In 1988, on the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, William Knibb was granted Jamaica’s highest civil honour, The Order of Merit. Only one other non-Jamaican and no white man shared this honour at the time. William Knibb was born in Kettering, Northampton on 7 September 1803. He was a student at Kettering Grammar School before joining his older brother, Thomas, as an apprentice to a local printer, J.G. Fuller. In 1816, Fuller moved his firm to Bristol and both the Knibbs followed their employer to the notorious slave trading city.

© Anti-Slavery International

Young William was baptised with his brother at Broadmead Baptist Church in 1822. Thomas, who was the elder by four years, answered the call to be a Baptist missionary, and set sail for Jamaica in 1824. His stay on the island proved short; he died almost three months after arrival. Continuing in his brother footsteps, William agreed to be his replacement.  In 1824, the 21 year-old William, and his wife Mary, headed for Jamaica to work as a schoolmaster for the Baptist Missionary Society.

It was while working with the enslaved Africans that Knibb realised the brutal nature of slavery in Jamaica. The Africans were flogged for even the most trivial of misdemeanours and their food and living conditions were almost unimaginable.  Added to that, little or no provision had been set aside for their spiritual wellbeing. Up until that point, churches had largely ignored the plight of Africans and went along with colonial policies that forbade Africans to attend evening prayer meetings. However, missionaries such Knibb and the Moravian H.G. Pfeiffer actively taught the Gospel to Africans in ways that drew parallels between the lives of slaves and the Exodus account in the Old Testament.

It was the work of missionaries such as Knibb that engendered the emergence of slaves such as Sam Sharpe. Sharpe, a deacon in the Baptist Church, was literate, articulate and politically aware, and combined his desire to preach the gospel with one that called for slaves to be set free. In 1831, Sharpe orchestrated a strike which soon developed into an island-wide rebellion. Although Sharpe played no part in the destruction of plantations he was subsequently hanged, and Knibb was held responsible for agitating the Africans to riot.

Alarmed by this turn of events the Colonial Church Union began to persecute non-conformists and agitate for the defence of slavery in Jamaica. Baptist and Wesleyan Chapels in the Parishes of St Ann, Trelawny, Hanover were burnt to the ground and pastors were arrested or beaten en masse.  Knibb and his family managed to flee to England in 1832, where the missionary used his experiences and considerable influence to call for the abolition of the slave trade. Knibb persuaded many in the non-conformist churches that slavery was evil and he spoke to packed meetings up and down the country about the horrors of transatlantic slavery. When the Parliamentary Act was passed in 1833 to outlaw slavery, Knibb returned to Jamaica in 1834 to continue his fight for the rights of Africans and rebuild the chapels that were destroyed by slavery-supporting mobs. Although slavery had been abolished the previous year, the British Government had introduced an apprenticeship system to help slaves come to terms with their freedom. The upshot was a horrible system that saw very little improvement in the lives of Africans. Knibb urged Baptists to free their slaves and he encouraged the colonial government in Jamaica to help the slaves to read (this had been forbidden during slavery).

On 31 July 1838, Knibb and his congregation in Falmouth buried a pair of shackles in a coffin to symbolise the end of slavery in the British Caribbean. On 1 August 1838, the Africans were officially freed after 276 years of slavery.

Life for the Africans saw little material improvement after this date and Knibb used his time to effect tangible improvements in their living standards in respect to wages and taxation. The Africans returned the favour by giving him a house in Kettering, a village in Jamaica. Knibb died in Jamaica on 15 November 1845 of a fever. He was 42. He was buried at his Falmouth Church the following day. His funeral service was attended by nearly 8,000 Africans.