Afro-Kittian Women—The Texture of Their Lives in Plantation Society

The context and texture of the Knowledge-Keepers’ lives at the time of the protest. It outlines the horrific conditions of their lived experiences as female employees and as heads of their households and demonstrates that women’s involvement was central to the uprising and its aftermath. It debunks the peripheralization of women, as implied by previous accounts of the episode that invisibilized their very active lives at all levels of family, community and the uprising. It details the types of jobs and the conditions of work that affected women in the sugar industry, which for centuries had been sustained by the enslavementEnslavement of persons of African descent who had been denied their personhood and humanity in the process. The stories displayed complex multilayered human experiences.