MAY 5 is Arrival Day in Guyana. And this month of May really is Arrival Month; the arrival into indenture and apartheid of Portuguese in 1835, Indians in 1838, and Chinese in 1853. Freed Africans arrived in 1841. About 30,000 Portuguese arrived from Madeira between 1835 and 1880; about 238,909 Indians from India between 1838 and 1917; and about 14,000 Chinese from China between 1853 and 1880.

Perhaps, none of this pomp and ceremony that we attach to ‘Arrival Day’ and ‘Arrival Month’ annually would have been a reality today, if there were no resistance to slavery. Slavery produced indentureship.

Quote : ‘…none of this pomp and ceremony that we attach to ‘Arrival Day’ and ‘Arrival Month’ annually would have been a reality today if there were no resistance to slavery. Slavery produced indentureship’

The abolition of slavery brought freedom to about 80,000 slaves; but this freedom would not have seen the light of day had it not been for African resistance. Major slave revolts in Barbados in 1816, in Demerara in 1823, in Jamaica in 1824 and 1831, in Antigua in 1831, together with the Anti-Slavery Movement, and fluctuating sugar profits, created the ingredients for the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1834.

The White plantocracy did not bring Indians, Portuguese, and Chinese to Guyana because there was a shortage of labour on the sugar plantations; African workers were in adequate numbers to keep the sugar mills alive. The refusal of Africans to continue to till the sugar lands at the end of slavery, and to focus their energies in developing a successful village movement, indeed, spelt the death of sugar. And by 1848, the African peasant class of villagers emerged.

Indentured labourers arrived in Guyana as an alternative source of cheap labour. Nonetheless, their replacement of Africans in sugar guaranteed the persistence of sugar. Around 1850, Indians replaced slaves on the sugar plantations, taking on the dubious distinction of being a new rural working class.

Quote : ‘Albeit the Indian presence in 1838 undermined the bargaining power of Africans on the sugar plantations, there emerged a burgeoning industrial solidarity between Africans and Indians in the colonial period that needs to be re-ignited today’

Albeit the Indian presence in 1838 undermined the bargaining power of Africans on the sugar plantations, there emerged a burgeoning industrial solidarity between Africans and Indians in the colonial period that needs to be re-ignited today. Rodney (1982:xxiii) attributed the common and perpetual pattern of African and Indian victimization as the catalyst inducing a genuine solidarity in the plantocracy. Nevertheless, this interethnic solidarity grafted “suspicious and judgmental eyes” in the early postcolonial period, projecting a sharper focus even today.

Invariably, we do not acknowledge the painstaking interethnic solidarity that both Indians and Africans achieved against all odds in the early years of Guyana’s history; and at times, we see distortions of this history; like the superfluous debate that slavery and indentureship are the same thing. They are not; both groups experienced unspeakable brutalities, but to definitively conclude they are the same is wrong; and these distortions will remain a serious holdup to any re-ignition of interethnic solidarity. Nonetheless, for today’s perspective, I want to speak to Arrival Day that engulfs both indentureship and apartheid.

Indentureds existed within a total institution framework that Erving Goffman spoke about. Indentured Indians inhabited a dehumanized total institutional environment, with no mobility, enslaved by the tyranny of the rule of law, and reduced to a history of humiliation; the slave, apprenticehip, and the indentureship labour markets were the ‘domination’ points for creating and re-creating the culture of human indignities that both Indians and Africans endured.

Indians, notwithstanding the indignities, maintained their culture through resistance and resilience. Their resistance to the White planters was a rallying point for cultural continuity, and the genesis of Indian political evolution. Just a few examples would substantiate that Indian resistance was a characteristic feature of plantation life. Indians staged 88 strikes and disturbances between 1886 and 1888, and they received 65,084 convictions for labour contract violations between 1874 and 1895.

In 1881, 3,168 were labeled criminals because of their struggles with planters. In fact, compared to other British Colonies, British Guiana became the worst offender, where planters used the criminal courts to enforce labour laws, as evidenced in the table for 1907:

Table: Indentured Adults & Convictions in 1907

	Indentured	Convictions under
	Adults	Labor Laws (no. / %)
British Guiana	9,784	2,019 (20%)
Trinidad	11,506	1,869 (16%)
Jamaica	2,832	237 (8%)
Fiji	10,181	2,091 (20%)
Mauritius	47,000	1,492 (3%)

Disaffection among both indentured and unindentured Indians produced intermittent violence representing one pole on the range of Indian assertiveness; their disaffection created the germ for political activism. In 1872, low wages at Plantation Devonshire Castle produced mass protests where police shot and killed five and wounded seven workers. The Parliamentary Papers, No. 49 of 1873 claimed that Oederman, a Brahmin (upper caste), was the instigator of this uprising. Planters believed that upper-caste Indians were the source of constant instigations on the estates.

Gooljar, a returnee, was the chief architect of the 1896 Non Pariel riots. Gooljar came under indenture in 1871, completed his indenture, became a cloth seller, and worked with the police force. He took advantage of the return fare to India in 1890, but returned to Guyana in 1894 as a reindenture. Planters having already had their share of upper caste as instigators, now faced another type of recalcitrant, the reindentured.

Bechu, a Bengali immigrant, accorded upper-caste status by planters, was an indentured labourer on Plantation Enmore in 1894, but emancipated himself in 1897. Bechu aggressively articulated the abuses of indentureship; in November 1896, in penning his first among many letters to the newspaper, Bechu spoke about White overseers’ sexual exploitation of Indian females; refusal of estate hospitals to provide medical treatment to unindentured Indians; and planters’ frequent breaches of labor laws pointedly intended to exert total control of Indians. It is remarkable that Bechu was the first Indian to present evidence to a Royal Commission, the West India Royal Commission in 1897.

Indian women, too, were significant players in the resistance movement. As victims of abuses, they sparked off protests, and so, too, contributed to the resistance effort as their men folk. Sporadic protests emanated from the weeding gang, largely the women’s domain. Salamea, an indentured woman worker, was the ringleader of a major disorder at Plantation Friends in Berbice in 1903. Interestingly, Indian worker resistance transcended gender, accelerated the resistance pace through this gender unification, rapidly limiting the planters’ monopolistic power, and casting the foundations for middle-class development.

In all of this, a main theme permeating this country’s early development was a defining interethnic solidarity evidenced through joint Indian-African battles for unionism and collective bargaining, and their collective efforts against colonial and imperial hegemony. Under colonialism, this solidarity brought home a wholesome unity between the Indian and African working classes. And restoration of this solidarity can happen, inter alia, through cultural pluralism; a new verifiable socioeconomic status data
base system; and race and ethnic relations policies simultaneously weaving in race, ethnicity, and class.