– the era of contracted labour

“ENGLAND is fearfully cruel to the poor, despite the work of all her philanthropists. In British Guiana we have our problems. The gruelling poverty of many; the cruel plight of the middle class, who must pay a rent forced upon them by the wickedness of a certain type of politician, not only to serve private ends and not that of those whose votes they beg at election time; but, let me say it, the plight of the poor in large towns in England is sufficient to make the heavens belch forth!

The match sellers at midnight, in the bitterest cold imaginable, and those without matches to sell!! Across all this, the veil is drawn in this mighty land of pleasure…I have often wondered, after experiencing the bitter coldness of a late spring, which was almost wintery in its temperature, how any woman can remain virtuous who was offered a warm bed and blankets against bleak rags and sordid surroundings. Hunger is as heaven compared with the hell of cold-and when both are combined, God help the victim.” -‘Caribbean Visionary-A.R.F Webber and the making of the Guyanese Nation’ by Selwyn R. Cudjoe.

The quest of the coloniser as indicated by Webber above has never been driven by any humane cause, except but the survival of itself, and the first to be colonised are the peasants of its own tribe, under the fixed distinctions of classes and castes. Emerging from Roman colonisation, the Anglo Saxon of Britain with a new perspective, strove to be defiant, but not cohesive Island nationhood, into the Christian Crusades, then to become themselves colonisers in defiance of the Pope and the Latin assault on Mesoamerica, the English were in the forefront of the Slave trade, and as Buccaneers, but by the mid-1700s the British were set on the threshold of the Industrial revolution.

Thus the end of the Slave trade (1808) and less than 30 years later, the abolition of slavery 1834-38, recognising that in its colonies, and all colonies had evolved a ‘Creole Culture’ that was ingrained independently and evolved in the vibrant aesthetics of some 20 generations of redefinition from exact, previous origins, that were not abandoned, but weaved into the new tapestry, and defended within the new whole, through creative cultural creeds and religious expressions.

The sugar plantations of the colony post- Emancipation found themselves facing fluctuating prices and worse by 1846, the Sugar Duties Act was passed in England that terminated preferential treatment for colony sugar. The manumitted Africans had purchased over 100 previous plantations, which were transformed into villages and were demanding rights when engaging in work on the sugar plantations as in 1842 and 1848. Thus, from 1838, the pursuit of contract labourers or indentured labour was enacted. These labourers were contracted from Africa, India, Portugal, and China mainly; Caribbean nationals migrated to Guiana but hardly worked on the sugar plantations.

The East Indian proved to be the most manageable group of labourers, 85 percent on the request of the planters came from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the latter is still one of the less empowered districts of India. The indentured labourer did not come to remain in the colony of British Guiana and the British saw to it that they were kept away from the creole villages and the towns because of the fear of cultural interactions that could lead to ‘rights issue contaminations.’ The other reason was that Indian women recognised that they could pursue freedoms that were restricted in India, upsetting the patriarchal setting, upon engaging with the liberties of the matriarchal creole women.

The chronicles of two indentured Indian women; Kama Cherry and Mary Ilandun present significant case studies. See Brian L. Moore-Cultural power, resistance and pluralism: The Portuguese labourers died in the canefield and were encouraged to turn to commerce, to undermine the retail trade dominated by the creoles in the towns, being Georgetown and New Amsterdam, post-emancipation was rift by the success of the Afro manumitted community outside of the plantation, in the presence of the plantocracy-controlled local colony administration, who saw this former enslaved group as a direct challenge to the stereotypical order of that day.

This led to riots and conflict between the Afro-creole and the indentured Portuguese, this healed with time, as the Portuguese soon came to terms as their Iberian European origins (of Moorish-African blood) were not sufficient to be included as European family by the Nordic posture of the English. With the Chinese as with other indentured not hindered by race-mixing, coming with not enough women, looked to the creole women for spouses; this generated the usual hostilities, but in most cases did not escalate.

But the most remembered were the Chinese raiding gangs; during the 1850s-60s Chinese immigrants would organise themselves into criminal gangs, with cutlasses fixed to long sticks like a popular Asian spear type; both on the plantations they were located on’ and into the neighbouring Creole villages, raiding stockyards and provision grounds, “ these marauding groups of sometimes 20 to 50 strong terrorised plantation watchmen and villagers by the viciousness of their attacks in which several were killed. This forced the plantations to arm their watchmen.” It is suspected that they launched these attacks to supplement their meagre rations.

See ‘Brian L. Moore Cultural Power… Even a brief narrative of the indentured era cannot be complete without reference to acts by authorities and the dire consequences. In closing, by the 1880s, plantations were resisting suggestions towards science and technology. “Planter discussions within the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society and the public press indicate that capital was virtually the sole constraint on the use of science and technology to reduce factory costs in British Guiana in the 1880s and 90s.” See-Walter Rodney ‘A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905.