Books are meant to be read, Part Four

May 02, 2010 Features / Columnists, Guyanese Literature

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– By Petamber Persaud

The Coolie, His Rights and Wrongs’ by John Edwards Jenkins
The Caribbean Press, 2010

Imagine how you would feel come payday after toiling ten hours a day for six days in the open, that you have no money to collect. Imagine never being told the reason/s. And when you are told it sounds ridiculous.
Imagine being given a ‘task’ which is constantly changing parameters like an amoeba, leading to accusation of dereliction of duty or desertion and loss of wages. Imagine being dismissed from hospital far from healthy and forced to work in special work camps for convalescents. Here if you pause to catch your breath, you are charged for idleness and dereliction of duty. You are subsequently fined, or imprisoned. Imagine your chagrin from hospital to prison.
Imagine you are pregnant, nearing time of confinement, and you are sent to prison for slacking on the job.
Imagine your woman forced into a practise of polyandry because of the scarcity of women on the plantation leading to crimes of passion including wife murders.
Imagine you are bounded by laws which are interpreted by your kind and by magistrates who are afraid of the lawmakers and thus interpreted in favour of the plantocracy.
Imagine a life of daily harassment, poor hygiene, insanitary conditions, inadequate medical facilities, arbitrary incarceration, and scanty accommodation.
That was the prevailing condition of the coolies (Indian and Chinese) especially of the late 19th century. The advent of the coolie to British Guiana was a replacement of the labour force, a labour force of enslaved Africans recently gaining emancipation and abandoning the estate. The condition of the coolie was labelled very early as a new form of slavery. ‘The Bristol Mercury’ of 1838, denouncing the system, described it as ‘a renewal of the slave-trade in the first instance, and a perpetuation of slavery in the second’.
Those are some of the wrongs administered on the Coolie as tabulated in a 134-point, twenty-eight-printed-page letter of Mr. Des Voeux to Earl Granville, dated 25 December, 1869, complaining about the wrongs of the Coolie in Guyana while Des Voeux was the stipendiary magistrate in the colony.
Des Voeux was that magistrate who was hounded from district to district in the colony of British Guiana by the plantocracy because of his balanced interpretation of the laws, a stand that was critical and unfavourable to the plantocracy. Des Voeux eventually had to leave, more precise, was forced out of, the colony for a new posting in St. Lucia from where he penned his letter of complaints and recommendations.
Des Voeux was not the only one to complain. There were other individuals and organisations cognisant of the plight of the immigrants. Even the newspapers of the day got hold and published the transgressions.
Eventually in 1870, a Royal Commission of Enquiry was set up to investigate the condition of Indian (and Chinese) immigrants in British Guiana. However, all that came out of that enquiry, amounting to 954 paragraphs, was a call ‘for limited and partial reform, leaving intact the essential structure of the system’.
This outcome was unsatisfactory, especially to the Aborigines Protection Society and the Anti-Slavery Society which contracted John Edwards Jenkins, ‘a radical barrister particularly sensitive to imperial issues’ to review the findings of the Commission.
‘The Coolie, His Rights and Wrongs’ is the result of that review by Jenkins which is described in the introduction of the book as ‘a meticulous work in which he denounced the corruption of officers and magistrates involved in the immigration system and offered a forthright account of what he had witnessed in British Guiana.Biased laws, arbitrary incarceration, unfair wages, scarcity of women, inadequate accommodation and daily aggravations, made the immigrants’ life miserable and jeopardised the well-being of the colony’.
David Dabydeen describes ‘The Coolie’ as ‘a work of monumental detail, its 446 pages the most comprehensive account of the indentureship system in the nineteenth century’. All of that couples with an appendix running into more than sixty pages, Jenkins defends, ‘I may add that long as is the Appendix, it will be found to repay a careful perusal’.
Of course, there were voices of opposition to his findings but this only serves to encourage Jenkins in his work as a social reformer. So incensed and concerned about the situation, he went universal with his findings. He specially edited an American edition ‘in the light of the international interests surrounding his subject…that the ‘coolie’ question extended beyond the British dimension’.
Unwilling to let the subject rest, Jenkins in 1877, fictionalised his findings into a novel, ‘Lutchmee and Dilloo’. But as commendable his efforts, Jenkins admits in the end that it was all ‘in the general interest of colonial well-being and good governance’.

Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@ yahoo.com
What’s Happening
· Look out for the staging of the next ‘The Journey’ – an ongoing literature event hosted by the National Art Gallery, Castellani House.
· Be a part of the Ministry of Education ‘remedial Literacy & Numeracy Programmes’ for Grade 6 pupils from Monday April 19 to Friday July 9, 2010.

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