From ‘Dorme’ to the Cockpit

By way of response to Devin Leigh’s “Apongo was a rebel leader in Jamaica …”

The name Apongo, also called Wager, reaches us through a fragile and morally compromised source: a 134-word handwritten note in the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, an 18th-century Jamaican enslaver. Yet from that sliver of text emerges one of the most intriguing African biographies in Caribbean history. As historian Devin Leigh has recently shown, Apongo was remembered not merely as an enslaved man but as a prince, a diplomat, and later, a rebel general who died in Tacky’s Revolt — the largest slave uprising in Jamaica before the 19th century.

Leigh’s intervention is important because it forces us to rethink African identity in Jamaica beyond crude plantation labels such as “Coromantee” or “Popo”. Apongo’s story, however, invites us to go further still. When read alongside Jamaican language, Maroon organisation, and African political survivals in Creole culture, Apongo begins to look less like an anomaly and more like a key to understanding how African systems of authority endured under slavery.

AN AFRICAN PRINCE IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD

According to Thistlewood, Apongo was a prince from a West African polity subordinate to a larger kingdom he called “Dorme” or “Dome.” He was reportedly sent on a diplomatic mission to Cape Coast Castle, then Britain’s principal trading headquarters on the Gold Coast. There, he was seized, enslaved, and transported to Jamaica.

For decades, historians assumed “Dorme” referred to Dahomey, the militarised kingdom located in today’s Benin. Others questioned this, pointing to the overwhelmingly Akan (Gold Coast) leadership of Tacky’s Revolt. Leigh’s research reopens the question carefully, showing that “Dorme” was indeed used in 18th-century Jamaican sources as a variant for Dahomey, while also acknowledging the strong Ghanaian presence in the rebellion.

What matters most, however, is not choosing between modern Ghana or Benin but recognising that Apongo moved within a fluid West African political world. African diplomats, linguists, war captains, and tribute-bearers travelled widely between courts and coastal forts. Apongo was likely one such political specialist — trained in hierarchy, warfare, and negotiation — whose skills did not disappear when he was enslaved.

WHY APONGO COULD LEAD

In Jamaica, Apongo tried for years to secure his freedom, even encountering the same colonial governor he had once met in Africa. When that failed, he turned to rebellion. During Tacky’s Revolt, which unfolded over some 18 months and spread across parishes, Apongo emerged as a principal leader in the west, sustaining organised resistance long after the initial eastern uprisings were crushed.

This fits a wider Atlantic pattern. Across the Americas, enslaved Africans with elite or military backgrounds — men accustomed to command — often became the organisers of revolt. Apongo was not simply reacting to plantation brutality. He was applying an African understanding of power, loyalty, and warfare to Caribbean conditions.

AFRICAN POLITICAL TITLES THAT SURVIVED IN JAMAICAN CREOLE

One of the most striking things about Jamaica is that African authority did not vanish under slavery. It survived, disguised, and transformed in Creole language and practice.

Consider “Nanny.” In Maroon society, Nanny functioned not just as a personal name but as an honorific title for a woman exercising political, military, and spiritual authority. The organisation of the Windward Maroons, often compared to Asante structures, preserved African ideas of leadership even as English words were adopted.

Then there is Obeah-man or Obeah-woman. Plantation authorities feared obeah precisely because it represented a form of power they could not easily control — oath-binding, healing, punishment, protection. In African societies, ritual authority and political authority were rarely separate. In Jamaica, obeah became the Creole name for that same dangerous legitimacy.

Similarly, Myal and the Myal-man preserved a leadership role rooted in Central African traditions. Linguistic research links myal to Kikongo leadership concepts associated with guidance, rule, and communal order. Myal leaders often appeared at moments of collective mobilisation, revival, or resistance — hardly accidental.

Even Maroon titles such as Captain and Colonel, though English in form, carried African content. They functioned as war offices within African-derived political systems, not as mere imitations of British rank.

READING APONGO THROUGH JAMAICAN MEMORY

Seen in this light, Apongo no longer appears as a puzzle that must be solved by modern ethnic labels. He looks instead like a cultural and political broker — a man fluent in multiple African worlds, able to command respect among enslaved Jamaicans because he embodied recognised forms of authority.

This also explains why a man associated with Dahomey could become a general in a rebellion remembered as “Coromantee”. African political identity was not narrow or static. It was layered, strategic, and mobile. Jamaica itself became a second African political theatre, where kingship, war leadership, and spiritual authority were reassembled under new and brutal constraints.

WHY APONGO STILL MATTERS

Apongo’s brief appearance in Thistlewood’s diary reminds us that slavery did not erase African intelligence or political imagination. It displaced it. The names Jamaicans still recognise — Nanny, obeah, myal, captain — are not cultural curiosities. They are the surviving grammar of African power.

In that sense, Apongo stands not only as a rebel leader of 1760 but as a symbol of something larger: the persistence of African statecraft in the Caribbean and the uncomfortable truth that the plantation world was never as politically empty as enslavers wished to believe.

His life challenges us, as Jamaicans, to read our language, our rebellions, and our heroes not as fragments but as continuations of an African past that refused to die.

Dudley McLean II is Church Teachers’ College Diamond Jubilee Alumni 2025 Awardee for Journalism and a graduate of Codrington College, UWI, Cave Hill, Barbados. Send feedback to dm15094@gmail.com.