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Africans enslaved in the British colony of South Carolina weren’t allowed to own or use drums because of its ability to “speak” in an unknown language and its potential to sow the seeds of rebellion. The colonials had good reason to fear the “talking drum.”
As early as 1708, slaves actually outnumbered whites and by 1730 there were twice as many slaves as whites in the colony. The rapid growth in the slave population raised the specter of slave revolt.
On this day in 1739, in the early morning hours some 20 enslaved Africans men & women met near the Stono River, about 20 miles southwest of Charleston. Led by an Angolan named Jemmy, the rebels took guns and powder from a store & killed the 2 storekeepers they found there.
With cries of ‘Liberty’ and beating of drums,” historian Peter H. Wood writes in the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, “the rebels raised a standard and headed south toward freedom in Spanish St. Augustine.”
Along the road more enslaved Gullah Geechees joined them, burning houses, and killing colonials, but sparing one innkeeper who was ‘kind to his slaves.
The Stono Rebellion, also know as the Gullah Rebellion, was the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in the British mainland colonies prior to the American Revolution.
Plantation owners riding on horseback caught up with the band of sixty to one hundred slaves. More than twenty whites and nearly twice as many Africans were killed before the rebellion was suppressed.
Over the course of the 1700s, South Carolina imposed a moratorium on slave imports, enacted a harsher slave code, and banned enslaved Africans from owning drums, horns and other loud instruments that could be used to start an insurrection. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p284.html
I post this ‘cause it’s American history that ofttimes goes untaught. Many go through the U.S. school system under the impression that enslaved Africans were passive, childlike, and stupid. And they never identify the “black slaves” in coastal SC, GA, or FL as Gullah Geechee.
