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.