London, . News from Sierra Leone reports that the head of the
Rev. William John Humphrey,
M.A., was found impaled on a stick. He
had evidently been murdered. The
Rev. Mr. Humphrey was for
some time curate of St.
Peter’s, Tunbridge Wells, England. On volunteering for missionary service he
was appointed principal of Foura Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, in
.
[The trouble in Sierra Leone has arisen by the enforcement by the Government
of a tax of 5s each annum
on native huts. In many cases the huts are not worth
5s, and when the tax
collectors went round in many of
the people knocked down their huts and slept under trees. A number of chiefs
were arrested for inciting their people to refuse to pay the tax.]
This tax, though similar to ones that had been successfully imposed in other imperial “protectorates,” was resisted, and led to a violent rebellion and then to a crackdown in which dozens of Hut Tax rebels were hanged and hopes for the independence of Sierra Leone from foreign rule were, for decades, frustrated.
The British coalesced the coastal African colony of Sierra Leone, and its adjoining inland “protectorate,” by negotiating with individual kings of the many small political groups native to the area.
These negotiations usually culminated in a treaty signed by the local king and the colonial governor that ceded certain rights over territory to the British in return for protection (including mediation and sometimes military intervention in inter-group conflicts) and often a periodic payment by the empire to the native king.
The British also made some effort to combat the still-ongoing slave trade in the area.
This, to the residents, was a mixed blessing depending on whether they had been prey or predator.
The fortunes of some local elites had been made in the slave trade when it was still being encouraged by Britain, and slavery had also become a local institution — with a large percentage of the population of the protectorate being slaves.
The British by this time were actively suppressing the slave trade, having had a change of heart about their own former pro-slavery policies about a century prior, but they didn’t try to abolish slavery in the protectorate or to free those currently enslaved there.
However because the British legal system did not recognize the validity of slavery, it wouldn’t treat enslaved people as property to be reclaimed if they did manage to escape to a British-controlled area, and some of the kings complained that their slaves were taking advantage of this to escape.
The British used this half-hearted effort to combat slavery in Sierra Leone as a moral prop, much in the same way that modern American imperalists in the middle east will pretend to care about women’s education in Afghanistan or the rights of the Marsh Arabs in Iraq when the occasion calls for crocodile tears.
Sierra Leone’s importance to the British was in part because it was “the only suitable coaling station England possesses on the west coast of Africa.” It does not seem to have been otherwise a great source of benefit for England, not having known mineral resources of much use then, or agricultural exports worth getting excited about; but in the Monopoly game that was the imperialist scramble for Africa, it was better to have poor colonies than no colonies at all.
Before the Hut Tax that was scheduled to go into effect in , the colony’s revenue came from customs duties.
The British colonial rulers had deputized some natives to be imperial “Frontier Police,” but in a classic imperial snafu, these more-or-less completely unsupervised police, because they had no particular investment in the British project or the reputation of the empire, tended to use their authority to settle old scores, shake people down, and take untoward sexual liberties with those they lorded over.
There seemed also to be instances of gangs impersonating Frontier Police in order to assume these same advantages.
Because they did all this as de facto representatives of The Queen of England, and often represented themselves as imperial judges and legislators as well as cops, their abuse or assumption of power reflected back on the Empire and made it harder for it to get respect.
In addition, the colonial government relied on the Frontier Police when it was trying to collect the tax or to take reprisals against tax-resisting groups or kings.
Even worse, when the colonial government justified the tax to the people in the area harassed by the Frontier Police, it did so by saying the money was necessary in order to finance this largely unappreciated police force.
The Protectorate Ordinance that instituted the Hut Tax also gave the colonial administration greater powers than before — and by fiat, marking a striking change in attitude by the empire toward the kings that it had previously been negotiating with.
Provisions of the new ordinance included “limiting the forensic jurisdiction of the Chiefs [kings]… enabling the Governor to unmake and make Chiefs, to banish persons from any part of the territories without any charge and without opportunity of a hearing or defence, and… imposing taxes.”
The humiliation of their kings, far from intimidating the populace, further infuriated them, and convinced them that the ultimate aim of the British was to destroy their own system of governance, take their land, and mine them for exorbitant taxes.
A king named Bai Bureh, in Kasseh, assembled an armed group, called “war-boys” in Chalmers’s report, which successfully defended him against an expected attempt to arrest him for refusing to pay the Hut Tax — an attempt that Chalmers labels “aggression pure and simple on the part of the authorities” — and thus the Hut Tax War began.
Other angry kings and people, inspired by Bai Bureh’s successful action, rallied to his side.
Chalmers is surprisingly sympathetic to the aims of the rebels at this stage, quoting a member of the colonial forces as saying of their own aims, “being unable to arrest him [Bai Bureh], we destroyed his country and that of other Chiefs also, whom we were unable to arrest,” while of the rebels:
The actions of the Imperial troops, on the other hand, resulted in “the laying waste of a country of about thirty miles’ radius round Karene, and the destruction of 97 towns and villages, having an aggregate population of over 44,000.” Chalmers implies that Imperial troops and their Frontier Police allies cut a path of unprovoked and senseless destruction through the territories they passed through during a punitive expedition — murdering, kidnapping children, burning villages — and then falsified their reports to say that they had been responding to attacks by “war-boy” guerrillas.
An interesting section in Chalmers’s report concerns the anarchic instincts of the people of the area and how these were underestimated by the more thoroughly conquered British citizens who took taxation in stride.
Excerpts:
[A] tax of the nature of the Hut Tax is unknown in native custom, and… it is highly obnoxious.
With a great deal of prevailing loyalty to authority, the native African mind has a strong grasp of the idea of individual liberty, and a tax peremptorily imposed irrespective of the consent of the tax-payer is felt to be derogatory to liberty.
Moreover no people has ever welcomed direct taxation or received it even with toleration unless they have become aware that the Government they are required to support brings to them reciprocal advantages worth paying for.
We must accept the fundamental fact that the Chiefs and people of the Hinterland of Sierra Leone have as yet only very slight knowledge of the English Government or its beneficent aims. It has been recognised by many of the Chiefs that the English rule is beneficial inasmuch as it has tended to allay and prevent inter-tribal raids, which are condemned by general native opinion.
And they probably have some feeling of security from the hope of English protection if threatened by outside enemies.
Beyond these advantages nothing tangible or intelligible has as yet accrued.
The advantages recognised scarcely suggest to the native benefits of a nature which ought to be paid for by compliance with a tax which they regard as oppressive and unjust in itself, and in the peculiar significance attributed to it, viz.: that it implied a taking away of the right of the people in their own country, and a taking away of the right of ownership in the houses, an implied meaning which spread widely and deeply.
It is said that those ideas can be got rid of by explanation.
That of course depends on the patience, skill, and success of the officer who undertakes to explain; he would start with a strong prepossession against his arguments.
It is true that Chiefs occasionally draw contributions from their people, but these are of the nature of free-will offerings for particular purposes known and approved of by the people, as in the characteristic instance mentioned by Captain Fairtlough — the coronation of a Paramount Chief, or other occasion for festivities.
I have found no instance of a Chief attempting to raise anything of the nature of a regularly recurring revenue in this way.
Chief Henry Tucker, a loyal Chief of the Meudi country, said, “The people are not pleased in paying this tax; they do not know what tax is.
The place is newly made Protectorate.
I think the Government ought to have given them a little more time to get used to it.
Their houses are hardly worth four shillings [the Hut Tax was five shillings]… To us to pay the Hut Tax is quite a strange thing.
That discourages them altogether… I knew it would not work smoothly.
My mother and father never knew what tax was.
People said whoever paid the tax would be killed.
That showed very very strong feeling… Chiefs ask their people for contributions.
Suppose, for instance, I wanted to visit some other Chief; I would leave it to them.
They would give what they could; but to say they must give the Chief so much each year — no!”
To nearly the like effect are some remarks of Colonel Gore, the Colonial Secretary: “I should have left them a little longer to see the results of civilisation.
They are not enlightened enough yet to understand it.
It might have been better to wait a little.
We are taking all their power away from them now… I do not think they were given long enough to understand it.
I do not think they have grasped it.”
Chief Hanna Modu: “This Hut Tax affair is very great.
Our fathers did not know anything about it.
If they wanted it, they should have sent a letter to us to meet in one place and say, ‘We wish you to do such a work for us.’ ”
Karene Chiefs: “If you come through the King we will do what we can, but not a yearly payment, for that would be the same as a tax… Our forefathers were good friends with the Government.
What we hear now as to our own country where our forefathers lived, is that if we want to live in this country we must pay Hut Tax: we have only mud-houses covered with grass; if we want to sleep in that hut we must pay for it.
Our forefathers did not sell their country to the Government, it was a friendship; what belongs to us belongs to you as a friend.”
“If asked for contributions occasionally, we would do what we could.”
“Government should say, We want you to help us with such an amount, but not to go and say, You must pay… Willing to give as a voluntary contribution; but it would be selling the country if the Government came and peremptorily demanded it.”
“If Government asks us to give some rice for the Frontier Police; we will do what we are able, but to compel us to pay the Hut Tax, we are not able; if we pay for the house it does not belong to us any more.”
Seems to me they “grasped the results of civilisation” pretty well.
David Chalmers’s report, which amounted to an indictment of the policy of the colonial government, and cast the blame for the war and the massacres that resulted on the ineptitude, clumsiness, brutality, and extralegal overreach of the Hut Tax and its enforcement, was not at all welcomed by the government that commissioned it.
The story they wanted to hear was that the Hut Tax War was “the result of an inevitable conflict between ancient barbarism and advancing civilisation,” nobody’s fault but of the child-like natives who, unable to comprehend that the benefits of their colonization would have to be paid for, threw a tantrum in the classic manner of unchristian savages everywhere.
Chalmers’s recommendations, which largely amounted to treating the people of Sierra Leone with respect to their human dignity — not in repudiation of the imperialist project, but in order to live up both to its oft-pretended ideals of extending the blessings of civilization and to its promise of financial and strategic rewards to the empire — were largely ignored, and the empire doubled-down on its “exterminate the brutes” policy.
One tactic tax resisters have used from time to time is to pack up and leave when the tax collector comes calling.
Here are some examples:
Around the time of the Dharsana salt raids in Gandhi’s independence campaign in India, the government there was also stymied by mass migrations.
Here are some news accounts from the period:
Government agents began at once to attempt tax collecting, but in most cases found the natives had departed from their lands.
The situation was viewed with great anxiety, as continued maintenance of the tax strike would seriously hamper government revenues at the end of the year.
The evaders lock their doors and flee when tax collectors appear or hide in the fields, so attachment was resorted to.
The anti-tax campaign which it was said would replace the campaign against the salt laws already has been initiated in the Bardoli district where officials are arriving to post signs warning the peasants that their lands will be forfeit if they refuse to pay the dues.
Thus far they have found the villages deserted.
All-India national congress reports say that 50,000 peasants of the Bardoli region [population ~88,000] have left their homes resolved not to pay land taxes until swaraj, or home-rule is established.
Many left their household goods, chattels, crops behind, the government confiscating and auctioning them off.
[Though another account said “The inhabitants had left, taking everything movable, including the newly harvested rice crop, household goods, and cattle.
It was discovered that the villagers had been secretly removing goods and crops by night across the border into Baroda State territory, where the Baroda villagers harboured and helped them.”]
The peasants are said to have for their slogan, “No swaraj, no revenue.”
The leaders of the movement declare the peasants do not desire to evade payment, but simply will not pay until Mahatma Gandhi is released from jail and has ordered them to pay.
The congress characterizes the peasants’ actions as “an unrivaled example of a migration movement on the part of the people who are resolved to forfeit their all in the interest of the Gandhi cause.”
There is a movement of sorts nowadays that goes by the initials “P.T.” — often said to stand for “permanent tourist,” but also “prior taxpayer,” and a handful of others.
One advocate explained:
In a nutshell, a PT merely arranges his or her paperwork in such a way that all governments consider him a tourist.
A person who is just “Passing Through.”
The advantage is that being thought of by government officials as a person who is merely “Parked Temporarily,” a PT is not subjected to taxes, military service, lawsuits, or persecution for partaking in innocent but forbidden pursuits or pleasures.
Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s Yankee animator and director of such masterpieces as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, told an interviewer he renounced his American citizenship to become a taxpatriate: “I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world.
Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.
The fact that Bush was [in office] there made it easier.”
Jeff Knaebel left his life as an American entrepreneur to become a stateless mendicant in India in order to stop paying for American military adventures:
Having made the decision to cease filing and paying income tax, I undertook a radical reorganization of my life.
I would have to emigrate, to become a “tax exile.”
It would not be right to benefit from the facilities and protection of my country while not paying my share.
I made the decision to leave my own, my native land forever.
I would become a man without a country, separated by a vast ocean from friends, family and my young adult children.
No more would I smell the rain on high desert sagebrush, nor hear wolves howl across moonlit tundra, nor watch the Northern Lights dance in Arctic sky.
I would owe allegiance to all of humanity and to no State.
I would be the indentured servant of no gang of murderers sitting in any legislative body.
By paying no tax to any State would I finally make a farewell to arms. I would seek peace and brotherhood.
I would attempt Satyagraha, that strong adherence to truth which is love.
I would aspire to a life of Ahimsa — nonviolence — which is the active force of love.
When the tax inspector came to town during the Poujadist uprising in France in , there might be nothing left to inspect — the business district having been abandoned in anticipation of the inspector’s arrival.
One account put it this way:
The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…
Leaving the United States for tax reasons seems to be a growing trend.
One “taxpatriate” wrote:
I sleep much better knowing I no longer fund the military-industrial-banking complex.
Anybody can get mugged, but every U.S. taxpayer is a constant patsy for the political establishment.
The rip-offs are so unthinkably big and endemic, there’s nothing an individual can do to stop them.
If you fall for the political fallacy that “the government is the people,” you end up with the faulty conclusion that America must be overrun by war-crazed, lawsuit-happy, debt-addicted criminals.
How could anybody buy this after even a moment of clear thought?
There’s certainly no resemblance to the American people I know.
These problems stem from the military-industrial-banking complex, the dark heart of the U.S. political machine.
Why continue being the stooge that supplies the money to run it?
Looking at the world with fresh, open eyes isn’t easy.
One of the great benefits of liberating yourself from the grip of the U.S. political system is that the world becomes your oyster.
You’re free to embrace places that welcome individuals who seek to live peaceful and prosperous lives.
In Sierra Leone in , collectors of a new imperial government “hut tax” found fewer huts than they expected:
The trouble in Sierra Leone has arisen by the enforcement by the Government of a tax of 5s each annum on native huts.
In many cases the huts are not worth 5s, and when the tax collectors went round in many of the people knocked down their huts and slept under trees.
The tax collectors in Mytilene, Turkey, were so rapacious that much of the rural Greek population there abandoned their farms and “emigrated to the towns and cities in the hopes of subsisting on private charity” in rather than risk losing their farms to the tax collector before harvest time.
This passive resistance was the precursor to a more active tax resistance campaign that swept Turkey starting in .
And here is an example from the Boston Evening Transcript on :
J.F. Hathaway of Somerville Says He Will Move Rather Than Pay Tax Assessed.
A long-standing controversy between James F. Hathaway of Somerville, president of the Sprague & Hathaway Company, engaged in the manufacture of portraits, and the board of assessors of that city has culminated in a statement by Mr. Hathaway regarding his attitude in the matter.
It seems that in the principal assessors taxed Mr. Hathaway for corporation stock which he was supposed to own.
Mr. Hathaway and business friends made strong efforts to induce the assessors to abate the tax.
Acting upon the advice of the city solicitor, the board refused an abatement, and turned the bill over to the city collector for collection.
Mr. Hathaway says he will remove the plant from Somerville if the collector forces payment.
It appears from the statement he has given to the press that he made the same threat in , and that on , he packed up his furniture and prepared a move from the city rather than pay a tax.
Why he did not carry out his intention he explains as follows:
“While my household goods were being loaded on a wagon in order to get them out of Somerville before , I received a message to come to the City Hall at once on important business.
When this message came over the telephone the wagon had not been at my house more than fifteen minutes.
Evidently they had someone watching my movements; they did not think I intended to move out of the city.
I went down to City Hall and fond the full board of assessors there, the city solicitor, the mayor and several others, who were probably never there at that time in the morning except by appointment.
When I arrived, they asked me what I wanted, and I said: ‘Gentlemen, this is a nice time to ask me what I want.’
They proposed that I should pay one-half the tax, which I refused to do.
Then they proposed that I pay one-third of the tax.
I said: ‘Gentlemen, I will never pay one cent of it; if any part of it is just, it is all just.’
“They were all very anxious to find some way out of the difficulty and keep me in Somerville.
The city solicitor told them then and there they had no right to abate the tax; it had been legally assessed, and there was no legal way out of it.
But in a very few minutes they told me they would drop it; they were anxious that nothing more be said about it, and desired to let the matter drop out of sight as quietly as possible; they said they would never force the collection of the tax.
The day this matter of the tax of was settled the chairman of the board of assessors brought me home in his private carriage.
On the way, he said: ‘Mr. Hathaway, I am very sorry this ever occurred, and I am glad to find some way out of it.’
I asked him how about the future, and told him that if this thing was to be repeated next year or at any future time, my goods were all on the wagon then, and I might just as well get out of Somerville immediately.
He said: ‘This taxing of foreign corporations never has come up before, and probably never will again.
I assure you that so long as I have anything to do with the assessing of the taxes in this city you will never hear from it.’ ”
Hathaway went to jail in for refusing to pay the tax, but emerged victorious, as the Somerville Board of Aldermen voted to rescind his taxes.
“He had threatened to take his business out of Somerville if this was not done,” a news account says.
Some tax resistance campaigns have accompanied their resistance with petitions to the government asking it to change its policies or to rescind the tax.
Here are some examples:
Some 14,000 American Amish petitioned Congress, putting aside that sect’s usual reluctance to participate in political affairs and asking the government to exempt them from the Social Security program, participation in which they felt was anti-Christian.
At the same time, some Amish were actively resisting the tax and suffering from government reprisals.
Congress eventually did carve out an exemption for the Amish and certain other sects.
American Quaker meetings frequently petitioned state legislatures when those bodies were considering laws that would force conscientious objectors to pay a fine or to hire a substitute — neither of which Quakers felt they could conscientiously do.
Here are two examples: from and .
On one occasion, American Quakers successfully petitioned the government to call off unscrupulous tax collectors who were seizing their property to pay such fines, in amounts that far exceeded the amount of the fine, and keeping the surplus (or sometimes the whole amount) for themselves.
In several Quakers wrote to the Pennsylvania Assembly to tell them they would be unwilling to pay a tax that body was contemplating for “purposes inconsistent with the peaceable testimony we profess.”
African-American entrepreneur Paul Cuffee petitioned the Massachusetts legislature in and to complain that he was not permitted to vote, although he was a taxpayer — and he backed this up by refusing to pay.
His petition arrived at a time when the state Constitution was in flux, and may have helped influence its drafters to omit a clause restricting voting to white citizens.
The Benares Hartal in , began with “the people deserting the city in a body, and taking up their station halfway between Benares and Secrole, the residence of the European functionaries, about three miles distant.
A petition was presented to the magistrate, praying him to withdraw the odious impost, and declaring that the petitioners would never return to their homes until their application was complied with.”
Before launching the Bardoli tax strike, representatives from the Indian civil disobedience movement petitioned the government, asking patiently for the concessions they would later demand via satyagraha.
The Rebecca Rioters, with their pseudonymous campaign of midnight toll-gate destruction, had the government nearly begging them to present a list of grievances they could at least pretend to address.
Many groups of Welsh farmers did meet and draft lists of grievances.
A London Times reporter gained the confidence of one Rebeccaite assembly, and set out their grievances in the form of a Times article describing the meeting.
Another group of farmers met to draft a petition of their grievances which they sent to a government representative via a trusted intermediary.
On at least one occasion a group of parishes had petitioned the Turnpike Trust that ran one of the offending toll gates to remove it, before it was destroyed by Rebecca and her daughters.
During the 17th century Croquant tax rebellions in France, the rebels carefully worded petitions to the king that assumed his benevolence and that the tax hikes must have been snuck past his royal highness by deceitful advisors.
In , nonconformists in Massachusetts successfully petitioned the King to free imprisoned resisters to a tax meant for the establishment church there, and to affirm that Quakers should not have to pay taxes to maintain the ministers of another church.
Abby Smith addressed the Glastonbury town council in to explain why she would not be paying her property tax to politicians who took advantage of her voteless state.
A newspaper obtained and publisher her speech, saying that “Abby Smith and her sister as truly stand for the American principle as did the citizens who ripped open the tea chests in Boston Harbor, or the farmers who leveled their muskets at Concord.”
Soon the Smith case became a cause célèbre nationwide.
During the Annuity Tax struggle in Edinburgh, Scotland, “40,000 citizens of Edinburgh petitioned the House of Commons for [the Tax’s] abolition.
The town council, the magistrates of Canongate, the Merchant Company, the Anti-state-church and the Anti-annuity-tax Associations, all exerted themselves with the legislature and the government to procure its repeal…”
The hut tax war in Sierra Leone was preceded by petitions from a variety of groups there asking the government to rescind the tax, and explaining why the tax was felt to be particularly offensive.
In this case, the petitioning may have backfired, as the government stubbornly pushed forward with the tax, but, forewarned of opposition by the petitions, it “came to the conclusion that the exercise of force, peremptory, rapid, and inflexible, was the element to be relied on in making the scheme of taxation a success.”
