By Mellissa Ifill
Most of the analyses of ethnic contestation in Guyana are principally concerned with examining the historic and contemporary ethnic contestation between Africans and Indians, largely because these are the two largest ethnic groups and open contestation between them persists until today. This article examines the conflict that emerged in the latter half of the 19th century between African and Portuguese groups and argues that conducting a wider historical assessment will reveal that conflict surfaced from the inception of European contact with the original Indigenous inhabitants and thereafter persisted all the way through the colonial era and, it is within this long historical perspective that African-Portuguese conflict during the second half of the 19th century must be situated.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, intense conflicts, not all of a violent nature, regularly surfaced under the inhumane slave system between the Europeans and the Africans and between the Africans and the Indigenous peoples. Indentureship brought large groups of Indians, Chinese, and Portuguese to British Guiana who were all embroiled in conflict, violent or otherwise with those ethnic groups already resident in the society. In essence therefore, this article contends that ethnic conflict was never limited to the actions of only two groups – although Africans were engaged in conflicts with all groups and in proportionately more conflicts than any other group – as generally, ethnic conflict emerged when an attempt was made to challenge or resist the European determined local division of labour and its attendant ethnic myth of European/white superiority and African/ Indigenous/Indian/Chinese and to a lesser extent, Portuguese inferiority.
This article suggests that ethnic contestation is also directly related to the construction and solidification of ethnic social and economic identities. The theoretical argument being advanced is that historically the intensification of conflict between ethnic groups was due to the structural contradictions underlying the construction and reproduction of ethnicity in order to reinforce the colonial enterprise and its unequal division of labour. Ethnic conflict and contestation are therefore interpreted as signs of resistance against the imposed ethnicised division of labour and colonialism. In other words, this article argues that labouring populations in British Guiana were deliberately divided, ethnicised and manipulated to suit the needs and demands of global capitalism and the plantation system in Guiana. Over time, various strategies including stereotyping were used to create/delineate/highlight difference and acts were deliberately committed and overlooked in support of one group and at the expense of the other – ultimately intensifying perceptions of difference and fostering conflict.
This article therefore contends that it is only by conducting a long historical analysis, that this true character and implications of ethnic contestation can be truly understood, that is, contestation and conflict that historically emerged between and among all groups were centred around resistance to and or protection of a group’s positioning in the division of labour. In other words, ethnic contestation and clashes are not as they are often interpreted in the literature on Guyana, emanating out of simple competition for entitlement or resource or for domination or fear of being dominated or assimilated or as a consequence of the actions of manipulative politicians. This paper, using a theoretical framework offered by Wilma Dunawayi offers an arguably more adequate interpretation that ethnic conflict and contestation in Guiana were essentially manifestations of attacks on or resistance to the capitalist world economy as it sought to incorporate territories and peoples into the global economy while simultaneously separating them through ethnicisation.
One world systemic process is of particular interest to this article and that is the continual incorporation of new territories and/or peoples into the global capitalist economy. It is through the historical systemic process of incorporation, along with ‘nation building’, that capitalist colonisers effectively divided peoples into superior ethnic groups and marginalised ethnic subalterns to justify inequalities.
Dunaway categorises the incorporation process as an incomplete one that is constantly bedevilled by resistance. Incorporation into the world-system meant that peoples were merged into a commodity-producing labour force that operates in households through the unpaid work of women and ethnic minorities. Additionally, ecological resources were reorganised and regulated for capitalist production. Land for instance was transformed into a commodity that could be owned and transferred. To strengthen the incorporation process, a civilisational project commenced, resulting in extermination, assimilation or accommodation of resident and imported groups. Within the incorporation process therefore is in the need to create and highlight difference and to establish a hierarchical ethnic structure to rationalise abuse and unequal treatment. Although indigenous populations are unable to prevent incorporation, they nonetheless continuously commit acts of resistance. Put another way, Dunaway argues that incorporation is ‘a dialectical historical process that involves both structural articulation with the world-system and human resistance against the capitalist civilisational project’.
It was this struggle over positioning in the domestic division of labour that ultimately led to a number of Portuguese-African conflicts in the urban centres during the mid 19th century. Having secured their freedom, Africans were determined to escape the plantation economy and Europeans were determined to restrict them to this sector since freedom was never intended to disrupt the division of labour. Africans however, had different ideas and their intention was to penetrate domestic sectors that were reserved for the dominant ethnic group. Consequently, Africans secured land, although their efforts at creating a viable economic existence through villages were stymied by a number of factors, prominent among them being the deliberate strategies employed by the central government and the planters who set land and taxation policies that were designed to undermine their endeavours.
Africans also attempted to realign the domestic division of labour by engaging in the retail trade and by 1841 were progressively moving into the business sector through huckstering. Their attempts to oppose the European determined ethnic division of labour that relegated them to the plantation was met with swift and decisive counter-resistance from the plantocracy and colonial state. Apart from restricting access to credit and land, colonial officials adopted other measures, such as forcing Africans to pay onerous taxes and licenses. Common consumption items were taxed heavily and this represented an indirect tax burden on the Africans. The colonial administration also imposed taxes in the form of licences which were required for huckstering, portering, shop keeping, also for cabs, mules and donkey carts and boats. The rationale was to make it impossible for the majority of Africans to earn sufficient money from their independent economic endeavours to pay these taxes and purchase needed consumer goods. They would therefore be forced to rely once again on the plantation for additional income.
The Royal Gazette, a newspaper which was sympathetic to the plantocracy, had noted with concern on Tuesday 2nd March 1841 that the number of labourers leaving plantation employment for huckstering was increasing. In the opinion of the planters, any African business enterprise represented a gross misuse of valuable labour and they were therefore obliged to prevent or halt same. One oft quoted example is of a Creole charcoal manufacturer, who was reasonably successful and therefore served as a role model for other creoles who was charged and imprisoned for operating without a licence.
The colonial elite felt the need to devise a specific strategy to prevent African entrepreneurial activities, particularly in the retail sector and force them back into ‘their’ European identified labour sector. The first proposal was to employ West Indians or Irishmen to drive the creoles out of their burgeoning business ventures. However the former were also of African descent and the planters believed that eventually they would collaborate rather than compete, and sufficient Irishmen did not migrate to British Guiana. The proposal that was finally successfully implemented was to use Portuguese to undermine and restrict Creole business ventures. The planter-merchant-Portuguese conspiracy to economically strangle Africans and prevent them from succeeding in the huckster trade while simultaneously forcing them back to the plantations was clearly revealed in the Royal Gazette in two articles on Tuesday 26 September 1843 and Tuesday 3rd October 1843. The first article noted “Perhaps the secret of their [the Portuguese] success has been that they have risen upon the ruin of others chiefly through the instrumentality of the Merchants, of four or five years back, who assisted them, at a very critical period, to take into their hands nearly the whole retail or huckster trade of the colony, in preference to the small native traders, who by the coalition were very nearly driven out of the market entirely, and have ever since been craftily kept wholly it may be said, out of it”.
The articles further commented that the merchants favoured the Portuguese and gave them easy credit terms, and they refused to extend credit or extended very onerous credit facilities to the African businessmen. Apart from the role played by the merchants, the planters also guaranteed African economic strangulation through their control of the Court of Policy and the Combined Court. The governing structure was designed to facilitate European economic dominance and it therefore did not take long for the dominant European group to achieve its aims since the Portuguese, who themselves did not relish working on the plantations, took advantage of the favourable credit facilities and used their international trading links to undersell all rivals and monopolise the coastal retail trade.
This article argues that this contestation within the economic sphere between the Africans and the Portuguese, over the assigned location of each group in the domestic division of labour place, was the foundation of the ethnic conflict between the two groups. It was the deliberate sabotaging of African entrepreneurial enterprises through the use of Portuguese immigrants that generated enmity between the two groups and culminated in the 1856 Angel Gabriel Riots that focused attention to the perceived cultural and phenotypical differences between the two groups. Africans were aggrieved by Portuguese alleged malpractices but more so by the denial of state support which was then granted to the Portuguese and which the Africans realised had been aimed at undermining their attempts to become economically self sufficient. In anger and protest, Africans pillaged Portuguese shops and business enterprises. Again in 1889, conflict exploded between the Africans and Portuguese over similar grievances of state prejudice against Africans.
This article concludes that notwithstanding the immediate stimuli to the various crisis periods, the inter-ethnic conflict between the Portuguese and the Africans during the latter half of the 19th century was a consequence of the effort to fashion a division of labour in keeping with the objectives of the colonial economy and the consequential decision on the part of the colonial state to use the Portuguese immigrants to displace Africans in the burgeoning commercial sector and reallocate African labour to the plantations. African aggression against Portuguese businesses can therefore be interpreted as forms of resistance against the imposition of this ethnicised division of labour and the colonial economy that it supported.
i See Dunaway, Wilma. 2003. ‘Ethnic Conflict in the Modern World System: the Dialectics of Counter Hegemonic Resistance in an Age of Transition.’ Journal of World Systems Research IX. 1.
