No compensation for slaves
Published on August 29, 2012 in Africa, Business, Education, General T&T, Indian, Labour, Race and Identity and Racism Watch.
By George Alleyne
August 29, 2012 – newsday.co.tt
The argument has often been put forward by politicians and would be politicians that persons of Indian descent own a far greater degree of property in Trinidad than people of African descent, because they had saved and used their money wisely.
It is an attempt to create misunderstanding between the two major ethnic groups. What led to today’s disparity in land ownership is well documented and rooted in Trinidad’s colonial past. The end of slavery in 1838 and the movement by freed slaves to urban and suburban areas and away from the sugar estates, with which they had for so long identified with their suffering, meant that the sugar planters had to source new labour.
Wages demanded by ex-slaves, who remained, were in the order of some 36 cents a day. Planters, with the example of Indian indentureship in Mauritius, looked to India for the restocking of their labour force.
Lord John Russell, then United Kingdom Secretary of State for the Colonies, would refer to the proposition for the introduction of Indian labour to the West Indies in a letter to Sir Henry Light, Governor of British Guiana, dated February 15, 1840. “It is stated” Lord Russell wrote, “that the wages of a day labourer are in Guiana one shilling and six pence 36 cents per day and in Hindostan (India) not more than two pence.”
While there had been a limited use of Indian indentured labourers in Guiana, between 1837 and 1839, indentureship had not been introduced in other areas of the West Indies. On July 25, 1842, Lord Howick moved a resolution in the British House of Commons: “That is the opinion of this Committee (the House of Commons Committee on the West Indian Colonies)” that, inter alia, “one obvious and desirable mode of endeavouring to compensate “for the diminished supply of labour,” is to promote the immigration of a fresh labouring population, to such an extent as to create competition for employment”.
It should be pointed out that as early as 1814, 24 years before the end of slavery, a planter in Trinidad, William Burnley, had proposed the bringing of free labour from India “on a large scale”, as Dr Eric Williams would note in From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean (Page 347). This proposal carried with it a sense of urgency as the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 had effectively blocked a traditional means of supplying labour to the sugar plantations.
Sir Ralph Woodford, who was Governor of Trinidad at the time, would recommend to the Colonial Office “the introduction of East Indian immigrants” — Eric Williams. With the bringing into operation of indentureship, a crucial provision of the agreements between parties had been the repatriation of indentureds to India at the end of their contracted stays, with the expense to be borne by the planters. But because sugar planters had found the cost of passages of indentured labourers back to India to be expensive, they made offers to the labourers of either money or land in Trinidad in lieu of return passages.
More than 100,000 accepted. Many of those who accepted cash, purchased land. The entire process would see some 100,000 indentureds becoming land owners. It would provide a financial jump-start and ladder that not even the calculated up to 1970 denial of commercial bank loans, in all too many cases, could negatively affect.
Ironically, following on Emancipation, instead of former slaves being given money for their years of having been forcefully and brutally exploited, money which could have given them the same jump start, the sum of 973,442 pounds sterling was paid out by the British Government to the planters in Trinidad as compensation “for the loss of their slaves”! It was a dismissal of the former slaves and was a statement that only the interests of sugar planters really mattered.
Indeed, the only freed slaves who received grants of land in Trinidad were those who had fought on the side of the British in the 1813 war in Virginia. They were given land in an area South of Princes Town known today as Fourth Company, Fifth Company and Sixth Company.
Meanwhile, despite the efforts of some politicians, Indian and African descent Trinbagonians are committed, as other ethnic groups, to the development of their country.
http://www.newsday.co.tt/commentary/0,165498.html
4 Responses to “No compensation for slaves”
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TMan
August 29, 2012 at 12:04 pm
I wonder if Mr Alleyne would be interested in examining the causes of the decrease and decline of the African professional and intellectual population in T&T. This pool is slowly drying up presenting challenges with regard to filling political and corporate vacancies in T&T.
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Linda Edwards, class of '67
August 29, 2012 at 3:28 pm
This is not a reply but a comment. I am a descendant of the Freed Negroes- called Merikins by some detractors, who have cultivated their own land in the Company Villages since 1815, when my father’s people arrived. I am glad Mr.Alleyne expoed this myth of Indian Industriousness, which if believed, could case someone to ask why then did they not prosper in India?
A jumpstart in a new land is essential. This is why Jonas Mohammed BAth, a West African sultan, petitioned the crown for compensation for those MAndingoes who had already purchased their freedom. He never got a reply. In contrast, my African friends-malawians, Ghnaians, Nigerians have lived on their own land for hundred of years, and the landowning families intermarry, keping and extending property holdings. Some of the Company Village residents lost their land to chicanery. People rented out their holdings, and often and over time, the taxes were paid by the renter, who was Indian. Bitish law is, if you pay the taxes in your own name, after 21 years, it is your land. The Africans did not know this. Their ladholdings are traditional. Everyone knows its yours.
Now there is a mad scramble for regularization of title to lands in East Africa, as extensive mineral wealth has been found in Zambia, Malawi and Congo. One such case involves a friend of mine. She knows where the boundaries of her mother’s family land aare. they have lwys been there.Mother is illiterate and 97 years old. how does one prevent the rampant theft of their copper and iron ore rich lands?
what happened to the African in the Caribbean should be classified as genocide- a deliberate attempt to wipe out the gene pool, by outsiders.
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Linda Edwards, class of '67
August 29, 2012 at 8:11 pm
It was in Antigua, where I went to work as a consultant in 1988 that my eyes were opened to the possibilities denied us in TnT. All the liquor stores, jewellry stores and fancy boutiques in their airport were owned by very dark women, who in TnT woul have had a market stall as a business opportunity, and maybe, expanded to two market stalls. Women, African women in Antigua owned trucking businesses, a set of beauty supply stores and salons, owned by one woman, and deparartment stores. The head of Antigua Commercial Bank at the time, John Benjamin, was the only AFRICAN bank manager I knew, and they owned a number of other businesses besides the bank. I began to study their society, and that of Barbados and Jamaica, and found that it was only in Trinidad(not Tobago) where the East Indian had been inserted by the Brit, and supported in their position, that an almost permanent underclass had been ceated among African people.Of course most Trinis have traveled to North America and Europe, but not taken a critical look at their neighbouring islands, so they are unaware of how differently Trinidad fared in the emerging business scene.For less to start thinking of the resons for it. Even in Martinique, the African originated people owned busineses. I first went there in 1976. In Guadeloupe, however, almost everything was white-owned.This difference could be explained by the leadership of Aime Ceziare, Mayor of Fort de France, and a leading French Intellectual, founder of the concept of Negritude. We need in upcoming years to take a more critical look at the emergent business climate in Trinidad. An analysis of small business loans by any bank, could be quite revealing, but the will power, and the laws that would release the documents to an analyst, are not there, or not working. We prefer to believe in the myth of the Lazy African, and we resent the ones from Nigeria who come here and set up small businesses, while we gladly seem to do business with the new immigrant Chinese.
Incidentally, the ONLY Afro-Trini jeweller I know, is a descendant of those free Africans from 1815. His family has the deed to the land they were given, framed and hanging on the wall. A jump-start is a powerful thing.
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Mamoo
August 29, 2012 at 10:30 pm
I have always believe that slaves and their descendants should be compensated. I think $7 billion should be enough to make them happy. I would recommend Mr. Alleyne start a campaign by gathering before the British Embassy and making this claim. The slaves after slavery ran away from the land, to this day in Africa starvation is a common feature because of a lack of farmers. Haiti was perhaps the only nation where the people had the land for themselves yet it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Why? Mr. Alleyne must explain. Also much of the Caribbean is owned by descendants of slavery.
Trinidad and Guyana saw the jealous descendants of slaves wanting more. Burnham tried that experiment by taking lands and giving it to descendants of slaves these lands remain uncultivated while indos fled this tyrant. Many have done extremely well for themselves. In Trinidad islanders were brought in “en mass”. Many of them received houses and today we are seeing the result of this with uneducated boys using the gun to slaughter without a conscience. Mr. Alleyne must understand capitalism, in a capitalist nation you can purchase property at market value. The real question for Mr.Alleyne is why descendants of slaves are prone to be unproductive, lazy and gun lovers.
Finally all descendants of slavery can get on board an airplane and with a one way ticket return to their African motherland. Mr. Goodluck will be happy to receive them.
Labels: SLAVERY, TRINIDAD AND TOBEBO
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The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves
The Slaves That Time Forgot
by John Martin
Global Research, May 28, 2012
opednews.com/ - 2008-04-14
They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.
Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.
We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery? King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.
The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.
As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.
African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.
In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.
But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.
Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.
But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?
Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.
Global Research Articles by John Martin
Labels: COLONIALISM, SLAVERY
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Gaddafi apologizes for Arab slave traders
Mon Oct 11, 2010 10:26PM
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has apologized to African leaders on behalf of Arab nations for their involvement in the African slave trade.
"I regret the behavior of the Arabs… They brought African children to North Africa, they made them slaves, they sold them like animals, and they took them as slaves and traded them in a shameful way. I regret and I am ashamed when we remember these practices. I apologize for this," Gaddafi said on Sunday at the Second Afro-Arab summit in Sirte, Libya, Reuters reported.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and a number of other African heads of state attended the summit.
Gaddafi also warned leaders about an increasing threat of annexation and division in Africa in the event that the Sudanese decide to split the country into two states.
Oil-rich Southern Sudan plans to hold a referendum in January 2011 on whether it should remain part of Sudan or establish an independent state.
MSD/SC/HGL
Labels: MUAMMAR AL-GADDAFI, SLAVERY
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Danny Glover's slavery film lacked "white heroes", producers said
Jul 25 02:19 AM US/Eastern
67 Comments
Watch the Trailer US actor Danny Glover, who plans an epic next year on Haitian independence hero Toussaint-Louverture, said he slaved to raise funds for the movie because financiers complained there were no white heroes.
"Producers said 'It's a nice project, a great project... where are the white heroes?'" he told AFP during a stay in Paris this month for a seminar on film.
"I couldn't get the money here, I couldn't get the money in Britain. I went to everybody. You wouldn't believe the number of producers based in Europe, and in the States, that I went to," he said.
"The first question you get, is 'Is it a black film?' All of them agree, it's not going to do good in Europe, it's not going to do good in Japan.
"Somebody has to prove that to be a lie!", he said. "Maybe I'll have the chance to prove it."
"Toussaint," Glover's first project as film director, is about Francois Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803), a former slave and one of the fathers of Haiti's independence from France in 1804, making it the first black nation to throw off imperial rule and become a republic.
The uprising he led was bloodily put down in 1802 by 20,000 soldiers dispatched to the Caribbean by Napoleon Bonaparte, who then re-established slavery after its ban by the leaders of the French Revolution.
Due to be shot in Venezuela early next year, the film will star Don Cheadle, Mos Def, Wesley Snipes and Angela Bassett.
"I wasn't the first one who had this idea," he said. "Sergey Eisenstein had the same idea, Anthony Quinn had this idea, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and this goes on."
The "Lethal Weapon" co-star, just turned 62, finally raised 18 of the 30 million dollars needed from a Venezuelan cultural body set up in 2006 by his friend President Hugo Chavez to counter what he termed "the Hollywood film dictatorship".
Venezuelan filmmakers last year slammed the investment.
"It is Mr Glover who should be bringing dollars to Venezuela," the National Association of Film Makers and the Venezuelan Chamber of Film Producers said in an open letter.
Glover, a longtime activist, has supported Chavez's political revolution since he was first elected in 1998.
After making his debut with a bit role in 1979 movie starring Clint Eastwood, "Escape From Alcatraz", Glover played in films such as "Silverado" and "Witness" but grabbed wide attention after Steven Spielberg's 1985 movie "The Color Purple".
He is probably most widely known as "Lethal Weapon" co-star with Mel Gibson.
Born in San Francisco, he enrolled at the Black Actors Workshop there and is known for his stand against discrimination as well as for his activism against the Iraqi war and anti-personnel mines.
An admirer of the Senegalese writer-filmmaker known as the father of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene, Glover has helped produce African films, including the recently-acclaimed arthouse movie "Bamako" by Abderrahmane Sissako.
"The first African films that I saw were films that portrayed Africans as savages, ignorant and uncivilized, and I wanted to know something else," he said. "I was very fortunate, I had the chance to read writers like Mariama Ba, Aime Cesaire ... and Leopold Sedar Senghor. I read him when I was 20."
"When I saw Sidney Poitier on screen, I was probably 10 or 11," he added. "That was a different image, an image I had never seen before, on screen.
"The African-Americans I saw, they danced, they were buffoons, that was the image. So Sidney brought another image."
History, Glover said, had enabled him to play a wide range of roles because of the changes taking place in society.
"I think cinema has played a great role in our re-imagining ourselves," he said.
Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium
Labels: DANNY GLOVER, HAITI, SLAVERY
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