Former President David Granger, speaking on his weekly programme – The Public Interest – cited Rawle Farley’s acclaim of the Village Movement as: “…the most spectacular and aggressive land settlement movement in the history of the people of the British Caribbean and a movement which seemed to one planter in British Guiana to be certainly without parallel in the history of the world!” Supporting this view, Granger asserted that the Village Movement did transform an archipelago of plantations into human settlements stretching from the Corentyne to the Pomeroon Rivers.
Ordinary folk achieved the extraordinary feat of subscribing over $1 million (in 1839 currency) to purchase over 6,000 hectares of land to create their communities. Almost half of the population moved out of the plantations into the free villages in 1839-1848. The series of subsequent purchases laid the foundation of the ancestral lands on which most African villages exist today. The Village Movement is believed to have started on 7th November 1839 when eighty-three poor, free men and women from five plantations – Ann’s Grove, Dochfour, Enmore, Hope and Paradise – agreed to pay 30,000 guilders for Plantation Northbrook.
Granger explained that the Village was to become an institution that transformed plantations into the nation of Guyana. Villages played a central role in the evolution of the local government system, the elementary education system, the drainage and irrigation system and for fostering of social cohesion and communal solidarity. The Movement was more than a physical and spatial process; it was also a cultural, economic and social mechanism for reassembling families and establishing communities on four pillars – homes for families, farms for sustenance, churches for Christian worship and schools for the children’s education.
Further, he described Victoria as the ‘mother of all villages’ mainly because of its role in pioneering local government. Villagers composed a unique agreement with regulations for village management – that included the collection of taxes, election of village office-bearers and prohibition of cursing, drunkenness and gambling − as early as 1842. Viable village economic development was sustained through agriculture societies which held fairs for the exhibition, exchange and sale of the best fruits, vegetables and livestock and stimulated a cultural renaissance through the celebration of the anniversary of Emancipation and Christian festivals.
The Village Movement faced challenges from its inception, Granger pointed out. He drew attention to the impediments imposed by the plantation owners purposefully to prevent the emergence of a prosperous peasantry which could draw labour from the plantations and create a rival village economy; legal limitations, including oppressive taxation, were imposed; formidable drainage and irrigation constraints afflicted many villages by end of 19th century.
The former President expressed confidence that villages can be strengthened further by enhancing their economic viability, increasing opportunities for economic enterprise and employment, enabling political empowerment and ensuring ethnic and social cohesion. He iterated that the Village Movement enabled the pioneers to provide a better future for their children by laying the groundwork for a ‘good life’ for their and future generations.
