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Dr. Wazir Mohamed’s Presentation to Lands Commission of Inquiry- Part I

The concern about land ownership continues amidst growing perception the People’s Progressive Party /Civic government is moving to dispossess Africans and Amerindians from wealth accrued through ancestral land rights by their land distribution programme. Village Voice News will be examining this issue from the perspective of difference voices.

Today we feature Part I of a presentation made by Dr. Wazir Mohamed to the Lands Commission of Inquiry on November 23, 2017. Dr. Mohamed, who is Guyanese, is an Associate Professor, Sociology, Indiana University East, USA

Introduction

Honourable Commissioners,

I am especially pleased to be given this opportunity to speak with you, and to share my knowledge on the history of the land problem of Guyana. In this presentation I begin by outlining some salient facts about the history of the struggle by the salt of the earth, the laboring population for access to land from the early 19 century.

I prefer to speak about the 19th century, as the period of the sugar revolution. This is necessary because acquisitions of lands outside of the European sugar plantations, were connected and integrally related to the needs of the sugar industry. The sugar barons, through their influence over the colonial state, exercised absolute controls over access to land, especially Crown Lands between 1838 and 1898. Planter influence and control over access to land was not limited to Crown Lands.

They had unlimited and in many instances, what can reasonably be described as unfettered controls over the development of land policy. Land policy was a primary tool used after emancipation to control movement and price of labor. A reading of the land ordinances of 1835/36, 1839, 1851, 1852, 1856, 1857, 1861, and 1898 render an understanding of the history through which our current land tenure structure evolved. Closer reading of these ordinances demonstrates the following:

  1. The ordinances of 1835/36, 1839, and 1861 – virtually prevents the former enslaved to acquire Crown
  2. The ordinances of 1851, 1852, 1856, and 1857 – produced fragmentation in the villages, and in many ways created bottle-necks, which thwarted the original intent of the former enslaved to work the backlands of the villages as cooperatives.
  3. The ordinance of 1898 – opened Crown Lands at very concessionary rates. Lands which for 60 years were out of reach of the former enslaved, became accessible to the formerly indentured, who were being hemorrhaged out of the sugar because of the global sugar crisis of the This lead to the evolution of the rice industry.
  4. The result – disparity in tenure between the two most populous sections of the laboring population.

Honourable Commissioners, we cannot make sense of the dilemma we face today with respect to the multitude of land disputes, and to lack of equity that permeate the society between different communities, and classes of our population without recourse to an understanding of the planter mentality – which informed colonial policy and hence law making.

The problems we face, the very reason for this commission’s existence, is deeply connected to the structure of land tenure developed in the period 1838-1898. In many respects the divergent access to land between descendants of the enslaved and descendants of indentured servants emerged, and evolved because of the needs of sugar. I have argued in other places that the structure of our ethnic/racial culture have its roots in the divergent access to land.

I arrived at this conclusion after years of studying this problem. I grew up in a farming household, and is familiar with farming in the East Indian as well as the neighboring African Village of Farm, East Bank Essequibo. The inequality in access to tenure I observed during my childhood between East Indians and Africans raised many unanswered questions. This lead me to study the roots of ethnic/racial problem.

Honourable commissioners, my journey to find answers to this troubling racialized structure of our history lead me to pursue studies towards the PhD. I have spent years looking through documents at the Guyana National Archives, at the British National Archives, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies – home of the Archives of the London Missionary Society. Because of my familiarity with that period of our history, I would argue that there is a lot more to discover with regards to the structure that evolved – which I would say without doubt was geared to keep the African Population Landless.

What began in the 1820s as a means of ensuring that all labor was available for plantation work, soon became a system that used control over land as the means of labor control. This later evolved to become a culture of control. Before I go on to give you some of the insights into the land policies as they evolved, permit me to encourage you not to make the same error of successive governments, in sweeping this history under the table. It would be highly regrettable if this commission were to leave these fundamental issues untouched and unresolved.

The answer to the dilemma that we face lies in the structure of our history. Let us briefly examine salient aspects of the history between the abolition of the slave trade in 1806 and the global sugar crisis of the 1880s. I call this period, the Sugar Revolution.

The Sugar Revolution and the labor/land market: 1806 and beyond

It is pertinent that I begin this section with a passage taken from Alan Younge’s, approaches to Local Self Government in British Guiana, published in 1958. Younge (1958:10) noted that,

“In British Guiana, where unoccupied land was available in vast quantities, land policy, private and official, was carefully shaped towards keeping the Negro landless. On the official side, measures were introduced to prevent both the illegal and the legitimate use of Crown Lands by the Negroes.”

Younge goes on to give details about the vagrancy laws, and other statutes through which the enslaved and former slaves were to be kept landless. Other scholars, namely Alvin Thompson (2002, 2006) and Emilia DaCosta (1994) gave as much details as available in the archives to show the extent to which planters and the colonial state went to prevent, destroy, and obliterate occupation of lands by runaway slaves.

Unlike other parts of the Americas, British Guiana was the only colony in the Caribbean where runaway communities were completely obliterated, and where the African population have been denied access to the lands occupied albeit illegally by their ancestors who were fighting freedom and independence from the hazards, and from physical and mental slavery of plantation life. I think it would be necessary for this commission to at least acknowledge this historical travesty.

Another historical travesty that should come under your consideration for acknowledgement were the roadblocks placed in the path of the enslaved to effectively use the right to cultivate garden plots and provision grounds as the law stipulated. The statute that outlined the requirement for provision ground allocation were not honored in the letter and spirit of the law. It was honored in the breach.

In the period immediately following the abolition of the slave trade, British Guiana found itself in dire straits, it had approximately 100,000 enslaved individuals, when its land endowment necessitated that it should have had more than 2 million. As a means of resolving this dilemma, the colonial enterprise opted for a one crop economy, cotton and coffee was jettisoned, plantations were consolidated, and all available labor were herded to meet the demands of the sugar industry.

Rather than diversify the economy, the planter class and the colonial office decided that sugar was to be the crop of choice. Against all odds, British Guiana opted for access to the global sugar market. The sugar economy required all hands-on deck. The colony of British Guiana became part of the global spiral, where production of single commodities was driven by increased regimentation of slave labour.

British Guiana joined other one crop colonies such as Mauritius and Cuba in a new global competition to produce sugar to fuel industrialisation, as Mercantile Capitalism was beginning to give way to the free market. In the same vein, the United States South became the primary producer of Cotton, and the Paraiba Valley in Brazil became the premier producer and supplier of coffee. British Guiana was not a blank slate, its history from thereon was being written, as its economy and internal arrangements were shaped to meet the demands of global competition for sugar. This is what I call the sugar revolution.

Honourable commissioners, everything that followed, was subject to the demands of global competition for sugar. This is why runaway communities were obliterated, and why garden plots and provision ground cultivation almost disappeared (Da Costa, 55). I make these points to lay the basis for you to understand the mindset within which post emancipation land policy was shaped. Post-emancipation land policies were interconnected to labor policy.

It is incumbent on this commission to delve into the complex interplay, in order to figure out the role labor policy played in the erection of land policy, and how these served to keep land away from the African population during the period of the sugar revolution. And consequently, the role land policy played in the rise of the rice industry, and hence the disparity that exist between Africans and East Indians with respect to land ownership and occupation.

To be continued….

Source: ResearchGate

Link to Original article

A huge human drama’: how the revolt that began on the Gladstone plantation led to emancipation

(The Guardian) The Demerara Rebellion failed, but it was a step towards ending slavery in the British empire

The Demerara Rebellion of August 1823 was a pivotal event in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

While the transatlantic slave trade, the largest forced migration in human history, was outlawed by Britain in 1807, slavery continued across the colonies. Conditions were brutal in Demerara, one of three provinces that made up British Guiana, where sugar plantations were among the most profitable in the world.

Nigel Westmaas, professor in Africana Studies at Hamilton College, New York, said: “In Demerara the sugar regime was extremely harsh. The cutting of the crop required huge numbers of labourers, who would wake at dawn or even earlier and carry out backbreaking work in the sun with a whip on their back.”

They worked barefoot and endured terrible conditions, he said. “There was terrible pain, suffering and isolation, families were split up and sold. It was horrendous.”

Rape, violence and brandings were daily occurrences. African culture was suppressed, life expectancy short.

The rebellion began on John Gladstone’s plantation Success, with the peaceful goal of securing better working conditions. Led by enslaved African Jack Gladstone, it quickly spread across the province and eventually about 13,000 Africans rose up on 60 plantations.

Although few of the white planters were harmed, the revolt was met with brutal repression. On 20 August, 200 enslaved Africans were killed by British soldiers under the command of Lt Col John Leahy, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars. He ordered his troops to open fire when 2,000 rebels refused to disperse, an event that turned the tide against the rebels.

Jack’s father, Quamina, was captured, killed and hung in chains outside the plantation. Others were tortured to death and decapitated, their heads speared on to poles as a warning to others. Jack was spared and exiled to St Lucia, but no record of his arriving there has been found.

An English missionary, John Smith, was convicted of assisting the revolt and sentenced to death. He died in prison while awaiting execution.

Westmaas said: “As a Guyanese I am immensely amazed and proud of the actions in the Demerara Rebellion. It’s a huge human drama. To have anything from 9,000 to 13,000 people rise up in plantations, given the conditions, was a tremendous feat of planning and endurance.”

The 1823 rebellion, and a later revolt in Jamaica in 1831, are thought to have persuaded the British government that slavery was no longer practicable. Emancipation followed in 1833.

Read more

Guyana Land Tenure Problems Pt III ‘Proprietary and Communal Villages’- Dr. Wazir Mohamed

Beginning in 1839, two types of villages (the village movement) emerged, the communal (independent) and proprietary (semi-independent) villages. The growth of these two types of villages evolved in the aftermath of the reaction of the former enslaved Africans to the draconian approach of the planter class which wanted to establish labor control through attachment to plantation housing and provision grounds. The ex-slaves not only rejected this approach, but petitioned the Governor (Editorial, The Royal Gazette, May 23, 1840) for the right to obtain leases to huts and provision grounds and some of them went further and pooled their resources to buy land which had become available as plantations were being abandoned.

The proprietary villages were established on the front lands of the plantations, invariably between the sea dam, the public road and the beginning of inland cultivation.6 These were founded as a means of continuing their attachments as laborers to particular plantations, while they mediated their independence through ownership of land. Contextually the pieces of land sold to the African population can be considered a negotiated space of freedom and independence (foremost Anthropologist of the Caribbean Peasantries, Sydney Mintz, described this phenomenon, which is endemic to the Caribbean as the space of on-going resistance and accommodation).

These villages served several purposes. First, they answered the demand of the former enslaved who wanted to own the huts and land on which they had lived as enslaved people for several decades. Second, it met their needs for sustenance as laborers on the plantations on which they had established independent residences. Third, they met the need of the planter class who wanted to attract and make secure labor arrangements. Fourth, it broke the character and culture of the earlier arrangement which had tied laborers in a continuous chattel type dispensation and offered relative comfort to both classes on any given plantation. Further, this arrangement allowed the enterprising planter to dispose of already useless land for the purpose of housing the labor needed for the plantation.7 This arrangement also brought much needed capital and labor to the plantation.8

By 1841 this movement had affected no less than eighteen plantations on the Essequibo and countless more in Demerara and Berbice.9 In Demerara proprietary villages were established at Providence, Craig, Supply, Brickery, Toevlugt, La Retraite, San Souci, Studley Park in Canal No. 1, Den Amstel, Good Hope, and Ruby.10 In Berbice proprietary villages were established at Sisters, Cumberland, Eliza and Mary, and Skeldon.11 On all of these plantations individual titles or deeds to the land were given to those ex-slaves who had purchased these properties.

Like the proprietary villages, the communal villages also began to come on stream in 1839. According to Alan Young (1958: 12) the impetus for these villages arose out of the “desire of the free laborers to turn their knowledge of cane-farming to their own account.” Because cane- farming required more land than the small plots the proprietary arrangement afforded, the free laborers turned to the abandoned plantations. In many parts of the country the African Population pooled their resources and purchased abandoned plantations which had come on the market as a result of the changed approach of some members of the planter class. Like the proprietary villages, these communal purchases were also related to the new position of the planter class to permit the former enslaved to own freeholds on or in the vicinity of existing plantations as a means of attracting their labor power.

The first such purchase of plantation Northbrook on the East Coast Demerara was carried out by eighty three (83) laborers in November 1839 who worked on the neighbouring estates of Douchfour, Ann’s Grove, Hope, Paradise, and Enmore, combined their resources and purchased this property, which was one of the first Cotton plantation to be abandoned. 12 This was soon followed in 1840 by the purchase of four more abandoned estates by laborers on West Coast Berbice. Plantation Golden Grove was purchased by fourteen (14) laborers, plantation St. John by forty six (46) labourers, plantation Perseverance by one hundred and nine (109) labourers, and plantation Lichfield by one (1) labourer, Cudjoe McPherson. In the case of the former estate of Lichfield, it was subdivided into twelve (12) shares and sold immediately after purchase.13

In the aftermath of these purchases, the villages became an important source of inspiration and served as anchors for the aspiration of independence for all other freed peoples who maintained residency on plantations. In the case of the first communal villages established, namely Victoria and Buxton the front lands were converted into homestead plots, while the backlands were being developed as a joint cultivation ground for the enrichment of the original shareholders.14 In effect joint cultivation represented the beginning of the process of collective farming. Each of these original communal purchases began in earnest to function as separate cooperatives with the possibility of dividends accruing to each shareholder.15 It is my hope that the honorable commissioners would spend some time to ponder, and to ask the question if what, or what would have been the likely outcome for the African population if joint cultivation was supported by the colonial state.

It is necessary that we recall that the process of collective farming was short-lived as the black working class, who had remained in Estate residency, were defeated in the sugar strike of 1847-48. This resulted in a massive migration from estate residency into the villages, which became overcrowded. The largest villages of Victoria, Buxton, Beterverwagting, and Plaisance bore the brunt

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