Tula

Who is Tula?

Tula, also known as Tula Rigaud, was an enslaved field worker on the Knip plantation on Curaçao, owned by Caspar Lodewijk van Uytrecht. Almost nothing was recorded of his early life, though a Dutch clergyman who arrived on the island decades later wrote that people who had known Tula personally remembered him as an articulate man of imposing stature. Aware that the Haitian Revolution had brought freedom to enslaved people on Saint-Domingue, and that the Netherlands was then under French revolutionary influence as the Batavian Republic, Tula argued that the enslaved of Curaçao deserved the same liberty proclaimed by their colonial rulers. On the morning of 17 August 1795 he led an uprising of some forty to fifty enslaved workers at Knip, then moved from plantation to plantation freeing hundreds more, in what became the largest slave revolt in the island's history. Tula reportedly refused to harm captured overseers and pressed his demands through negotiation with colonial authorities before the uprising was suppressed. He was captured on 19 September 1795 alongside his lieutenant Bastian Karpata and was publicly tortured to death on 3 October 1795. Curaçao today honors Tula as its national hero of freedom; the Tula Museum stands at the former Knip plantation where the revolt began.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Tula (Curaçao)" · Wikipedia, "Curaçao Slave Revolt of 1795" · Curaçao History, "1795 Tula, the Revolt"