Afterwords—“Aawe Kangka” (We Prevailed)

The Afterwords, completes with the women’s sense of accomplishment summed up Florence Hanley’s expression “Aawe kangka” (We prevailed). They had obtained much satisfaction and respite from the high percentage of acquittals of persons charged with rioting. That level of success in a judicial system was unprecedented and indicated that change was possible. The disgruntled employees returned to work with no change is wages but with the confidence that they had stood up to the combined forces of the local and British forces, that generated enough concern in the colonizedColonized political structure that the British government established a Commission of Inquiry charged with inquiring into the cause of the uprising. The gratification was the unsettling of the plantocracy and its aspiring new breed of politicians and business owners who realised that without change, they would be creating the opportunity for another generation of oppressed Africans on a Caribbean island to establish a Black republic in the western hemisphere in the twentieth century.