THE post-Emancipation villages were constructed to facilitate the very systems that worked in the interest of the Afro-communities from the inception of slavery, and each home and family was entitled to farmlands to the rear of the villages.

The homes were designed with accommodations for livestock and fruit trees. This had begun with the Dutch in Berbice.
The disputes in 1763 between the Creole Africans and the African populations led to many who were newly brought into slavery and were the vanguard of the revolutionary forces under Kofi. The analysis of the Creole slave population was rooted in whether the revolution would be successful in meeting the aims and ideals of the revolution or would fail, sensing that they would all be fighting not only the Dutch of Berbice. There were entire slave nations that were friendly to the Dutch in the Caribbean also, which would cause them to lose their own small farm permissions and livelihoods within slavery. These apprehensions did affect loyalties and caused subtle divisions within the 1763 Revolution, but this was, however, not the cause of its failure, but the fact that the anticipated foe was indeed the entire confederation of slave nation allies, as foreseen (see BLOOD ON THE RIVER by Marjoleine Kars). This conflict, specifically with the permissions for allowed farm space, would undoubtedly influence the plantation culture of mainly English plantations that emerged after Demerara was civilised by slave labour to accommodate facilitating food on the plantations, by and for its slave plantation populations, had become a feature of plantation existence.

Thus, Europeans also became partakers of African foods from an early age.
However, after the abolition of slavery, and the slaves had become the colonial subjects of the so-called Mother Country, other changes emerged. The post-slavery world was also rooted in new ideas and ideals. Most of these ideas were directed at the mass echelons of European divisions between the haves and the have-nots to entail the new realms of the industrial age. For example, with the European onslaught and genocide by some nations involved in the onslaught of Africa. The functional facade was Christianity, civilisation and commerce, as Sir Henry Morton Stanley indicated. “Stanley estimated that if every African in the Congo bought one Sunday dress and four everyday dresses, it would require 3,840 million yards of Manchester Cotton. worth 16 million pounds. And this did not include the cloth for winding sheets.” -see ‘THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA-by Thomas Pakenham’

This “functional façade” also applied to the older Colonies of the Caribbean. But with the arguments of the social balance of society now with intense debate, with minds like Karl Marx among others, the village farms came under new assault, “The villages of the Colony of British Guiana at once came under scrutiny and criticism. In the London Times, the cooperative village system was attacked and labelled; they were called, “little bands of socialists living in communities” Under the combined attack of the plantation and the government from outside, and the church from inside, the collective Village economy collapsed. See SCARS OF BONDAGE by Eusi Kwayana and Tchaiko Kwayana from Free Press.

The Farmer’s Association was started at Mara in Berbice in 1898 and quickly spread to Demerara and Essequibo. At the Victoria-Belfield Horticultural and Industrial Show in 1898, the Chairman went to extremes to explain that the exhibition was not promoted by the sugar plantation owners and was thus a project of their own resilience. The Village movement remains a foundation of modern Guyana.