Latest update May 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 05, 2024 Consumer Concerns, News
CONSUMER CONCERNS
PAT DIAL
Kaieteur News – May 5 is commemorated by the descendants of Indian indentured immigrants from at least as early as the 1930’s as marking the anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured Indians in 1838 in the ships Whitby and Hesperus. It was only after Independence that this commemoration of Indian Arrival Day was extended to the whole population when it was declared a public holiday.
At the time the public holiday was declared, however, it was designated “Arrival Day” with the intention that it would also encompass the arrival of Chinese and Portuguese, until President Granger, a history scholar, decided to end the gaucherie by publicising the actual arrival dates of Chinese and Portuguese and extending his felicitations on their respective anniversaries. Thereafter, the Public Holiday on 5th May was correctly termed “Indian Arrival Day”.
In 1833, the Emancipation Act was passed by the British Parliament freeing the slaves throughout the British Empire. In Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean territories, the ex-slaves had to serve a period of “Apprenticeship” before being fully free.
During the 1830’s, therefore, the planters became frantic to recruit workers to man their sugar estates since they foresaw the freedmen would abandon their estates as soon as they could.
The system under which the foreign workers were to be recruited was known as the Indenture System. The basic terms of this contract were that the workers’ passage to Guyana would be borne by the planters, they would be bound to serve for five years with specific levels of wages and after the five years of service, they were eligible for a passage home.
Indentured workers from various countries including Malta, Madeira and China were tried but the planters finally settled upon India to source their workers and between 1838 and 1917 when Indentureship was discontinued, approximately 239,000 Indians were brought to the colony. Of these, one-third approximately returned to India, approximately one-third died in the colony and approximately one-third remained in the colony, mostly because they never had enough money with which to go home or were so broken in health that they could not face the rigours of the three-month sea voyage to India. It was the high death rate and debilitation of so many workers which necessitated the regular importation of workers.
The high death rates suffered by the immigrants were due to their poor and insanitary living conditions and the harsh conditions of work. The conditions of their living and work were much the same as the slaves before them and Indian Indentureship was termed by some historians as “the new slavery”. The immigrants were housed in the same deteriorating logies in which the slaves had lived.
These places had no privacy, their floors were mud and always damp or wet and they had no ventilation. Water for drinking and washing came from the canals which were polluted with sewage. It is not surprising, therefore, that diseases like typhoid, malaria and dysentery were endemic and the “hospitals” on these estates had no equipment or drugs and could be of little help to the sick. The contracts were never honoured and the workers were always overworked and badly robbed of their pay. Indeed, their normal wages could barely allow them to survive and from the 1860’s, there were regular worker protests.
These labour unrests were always treated as criminal offences and the colonial police were always called out. The first notable protest took place at Leonora Estate in 1869 and as usual, the police sided with the Estate Management and loss of life was barely avoided when the leaders of the protest were arrested. The leaders were convicted and incarcerated in the Mazaruni penal settlement. Following the Leonora strike, there were strikes at Plantation Farm, Mahaicony, Chateau Margot, and in 1870, there were violence and strikes at Hague, Vergenoegen and Success. In 1872, at Devonshire Castle Estate in Essequibo, a very serious strike took place. Such strikes were always called “riots” so as to involve the armed police who, in this case, shot five strikers and seriously injured several others. At Rose Hall in 1913, fifteen strikers were killed by police during a strike. Then there were the Enmore Martyrs where seven strikers were shot by the police in1947 and before that there were the Ruimveldt killings.
Sugar workers, from the high days of Indentureship in the 19th century, have never been able to accumulate generational wealth and to really better their social and economic condition; it is only when they and their children leave the estates and get involved in other economic activities and also acquiring a Western Education that they were able to move into the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie class and make notable contributions to national life in all spheres. As Gilbert and Sullivan would have put it “a sugar worker’s lot is not a happy one”.
When the first indentured immigrants ventured off the estates, they went into rice cultivation on a small scale to meet their home and village needs. In a short time, they grasped the commercial possibilities of the crop and for a long time, it became one of the legs of the tripod – Sugar, Bauxite and Rice – on which the Guyana economy rested. They then went into coconut farming and had the first coconut estates producing coconut oil.
Probably the most important contribution to Guyanese life which Indian immigration made is in the field of Culture: Indian cuisine such as dhal puri and the eating of rice as a staple; Indian Festivals like Phagwah which are now enjoyed by the whole population; and Guyana, in addition to being home to the great Christian and Western Civilization, has now become equally home to mankind’s two other great religions and civilizations- the Hindu and Muslim. Our Indian-descended indentured immigration population has encouraged India, a world power with the third largest military in the world, to have a special relationship with Guyana and to lend support to Guyana in difficulties it may have on the international stage. The indentured Indian immigrants and their descendants have been an essential part of Guyanese nationhood.
Public Servants salary can double overnight by just fencing the oil projects.
May 18, 2024
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