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Below represents another part of Dr. Wazir Mohamed’s presentation on November 23, 2017 to the Land Commission of Inquiry. This commission was established by the David Granger/Moses Nagamootoo, A Partnership of National Unity and Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) government, to deal with ancestral lands and other land issues. The commission was chaired by Reverend George Chuck-a-Sang and included David James, Carol Khan-James, Professor Rudolph James, Lennox Caleb, Berlinda Persaud and Paulette Henry.
Dr. Mohamed, Guyanese, is an Associate Professor, Sociology, Indiana University East. Part IV of his presentation follows:-
The Exodus of African Labour from Sugar
The major exodus from the sugar industry and from access to plantation housing and provision plots which began in 1847 were connected to three events.
- First, to stem what the planter class considered as hemorrhaging of labour, which was occurring because of labourers taking time off to tend to their farms, the planter majority of the Court of Policy passed the “Masters and Servants Ordinance” in 1846. This was done with the sole intention of stabilising the plantation workforce. This ordinance required each estate labourer to give two weeks’ notice of their intention to legally leave the estate. Or else they could not reap any of the provisions they had planted. This was very convenient for the planter class, because if this notice was not given at the beginning of the new month, the labourer was committed to remaining on the estate for the duration of the month. This incensed the African workforce. The record shows that when the provisions of this new law were explained by Ministers from the London Missionary Society to Labourers on the East Coast Demerara, many of them chose that moment to quit and immediately sought refuge in the nearby villages.17
- Apart from the Masters and Servants Ordinance, two other dramatic events hastened the movement from estate to village. These were the financial panic of 1847 and the general strike of 1848. The financial panic of 1847 which for all intents and purposes fueled the fire of suspicion the labourers had long harboured of the planter class laid the basis for the general strike of 1848.18
- These events were preceded by the equalisation of sugar duties in 1846 on home grown (British Colonial Produced, mainly from British Guiana and Mauritius) and slave grown sugar entering the British Market.19 The passage of this act by the British parliament closed off the avenues for credit for planter interest in the British colonies and forced Guianese planters to match the cost of production of slave produced.
This spelt disaster for the working class in the British colonies engaged in sugar production. Labour in the British Empire was expected to compete with slave labour in the global economy for jobs in the production of sugar. From this backdrop the planter class and the colonial state demanded that the African Workforce accept a pay cut. Stipendiary Magistrates were authorised by the Governor and the Court of Policy to urge them to accept a wage cut of 25 percent, and if they disagreed with that, they could perform an increase in their daily task for the same wage.20And to this entreaty was added the veiled threat that if they refused to accept the 25 percent wage cut, cultivation would likely cease and they would lose their source of employment. The response to this invitation to accept reduced wages was open rebellion.
The labourers engaged in a colony wide strike in 1847. While the bulk of the African workforce answered the strike call, this was not enough. By March of 1848 the strike ended as a failure. The combined presence of East Indian and Portuguese contract labourers as replacement for the Africans on the workforce and the collapse of a number of plantations sullied the competition for labour. The struggle for decent wages and working conditions which the labourers engaged with the planter class between 1838 and 1848 came to end with the defeat of the African workforce who basically lost their place of residency on the plantations to the indentured immigrant labour force. The defeat of the Creole African working class in the sugar strike of 1848 capped a period of community building which was intertwined with working class action. The overcrowding of the villages added to the social ferment in the colony – it is within this context that we must rethink the land acts that were introduced in the 1850s.
The Land Acts of 1851, 52, 56, and 61
The Land Acts of the 1850s in the words of Alan Adamson which served to subdivide, fragment and make the villages into unworkable parcels, set in train the processes of stagnation and decay of most of the villages.
Honourable Commissioners, I invite you to think about the connection between our natural environmental problem (constant threat of flooding from in front and from behind), which necessitates tip top drainage and irrigation systems. Think about how the land acts that produced fragmentation was used by the planter class to make the villages unworkable units – as a means of ensuring that labour cost remained cheap.
Because the villages were legally constructed as unworkable units, the unemployed African workforce remained as what Karl Marx referred in labour theory as the army of unemployed – to keep wages low there is always need for an army of people ready to take their place. This is how the East Indian Indentured Workforce were kept compliant until the global sugar crisis of the 1880s.
To give you a graphic sense of this tragedy of our history, I present you with the actual village plan of Plantation Friendship which was retrieved from the Land Registry at Lands and Surveys Department in Georgetown Guyana. Plan number 16852 dated March 31, 1973. To dramatise the problem produced by fragmentation, this plan is superimposed on what a normal plantation would look like, bordered by the sea dam, sideline dams, the crown dam, and intertwined by internal drainage and irrigation canals – this is how each plantation, some of which became villages were laid out through the use of skillful labour of the enslaved.
This plan demonstrates in no uncertain manner the level of village fragmentation to which I refer. This plan outlines parcel 1335 to 2138. This means that at the time this plan was being produced this village which was bought in 1841 by 128 ex-slaves, was sub-divided into 2138 parcels.
Honourable Commissioners, the problems of ancestral rights and lands cannot be separated from this predicament. Land fragmentation in the presence of constant flooding was a recipe for disaster. And to boot the land laws as produced, created this problem that we are now trying to address. I am not the first person who recognised this dilemma.
Cecil Clementi’s, A Constitutional History of British Guiana (1875) captures the structural problem which rendered the villages unworkable agricultural and settlement units, because as he puts it they were situated “in the plantation;” hence he concluded that no individual villager could cultivate his plot with success unless the whole system of main drainage throughout the estate was kept in order. So long, therefore as the drainage system, with which the plantation was provided at the time of purchase, remained in good order, it was not impossible that the new village situated in the plantation should prosper.21
Clementi showed a remarkable recognition of the central problem village layout after 1850 posed. In the above quote, he thus surmised that in the daunting environment, “it was not impossible that the new village situated in the plantation should prosper.” But prosperity was not possible; these villages suffered “disastrous consequences” because they lacked the ability, organization and management to deal with the over-riding problem of drainage. I would leave it up to you honourable commissioners to determine how this problem will be tackled. Because as a country we have to tackle this problem – the villages sits on the best agricultural lands in the country. The future prosperity of these villages depends on us finding real life solutions.
Commissioners, draconian systems were erected to keep the African people in subjection, the time is now to correct this system. We must note that the statutes and laws that emerged as land acts to govern ownership in villages after 1850 has done innumerable harm to the population and served to keep them in suspended subservience in a society in which they were supposedly “free.”
We cannot help but think about why the Europeans erected legal barriers – note that it was in this same period that scientific racism took root in the United States of America and began to infect the rest of the world. Hence protests and complaints against the system by the African workforce were met with comments such as this from the Sheriff of Demerara, “villagers are apt to consider that the daily use of the hoe and shovel are not essential to human happiness.” This kind of comment was further qualified by Governor Wodehouse in 1856, when he explained, “that a negro needs to be under a necessity to do right….Remove the necessity and the spirit of license comes into operation at once….”22Inherent in this statement is the meaning of “to do right.” Alan Adamson (1970: 386-405) says this “meant to labour for wages on a sugar estate.” Contextually because “to do right” meant to labour on sugar estates, the village economy was undercut.
The conditions had to be organised as such to make the pull of the plantations impossible for the Africans to resist. While they could not be enslaved and they had resisted long term contracts, the village economy had to be made unworkable. This thinking formed the backdrop for the policies pursued by Early Grey and Governor Barkly in the early 1850s. In 1851 they “induced the Combined Court to reduce the taxes on basic items of consumption by the masses.”23 This was a ploy to undermine village production through the lowering of the prices on imported foodstuffs; thus undercutting local farm produce in the internal market in a crucial period. This was accompanied by three land ordinances. These were designed to limit the ability of the Africans to expand their land holdings and to fragment the villages.
Honourable Commissioners, for your benefit, below I take a closer look at the land acts. This done deliberately to give you the bigger picture of the changes that occurred. As you deliberate, I am certain that you will take account not only of the legal roadblocks to the African people realizing their ancestral rights, but the struggles they carried out, particularly the ways they fought against the constant drudgery of life surrounded by mud and water; and how they helped to produce the system of village and local government, which made the villages workable again in the 20th century.
The Bigger Picture
In the first case, the earlier land ordinance which was passed in 1836 and expanded in 1839 to limit the sale of Crown lands in parcels of 100 acres at one British pound per acre was enlarged; the purchase price was raised to five dollars in 1851, and in 1861 to ten dollars.24 While the above mentioned law was re-organised in 1851 and 1861 to create impediments and establish roadblocks against the growth of villages outside of the empoldered area; new laws were passed to constrict land ownership in the existing villages.
Laws were passed in the years 1851, 1852 and 1856 which prevented groups of more than 20 persons from joining together to purchase lands, and which required that all lands purchased by more than 10 persons be partitioned.25 Land ordinance number 4 of 1851, number 1 of 1852, and number 33 of 1856 were established with the clear intent of restricting any further communal purchases. These laws prevented the growth of cooperative style entities, the original intent of original purchases in the decade of after emancipation. The workability of these laws was to set in train the process of fragmentation of the villages from which they are yet to recover.
Honourable commissioners, I do not think it would be far-fetched if you were to examine the workability of fragmented village land in today’s global economy. I believe this is a discussion we ought to have. I believe it is within the purview of the commission to speak to intent on the part of the planter state in the erection of these laws. This is necessary because of the restrictions, impediments and burdens placed on the population.26 The first set of laws was prohibitive in the sense that they served to debar the African population from venturing outside the poldered coastal region.
These laws almost completely debarred and prohibited any large movement of Africans from the vicinity of the sugar plantations. Movement from the sugar area could have allowed for the growth of new crops and the establishment of new industries like those the ex-slaves established in Jamaica and other areas in the Windward Caribbean, even before emancipation. Added to this prohibition was the unwritten addendum to these laws which permitted the planters to extend their cultivations beyond the boundary of the crown dam. For the villages which were established between 1838 and 1848, extensions beyond the crown dam was almost prohibited.
The second set of laws extended this prohibition; they went further and debarred the further purchase of land for the erection of villages on the coastal plain itself. These laws represented a dramatic turn of events for the African population after 1850. While these laws did not debar the African population from extending their holdings, they certainly did not permit the villages to expand. In fact the laws were draconian in nature, they prohibited sale of lands on the coast to groups of twenty and more persons. Furthermore they required that all lands, those in the existing villages, and any future purchases be partitioned so long as they were acquired by ten or more persons. (ResearchGate)
To be continued…
Citations
17 Walker to Lord Grey, – C.O. 111/254, June 13, 1848.
18 This panic in the British financial circles was exacerbated by the famine in Ireland which affected the price of corn, and which in turn lead to the calls on railway shares which had been over speculated. This created panic in financial circles and drastically affected the banks and financial houses in the sugar colonies. This crisis caused at least a dozen West Indian Financial houses to be bankrupted. W.P. Morrell, The Colonial Policy of Peel and Russell (Oxford, 1935), 244; Rodway 1891, Vol. 111:43; A. R. F. Webber, Centenary History and Handbook of British Guiana (Georgetown, 1931), 215-216.
19 Guianese and colonial sugar producers had been enjoying until 1846 preferential access to the British Market. With the equalization of duties on foreign and colonial sugar over five years beginning in 1846 Guianese and colonial sugar producers were made to compete with slave grown sugar producers.
20 Reports of Stipendiary Magistrates, -C.O. 111/167 (1848); Light to Lord Grey, Enclosure 224, C.O. 111/249, December 3, 1847.
21 Cecil Clementi, A Constitutional History of British Guiana (Georgetown, 1875), 281-282.
22 British Parliamentary paper. 44, No. 431 (1956): 35.
23 Khaleel Mohamed, “The establishment of the Portuguese Business Community in British Guiana,” History Gazette 60 (1993): 17; See The Royal Gazette, Tuesday March 11, 1851; W.P Morrell. The Colonial Policy of Peel and Rusell (Oxford, 1935): 239; Barkly to Parkington, January 1853, C.O. 111/293, No. 25.
24 Alan Adamson, “Monoculture and village Decay in British Guiana: 1854-1872,” Journal of social History 111, 4 (1970): 386-405.
25 See Ramsahoye 1966 – Ordinance No. 4, 1851, Ordinance No. 1, 1852, and Ordinance No. 14, 1861.
26 See Alan Adamson, “ Monoculture and village Decay in British Guiana, 1854-1872,” Journal of Social History, 111, 4 (1970)
