Bridgetown to Georgetown

By Michelle Springer

Michelle Springer is a features writer with the Nation Publishing Company in Barbados.  She is also a fiction writer and recently returned home from Guadeloupe where she lived for six years. This is the first of a four-week series carried in the Barbados Sunday Sun, which examined migration trends between Barbados and Guyana and the impact they have on the two countries. This first issue looks at the earliest journeys from Barbados to Guyana following Emancipation in 1838.

Bajans had come “to full up de country and force all-o-wee fo work whole week and starve…Dem Bagion is one cobba cobba nation.” Ned Hector The Colonist Newspaper (1864) as cited by Guyanese historian Brian L. Moore (1973)

Caution to Barbadians: BE CAREFUL where you aim hate!

Those targeted may just turn out to be your brother, sister, aunt, mother, cousin or grand-father. With increasing fear, suspicion, and mounting tensions between Guyanese settlers and Barbadians within the last ten to 15 years, Barbadians have fast been gaining a solid reputation in the region, and further afield, as “unapologetic xenophobes”.

But the reality is, Barbados–Guyana connections run deep. In fact, some 173 years deep. So deep is the connection between the two former British colonies that any process which involved the mechanics of tracing ancestry would be nothing short of a journey into the written and oral annals of West Indian history. Much of oral history places Bajans very clearly in Guyana at some period or other. Some Bajans talk about hordes going down to Guyana during the 30s and 40s as teachers, policemen and other civil servants during the colonial period. Others mention Bajan men who went over to work on the sugar plantations, but were not sure when. And still others, with stout conviction, talked about the Bajans who stowed away on ships to Demerara in the late 19th century and never came back.

And of course, every Bajan knows somebody who had a relative connected to Guyana through one of these “stories” and is therefore an “expert” on the two country’s immigration policies.

The Barbados SUNDAY SUN set out on a mission to trace the historic connection between the two countries in an effort to fill in the blanks floating between the myths and mysteries embedded in those “stories”.

The late Guyanese historian and radical Walter Rodney, in a 1977 paper entitled Barbadian Immigration Into British Guiana 1863-1924, acknowledged a “modest inflow” of movement between 1835 and 1846, but he concentrated on the period 1863-1886 in which he identified more “substantial” numbers.

New York based Guyanese historian Brian Moore supported his countryman’s claims. Nonetheless he recognised the even earlier connection: “The Bajan-Guyana connection with Guyana goes back even before emancipation. In fact, several of the plantations that were opened up under the Dutch colonial government in Essequibo and Demerara in the 18th century were owned by Barbadian planters, and in fact after the British abolished their slave trade in 1807, there was a small traffic in slaves from Barbados to Guyana, until it was eventually stamped out. After emancipation, Guyanese planters sent agents to Barbados (and other West Indian islands) to recruit labourers to increase the work force on their sugar estates.”

As Barbadian historian and educator Trevor Marshall outlined, during the early-to-mid 19th century, Barbados’ political landscape was such that it encouraged early migration. “Samuel Jackman Prescod was the earliest to advocate migration back in 1841,” Marshall said. While Prescod, who became the first non-White member of Barbados’ parliament in 1843, at the time had identified Trinidad and Tobago as a likely market for Barbadian plantation labourers, his observations of their work ethics made them quite favourable for plantation owners in Guyana.
Ideal work type

The Barbados Community College tutor explained: “Prescod said Barbados had the ideal work type… ‘The Barbadian,’ Prescod said, ‘was industrious, hardworking, devoted, concentrated and focused’.”

Rodney’s words were: “Barbadian labour had certain qualitative advantages: it was seasoned agriculture labour, specifically experienced in the cultivation of sugar cane.”Marshall said Barbadian labourers were experts in ratooning and were good in all areas of agronomic work.

In the early years of the post-emancipation period Guyanese planters sent agents to Barbados and other West Indian islands in order to recruit labourers with the vision of increasing the work force on their sugar estates, Moore explained. “Places like Guyana and Trinidad [during the 1840s] were ideal because they were low-density in terms of population,” Marshall confirmed, adding: “Where Barbados had 94 000 Blacks, Guyana did not even have 49 [thousand].”

Bajans were therefore sought after and did not therefore immigrate in mass pilgrimages as stowaways as the popular myth indicates.

There was tension because the Barbadian planters were losing workers to Guyanese competitors. “Bajan planters were not at all happy with that because it meant that they were losing valuable workers which threatened to push up the wages that they would have to pay their workers,” Moore stated.

“So that, strained relations between the two sets of planters [ensued] although some were related. Still several black Barbadian ex-slaves opted to go to Guyana because the wages were much higher than in Barbados,” the Professor added. Between 1835 and 1863 in excess of some 20 000 Barbadians went to Guyana, most footed their own cost for the boat fare. But, as Moore pointed out: “Another 25,000 or so went between 1864 and 1885 under a bounty system paid for by the Guyanese planters.”

Local planters made it difficult for their workers to leave. “In fact, they made the workers sign a bond to come back to put them under pressure telling them if they didn’t come back they would kick their wives and families off the plantation,” Marshall said.

While the historians did not provide any evidence to suggest Barbadian women also made up the numbers of migrants, it is clearly implied. According to Moore, “One of the features of Bajan migration to Guyana is that many migrated in families. So several women went with their ‘spouses’. That makes Bajan migration somewhat different from Indian and Chinese migrants who tended to be male”.

Both historians also agreed that while most of the Bajan immigrants who went over to Guyana did so to work on the plantation, in the later years several others worked as artisans, mechanics, servants and field servants. Bajan women, Moore stated, worked in the same capacity as Afro-Guyanese women: as domestics, coal women, labourers, vendors and the like.

 (This is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)