Making the Chief Servant Mad: Disability, the Regulation of Afro-Caribbean Religions, and the Political Prophesy of Tubal Uriah Butler

Abstract:Facing unrest after a global economic downturn, the British government in Trinidad arrested the labor organizer Tubal Uriah "Buzz" Butler in 1937. The colonial government charged him with sedition, claiming that his actions had led to revolts. While evidence in the king's court focused on Butler's supposedly seditious rhetoric, in the court of elite public opinion and in popular and official speech and writing Butler was repeatedly portrayed as a disabled madman, an unreasonable religious fanatic. Colonial regimes and their dependents in the Caribbean have used a racializing discourse of mental and physical disability purportedly caused by African superstition or fanaticism to contain the social formation of the colonized, including uprisings but also general community-building outside of colonial control. In this article, I use the history of such regulation to better understand the government crackdown on Butler's activism as well as his critique of colonialism and British sovereignty.