1758 when the Quakers prohibited their membership from any involvement in this 'iniquitous practice'.

Yet if anything this was also a period when enslavement was expanding and intensifying. Not in essence because the enslavers had suddenly become more intensely evil and racist than any before them, but because they were responding to the lure of an economic opportunity the likes of which nobody had ever before experienced. They were proto-capitalists.

Capitalism will always prefer machines to human beings, but when no machines are available, it will tend to use human beings as if they were machines. This was basically the situation that the proto-capitalist planters of Jamaica found themselves in. Europe's sweet tooth was calling and they needed a human machine of heat and malaria-resistant, archetypally unfree and rights-deprived labourers.

But the demand was of course only one side of this new economic imperative. The planters soon realised that the price they got for their sugar was highly sensitive to the supply, and so they deliberately under-exploited their local opportunity in order to suppress the quantity of product available for export.

This meant that large parts of Jamaica remained under-cultivated. And this in turn helped preserve a rather strange phenomenon known as the Maroons (from the Spanish word Cimarrón, meaning wild or untamed.)

The Maroons were a community of thousands of former Africans descended from former Spanish slaves living 'wild' in the island's hilly hinterlands, residing in caves and sinkholes, from which they persistently launched guerrilla raids on the sugar rush.

The sneaky supply side dabbling of the planters meant that the Maroons in the deep interior significantly outnumbered the actual slaves on Jamaica and the conflict became very intense and brutal, placing a burden on the British Army that was only alleviated when a treaty was signed in 1738.

Crucially, as part of this deal, the Maroons agreed to cooperate on some levels with the plantation economy, returning escaped slaves to their masters.

Cue Tekyi/Tacky and his 1760 revolt. Having freed himself and recruited hundreds of others, he stormed the coastal township of Port Maria where many muskets were acquired. There followed a rampage through the plantations where more and more slaves were freed and more and more proto-capitalists were summarily taken off the market.

This little army included Coromantee obeahmen from Africa's Gold Coast who mixed up a powder which could, they asserted, protect the wearer from gunshots.

Things were perhaps looking a bit touch and go for the modern world, but then Tekyi and his team turned inland and sought refuge in the mountains. And that's where the Maroons got them.

In August Tekyi himself died in a running shoot out with a Maroon called Davy and when the rest of his followers were located later on in a cave, they had all committed suicide.

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013)

Having had our curiosity piqued by Ron Howard's Eden (2024) we quickly turned to 2013's The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, the documentary which borrowed part of its title from Dore Strauch's seemingly rather self-serving first hand account of said 'affair'.

At the same time I have acquired a copy of Margret Wittmer's response to it, Floreana, described rather less luridly as a 'pilgrimage'. Following publication, Wittmer's only further comment on the matter up to her death in 2000 aged 95 was 'a closed mouth catches no flies'. (More on this later, I suppose.)

You may recall that I had noted that the accents on display in Eden were as unique and startling as one might expect of the Galapagos (though obviously non-endemic). In the documentary there is one, for Strauch's own words, which seemed immediately even more outrageous, yet I had assumed the film-makers had employed native German voiceover artists (and in the main they did), and it wasn't until the end credits that I learned that this particularly arch and thespy narration of the Krouty kind had been provided by Cate Blanchett.

It becomes clear early on here that the 'Baroness' was a French woman, something which was absolutely not at all evident in Anna de Armas's performance, and I think both films missed the chance to suggest that the underlying conflict of worldviews might have been fed by an existing continental European divergence.

And neither do either of the movies examine in any depth why it was that Germans in particular were drawn to these Islands in the late twenties. Historians have long been aware that many of the strange compulsions which would lead to the rise of Adolf were widely present in the population at the beginning of the twentieth century even amongst those who would claim to be steadfastly 'anti-fascist' before WWII.

Goldfine and Geller's documentary has some zingers in terms of insights into how the bad blood started to flow, but is ultimately undermined in the second half by bagginess, inconclusiveness and a largely superfluous cast of spare Germanic migrants who were inhabiting a separate island.

At the start one of the talking heads paraphrases Göethe’s sentiment that 'We are our own demons, we expel ourselves from our paradise.' and then again at the end, another two long term Galapagos inmates conclude that 'paradise is not a place', one having already expressed the hope that if there really is a paradise, that 'it is nicer than this'.

This aspect of the thematic material is handled well. I have often noted here in this region that 'paradise' is an umbrella term used by various kinds of outsider, specifically those who come to make and those who come to take, both perhaps slightly antithetical to the basic concept.

This region is not however one of those to which individuals flee as a way to leave civilisation behind. It's more like an environment you turn to once you have somewhat outgrown civilisation...or it has somewhat outgrown you.

The documentary does hint at tensions in the little community on Floreana which Noah Pink and Ron Howard must have consciously passed over in their screenplay: occasionally intense jealousy between the three women, a spark of Romantic interest perhaps between Wittmer and Strauch and a curious love-hate dynamic between Ritter and the Baroness.

In spite of all this it does seem that the most likely candidate for the murderer of the Baroness and Phillipson was the other member of this triangle, Lorenz who, in the later fictionalised account, is excluded entirely from the deadly confrontation, which requires the invention of a 'spark' — the death of Burro — to explain it.

It is also interesting how the boatload of dilettante scientists made more repeated and eventful interventions on the island.

I cannot quite grasp why Eden chose to hide the fact that tge doctor’s last meal was also his last meal as a vegetarian.

Beyond the fact, as noted by one descendant, that people who leave their own native environments are often natively and notably anti-social, some of the agitations which played out here resemble what I witnessed amongst certain fresher cliques of undergrads at Girton. They had paired up almost immediately after matriculation, yet almost within the first term the 'cross border migrations' had begun and by the end of the year many of them had fallen out definitely and the little pack disbanded.

The silent movie element of the story is beguiling and worth including in complete form, even though it adds to the length of the documentary. 

I was rather struck by the self-styled Baronness's resemblance to 2025 Australian Open winner Madison Keys.