The rise of Victoria
– mother of all villages
Victoria Village, the first village to be founded on Guyana’s coastland, celebrated the 170th anniversary of its purchase in November.
By David A. Granger
Victoria is the mother of all villages. The founding of Victoria, the first village on the coastland, is a landmark – a monument to the idea of human freedom and a living museum of human endeavour in this land. Victoria spawned the great village movement that transformed a cheerless archipelago of plantations on British Guiana’s coastland into a chain of human settlements stretching from the Corentyne to the Pomeroon Rivers.
Celebration
The survival of any institution for 170 years cannot be a mere historical accident. It has to be the consequence of conscious human thought and action. The observance of this anniversary ought to have been the occasion for a national, if not a regional, celebration in the English-speaking Caribbean. In reality, the anniversary was celebrated locally last month with various events organised by the Victoria Reconstruction Trust and supported by the Emancipation Foundation, in the village itself on 26th November.
Two exhibitions – one comprising illustrations by the artist Barrington Braithwaite and the other comprising local publications of interest to villagers – were held at the GRECO training centre where they were viewed by scores of schoolchildren from the district. Later, a commemoration address was delivered to an audience at the primary school. Representatives of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports took the opportunity to hand over a cheque for the purchase of copies of the commemorative magazine, The New Victoria. In New York, meanwhile, the Friends of Victoria Village-Diaspora organised commemorative activities on 29th November and distributed copies of the magazine.
This year’s celebrations provided an opportunity for the present generation of Guyanese, who are the inheritors of Victoria’s legacy, to learn of the ideals that inspired the ‘magnificent eighty-three’ pioneers – the original purchasers of the village. These proprietors became the progenitors of a completely new mode of production and a new way of life in this country. Their names should be incised in a stone obelisk of remembrance so that they remain etched eternally in human memory.
The story of the ‘magnificent eight-three’ pioneers who purchased Plantation Northbrook on 7th November 1839 reads almost like historical fiction. The eighty-three free men and women drawn from five plantations − Ann’s Grove, Dochfour, Enmore, Hope and Paradise − paid the price of 30,000 guilders (about BG$ 10, 284. 63c when BG$ 4.80 = ₤1.00) for Northbrook, a former cotton plantation.
Two-thirds of the money was paid right away in coins, delivered in a wheelbarrow, “some of them still black with the mud in which they had been buried.” The remainder was covered by a promissory note which was redeemed three weeks later.
Located about 29 km from Georgetown on the East Coast Demerara, the village originally comprised about 202 hectares (about 500 acres) and had a depth of 11 km and width of 483 m. The transport, passed on 4th January 1841, was signed on behalf of the new proprietors by Samuel Burke. It is recorded that he was deputed to go to town to receive the transport because he alone among the purchasers could sign his name, which he did before Judge Thomas Norton.
Victoria’s historic achievement has been immortalised in drama, literature and music. The composer William ‘Bill’ Pilgrim’s masterpiece − The Purchase − an inspiring 1980 musical play, is one of the finest ever written in this country.
The village has also been the subject of several articles, books, chapters and magazines, or at least parts of them. Publications such as William Arno’s History of Victoria Village; Alan Adamson’s “Monoculture and Village Decay in British Guiana, 1854-1872;” Rupert Dowden’s Our First Village; Emancipation Magazine’s “Victoria;” Rawle Farley’s, “The Rise of Village Settlements of British Guiana” and “The Rise of a Peasantry in British Guiana;” Eusi Kwayana’s “Victoria’s Historic Model of Village Governance” and Allan Young’s Milestones in Village History testify to Victoria’s significance. Claire Goring edited and published The New Victoria to commemorate this anniversary most recently.
Challenge
Victoria’s experience is the story of challenge and response. It is the story of how our Guyanese fore-parents responded to the degradation of enslavement with a declaration of their human dignity. It chronicles how they responded to the threat of collapse with a covenant for village administration; to impoverishment with the bountiful production of agricultural commodities and to disunity with the creation of a unique community on the East Coast.
Victoria’s founders had a vision of a nation in which the idea of human freedom could become a practical reality. It was their resolve that legal emancipation should not remain a sterile statute in the law books but would become an actual experience that guided their daily existence. It was their belief they should empower themselves by making the decisions that affected their lives.
They had endured the nightmare of enslavement out of which they had adopted a practical approach to the world around them. They saw the need to employ themselves in the day-to-day business of producing food to survive; to marry and to raise families and to educate themselves. They yearned to be seen by others as equal under the law.
Contrary to popular belief, there was no mass exodus from the plantations after Emancipation on 1st August 1838. The free men and women continued to work and it took 15 months after Emancipation before they started to buy land, leave the plantations and move in their own villages. Why did the free men and women quit the plantations?
The planters reasoned that labour was already in short supply and, if the free men and women worked on their own farms and provision grounds instead of in the canefields, plantation labour would become more scarce and costly. The planters, therefore, began to destroy fruit trees and to dig up provision grounds deliberately in order to make the free labourers dependent on plantation wages, rather than their own produce, for their living.
The free men and women considered this an aggression and this was their proximate motivation for leaving. They also quit the plantations because they wanted to be free. They rejected the humiliating punishments and inhumane conditions on the plantations and yearned to establish their economic independence. They took advantage of the closures of unprofitable cotton and sugar plantations to begin buying land. And, by thrift, they had cash which they had carefully accumulated during their four-year apprenticeship. This enabled the free men and women, collectively and individually, to purchase many of the properties and pay for them in hard cash.
The Covenant
Seven years after emerging from enslavement − the worst form of domination and degradation in human history − villagers promulgated a remarkable prototype for local government on 2nd May 1845. Their covenant was entitled “Agreement Entered into by the Following Persons in the Name and on Behalf of Themselves and the Other Proprietors of Victoria Village for the Good Regulation and General Benefit of Said Estate.” The 20th Article read in part:
“…calling to mind our happy condition and comparing it with our past state of degradation, we have determined in gratitude to our Almighty Father to erect two buildings which shall be used and devoted to the purposes of Religion as a School House and a Church where our children may be taught to read their Bibles and learn their several duties, and where we may from time to time assemble and meet together and there offer up to Almighty God our humble prayers and thanks for the mercies we have received…”
The covenant prescribed twenty detailed regulations for the management of the village by its proprietors. These included the election of office bearers, taxes, the prohibition of drunkenness, cursing, swearing, gambling, etc, trespassing, observing the Sabbath, sale of properties and the use of firearms, among others.
As a result of this advanced thinking, Victoria’s founders had a head start on other villages. Gradually, by the late 19th century, the village came to enjoy a relatively high cultural standard – influenced by the large number of churches and schools and inspired by a growing group of educated people among whom were parsons and school teachers.
Christian worship, as so evident in the text of the ‘Covenant,’ was always important to the proprietors. Villagers would walk to the Bethel Congregational Chapel at Le Re Souvenir to attend service in the early days. Not surprisingly, one of the first buildings to be constructed in the village, in 1845, was the Wilberforce Congregational Church, named after a prominent anti-slavery activist.
Other places of worship – established by the Wesleyans; Plymouth Brethren; Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Anglicans – followed. Church bazaars, guilds, and Bands of Hope which aimed at suppressing the drinking of alcohol, and Improvement Associations, which catered for debating and literary pursuits, flourished.
Victoria, together with nearby communities, particularly Belfield to the East, pioneered agricultural shows with the formation of an Agricultural Society, an idea that was copied in other villages. The greater community developed a thriving agro-processing economy.
This was based on the production of coconuts – used in the manufacture of oil but which also generated pig and poultry feed from its by-products and coir for making mattresses; cassava − which was processed into cassava-bread and casareep; and fruit for beverages, table consumption and preserves.
Most households maintained kitchen gardens for green vegetables. Farms in the backdam produced fruit, ground provisions and plantains and farmers sold their produce at a vibrant village market. There were bakeries, clothing stores, retail shops and parlours. Cottage industries produced drinking chocolate and households made sugar-cake, black-pudding, souse, mabi (mauby) and other beverages for sale. There were several artisans, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, contractors and carpenters.
Context
Victoria and the village movement faced many challenges that could be understood in the context of the conflict between the planters and the peasants. The two most pressing problems were those of sea defence, drainage and irrigation and the colonial government’s insistence that the villagers should bear the full costs of local public works, particularly roads, dams and bridges. Then, as now, these two tasks required massive investment and centralized management. Neither was available to the villages and they suffered greatly as a result.
Frequent floods on the East Coast engendered epidemics of cholera, malaria and yellow fever which spread easily in the prolonged inundation. The loss of crops, livestock and food supplies led to malnutrition which, together with disease, debilitated the villagers and decimated the population.
Victoria’s purchase launched the Village Movement as an idealistic response to the challenge of Emancipation – a grand effort to transform legal Emancipation into economic reality. In so doing, however, villagers came to be perceived by the planters and officials as competitors with the plantations for the scarce resources of the colony, particularly for labour, land and government funds. The antagonists – the emergent peasantry on the one hand and the planter class on the other – were locked in mortal combat for over half century. In the final analysis, however, it was Victoria’s exemplary initiative that called into existence a mode of social organisation, commodity production and local legislation that created what we now accept as free village life.