He Bought His Freedom in 1837 and a Piece of Land in 1839: The Enslaved Evangelist Buried Among Moravian Missionaries

• Aniaso was kidnapped from Igboland and sold in Jamaica, where he was renamed Archibald John Monteath
• He learned to read and write and became a significant evangelist in the early Moravian Church
• He bought his freedom in mid-1837, then land in 1839, on which he built a house
• A neighbouring planter donated the land for New Carmel Moravian Church, which still stands

In the churchyard of Carmel Moravian Church in Westmoreland lies a headstone that should not exist by the rules of its time. It marks the grave of Archibald John Monteath, born Aniaso in Igboland, in what is now Nigeria, who was enslaved in Jamaica. Paul H. Williams, writing in the Sunday Gleaner in September 2025, explained how he came to be buried near the European missionaries.

Aniaso was kidnapped as a boy in the early 1800s and shipped to Kingston, then taken to Kep in St Elizabeth, the estate of John Monteath of Glasgow. He became a house servant, first to the estate manager and then at Monteath’s own home. Drawing on the work of Professor Maureen Warner-Lewis, Williams describes a world of neighbouring estates and devout planter families. The Cokes held services at Paynestown for whites and the enslaved. Hutchinson Mure Scott owned Lenox Sugar Works and Hopeton Pen. It was in this circle of evening prayers and singing that Monteath learned to write, despite ridicule from others who were enslaved.

“Hutchinson Mure Scott donated land for the building of the New Carmel Moravian Church, which still stands atop a hill on the road between Newmarket and Paynestown,” Warner-Lewis writes. After John Monteath died in 1815, Archibald passed through several owners and rose to the trusted position of headman. He did not join the 1831-32 uprising, but he was looking into how to secure his freedom. He bought it in mid-1837, before full freedom arrived in 1840, and in 1839 he bought a piece of land and built a house for himself, his wife and his daughter.

By the late 1820s the Moravians had found in him a committed local assistant, and by the 1830s he was ready to work full time in ministry, his zeal strengthened by his literacy, which was rare at the time. That is why, Warner-Lewis writes, his grave sits close to those of the missionaries.

Monteath’s story shows one freed man’s order of priorities: first his own freedom, then land, then a house of his own. The New Carmel church on land donated by a planter shows the other side of the same history, in which some church property came from planters’ estates. More than 180 years on, the ambition that drove Monteath, a plot of one’s own and a secure family home, is still what many Jamaicans at home and abroad are working towards.

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