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May 25, 2017 Letters
Dear Editor,
I want to look at the question of the expansion of East Indian immigration after 1848 and its interconnectedness with the second slavery, which I explain below. Reflection and analysis of our formative history are necessary to understand the trials and travails of the indentured servants. They are also important because they help us understand the slave-like existence of indentured servants on the sugar plantations. Slavery and indentureship were connected.
Abolition and emancipation from slavery did not free the planters from the mentality of ownership – As Mary Noel Menezes put it, ‘the abolition of slavery act…freed the slaves,’ but it ‘did not free the slave owner from the mentality of ownership.’ For the slave owner’s ‘mind was conditioned by centuries of looking upon human beings as chattels without mind, body, soul, identity or history of their own.
This anniversary, 100 years since the end of indentureship, affords us the opportunity to shine a light on the indentured contract. As we do that we will find that it was imposed by the same forces after 1848, whose minds were conditioned to think about non-white workers as chattel. My task as a social historian is to point to the connection between profits and exploitative social and economic arrangements. This kind of expose is especially important in the Guyanese context. After 100 years since the end of indentureship, and 179 years since the end of slavery, we have not solved the problem of the planter mindset. We will not move forward until we address these historical structural problems. Guyana was not a blank slate when the indentured contract was imposed.
The African- Guyanese working class had been staking their claim for dignified treatment. And the planter class had to adjudicate the claims of the African people for equal dignity within a global context, wherein the cost of production for sugar and market price were driven by the expansion of slavery. It is in this context that I invoke the concept “second slavery.”
Since the idea of the second slavery may be new to you I will take some time to explain the construct. The study of the second slavery is gaining global currency in academic circles because of the structural deficiencies that grip most of the former colonies, wherein the majority of peoples of African descent, peoples closest to blackness, and indigenous communities have been seemingly permanently shunted to the margins of society. This is especially the case across the Caribbean, the United States of America, and in several areas of Central and South America. The term second slavery is used to explain the rapid expansion of slavery in the 19th century immediately following the abolition of the slave trade of 1806. During the 19th century it should be recalled that slavery intensified in non-British areas of the world, especially in the United States South (the home of Jim Crow segregation) – and more significantly the center/leader of global cotton production. Brazil – the center/leader of global coffee production.
And Cuba – the center/leader of global sugar production. The concentration of global commodity production of these products became pivotal to the growth and expansion of industrialization in Britain and North Western Europe. There are several lessons to be learnt from this development. First, global commodity producers and free traders defied the imposition of the abolition order – there was a manifold increase in the demand for African slaves.
Second, slave production of raw materials for industrial processing in Britain and North Western Europe led to the expansion of factories and the demand for cheap wage labor. Third, innovative technologies were transferred and agricultural production intensified in the slave zones and this helped to propel the need for cheaper labor or the expansion of slavery. Fourth, the disconnect between white and black peoples in the Americas expanded, and this led to the birth of scientific racism in the USA as a means of justifying slavery.
British Guiana was caught in this global cauldron. Being a British colony it was denied the possibility of expansion of slavery after 1806. At the time of abolition, the colony had a mere 100,000 slaves, when according to Eric Williams (Trinidadian historian who became Prime Minister of that country), to meet the demand posed by its endowment in fertile soil, it needed at a minimum 2 million slaves. Guyana was caught in this conundrum. Faced with the shortage of labor, Guyana chose sugar and moved away from coffee and cotton production. Land and labor were consolidated. No one can deny that Guyana needed more labor. This is still the case today.
But the story of the African and East Indian Guyanese, the majority groups of our population, is related to the struggle for cheap labor. The insertion of East Indians into the labor force in the first ten years of Emancipation was intertwined with the struggles of the African labor force on the sugar estates for improved wages and living conditions. These early trade union struggles are properly covered in our history.
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.
Dr. Wazir Mohamed
Special Technical Director
Ministry of Education
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