One hundred and eighty-three years have passed since those freed from enslavement on August 1st crowded the churches to give thanks to God. The new world which was ushered in on that day was fundamentally different from what had gone before. Freedom in the sense in which we understand it nowadays still did not exist, but emancipation created the framework for the society which has given us identity and has moulded us into what we are as a people.
There are those from all the groupings represented here who like to emphasize their ethnic affinities, but that ethnicity is expressed within a Guyanese context. While culture and provenance are important to them it does not mean they perceive themselves as belonging to India or Africa or China or Madeira. For the Indigenous nations there are other issues, of course, since they are the first inhabitants of what is now the Guyanese land space. But while some like to call attention to our differences, it should be remembered that many areas of accommodation have evolved over the decades in what began as a polyglot, diverse society, even if the two dominant groups have yet to reach an understanding in relation to the political dimension.
And when it comes to the past it should always be borne in mind that the history of one ethnic group is the history of us all. Each of them has made a contribution which has gone to shape the society we are part of today, and without that contribution our local world would be a rather different place. It is our indigenous inhabitants who give us our roots in this landscape, since the first-comers – possibly the ancestors of the Warraus – have been here at least 7,000 years. It is their presence which supplies the element of antiquity.
The intruders from other continents did not arrive until millennia later. And while the popular notion is that the Europeans, i.e. the Dutch, came first and they subsequently brought in the Africans, that does not reflect the true sequence. Where Berbice was concerned it is clear that when the first colonists appeared in 1627 they had with them six Africans. While there is no absolute certainty about the date for the founding of what became the Colony of Essequibo, there is a snippet of circumstantial evidence to suggest that there too Africans landed simultaneously with the Dutch.
Unlike most of the British West Indian colonies, Guyana has always been a multi-cultural society, with considerable interaction prior to the nineteenth century between the Indigenous peoples and the Africans, and not just the Dutch. The nations supplied all kinds of foodstuffs, among other things, to the newcomers, and in the case of the first Berbice settlers, saved them from starvation. In the seventeenth century in particular, it was segments of the Indigenous population which supplied Essequibo and Berbice’s second most important export after sugar, namely, the anatto used to colour cheeses.
In fact, in the first century after colonisation, trade with the nations of the interior and the production of anatto were so important to the Dutch, that a cadre of African traders grew up in Essequibo who had a command of some Indigenous languages and would travel into the interior to trade. They clearly had to have a linguistic facility, and it may be that the occupation was passed on from father to son. One presumes that most of them were probably given their freedom, although that is not really known. The first reference to such a trader is in 1629, when a Dutch boat exploring the coast put into the Demerara and found an African trader there bartering on behalf of the authorities in Essequibo.
It was not always a safe occupation, since there is a reference to one of them being killed by the Akawaios, but most times relations went smoothly, with one trader marrying the daughter of a Carib ‘Uil’, or Toshao, as we would now say. While there were no such traders in Berbice, nevertheless it seems that some of the governors there relied on Africans to translate for them when they were dealing with Indigenous nations. It should be added that the Dutch only recognised four nations in this country as being immune from slavery – the Caribs, Arawaks, Akawaios and Warraus – all others, theoretically at least, as qualifying to be enslaved.
The Dutch emancipated the Indigenous enslaved more than forty years before the Africans were freed, so the nations can also share in the celebration of Emancipation in a real sense. The role of the so-called ‘free’ nations, particularly the Caribs, as ‘slave-catchers’ came late in the slavery period, after they had ceased to have importance to the Dutch as traders and were only useful in a plantation custodial role.
Of course the vast majority of Africans endured a plantation regime in this country as brutal as it was elsewhere, and two of the region’s great uprisings occurred here in response – in Berbice in 1763 and Demerara in 1823. There were as well minor ones, especially in Berbice. Unlike the case of our neighbour Suriname, maroon settlements were not found here until after the Berbice rising had been crushed. The most significant and enduring community was that of the Demerara maroons, although it has never been established whether they had their origins in people from Berbice who had not been recaptured after 1764.
There were no large-scale risings in Essequibo and no significant maroon bases either. This was not because the Africans there were more docile than those in Berbice and Demerara. It was because they had an option not available to the enslaved of the other two colonies. At certain periods (although this was not consistent) the governors of what is now Venezuela would allow runaways from Essequibo to stay, provided they converted to Catholicism. The Africans would try and make their way there by water, while the Indigenous, who were more comfortable in the forest, would take the land route.
When they were freed in 1838, the Africans demonstrated a great capacity for organisation and planning, as well providing undisputed evidence of their determination. The purchase of abandoned plantations with wheelbarrows full of the small coinage they had amassed (they were not allowed to own specie under enslavement) is one of the great stories of the region which has no equivalent in any other colony of the time. Similarly, the relocation of the former plantation workers off the plantation is one of the great movements of peoples which also has no parallel in any of our neighbouring territories. It is said that their purchases caused an increase in real estate prices.
The planters, of course, as vindictive and resentful as ever that their former labourers were not just independent, but independent-minded, organised a reduction in their wages throughout the length and breadth of the country through the agency of their agricultural societies. But the Africans were prepared and responded on a countrywide basis with the 1842 strike, perhaps the most comprehensive, large-scale strike ever to take place here. A further strike in 1848 was less successful because by that time the plantocracy had decided their labour problems would be solved by immigration.
The first Indians were brought here some three months before emancipation, and many of them were appallingly badly treated, being half-starved and flogged. The consequence was an interdiction on indentured labour from India for a time. During the inquiry into their treatment, Africans on the estates where the worst excesses had occurred recognised immediately what was going on, and testified that it was like slavery.
While immigration over the longer period was not the equivalent of slavery, those who laboured on the plantation were subject to the same regimentation as the Africans before them, and although the abuse took different forms, coercion and abuse were still the norm. In other words, the plantation defined everyone’s working experience here at some stage, and by extension their social experience, going back to the early seventeenth century.
We should all celebrate Emancipation today. With the exception of the Indigenous people it is the reason that nearly everyone else is here, and even many of them share the historical plantation experience at some level with the rest of us. It is the point at which, colonialism notwithstanding, we began our long journey to becoming a nation. We have learnt a great deal in the process and one hopes that those lessons will not be jettisoned because of impetuosity on the part of some segment of the citizenry, let alone recklessness or intransigence on the part of politicians. The efforts and commitment of our 1838 forebears, either literal or metaphorical, stand as an example to all of us.
