Last week, I stated that the African-Guyanese historical experience is more complex and multi-faceted than just providing slave labour to European plantation overlords. I will now examine the process of why and how Africans were uprooted to provide free labour in Guyana.
The shortage of free labour on the British Guianese plantation largely due to the unavailability of Amerindian slave labour led to a frantic scramble and search among the European plantation class to find a new source of slave labour. Africa was eventually singled out as the place to supply free slave labour because Africans were perceived by Europeans to be more suitable for plantation labour. Of course, the suitability explanation was a justification to rationalize slavery.
That being said, when Europeans arrived in Africa, they noticed an internal slave trade from Africa to the slave-holding Islamic states of the Middle East, strong trading relations, extended family networks, numerous languages, dialects, multi-religious beliefs based on animism, political organizations based on chieftain and dynastic characteristics, oral traditions and farming communities. Unfortunately, the European slave traders chose to narrate mostly the negative aspects of Africa such as slavery and ethnic warfare. The idea that Africa has always possessed complex civilizations took a very long time to penetrate into the mainstream textbooks of western civilization. Given this diverse complexity of Africa, slave traders realized that obtaining slaves for the New World would not be easy pickings. Towards that end, African slaves were taken from the ranks of war captives, debtors, and those found guilty of various criminal and social offences. Others were kidnapped through raids and deceitful ways. African males were targeted into slavery since women were considered a burden to the plantation system because of their time spent on child-bearing and caring activities. European slave traders were initially involved in the recruitment of African slaves but overtime when recruitment became difficult, African chiefs or middlemen were targeted to supply slaves and rewarded with material objects.African slaves were drawn mainly from West Africa, from the Senegambian region to the Congo and Angola, as well as from Biafra, the western regions and Mozambique on the East Coast. They comprised of multiple ethnicities such as Accra and Ashanti from Ghana, the Yoruba and the Ibo from South Western Nigeria and the Mandingo from Senegal.
After the Africans were captured and subdued, they were taken to the holding depots along the western coast and then transported to the New World through a system known as the Triangular Slave trade. The system operated like this: In Europe, ships were loaded with traded goods like guns, trinkets, tools, pans and so forth and then departed to the West African coast where these goods were exchanged for slaves. The slave ships would then sail to the Caribbean and the Americas. This voyage was known as the Middle Passage, or the in between sea voyage between Europe and the Caribbean. Suffering on the Middle Passage were unbearable. Africans were packed like sardines in the most inhumane ways. Death and suicide were common occurrence as well as occasional physical resistance. Actually, it is believed that because of the Slave Trade, the feeding migration of sharks changed drastically as they followed the slave ships to feed on dead Africans thrown overboard and those who preferred jumping overboard rather enduring horrors of the Middle Passage. In the Caribbean, the slaves were exchanged for sugar, rum and other tropical commodities needed in Europe. The ships would then leave the Caribbean and sail to the Southern United States where the slaves were exchanged for cotton and tobacco. The additional leg of this trade is called the Quadrangular Slave trade. The ships would then sail back to Europe packed with tropical commodities, least of which was sugar. The Slave Trade lasted for three centuries, starting in 1570 and ending in 1808 but went on illegally until the 1870s, especially to Cuba, Brazil and the Southern United States. Historian Phillip Curtain writes that it is probably unlikely that the ultimate total of African slaves brought to the New World was less than 8,000,000 or more than 10,500,000. He suggested that 480,000 slaves were brought to Suriname and Guyana. Out of this total, about two thirds probably were brought to Guyana. By the 1820s in Berbice, for instance, there were 523 whites, 1,161 free coloured and 20,118 African slaves. In 1838, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 African slaves were living in Guyana.
The arrival of Africans changed the demographics of Guyana as their numbers made them the largest ethnic group. Nevertheless, Africans remained at the bottom of the hierarchy of Guyanese society during the period of slavery. They were restricted and restrained by harsh labour, inadequate education, nutrition and health care, along with the violation of personal and family dignity through sexual molestation, separation of family members, refusal of marriage, and prohibitions of various cultural, economic and political activities. The Guyanese slave society was one of a vertical polarisation. Europeans occupied the highest social strata while the mixed and enslaved remained at the middle and lower strata respectively. To be continued ([email protected])
