William Knibb

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William Knibb (1803-1845), Baptist minister and missionary to Jamaica, following the pioneering work of the African preacher George Lisle, was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire on 7 September 1803. Knibb played a prominent part in the slavery abolition movement in the 1820s and 1830s, and subsequent labour reforms supported by his Baptist missionary colleagues on the island such as Rev. Thomas Burchell, and later Rev. Samuel Oughton, and more cautiously by Methodist missionaries. In 1988, the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, he was posthumously awarded The Order of Merit in Jamaica; the first white man to receive the country's highest civil honour.

Knibb and his Baptist colleagues were instrumental in opposing the repeated attempts by the House of Assembly to enact draconian legislation in Jamaica during the 1820s; the infamous Consolidated Slave Law, and in persuading the British parliament to disallow it. In the 1830s he opposed the new law passed by the Jamaican House of Assembly to thwart the intention behind the Slavery Abolition Act of the British parliament; Jamaican legislation that prevented emancipation by compelling former slaves to work in an apprenticeship scheme under which the proceeds of their work were to be used to buy out inflated apprenticeship values of £60, £80, or £90 or higher, as set by their former owners.

Knibb died of fever in Jamaica on 15 November 1845, aged 42, and was buried at his Baptist Falmouth Chapel, the service attracting eight thousand African islanders. His funeral sermon by pastor Samuel Oughton was taken from Zechariah, xi, 2 Howl, fir tree, for the mighty cedar is fallen.