From peasantry to prominence

BARNES IS not an uncommon surname in Jamaica, but not many Jamaicans know about Isaac Edmestone Barnes and his great achievements.

The first child of William and Amelia Barnes was born at Highholborn Street in Kingston in 1857, yet all his siblings were born at Kraal, near Smithville in Clarendon, where his parents had acquired a bankrupt coffee estate. They were peasants originally from Nain in St Elizabeth.

The black Barneses are descendants of the Jewish Barneses who came to Jamaica from Edinburgh, Scotland to work on a sugar estate in western Jamaica in the last decades of the 18th century. Two of the Barnes brother married black women and settled as peasants in Lititz and Nain.

After the Second Maroon War ended, over 500 of the Trelawny Town Maroons of St James were tricked into exile to Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada. Their exile meant the availibilty of agrarian lands in the mountains of the Cockpit Country. Some of the Barneses from St Elizabeth relocated and settled in that space. Another set moved to the Highholborn Street area.

BACK-TO-AFRICAN MOVEMENT

Isaac Barnes’ family was a proud set of people and, after Emancipation, before Isaac was born, they joined a ‘back-to-African movement’. The story is told of his father who wrote to Queen Victoria, urging her to recognise the independence of the Republic of Liberia, a country that Isaac was to move to and where he became a national.

Young Isaac attended Calabar High School and then Calabar Theological College, because he wanted to join the Baptist clergy. But he was unhappy with the teachings and practices of the Baptist faith. He left to study surveying at Jamaica University College, Jamaica’s first university, which is long defunct and is now Jamaica College on Old Hope Road.

Barnes was the only black student in his cohort, did very well, and obtained a diploma in civil engineering. Because he was black, he was refused an engineering commission from the colonial government, but that did not deter Barnes, who gained possession of Lucky Valley Estate at a relative young age and became a planter/businessman/exporter.

Lucky Valley Estate in Clarendon was one of the largest and most historic of Jamaica’s plantations. When Barnes acquired it, it was producing a variety of fruits, cocoa, coffee, livestock, oranges, sugarcane, etc. It was also ideal for the cultivation of bananas, so Barnes got into the cultivation and trading of bananas.

Jamaica Journal Volume 32 Nos 1-2 August 2009 quotes a notice from The Daily Gleaner and De Cordova’s Advertising Sheet of June 20, 1888. A part of it says, “Mr Isaac Barnes of the city has been appointed agent of the Union Fruit and Trading Company Ltd, Kingston Branch, and any person desirous of obtaining shares in the said company will please apply to him at his office, 141 Harbour Street.”

DEATH THREAT

At the age of 31, Barnes was a leading fruit exporter, mainly of bananas. He was one of a few black business leaders at the time, and that did not go down well with some of his competitors, such as Samuel Mendes, a Jew, who was one of the leading fruit dealers in Jamaica at the time. He wanted Barnes out of the banana trade, and thus issued a death threat to Barnes, who was unperturbed, it seemed. And, Mendes lived up to his threat.

The aforementioned Jamaica Journal, referencing a Kingston court record of October 31, 1888 and The Daily Gleaner of November 1, 1888, says, “Simon Mendes, the younger, struck Barnes with a stick across the chest, the girl Walters took up another stick and broke Barnes’ head with it. The other girl Thompson used a shovel, and others joined in with stones and sticks so that Barnes was carried away to his apartment grievously wounded.”

The attack on the person of Isaac Edmestone Barnes was tried in court and Simon Mendes was found guilty. He was told to pay one pound or spend 14 days in the St Catherine District Prison. Resha Walters, one of the female attackers, was told to pay 10 shillings or spend seven days in prison. Yet, the victim, Isaac Barnes, was given the same sentence as Simon Mendes, and Samuel Mendes was not charged. The research did not mention the punishment for “the girl Thompson”.

“It can hardly be doubted that both the attack and the trial had racist overtones, to say the least. Both Barnes and Mendes were businessmen, supposedly equal before the law. But, one was black and the other Jewish white,”Alan Eyre and Ouida Lewis say in the aforementioned Jamaica Journal.

“That the legally innocent black victim should have been given the same sentence as his guilty white would-be-assassin in a travesty of ‘British’ justice does not seem to have troubled the Jamaican press in the least.”

This injustice was not lost on Barnes himself, the victim, and it could have been the catalyst that pushed him out of Jamaica during the first quarter of 1890. By that time, he was a baptised member of the Christadelphian Brotherhood and had founded the Kingston Christadelphian Assembly at 26½ Mark Lane, Kingston. He sojourned in Britian before travelling to Liberia, Africa, where he left his mark in many ways.

In Part Two in the Sunday Gleaner, Isaac Barnes rises from disgruntled prospective clergyman to missionary in Africa .