Mavis C. Campbell (19?? - 2019)
Professor Mavis Campbell began her post-secondary education at the Bethlehem Training College in St. Elizabeth Parish in southwestern Jamaica, before going on to the London School of Economics and the University of London. After earning her doctorate, she worked as economic advisor to the Zambian Embassy in London and at the Zambian mission to the UN. She taught for six years at Hunter College in New York before coming to Amherst where she taught Caribbean history for 29 years. In 2006, she returned to her native Jamaica.
Amherst, in the late 1970s, was a difficult place for female faculty and faculty of color to thrive, and Mavis was one of only two female faculty of color with tenure-track positions at the time. Professor Amrita Basu remembers that when she joined the faculty in 1981, bringing that number to three, Mavis was among the first colleagues who invited her to share a meal in her home. Amrita recalls Mavis’ elegant style, commanding presence, and fierce sense of pride. She was struck both by how isolated Mavis was and by how she found companionship in writing about issues that were deeply meaningful to her. By the time Martha arrived at Amherst in1996-7, Mavis had withdrawn from the Black Studies department and from participation in history department meetings.
Although Mavis led a solitary life and did not have peers who could tell her story, she did leave a rich record of original and meticulous scholarship about the Caribbean world from which she came and to which she would return. Mavis engaged vigorously with history, evaluating sources, weighing alternative interpretations of an event or action, and describing the results of a conflict or a piece of legislation. Her writing voice is formal but fully alive; her judgments are persuasive, and it is hard to miss how much she savored uncovering the stories of those who defied slavery, oppression, and racism.
Mavis’s first book, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1800-1865, explores the history of Jamaica during the period surrounding the abolition of slavery in 1834, focusing on the small, relatively wealthy group of free blacks, positioned between the white planters and the majority enslaved population. Mavis described this intransigent, pro-slavery group, who were literate and therefore her most important sources, with a certain matter-of-fact acceptance, using their papers strategically to reinterpret events. She admired those enslaved men and women who endured and resisted and admired, even more, those bold enough to escape to live in the several maroon —or runaway—communities. She reserved her deepest opprobrium for the protagonists of her study, the mulattos who distanced themselves from slaves and darker-skinned Jamaicans, while futilely trying to achieve acceptance from white planters. She blamed the “free coloreds” for their failure to transcend their debilitating self-hatred. As she wrote, “If the society of Jamaica today displays traces of complexional prejudices…then it is more the result of the behavior of the mulattos than of the whites…. [These…prejudices] that are now transferred into “class” prejudices have bred fear and insecurity and have stultified development….” (193-4).
After completing her first book, Mavis turned her forensic talents to uncovering the largely hidden paths of the maroons, filling a scholarly void that Orlando Patterson had identified in 1970. The maroons’ variety of survival techniques interested Mavis. Some groups made arrangements with the plantation owners and Assembly, agreeing to return escaped slaves in exchange for being left in peace. Others secreted themselves in inaccessible mountain hideaways, where the women grew crops and the men raided plantations for supplies, arms, and new recruits. The British authorities only managed to find these maroons at the end of the 18th century and only after importing packs of vicious Spanish hunting dogs like those the conquistadors had let loose on indigenous people. The maroons finally signed a peace treaty when the British promised they would be allowed to remain on the island. However, the British banished all the surviving maroons to the northern wilds of Halifax, in Nova Scotia.
Mavis narrates the odyssey of these intrepid 568 men and women in her next two books, through documents which she edited. The Jamaicans were exiled along with a group of formerly enslaved men and women who had fought for Britain during the American Revolution. Miserable and sick in these chilly latitudes, the largely illiterate maroons petitioned, politicked, and protested over the next three years until they browbeat reluctant British bureaucrats into allowing them to be transported to Sierra Leone. Mavis dedicated her first volume to Mrs. Rhea Cabin, the History Department’s longtime, sainted coordinator, “whose lightning swiftness in processing the work incredibly did not affect her accuracy. There were moments when I thought she would have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the material, but her enthusiasm never flagged.” Mavis’s next book follows the maroons to Sierra Leone, using the journal of a British employee of the Sierra Leone Company who oversaw this voyage. In her maroon trilogy, Mavis uncovered a hidden story and paid tribute to a persecuted but undaunted and resourceful people.
Mavis’s groundbreaking contributions to Caribbean History were highly regarded by other Caribbean historians and intellectuals. Professor Carlene Edie of the University of Massachusetts judges Mavis’s work to be on a level with that of Harvard’s Orlando Patterson in opening up Caribbean history and being the first to link maroon histories across the region. Professor Rhonda Cobham-Sander recalls that when she invited the Barbadian poet and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite to Amherst in the late 1980s, Mavis was the first person he asked to meet. At lunch with the two scholars, she was impressed by the deference with which Brathwaite treated his fellow Caribbean historian. Listening to their conversation, she was intrigued to learn how Mavis’s early research had influenced Brathwaite’s own magnum opus on the Development of Creole Society, 1770-1820, published two years after Mavis’s first book appeared.
Mavis’s next work was Black Women of Amherst College, a compendium of information about 56 of the more than 250 Amherst African American women graduates from 1980-1997. It was written as the companion to Black Men of Amherst, by Harold Wade. As Mavis said, “the thrilling side to the writing of this book –the -labor-of-love aspect—was to see the impressive achievement of these black women within the relatively short period of coeducation at Amherst.” (Coeducation began in 1976). Black Women of Amherst College illuminates the challenges of coeducation for this cohort of Amherst women, as well as their contributions to the College, their struggles with it, and their inspiring post-graduate careers.
Mavis’s final work, Becoming Belize, explores the former British colony that occupies a slice of the Honduran coastline and was a much-coveted prize in the long struggle between Britain and Spain for control of the Caribbean. In tracing the fate of this sliver of land, Cambell spotlights the Miskitos, a coastal group of Zambos, or indigenous people who had mixed with Africans, possibly former slaves from Providence Island, held by English Puritans briefly in the mid-17th century. Their military prowess was indispensable to Britain in keeping a toehold on the Spanish Main. All her historical skills are on display here--her meticulous examination of evidence, her thoughtful resolutions of historical disputes, and her knowledge of 17th and 18th-century imperial history. So does her enjoyment in telling the stories of people who resisted imperial domination, slavery, and racism and carried themselves with pride.
Mavis’s academic successes did not come easily. Like many Caribbean scholars of her cohort, her early educational experiences were shaped by formidable West Indian schoolmasters and mistresses who approached the education of their students with military precision and ferocity. Many of these teachers held no more than teaching certificates from regional Teachers’ Colleges like the Bethlehem Teachers Training College where Mavis received her earliest post-secondary education. Nevertheless, their uncompromisingly high standards and no-nonsense approaches to discipline produced the cohort of Caribbean intellectual giants, many of them Oxbridge and LSE graduates, to which Mavis belonged—Nobel laureates, for example, like the economist Arthur William and the poet Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, or the acclaimed historian Eric Williams, who was also the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. If, as their biographers have written, these black men had to struggle mightily to achieve their full intellectual potential in the global arena, the battle for an education was even more harrowing for women in their cohort. Mavis never forgot the importance of the need to fight for educational access, and she carried into her Amherst classrooms the combative style and rigorous standards that had shaped her Caribbean education, as well as the fighting legacy of the maroon communities near which she had been raised. As kinder, gentler approaches to learning replaced this boot camp approach to education, many Amherst students came to fear her blunt, confrontational style. Some of her earliest students, however, found her tough demands bracing. Rhonda Cobham-Sander recalls that, when she first arrived at Amherst in the mid-1980s, a black female student, who had found the College a hostile, forbidding space, singled out Mavis for having taught her how to fight her way through the institution by challenging her to set higher goals for herself than those demanded of other students.
Mavis never forgot her origins. Throughout her professional life, she paid for the education of numerous relatives back home. And at the end of her distinguished academic career in North America and beyond, she returned in retirement to the community in which she had first been educated. It is fitting that the New Beulah Moravian Church in St. Elizabeth Parish was the setting for the memorial service that celebrated her life this past winter. Their warrior daughter had come home.
President Martin, I move that this memorial minute be adopted by the faculty in a rising vote of silence, that it be entered in the permanent record of the faculty, and that a copy be sent to Professor Campell’s family.
Respectfully submitted by
Amrita Basu
Rhonda Cobham-Sander
Martha Saxton