“Throwing dead cats across the fence at each other”

May 26, 2017 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I refer to the last paragraph of my letter in KN, of Thursday, May 25 captioned, “East Indian Immigration and the Second Slavery,” The paragraph stated; “As we mark one hundred years since the end of indenture, we need to pay renewed attention to the structure of social and economic relations that gave birth to the continuation and expansion of indentured immigration between 1848 and 1917. I use this periodization because it is my belief that we need to pay more attention to the factors that led to the imposition of the draconian indentured contract after 1848. We must consider the context. This is especially necessary since many of our communities continue to suffer from the vestiges of the demand for cheap labor, the original reason for slavery and indentureship.”
Let us look at some of these factors:
1. The first experiment with indentured laborers in 1838 was terminated because of the neo-slave nature of indentureship. The first arrivals were treated in similar manner as Africans under slavery.
2. The bulk of the African Workforce had remained on the plantations after emancipation, and demanded better wages and working conditions. There were sugar strikes in 1841-42 and 1847-48. According to Rodney, this strengthened the resolve of the planters to seek immigrant laborers.
3. The Sugar Duties Act of 1846 – which equalized duties between slave and free produced sugar. With the passage of the Act in 1846, free and slave produced sugar met on the global market. The cost of production of the cheaper slave produced sugar affected the price at which free produced sugar could be sold, and this acted to push change at the local level in British Guiana, where the result was imposition of the indentured contract, and depression of wage rates to match the cost of slave produced sugar. This sent the sugar industry into crisis. The result was the demand that the majority of Afro Guyanese sugar workers take a 25% pay cut.
4. When the Afro Guyanese sugar workers rejected this imposition, their strike action was defeated because there were enough indentured contract laborers (East Indians and Portuguese) on the plantations.
5. Afro Guyanese sugar workers left estate residency/housing en masse – this led to over-population of the villages.
1848    was the year of change
1. In the intervening period, although indentured immigrants were tied to specific plantations, there were no rigid contracts. But this was not good enough to meet the challenge for complete control over the labor process.
2. What is worthy of note are the rapid changes of the immigration contract regulations governing indentured laborers and how these became more draconian as more and more laborers were introduced.
a. The provisions governing the nature of the indentured contract went through rapid changes in the years 1846, 1848, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1862, and again in 1863.
b. The most drastic changes began to occur in 1848 after the defeat of the sugar strike; these were followed by the changes in 1851 to require the indentured immigrant to be contracted to an estate for five years that is bound with an employer he/she selected.
3. Each change represented a tightening of the noose around the neck of the East Indian immigrants. Each change brought them closer to the conditions of slavery. Walter Rodney and Alan Adamson help us understand the draconian nature of the contract and its application in the everyday setting.
a. Rodney explained that the working of the indentured code was of such, that if a laborer was not at work, the expectation of their employer was that they were either in hospital or in jail. There was no middle ground. “An unexplained absence [from work] was classed as desertion, and like all other breaches of civil contract on the part of the laborer, absence constituted a criminal offense punishable by a fine or imprisonment.”1
b. Adamson on the other hand explained that the indentured immigrants were immobilized and insulated from the rest of the society through carefully devised laws, which were designed to keep them unattached from the rest of the population: “insulation and immobility were…maintained through several…devices, the most effective of which were the vagrancy laws and a clause in the immigration ordinance which forbade an immigrant to leave an estate without a written pass from the manager. [And] since the law only authorized but did not compel the employer to issue a pass, it could be used to keep the immigrants in a state of virtual imprisonment.” 2
4. The legal sanctions imposed through the indentured contract on indentured laborers distorted the labor market. There was no free labor market. This was pointed out by the Commission of Inquiry into the treatment of immigrants of 1871.
I believe enough attention has not been paid to the indentured contract which not only tied laborers to plantations, but imposed an alternative workforce; which by dint of circumstance actively supplanted the African workforce, and with that curtailed the struggle for equal dignity in the colony which began with the Free Villages.
Today, we suffer from the structure of this history in several ways. First, our racial and economic divide which is now an important sub-culture is directly connected to our history. Second, the major class division in the East Indian community between rich and poor is also directly related to this history. Third, the colonial mindset is still present in the recesses of our society and acts as a driving force. Fourth, the global/international economic climate that helped to shape the economic and social beginnings of the East Indian community is still with us. We can see this in the perpetual crisis in rice and sugar.
We will move forward as a people and as a country, when we develop the fortitude to understand and speak about this history. If we continue as Eusi Kwayana said sometime ago, to “throw dead cats across the fence at each other,” as a nation we will continue to go downhill. We have to speak to each other, not at each other.
Dr. Wazir Mohamed
Special Technical Director
Ministry of Education

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